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In this collection of ten short stories, the main characters — women between the ages of 13 to 88 — see death appear suddenly in their daily lives: in the pages of a novel written by a former lover, in a farewell letter abandoned on a living room coffee table, in the memory of a first love. Although disturbing in their truth, these stories are written in luminous prose that reconciles us — almost — with that ultimate rendezvous, our own Date With Destiny.
Jenkins never dreamed he’d live long enough to be dating again. Old folks acting like teenagers was unheard of in his parents’ generation. Less than two years after his beloved wife’s death, Jenkins finds himself sheepishly slinking past her portrait to take another woman out to the movies. With good (and sometimes not-so-good) memories of his youth, Jenkins recalls his dating experiences through the decades — and finds that he is still no wiser than a schoolboy. Especially when he learns his high school grad date is back n town and newly widowed. Will she be the same sweet Janie who made his grad night perfect or will age have taken its toll? Things don’t look good when her son greets him at the door with a list of rules. The tables have turned and the parents are now the children. Boomers will connect on many levels with this outrageously funny portrayal of their generation grappling with the realities of growing older.
Vivid accessible poems revealing the mythic proportions of a seemingly simple, rural childhood and the passions that course through every life.what do you do
with other people’s memories
when they are carved into this land
the land offering up proof
— from “Prayer for Rain”Brenda Leifso’s first volume of poetry is a stunning debut: haunting, disturbing but resolutely beautiful. With an unflinching eye, Leifso explores the uncertainty of memory, the legacy of place, the powerful dynamics of sexuality and secrecy, and the violence inherent in family relations. Her central section, “The Theban Women,” is a multi-voiced re-imagining of Euripides”s The Bacchae; this drama in verse gives voice to women long silent, and together with Leifso’s more personal poems, it forms a book of exceptional power from a poet whose voice is as honest as it is beautiful.”In Daughters of Men, Brenda Leifso demonstrates a subtlety of heart, mind and soul that represents a new level of maturity for poetry in the West. Her book encompasses, among other things, a Greek tragedy of inherited crime within the family
which, for the one who does not share in it, provokes a slow-burning jealousy and sorrow at the exclusion. Is this a mind-set and verse that only a mad Alberta poet or Greek tragedian could invent? Or is it as simple as wanting to have one’s rightful share — of the abuse and of the beauty, of a land and of a family. Brenda Leifso looks for the gold in the tar, and remarkably extracts it for her readers.” — George McWhirter (Inaugural Poet Laureate of Vancouver)
This volume explores the life and works of Dave Godfrey. These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study that contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author’s key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works.
David
David Askevold broke into the art scene when his work was included in the seminal exhibition Information at New York’s MOMA 1970, which cemented Conceptualism as a genre. He later became recognized as one of the most important contributors to the development and pedagogy of conceptual art; his work has been included in many of the genre’s formative texts and exhibitions.
This illustrated volume takes readers on an eclectic journey through the various strains of Askevold’s pioneering practice — sculpture/installation, film and video, photography and photo-text works, and digital imagery. David Askevold moved from Kansas City to Halifax in 1968 to lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
During the early 1970s, his famous Projects Class brought such artists as Sol Lewitt, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner to work with his students, focusing critical attention on his adopted city and on his own unorthodox approach to making art. He quickly became on one of the most important conceptual artists practicing in Canada and throughout his career he remained at the vanguard of contemporary practice.
David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East features essays by celebrated writer-curators Ray Cronin, Peggy Gale, Richard Hertz (author of The Beat and the Buzz), and Irene Tsatsos as well as several of Askevold’s contemporaries including Aaron Brewer, Tony Oursler, and Mario Garcia Torres. It accompanies an exhibition that will open at the National Gallery of Canada in October 2011 and will tour thereafter to the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.
One of Canada’s best-known printmakers, David Blackwood (1941–2022) put onto paper an enduring vision of Newfoundland, where he was born and raised. His hauntingly beautiful images draw from personal and communal memory, local tradition, and dreams and legends to capture a way of life that had already begun to vanish during his youth.
Tracing Blackwood’s career from his days as an art student at the Ontario College of Art to his final drawing, David Blackwood: Myth & Legend brings together more than eighty drawings and prints, alongside proofs, copperplates, and archival materials to provide a unique insight into Blackwood’s creative process. Essays by AGO curator Alexa Greist and Amy Marshall Furness, the archivist who has stewarded the acquisition of Blackwood’s extensive personal archives, round out the volume. This stunning combination of work spans Blackwood’s entire career and reveals the creative evolution of one of Newfoundland’s, and Canada’s, most beloved artists.
David Blackwood: Myth & Legend accompanies a retrospective exhibition at the AGO opening in October 2025. Touring dates and locations to be announced.
To date, Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist David Helwig has published close to fifty books and edited numerous others. He has written for television and radio, worked at the CBC, taught at Queen’s University, been Poet Laureate of Prince Edward Island, and named to the Order of Canada. Yet, he remains little known. This volume is the first to gather new essays, an interview, and earlier material — by George Fetherling, Douglas Glover, D.G. Jones, Simon Lloyd, Tom Marshall, rob mclennan, Shane Neilson, Ingrid Ruthig, Mark Sampson, and Lorraine M. York– in order to introduce and explore Helwig’s body of work, while documenting the broad range of his literary talents and accomplishments.
Confronted with the task of re-inventing her life, young widow Priya grieves by researching spiritualism for a new age magazine and spending time in the garden her late husband, Gabe, had tended. Human contact is limited to an elderly nursing home resident, Jeevan, who is from her father’s native land of Sri Lanka. Soon Priya is drawn further into Jeevan’s world, which includes a mysterious nephew, Suresh. Despite rigid religious views, Suresh takes advantage of Priya’s vulnerability. Soon an isolated Priya finds herself facing the prospect of either single motherhood or a loveless marriage. While her Canadian and Sri Lankan friends Meg and Shobi conduct a tug of war over Priya’s destiny, Suresh’s jealous and coercive tactics prevent her from exploring a third possibility, her kindly neighbour Ryan, the only person whose presence gives Priya a genuine sense of solace. In this sequel to the author’s earlier novel, Priya’s World, Priya’s life is mired in uncertainty, but as spring begins to stir, the garden Gabe planted begins to speak to her of new life and fresh possibilities.
From the author of Ice Diaries, winner of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival Grand Prize, praised by the New York Times as “stunningly written,” and a Guardian Best Book of 2018
Set in the throes of Brexit-era London, Day for Night is an unflinching exploration of desire, gender, and history, in which a married filmmaking duo seeks to tell the tragic story of 1940s German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, while their own relationship and nation are imploding behind the camera in real-time
Richard Cottar is a respected independent film writer and director; his wife, Joanna, is his increasingly successful and wealthy producer. Together they are about to embark on a film about the life of Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who killed himself in northern Spain while on the run from the Nazis in 1940. In what looks set to be the last year of Britain’s membership of the European Union, Benjamin’s story of exile and statelessness is more relevant than ever. But Richard and Joanna’s symbiotic life takes a sudden turn when they cast an intelligent, sexually ambiguous young actor in the role of Walter Benjamin. In a climate of fear and a bizarre, superheated year redolent of sex and hidden desire, Richard and Joanna must confront their relationship, Benjamin’s tragic history, and the future of their country.
Taking its cue from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Day for Night is an unsettling, riveting story of reversals — of gender, power, and history.
day/break, poet Gwen Benaway’s fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, day/break asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world. Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, day/break reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations.
What do a Canadian farm woman and a Brazilian plant collector have in common? An enigmatic death, a monkey and destiny.
Beginning the day of the devastating Halifax Explosion of 1917, Dazzle Patterns is an unforgettable story about loss, the resilience of the human spirit, and the transformative power of art.
While Clare Holmes waits for her fiancé, Leo, to return from the war in France, she works as a flaw checker at the Halifax glassworks. It is there that she meets Fred Baker, a mysterious master glassmaker who was trained in his home country of Germany. After the disastrous explosion on December 6, 1917 – which killed 2000, injured thousands more, and is said to have shattered every window in the city – Clare, Leo, and Fred’s lives become irrevocably intertwined.
In the chaos and turmoil of the war and the aftermath of the explosion, Clare finds solace in drawing, but is further devastated when Leo is reported missing. Meanwhile, tensions in the community quickly rise: who was responsible for the explosion? Could there be German collaborators in their midst? When Fred is arrested, Clare is determined to find a way to prove her new friend’s innocence.
Dazzle Patterns is a moving story about three people making their way through harrowing, impossible times. With extraordinary vision and clarity, Alison Watt’s remarkable debut novel brings the past to life.