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All Books in this Collection
Showing 2017–2032 of 9481 results
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Dervish at the Crossroads
$20.00Dervish at the Crossroads isn’t a music guide so much as an autobiographical exploration of the experience of music from 2000 to 2020, with commentary on what makes the experience of music during these two decades radically different from all that came before. As the title of the book implies, due to the unique conditions of our time we can no longer think of ourselves as points on a series of evolutions; we’re now much more present to all of music, from the beginning of written and recorded music, all of which turns around us like spokes on a wheel. This grants us a unique vantage point from which to appreciate music in itself. The book alternates text with a comics and infographics detailing the history of the author’s discoveries as a music journalist during this time, along with personal experiences and ruminations and interviews.
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Descântec For My Split Tongue
$21.95Descântec For My Split Tongue, Adriana Oniță’s first book of poetry, gathers English-Romanian poems that travel across generations, homelands, and dreamscapes to ask: what do we lose when we lose a language? Drawn from Oniță’s childhood and her immigration from Jilava to Edmonton, the poems explore dor—a Romanian word for deep longing—for her mother tongue. Along the way, Oniță unpacks “untranslatable” Romanian words and proverbs, each a compressed zip file of culture, humour, grief, and courage. The book itself becomes a descântec—part incantation, part prayer, part spell—summoning both the failures and the triumphs of translation into a ritual of healing.
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Description of the World, The
$18.00Winner of the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2017 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
The Description of the World was the original title for Marco Polo’s writings about his travels, but in describing the world, Polo also helped to create it. In this collection, Skibsrud asks: is our world really what it appears to be? How do we shape it through language? And if language can create our world, can it also transform or destroy it?
A sense of vastness permeates the poems. Vistas and open fields are created rather than described. In these spaces, Skibsrud confronts us with the question of our own annihilation: atomic warfare, nuclear fallout and apocalyptic imagery inspired by French artist Jean Tinguely’s Study for an End of the World.
In turn, Skibsrud also addresses the subject of birth and renewal. In a final sequence of poems inspired by the birth of her daughter, we arrive at an understanding of ourselves in relation not only to the world we are born to, but to our role in a world we are still, and always, in the process of creating.
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Desert of the Heart
$19.95When Jane Rule’s first novel, Desert of the Heart, was published in 1964, it was an auspicious beginning for a writer who would build a reputation on her unflinching views about sexuality, relationships and the painful constrictions of societal convention. Even more astonishing is the way in which the novel has retained its cool quiet beauty and power of expression decades later.
Evelyn Hall is a literature professor who travels to Reno, Nevada in the summer of 1958 in order to obtain a divorce and thus put an end to her disastrous sixteen-year marriage. She is divorcing her husband on the advice of his psychiatrist because, this being the ’50s, he believes that Evelyn’s success is causing her husband’s depression. During her six-week stay at a boarding house (a residency requirement) Evelyn meets Ann Childs.
At once, the narrative enters an aesthetic space that calls to mind the mythical preoccupations of Thomas Mann, the philosophical speculations of Frederich Nietzsche, the artistic theories of Camille Paglia, and the wry ironic humour of Iris Murdoch. They rapidly become aware of an increasing tension, arising in part from the generational gap between Evelyn and this young woman who bears a striking physical resemblance to her.
As for Ann, she is most alluring in her representation of freedom to Evelyn, from her innate artistic prowess to her unconventional liaisons amid the smoky nocturnal backdrop of casino life. And once these women have found the promise of a significant relationship, Rule’s rather open-ended question is whether or not it can survive the toxic atmosphere, not simply of an unruly gambling town, but of the past sorrows and hardships each of the characters is attempting to put behind them.
The title derives from W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats—“In the desert of the heart / Let the healing fountain start.”
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Design and Scenography
$30.00“In this volume several broad areas of concern may be discerned. A main one is the kinds of understanding and modes of collaboration between creative artists…. Another is, of course, the exploration of approaches to design for theatrical presentation or performance by individual designers working in their designated fields. Then there is the more specifically Canadian preoccupation with designing with an awareness of cultural and regional diversity…” —from the introduction by Natalie Rewa
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Desire Lines
$20.00Desire Lines features an eclectic collection of Toronto writer/poet Ewan Whyte’s astute essays and reviews on art, poetry, and culture, both high and low. Among the subjects included: the Roman poet Catullus, the bondage photography of Maria Coletsis, the rain paintings of Viktor Mitic, Ai Weiwei, Vladimir Azarov, Anne Carson, Leonard Cohen, Christopher Logue’s Homer, Janet Cardiff, Alex Colville, Pasolini, Priscilla Uppal, Anish Kapoor and Canadian performance artist Istvan Kantor, better known as Monty Cantsin. Spontaneous and contemporary, essays for those who like to re-think.
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Desperate Stages
$9.95Desperate Stages tells the stories of a disgraced one-time playwright, a starving actor, and a failed actor-manager, whose lives crossed in Fredericton in 1845. Together they provided New Brunswick with some of its most exciting drama and its wildest theatre riot.
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Dessins
$14.95Pascal Girard, the Doug Wright Award-winning author of Reunion and Petty Theft, offers a peek at his personal sketchbook with Dessins, a collection of various drawings done in Montreal which aptly showcases his remarkable attention to details as well as his unique sense of humor. Throughout the book, Girard proves that sometimes, all it takes is a single image to tell a story properly.
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Destination Prairie
$17.95Bartlett beautifully describes the heart-aching lonelinessof a newcomer and gives an important glimpse into a lowly life of a hired gird.
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Destiny’s Telescope
$17.95The stories in Destiny’s Telescope illuminate the moments when life spins in unexpected and inexplicable ways. A girl with a deadly allergy to the sun ventures out-of-doors. A businessman abandons his sports car in the middle of a traffic jam. A small-town waitress orders her favourite breakfast for a motorcycle riding stranger. A Lolita-chasing man has a run-in with a mysterious black taxicab on a busy street and goes for a different kind of ride. Sometimes, destiny does wait.
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Detachment
$21.95In 2005, Maurice Mierau and his wife, Betsy, travelled to Ukraine to adopt two small boys, age three and five. After weeks of delays while navigating a tangled bureaucracy, they returned to Canada as a proud new family of four.
Now what?
Does fatherhood begin the moment that the adoption papers are signed? Is family something that is created in an instant? And what happens when everything seems to be on the verge of falling apart?
In Detachment, Maurice Mierau probes not only the process of adoption but what comes after—the challenges of becoming a family, the strain on his marriage. While his son acts out and gets in trouble at school, Maurice feels removed, detached, thinking instead about his own emotionally distant father. Also born in Ukraine, Maurice’s father has a traumatic and mysterious past of his own. If Maurice can come to understand his father’s life, perhaps he can start to make sense of his new sons…
Detachment is a moving, darkly funny, and searingly unsentimental memoir about learning to become a father and a son.
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Detours:
$19.95Detours: an anthology of poets from Windsor & Essex County showcases the eclecticism that characterizes the region: the traditional and experimental, the academy and community, the established and emergent, the internationally renowned and promising apprentice. It excavates a rich literary heritage, paying tribute to such luminaries as Bronwen Wallace, Di Brandt, Joyce Carol Oates, Marty Gervais, and Phil Hall, while highlighting work by emerging poets such as Alex Gayowsky, Dani Couture, Darryl Whetter, Kate Hargreaves, and Robert Earl Stewart.
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Deuce
$22.95Gilda Peterborough has always worried about her twin, but when Pete deletes his Facebook page, she is doubly concerned. Pete, A.K.A. Philippa, A.K.A. Phil, is intersex, and Gilda credits all of Pete’s social problems with this biological fact. As far as Pete is concerned, however, the problems all lie with Gilda, who is constantly on his case for reasons that are unclear to him. Meanwhile, Pete and Gilda’s mother Beth frets about both of her twins, neither of whom seem to be thriving. Beth tries desperately to be a patient and laid back parent, but when Pete abruptly decides to move away from Edmonton to Montreal, both Gilda and Beth are separately compelled to try to find him and somehow reconcile the family’s unresolved past, a family history haunted by the influence of Ralph Peterborough, a father who has never accepted his child for who they are.
Events in Edmonton and Montreal spiral with the dual reckoning of Beth in one city and Pete and Gilda in another, but ultimately Beth, Pete and Gilda will have the final say in their relationships and their identities.
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Devil in the Woods
$20.00A collection of letter and prayer poems in which an Indigenous speaker engages with non-Indigenous famous Canadians.
D.A. Lockhart’s stunning and subversive fourth collection gives us the words, thoughts, and experiences of an Anishinaabe guy from Central Ontario and the manner in which he interacts with central aspects and icons of settler Canadian culture. Riffing off Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, the work utilizes contemporary Indigenous poetics to carve out space for often ignored voices in dominant Canadian discourse (and in particular for a response to this dominance through the cultural background of an Indigenous person living on land that has been fundamentally changed by settler culture).
The letter poems comprise a large portion of this collection and are each addressed to specific key public figures–from Sarah Polley to Pierre Berton, k.d. lang to Robertson Davies, Don Cherry to Emily Carr. The second portion of the pieces are prayer poems, which tenderly illustrate hybrid notions of faith that have developed in contemporary Indigenous societies in response to modern and historical realities of life in Canada. Together, these poems act as a lyric whole to push back against the dominant view of Canadian political and pop-culture history and offer a view of a decolonized nation.
Because free double-doubles…
tease us like bureaucratic promises
of medical coverage and housing
not given to black mold and torn-
off siding. Oh Lord, let us sing anew,
in this pre-dawn light, a chorus
that shall not repeat Please Play Again. (from “Roll Up the Rim Prayer”) -
Devolution
$18.00Devolution is Kim Goldberg’s eighth book and her personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. Using absurdism, surrealism and satire, Goldberg offers up businessmen who loft away as crows, a town that reshapes itself each night, a journey through caves so narrow we must become centipedes to pass. Goldberg’s canvas holds both the personal and the political at once, offering rich layers of meaning, but with a playfulness reminiscent of Calvino or Borges. Each imaginative narrative will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down.
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Devotional Forensics
$22.00With dazzling wit and brittle tenderness, multi-award-winning poet Joseph Kidney catches all in his highly anticipated debut collection. Kidney’s rich, innovative imagery finds the durable in the contemporary and articulates a new vision of human vitality from inside a world that always seems on the verge of ending.
Channeling influences as wide as Shakespeare and Anne Carson, Virgil and John Ashbery, Devotional Forensics takes full advantage of the liberties of language, playing with its boundaries. This formally inventive collection exalts the ordinary and fleshes out the metaphysical, constructing theologies out of wildfires, classical music, and garbage collection, while engaging seamlessly with everything from renaissance literature to family intimacy, from modern art to biological science. At once timeless and urgent, Kidney’s poems dance through all the miniature apocalypses that compose the evolution of time into history.