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Showing 2081–2096 of 9492 results
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Disturbing the Buddha
$20.00A beloved poet explores why life is so rich, even at the worst of times.
Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster’s fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck–the “three-leaf clovers” so much more plentiful than the four.
Dempster’s wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to life’s ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities. In these poems, a forty-year-old man dons a pink plastic crown on his niece’s order; a solitary man watches a Nicole Kidman rom-com with his cat; an aging Aphrodite, more mortal than god, suffers hot flashes. Like the mystic poets he addresses in the book’s final section, Dempster respects the unknown as he comes to terms with the ups and downs of the all-too-human condition.
Shifting effortlessly from light-hearted ode to solemn elegy, Dempster offers no touch-up jobs; instead we find a love of the flaw, a generosity toward it even as he exposes it. This is a poetry of inclusiveness, engaging both our better and worse angels, baring its Achilles’ heel and trusting us to do likewise.
…Heaven
is a still life in a Motel Six
non-smoker. … Tonight
you’ll sleep in a clearing
that won’t be there come dawn. (from “Lao-Tzu”)“Few if any poets encompass the range, the dynamism, and the spectrum of emotional colours Barry Dempster does…” –Canadian Authors Association Chalmers Award Jury Citation
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Diversion
$18.95New poems from one of Canada’s best-known poets
Where most poetry seeks contemplative quiet, as in Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” Diversion asks: What happens to poetry if one stops trying to block the incoming cacophony and instead embraces the multiple streams of data that bombard the contemporary thought process? What poetry comes from the multitude of channels — ambient office radio, TVs at the gym, rampant social media alerts, eavesdropped conversations within crowds, 24-hour-news cycles, texts, telephone and voicemail, email pings — that constantly interrupt the brain from cogent thought? The result is alternately dark and hilarious, straddling the line between aphorism and poetry and creating an atmospheric narrative through connections that form between seemingly unassociated lines. For better or worse, what used to be stream-of-consciousness is now stream-of-collective-unconsciousness.
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Divide and Rule
$17.95In Divide and Rule, Walid Bitar delivers a sequence of dramatic monologues, variations on the theme of power, each in rhymed quatrains. Though the pieces grow out of Bitar’s personal experiences over the last decade, both in North America and the Middle East, he is not primarily a confessional writer. His work might be called cubist, the perspectives constantly shifting, point followed by counterpoint, subtle phrase by savage outburst. Bitar’s enigmatic speakers are partially rational creatures, have some need to explain, and may succeed in partially explaining, but, in the end, communication and subterfuge are inseparable – must, so to speak, co-exist.
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Dividing Lines | Líneas Divisorias
$19.95The one thing everyone knows is that we’re all going to die. Which means our loved ones are going to die. So how can we prepare for, experience, and honour their deaths? And does that look different if we have to make the decision to end their lives for them if they’re suffering? Dividing Lines | Líneas Divisorias is one woman’s story that offers a space for communal grieving through a celebration of life.
Traced by the historic world events that coincide with her memories of independence and immigration, Beatriz reflects on how she spent over a decade caring for her mother—the one person she promised she’d be there for all the way until the end—as she lost her more and more to Alzheimer’s, and ultimately had to make the tough call to end her mother’s pain.
A meditation full of light that doesn’t shy away from fear of the unknown, Beatriz’s narrative comes from a vulnerable and recognizable place of love that will invite our memories and choices in to heal.
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Divine Realms
$17.95Divine Realms is an anthology that looks at spiritual questions through the medium of science fiction and fantasy. This is an eclectic lot, and the main theme is faith– or lack thereof. The stories are written by some of Canada’s best and up-and-coming writers.
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Diving Board
$24.95A collection of haunting, bizarre, extraordinary stories in which human experience and
relationships are examined as though through a magnifying glass and then distorted by the
light. In Diving Board, children are dangerous, or in danger, adults are lost and confused,
everything is a bit off kilter, and nothing is quite as it seems. In one story, two sisters visit a
clearing in the woods where black birds fall from the sky and die en masse. In another, a family
is besieged by a strange cloud. There are shape-shifting plants, mysterious beings from another
planet, a human zoo. Award-winning Argentine author Tomás Downey moves between reality,
fantasy, horror, and science fiction – his work can be considered alongside Latin American
authors such as Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez – but his fiction ultimately resides in
a singular, magical space that exists beyond genres. Downey has the ability to draw you into his
miniature worlds. To read these stories is like watching an anthology of eerie short films
projected inside your head: they seem so real you could reach out and touch them. -
Divisions of the Heart
$32.95In the fall of 1998, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, hosted a symposium on the life and work of Pulitzer prize-winning writer Elizabeth Bishop (19111979). This book collects 25 of the essays that were presented at the conference, as well as over 40 black and white reproductions of photographs relating to Bishop’s life.
Contributors include: Crystal Bacon, Marian Bannerman, Sandra Barry, Brian Bartlett, Neil Besner, Theodore Colson, Barbara Comins, Gwen Davies, Jeffery Donaldson, Patricia Dwyer, Lilian Falk, Andre Furlani, Gary Fountain, Glen Robert Gill, Lorrie Goldensohn, Michael Happy, Kathleen Johnson, Ross Leckie, Elizabeth McKim, Laura Jehn Menides, Sara Meyer, Roger Moore, Brian Robinson, Camille Roman, Peter Sanger and Anne Stevenson.
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Dk/Some Letters of Ezra Pound
$14.95This correspondence with Ezra Pound covers the years from 1949 to very nearly the end of his life. It began as an offer to help, in his difficult days in St. Elizabeths, Washington, D.C., and it grew into a whirlwind of paper and communication for a few years; then it diminished after 1953. For the following years there was only a few scattered letters set off by some particular event – a new magazine, a radio broadcast – and finally the correspondence came to an end with the complications about Pound’s coming to the World Poetry Conference at Expo in 1967.
“…a major contribution to our understanding of two distinguished North American poets…. Intrinsically delightful….” – Quill & Quire
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Do It Wrong
$21.95Do It Wrong is a short, snappy series of provocations and suggestions designed to help poets think outside the box and foster creativity.
It’s a permission slip to take a path others reject, to do the counter-intuitive thing, to embrace the weird.
It’s a guidebook designed to bring poets together, to question our assumptions, and to move past the “business as usual” educational models into the new, the strange,and the “wrong.”
And it’s a playful, purposeful contribution toward the building of stronger, more resilient writing communities. -
Do Not Chase the Birds
$9.95A stunning collection of three mini narratives. Full colour contemplations on themes of psyche, mad identity, nature, animals, chickens, motherhood, menopause, dreams, and the principles and elements of design.
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Do Not Feed the Birds
$9.95A stunning collection of three mini narratives. Halftone contemplations on themes of psyche, mad identity, nature, animals, chickens, motherhood, menopause, dreams, and the principles and elements of design.
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Do This In Memory of Me
$18.95Twelve-year-old Genevieve has been having a hard time at home, and all she really wants is to be an altar server at her church. Except it’s 1963 and Father Paul tells her that’s not allowed. After having her dreams crushed and being made fun of by her classmate and star altar boy Martin, Genevieve prays to God hoping for an exception. Instead, a fourteen-year-old martyr from the fourth century, St. Pancras, appears and promises to get her an answer from God. But with her mom missing for weeks and Martin disappearing on his way home from school the next day, she fears her prayers have been answered in dire ways.
This dark comedy dives into the expansive time between childhood and adolescence, exploring questions about the realities of home life to the possibilities of unknown worlds. Do This In Memory of Me is for anyone who has ever questioned the relationship between faith and trust or wondered where they fit in the bigger picture.
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Do You Think This Is Strange?
$17.95Shortlisted for the 2016 Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2016 Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
Winner of an Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY)Freddy has problems. Some of them are because he’s autistic. Most of them are because he’s a teenager.
When he’s seven years old, Freddy’s mother walks him to the train station, sits him on a bench, kisses his forehead, and disappears from his life. In a few short days, everything changes. His father moves him across town, enrols him in a different school, and takes him away from little Saskia, the only friend he’s ever had.
Ten years later, Freddy is struggling to get through his last year of high school. He painstakingly avoids interactions with other students, who don’t understand his hyper-literal perspective. But then Saskia appears, and she’s different from the laughing little girl he remembers. She no longer smiles, and she doesn’t speak.
As they reconnect, Freddy begins to remember what really happened ten years ago. And everything he thought he knew begins to unravel. Both humorous and heartbreaking, Do You Think This Is Strange? is a coming-of-age tale you won’t soon forget.
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Doctor Thomas Neill Cream
$16.95In 1876, Jack the Ripper, otherwise known as Canadian Doctor Thomas Neill Cream, graduated with merit from McGill’s faculty of medicine. Cream was a backstreet abortionist and managed an exclusive brothel called The Elite Club. His notorious reputation eventually forced him to flee Canada for London. He was hanged in 1892 for the murder of four prostitutes.
Doctor Thomas Neill Cream mixes fact and speculation with its cast of unlikely characters: khaki-covered union organizers—the good guys; five white-faced “zombies” representing such illustrious “Founding Fathers of Confederation” and distinguished members of the McGill fraternity as Sir Hugh Allan, Sir William Dawson, Sir William Osier and Lord Strathcona—the victors; and their young prostitutes—the victims.
Intended as a cultural exorcism, playwright David Fennario charges with murder the capitalists who are now paraded through our history books as nation-builders. Past evil is parallelled in the present.
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Doctored
$22.95Everyone knows someone who has been abused by a doctor and this book, a moving true story, is about the devastating impact of sexual abuse and one woman’s steely determination to recover and find justice. Sky Curtis is a successful writer who goes to her family doctor for anxiety resulting from childhood trauma. Like many vulnerable women in doctors’ offices, she is horrifically abused, emotionally and sexually. And, like many women who are abused by their doctors, she loses her career, friends, savings, religion, family relationships, and her mind. She almost loses her life. After her roller coaster recovery from the dark wells of fear, pain and madness, she reports the doctor. She then encounters infuriating prejudice against women in the legal system and the media. Despite this, Sky triumphs at many levels, winning in an arena where women rarely do, consequently getting back all that she had lost, plus more; a sense of self. Doctored is a sometimes hilarious and sometimes enraging story woven together with compellingly poetic images. This book will help the many women who have suffered doctor abuse. It will also help others understand the impact of this awful betrayal of trust. Doctored is a bold and important book that breaks through the protective barriers surrounding the medical profession.
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Doctrine of Affections, The
$23.95A poverty-stricken guitar virtuoso navigates the political landscape of nineteenth-century Parisian society as he comes out of retirement for one final concert. A sessional instructor competing for the prestigious Interdisciplinary Chair in Aretha Franklin studies gets sidetracked by her obsession with a mysterious student in a yellow hat. A dying doo-wop DJ and his wife try to bridge the estrangement wrought by illness as they travel in search of the horns, drums, and vocals of highlife.
In the eleven stories that make up The Doctrine of Affections, Paul Headrick takes us on a fascinating journey into the heart of music. From the perfectly honed decrescendo of a symphony’s string section to the down-home chord progressions at a late-night kitchen party, Headrick’s stories question the subtle differences between hearing and listening, and communicating and understanding. The subjects of this collection are soloists, ensemble players, scholars, collectors, and lovers of music, but their experiences with risk, religion, relief, and often regret make their stories resonate for readers who are hearing their songs for the first time.