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Esker Mike & His Wife, Agiluk is a social satire about Eskimo life in the Mackenzie River Delta and how it is affected by white settlers, priests and government officials. The play is also a tragic reflection on the role of women who are forced to bear children in a society that cannot afford to support them.
Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. One of Lucia Frangione’s blasphemy plays,’ it inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In an erotic world where men are traditionally cast as either fathers to be looked up to or sons to be looked after, where, for women, is the possibility of a flesh-and-blood lover, challenging her to open her heart without trespassing her will—a lover as he appears in the Song of Solomon: passionate, earthy, creative, vulnerable and beautiful— the avatar of the holy spirit? There has been a horrible car crash, and Vito, the patriarch of an immigrant family, has had his body smashed and his heart lacerated, his life hanging by threads of tubes and wires in an intensive care ward. His family has rushed in from all over the country for an anxious vigil of hope, prayer and memory by his bedside. In this crucible of anxiety, a single actress alternately narrates and enacts her own and her family’s history along with an uninvited narrator/actor, Amante (“lover” in Italian). As Amante engages all the women of the clan Rosa plays in a swirl of sharply portrayed characters—Vito’s mother, Nonna, forced into marriage at 13 but only now, at 67, experiencing the first intimations of her body’s desire; the pit-bull martyrdom of Vito’s second wife, Vincenza; and Rosa herself in her own thin, urbane skin stretched tight to hold in the red, passionate blood that boils just below the surface—we are never sure whether Rosa has created Amante or he has created her.
Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.
This suite of pandemic essays exist within those first one hundred days of original lockdown, marking time through moments, anxieties and the elasticity of time itself. What are days, weeks, months? In this stunning collection of deeply personal essays, Ottawa writer rob mclennan wanders through literature, parenting, family, the constant barrage of cable news and the slow loss of his widower father across the swirling, simultaneous anxieties and uncertainties of an increasing sense of isolation.
From his plundering of elements from B-movies and melodrama in early plays like Zastrozzi and Beyond Mozambique to the uneasy satire and the class politics of the East End and the Power plays, and now most recently in the shape of “Suburban Motel,” a cycle of six new plays, George F. Walker has not only created a substantial and impressive body of work, but impressed it all with his unique “Walkeresque” stamp—brash, assertive, perceptive, genuinely perverse, often wonky, and very, very funny. Toronto’s most-produced and internationally recognized playwright, Walker’s plays have appeared on stages in London and New York, across North America and around the world.
There are times in a parent’s life when they ask why am I doing this? It’s so hard.. That is, until those occasions of magic happen, and they always do. Parenthood is a journey with no road map. And it is the children who most often steer the ship. In her new collection of poetry, Essential Ingredients, Carol Rose GoldenEagle recalls when Creator’s blessings have truly been bestowed in a parent’s shared life with their children. Poems examine hardship and struggle, triumph of spirit and joy, and serve as a reminder to all parents that childhood is fleeting. This beautiful volume is a celebration of parenthood, in the form of love letters to the poet’s children. It is ultimately a tribute to the memories of those many magic moments which define love, purpose, and pride.
Taking the name of a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary shaking, Essential Tremor undertakes an exploration of the body that holds disruption at its heart. The captivating and timely poems in Essential Tremor attend to many bodies–the body of the world, changing, unreachable, at times momentarily illumined; the human body, loved, ill, mourning, passing or passed from this world; and the divine body, questioned, encountered and not, sought by people from the margins in the body of a biblical palimpsest.
In her third collection, award-winning poet Barbara Nickel blends sonnets in sequences and scattered stand-alones with more formal innovations and extensions–erasures of the notes accompanying da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, lines found from Beethoven’s autopsy, and the musings of poet isolating in the midst of a twenty-first-century pandemic. Nickel asks her readers to consider the many facets of the body, how it finds the words, lines and poems that together form an essential life, a gift among our deepest wounds and terrors.
Lively, illustrated and guaranteed to be controversial, The Essentials: 150 Great BC Books & Authors serves as an unprecedented guide to books from and about British Columbia – culled from Alan Twigg’s unrivalled knowledge of more than 200 years of BC literary history. It also identifies 100 essential authors, such as Alice Munro, Earle Birney and Eric Nicol, who did not have one particular book that is outstanding but have enjoyed outstanding careers.
Louis Dudek, poet, professor, editor, publisher, translator and legendary Canadian man of letters, passed away on March 22, 2001. Shortly after his death, many of the people whose lives he had touched, from family members to distinguished writers, voiced the same proposal: there must be a tribute. Dudek’s influence was vast and his accomplishments breathtaking-from revolutionizing this country’s small press movement (First Statement, Contact Press, CIV/n, Delta and Delta Canada) and editing such ground-breaking anthologies as Canadian Poems: 1850-1952 (with Irving Layton), Poetry of Our Time and The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (with Michael Gnarowski), to authoring many remarkably eloquent volumes of poetry and criticism. He was also known as “The Great Encourager” during his decades at McGill University, publishing the first books of such poets as Leonard Cohen. Robin Blaser called Dudek “Canada’s most important-that is to say, consequential modern voice.” Les èditions Triptyque wrote that “Louis Dudek se situe au premier rang.” This collection of essays, poems, rare photographs, facsimiles of letters and manuscripts, simultaneously celebrates Dudek’s life and offers fresh illuminations on his life’s work.
Nominated for several Dora Awards
When a young scholar finds Eternal Hydra, a long-lost, legendary and encyclopedic novel by an obscure Irish writer, she brings the manuscript to an esteemed publisher, hoping to secure an international audience for the book. But Vivian’s obsession with the dead author, who has materialized in her life, is challenged by the work of a contemporary historical novelist,and she’s forced to face confounding questions about authorship, racism, and ethical behavior.
Weaving between modern-day New York, 1930s Paris and New Orleans in the years following the Civil War, Eternal Hydra is a postmodern look at the making of a modernist masterpiece.
‘A play of such tight structure, such cerebral content and such sure drama that the thoughtful theatregoer could hardly fail to be impressed.’
—Globe and Mail
In this poetry collection, Michel Pleau uses simple, moving images that go straight to the heart. He shapes words like a sculptor, with painstaking care, to give us moments of pure beauty and flashes of luminous landscape. He evokes the nostalgia of childhood in language as refreshing and bracing as the wind. With this book, Michel Pleau invites us to a celebration of the marvellous. In a collection brushed with nostalgia, he gently awakens us to the simple gestures of childhood. Attentive to his worlds, he invites us to go back to the essentials, to natural elements, innocence and light, in order to magnify the beauty of the universe.
Eucalyptus
The controlled and calm life of William Oaks is shattered when his parents die suddenly in a car accident. A reclusive paper conservator at a renowned Toronto museum, William must face the obsessions and denials that have formed him: delusional family history, religious fundamentalism, and get-rich-quick schemes. Memory and facts collide, threatening to derail his life and career as William feverishly prepares for an important exhibition on the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
“A book about grief has no right to be a page-turner, but this one is.”—Globe and Mail
Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002)
Stunning and masterful in its execution, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram.
The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapteris a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!).
Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008.
This new edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bok and an expanded afterword.
‘Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane.’ —Samuel Delany
‘Eunoia takes the lipogram and rendersit obsolete.’ —Kenneth Goldsmith
‘A marvellous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes.’ —Harry Mathews
‘An exemplary monument for 21st century poetry.’ —Charles Bernstein
‘Bök’s dazzling word games are the literary sensation of the year.’ —The Times
‘A resounding success … brilliant.’ —The Guardian
‘Brilliant … beautiful and strange.’ —Today Programme, BBC Radio 4
‘Impressive.’ —Sunday Telegraph
‘No mere Christmas stocking filler for Countdown fans. Rather, it’s an ingenious little novel … playful and irreverent … charming.’ —Metro
The first novel by the prolific 18th century writer, Evelina is a lighthearted epistolary novel chronicling a young lady’s rise in Regency England society. Evelina, having been raised in the country and sheltered from the evils of London, is suddenly thrust into the height of upper class society and introduced to her ridiculous and self-important grandmother. What follows is an entertaining tale of love, friendship, and growing up, told with the wit and charm that inspired, and was admired by, Jane Austen.
The first novel by the prolific 18th century writer, Evelina is a lighthearted epistolary novel chronicling a young lady’s rise in Regency England society. Evelina, having been raised in the country and sheltered from the evils of London, is suddenly thrust into the height of upper class society and introduced to her ridiculous and self-important grandmother. What follows is an entertaining tale of love, friendship, and growing up, told with the wit and charm that inspired, and was admired by, Jane Austen.