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First Things First gathers 18 of the best of Diane Schoemperlen?s earliest and uncollected stories, with several being published in book form for the first time. Playfully inventive, comic, moving and profound, this collection will reinforce Schoemperlen?s importance as one of the leading short story writers of her generation.
Award-winning Canadian writer Patricia Keeney’s latest collection of poetry, First Woman, continues her personal journeys inward and across the world. Lyric and political, emotionally raw and deeply human, the volume ranges from sexual love to family, from writing to confrontations with power and profound meditations on life and culture. Her ninth collection since her debut in 1988 with Swimming Alone, these new poems — as the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has written of her — are filled with “the fiery mystery of inspiration> a mystery ‘that burns long after one closes the book.” First Woman is both personal and political. It takes personal journeys inward and across the world. It both thinks and feels, striking a broadly humanist note in a literary world of theory, a technological world of quick fixes and a political world lacking vision. First Woman, also includes some of her most popular poems from earlier volumes making it an important place to either begin one’s own love affair with this unique and admired poet or to continue it. In either case, the contact will be filled with insight, intelligence and love.
In Fish Bones Gillian Sze takes a random walk through the art museum and finds the drama of life framed in a series precisely rendered and moving artefact poems. Working from Jeanette Winterson’s idea of a “constant exchange of emotion” between the artist, the painting, and the writer, Sze’s ekphrastic verse is unrelenting in its commitment to action, so that each poem sparked by a picture comes to follow its own impetus, the origin of which is always a deeply felt encounter, whether familial, erotic, or strange. Vacillating deftly between the suspended space-time of a museum exhibit and the charged urgency of the lives she imagines via the art she describes, the result is a collection at once stirring and arresting, tender and coolly true.
In 1930s Hamilton, the boathouse community of Cootes Paradise is under siege: the squatters’ shacks that line the shores of Dundas Marsh stand in the way of ambitious plans to make the city beautiful. Egypt Fisher and her mother are struggling to keep their lives together in the absence of her father, a con man neither of them has seen for six years. Into this mix walks a handsome drifter and the family falls under his spell, until Egypt’s father unexpectedly returns. Unhinged by jealousy and a harrowing brush with the local mafia, he reveals a family secret that sets Egypt’s world off-kilter and poisons her relationship with her mother. When Egypt tries to turn the situation to her own advantage, her lies set in motion a series of events with devastating consequences.
My name’s Bacon Sobelowski, and I’m trying to find my someone. Kenny Rogers sings a song that says there’s someone for everyone, and in Bellevue where I live, Kenny Rogers’ word is gold. It’s just too bad my mother thinks girls turn boys into pigs, but that’s probably just because my father had enough of her Eggos and walked out.But maybe she’s right. I’m not sure if Sarah is my someone because she got mad and smashed chili peppers into a cut on my head, and maybe my someone wouldn’t do that. Karla could be it because she lets me stay at her condo, but she might be too old to be my someone. Then there’s Mr. Kwon’s daughter, but she’s sort of my cousin and I’m not sure if sort-of cousins can be someones at the same time.I think it might all come down to timing, and if that’s true then I’m in trouble. I’m Bacon Sobelowski–who knows if I’ll ever find my someone.
Winner of the 2019 American Book Fest Best Book Award for Women’s Fiction; Finalist for Literary Fiction
Kate, a somewhat clumsy widow of thirty-two, flees her stifling hometown on Vancouver Island to live alone on an even smaller island in the Salish Sea. In so doing, she has vague expectations of solace and sanctuary, despite past experience. Instead she meets Ivy, a woman who through their conversations transports her to the intoxicating world of 1926 Cuba. Within the context of their friendship, Ivy’s past begins to unravel from a long-held silence, just as Kate finds herself confronting her relationship with the colourful community she’s known all her life, along with an unexpected visitor who threatens to remove all peace from her chosen refuge. Told from the perspectives of three narrators: Ivy, Kate, and Kate’s mother Nora, Fishing for Birds is a novel that juxtaposes the expectations we cling to so fiercely and the unexpected and sometimes unconventional things that turn up. The novel challenges traditional constructs of time, ethnicity, and relationship. Set against the tropical beauty of 1920s Cuba and the Northwest Coast of contemporary time, both the landscape and unique character of island life underscore the experiences of three very different women.
Had Charles Bukowski and Mary Karr birthed a literary bastard-child, it could have been Rodney DeCroo. From the banks of the Allegheny River to the west coast of Canada comes a fighter and survivor that has chosen poetry and song as his weapons of defence. These poems show you what happens to the traumatized children of drunken, negligent and equally traumatized parents. Children and teens living in powder keg homes whose “safe place” is a hiding spot behind the furnace, the streets, abandoned houses, and condemned factories.
These pages are stained by people that have done horrible things and had horrible things done to them: neglected Vietnam vets, out of work coal miners, desperate and violent men with nothing but rage for a world that used them up like canisters of propane. Fishing for Leviathan is not a work about the privileged and entitled, but the trapped wage-earners and broken labourers that make the world of the privileged possible. And it is all anointed with liberal quantities of booze and drugs which, of course, make the situations worse; but they also make the days and nights bearable.
These are poems from a writer who has crawled through a mile of broken glass and come out the other side more or less intact.
Sobriety, meetings, counselling, therapy, and good friends are the balm and glue that put the broken back together again.
Advance praise for Fishing for Leviathan
“Rodney DeCroo’s work reveals again and again that he’s as true a poet as any writing today. Like all poets who can lay claim to authenticity, he’s a troubled marriage of heaven and hell, and in this collection he has brought forth fierce, finely honed poems that are at once brutal and uniquely beautiful. Fishing for Leviathan is a piercing imaginative document and a clear, redemptive revelation of what it is to be alive.”
– Russell Thornton, author of Answer to Blue
Finalist, New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
From the first sentence, “I come from a long line of river people,” to the last, “Bad luck to kill a moose bird,” Wayne Curtis signals that this book occupies the territory of a classic, a lyrical memoir of a river and those who submit to its call.
New Brunswick’s Miramichi River is one of the most entrancing salmon rivers in the world. In Fishing the High Country, Curtis has created what can only be described as a river masterpiece, a lyrical record of time and place, of those who are drawn to its side and those who cast their lines into its waters.
Drawing on his experience of life along the river — as a boy, as a young man, and as a river guide among guides, Wayne Curtis crafts the compelling memoir of this place, a high country where he spins his tales, casts his flies, and fishes the river and woods for his stories. The Miramichi vibrates in Curtis’s bones. His cast of characters are earthy, whimsical, and wise. His eye for the telling detail and his rooted understanding of lives lived humbly will captivate readers with its near mystical blend of the mysteries of fly fishing and the affections of the heart.
A literary meditation on memory, time, love, and loss
Fishing With Tardelli contemplates the relations among four parents — mother, father, stepfather, and a Brazilian fishing companion — and the author. Over marriages and remarriages, fathers and mothers become stepfathers and stepmothers, and brothers gain and lose stepbrothers and half-brothers, sisters and half-sisters across two continents. The various homes become part of Besner’s internal geography; memory, dream, story, fable become permeable layers folded over bald facts baldly stated.
Beginning with an older man’s recollections of himself as a young teenager fishing with Tardelli in the bay in Rio de Janeiro, the memoir reflects on time lost and time regained. The narration ranges across the mid-’40s in Montreal, where two couples marry, divorce, and remarry in a new configuration; proceeds to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-’50s, when one of these newly formed families emigrates; and returns to Montreal in the late ’60s and early ’70s. After a 50-year interlude, Besner returns from Western Canada to the pandemic moment in Toronto.
The wild, the woolly, and the very strange: Fit to Print contains stories of the comic, the sad, the odd, and the forgotten from 150 years of New Brunswick newspapers. By the author of Six for the Hangman and When Rum Was King.
When Olivia loses control at her fiftieth birthday party, her three best friends decide to intervene once and for all, much to the irritation of Olivia and her lover, Norma. But is she the only one battling a demon? Or do each of these women face an addiction of one kind or another? 5 @ 50 is a raw and darkly comedic portrayal of turning fifty in contemporary society, and of the friendships we can’t live without.
The Canadian border city facing Detroit was not always simply “Windsor, Ontario”—it was a patchwork of multiple communities that amalgamated into Windsor throughout the 20th Century. In Five Days Walking Five Towns, fabled local raconteur Marty Gervais puts on his boots and takes the reader on a street-by-street walking tour through Riverside, Ford City, Walkerville, Windsor, and Sandwich—weaving together his own memories with the booms and busts of his eclectic, storied city. Along the way, tales of Indigenous curses, rum-running, union-busting, and murderous ministers abound.
With intimate, conversational prose and an acute eye for lore that time forgot, Marty Gervais has created a work not just for Ontario history buffs but for anybody who cares about the evolution of cities and the strange, beautiful people who inhabit them.
Award recognition for Two for the Tablelands:
***THE HOWARD ENGEL AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL SET IN CANADA 2021 – SHORTLIST***
***ATLANTIC BOOKS TODAY STAFF PICK 2021 – SHORTLIST***
Award Recognition for Three for Trinity:
***THE HOWARD ENGEL AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL SET IN CANADA 2022 – SHORTLIST***
The fifth book in the Sebastian Synard mystery series takes our intrepid tour guide/private detective on a jaunt across Newfoundland and into Labrador, in pursuit of those towers of intrigue—lighthouses!
The final stop on Synard’s lighthouse tour is the one at L’Anse Amour, Labrador, the highest in all Atlantic Canada. It’s a long climb into the lantern room, and a long fall from its catwalk to the ground below. Dead is photographer Amanda Thomson. Who is the scoundrel that nudged her past the railing? The RCMP in Forteau are pointing to one of the tour groups, but Sebastian and his partner Mae have other ideas. They retrace the excursions of Amanda and her vagabond boyfriend back to a section of northern Newfoundland called the French Shore. Could the recent bizarre vandalism at its historic sites hold a clue? What is it about the French Shore that leads them back to murder at L’Anse Amour?
Non-profits are big business. According to a recent Johns Hopkins report, third-sector institutions in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Japan, the U.S. and Canada have been growing at an average rate that is twice the growth rate of their GDPs. Canada is home to the second largest non-profit workforce in the world, employing 2 million paid staff and contributing $112 billion to our economy each year. We are also recognized worldwide as an important generator of ideas and agent of social change.
Maytree, a Canadian foundation established in 1982, has long been immersed in the dialogue surrounding the growth of the non-profit sector. From its extensive network of non-profit, government and corporate-sector leaders, Alan Broadbent and Ratna Omidvar have amassed a collection of practical ideas for running non-profits.
As the sector expands to embrace new issues, there is increased pressure for accountability, relevancy and efficiency. Practitioners are expected to be experts in a variety of fields. Five Good Ideas offers information, strategies for action and management solutions that are easy to implement and will improve how organizations function. It is a testament to what can happen when people from a variety of backgrounds get together to share their skills and knowledge.