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All Books in this Collection
Showing 2705–2720 of 9481 results
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for love and autonomy
$16.95Anahita Jamali Rad’s debut book of poetry juxtaposes Marxist economics with pop culture lyrics, from FKA Twigs to Sonic Youth, tangling the “You & I” of relationships and social identification. She asks: How is it possible to communicate when the “I” speaks from the margins? Who is the “I” when Motown’s doo-wop and post-punk’s Telecaster jangles shake up the body’s rhythm? for love and autonomy speaks from a place of discomfort, where internalized pop songs mutate communication and meaning under the guises of individuality and romanticism. Jamali Rad’s “I” is highly textured, musical, and suspect. Her poems bring us together with their rebellious voices – only to push us away into alienation when mimicry falls flat, when the “I” loses its context, when we become oppressed, thingified, dependent, and belligerent.
Jamali Rad deals with the stuff of everyday life: work and sex, friendship and love. Her critical attention to the structure of these social relations creates a poetics of trial and failure, questioning the very “culture” responsible for its making as she forges a way for the possibility of radical resistance in language.
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For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin
$19.95Drawn from nine collections published over thirty years, the thirty-eight poems in this retrospective reveal the poetic accomplishments of John Barton. In this collection, which is introduced by R.M Vaughan, Barton explores the role of love in contemporary society, the complexity of gay experience, the persistence of homophobia, the reinvention of the idea of family, and the fear and courage that AIDS engendered and how it continues to shape the search and attainment of intimacy.This selected embraces Barton’s passions for art, literature, the city and nature, including his ongoing passion for Emily Carr with four poems drawn from West of Darkness. Other personages make cameo appearances, including Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, Joseph Brodsky, M.C. Escher and C. P. Cavafy. Adolf Hitler has a dialogue-free, walk-on part early on.What Barton accomplishes in For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin is best described by Barry Dempster: “This book reminds us of John Barton’s stature as a consummate social poet, a topnotch lyricist, and a risk-taker of sometimes breathtaking scale.”
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For the Changing Moon
$20.00At a time of cultural change for Indigenous people that feels relentlessly tidal and epochal, For the Changing Moon: Poems and Songs records the ebb and flow of what it is to live here and now in Canada, as a woman, an indigenous woman, a culturally mixed woman, a daughter, a mother, a peace-seeker and a warrior.
The book includes work visually designed for the page, and work composed to be chanted, sung, and spoken amongst ourselves. We are asked to experience it as a record of the shifting times, and understand how the mood of the world can strike change in an individual, sometimes, like a rogue wave; and other times, slowly and methodically like a lunar tidal pull.
If you can do this Can you, Can you do this?
If we can do this, Can we? Can we do this?
Anna Marie Sewell’s poems court performance as they incorporate the energy of slam and employ the beat structures of chant. They encourage us to enter their spells and incantations always built with an ear for sound and with an eye for images of dream and wonder. Her invite and challenge is clear: “Come lovers of language, seekers of change, moon-mad prophets, come. Read and share these poems and songs, and answer them back with your own.”
From this specific place, Canada, during a moment of global sea change, these poems and songs reach for the moon-mad natural soul in all of us, that part of all of us that lives to follow the Great Song.
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For the Despairing Alone
$18.95This poetry collection is a book for those who do not turn a blind eye to the often desperate state of our world. Presented in a formal and artistic way, the poems cultivate hope and bring us back to what is significant and fundamental in our lives. “For the Despairing Alone” shows us the small glimpses of joy that watch over us and give us hope for the human world. Relating to nature and botany in a creative way, this book reveals to us that even in small things, such as nature, there can be joy in the turmoil-filled world that we live in today.
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For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again
$16.95For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is Tremblay’s homage to his mother, who nurtured his imagination, his reclusive reading habits and his love for the theatre and the arts, yet who did not live to witness the performance of Les Belles Soeurs—the first successful play written in joual with which Tremblay legitimized the Quebecois vernacular in the arts—and the world-wide acclaim for her son’s artistic genius. In a compelling balance of humour and poignancy, Tremblay offers glimpses of himself and his mother at five different stages of their lives together, culminating in his reassurance of his dying mother’s concern for him immediately prior to his spectacular success.
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For Want of a Fir Tree
$19.95How can a country at peace suddenly be plunged into war? What compels hitherto peaceable citizens to take up arms and kill one another? In For Want of a Fir Tree: Ukraine Undone, Frédérick Lavoie tells Artyom, a four-year-old child he saw lying in his little blue coffin on a January afternoon in 2015, about the sequence of events that led to his death. In doing so, and in travelling the country from one side to the other, talking to people from all walks of life in both camps, Lavoie tells a compelling story of a land drawn into conflict through misadventure, misjudgment, mistrust, and a legacy of ancient historical resentments with a tenacious hold on their populations. It is a cautionary tale whose truths and whose lessons resonate far beyond these specific events, these particular borders.
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For Your Eyes Only
$22.95All-new stories told by the people who make Bond come to life. For Your Eyes Only: Behind the Scenes of the Bond Films is a rare tour of the world’s most successful film series of all time. Explore the exciting world of James Bond through unprecedented access on the 007 sets and exclusive interviews with Bond’s leading players, from Pierce Brosnan, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Sean Connery, to the key directors, stunt and special effects wizards, to the legendary producers and writers, to old series favourites like “Q” and Miss Moneypenny. And, oh yes, the bevy of Bond girl beauties.
Retracing the cultural and political impact of the Bond series, the book also features interviews with such luminaries as Hugh Hefner and CIA agent E. Howard Hunt discussing the Bond phenomenon. From literary beginnings, to international film sensation, to mid-’80s faltering, to the spectacular resurgence when Pierce Brosnan took over the infamous role, James Bond is now more popular—and a bigger box-office behemoth — than ever before. Tomorrow Never Dies — and neither does Bond … James Bond.
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For Your Own Good
$18.00In the canon of contemporary feminist and lesbian poetry, For Your Own Good breaks silence. A fictionalized autobiography, the poems in this collection illustrate the narrator’s survival of a domestic and sexual violence in a lesbian relationship. There is magic in this work: the symbolism of the Tarot and the roots of Jewish heritage, but also the magic that is at the heart of transformation and survival. These poems are acutely painful, rooted in singular and firsthand experiences. But Horlick also draws from a legacy of feminist, Jewish and lesbian writers against violence: epigraphs from the works of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt act as touchstones alongside references to contemporary writers, such as Daphne Gottlieb and Michelle Tea. In this reflection on grief, silence and community, we follow the narrator’s own journey as she explores what it is to survive, to change, to desire and to hope. At once unflinching and fragile For Your Own Good is a collection with transformation at its heart.
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For Your Safety Please Hold On
$18.95For Your Safety Please Hold On is a truly remarkable first poetry collection from debut talent Kayla Czaga. Her poems are already making waves–several from this collection have received award attention, including: The Fiddlehead’s 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Malahat Review’s 2012 Far Horizon’s Award for Poetry and an Editor’s Choice Award in ARC Poetry Magazine’s 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. They have also been shortlisted for The New Quarterly’s 2013 Occasional Verse Contest, longlisted for CBC’s 2013 Canada Writes Poetry Contest and have appeared in literary publications across North America.The poems in For Your Safety Please Hold On move in thematic focus from family, to girlhood, to adulthood, each permeated by Czaga’s lively voice and quick-witted, playful language. They test the line between honest humour and bitter reality in a sophisticated, incisive manner that tugs at the gut and feels true.The linguistic hopscotch of Czaga’s poems about girlhood is often beautifully juxtaposed with feelings of menace or a first taste of smothering expectations–“She sits. She sips her bright pink fingers. / She slips into smart short haircuts, yes, / she does so, and does herself up just so.” While her pin prick meditations on contemporary adulthood suggest a yearning for personal meaning and purpose on a larger scale–“I still wander, sometimes, / my coat closing the world out of my body, with pockets / full of garbage, with my slender steady want. I still / make the bed and at bedtime unmake it.”The irrepressible energy of the poems in For Your Safety Please Hold On, paired with their complex balancing act between light and dark, humour and melancholy, innocence and danger, make this collection an extraordinary first offering.
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Forage
$19.95Winner of the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry PrizeFinalist for the 2008 Asian American Literary AwardRita Wong’s new collection of poems explores how ecological crises relate to the injustices of our international political landscape. Querying the relations between writing and other forms of action, Wong seeks a shift in consciousness through poems that bespeak a range of responses to our world: anger, protest, anxiety, bewilderment, hope and love. In her words, “the next shift may be the biggest one yet, the union of the living, from mosquito to manatee to mom.”Forage is accompanied by marginalia, Chinese characters and photos that give depth to the political context in which most of Wong’s poems are situated. She is instructive without being pedantic, and thought-provoking while still calling forth humour and beauty.
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Ford City
$24.95Ford City was a town steeped in the history of the auto industry. Companies including Ford, E.M.F., Studebaker, Chalmers and Chrysler all called Ford City their home of Canadian operations. But it was more than just an industrial town. It was a rumrunning hub, a communist hotbed, and a thriving cultural centre for the people of the Border Cities. From the town’s inception, through amalgamation, to the revitalization of the Ford plant in the 1990s, Ford City is the story of the industrial heart of Windsor.
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Fordmates
$18.95The stories in Fordmates ricochet headlong between comedy and tragedy, balancing the tedium and gruelling demands of the automotive assembly line with the workers’ gutsy attempts to preserve spirits and some semblance of sanity. Many of the stories revel in some unexpected small victory extracted from the daily routine, from the giddy foolishness of gloveball fights and improbable practical jokes to the terse satisfaction of outsmarting overbearing foremen. The persistent theme throughout remains the unbreakable spirit of the workers in the face of a relentless machine. In these linked stories, Ivo Moravec, himself a twenty-year veteran of the former St. Thomas Assembly plant, characterizes automotive factories as the source not only of Ford Crown Victorias and Mercury Grand Marquises but also of daydreams and paycheques, of philosophers and drug addicts, and of broken families and best mates.
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Forecasts for Flying
$14.95In Forecasts for Flying the author sketches the history of the Meteorological Service of Canada in the two decades following the Great War.
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Foreign Homes
$15.00Foreign Homes, Joan Crate’s second book of poems, explores domesticity and dislocation, where what was thought to be home becomes alien, and where the alien is, piece by piece, made into home — often in such simple, physical acts as laying a table, or driving a highway, or reassembling a tom photograph. In Crate’s careful hands, the knife that cuts the vegetables for dinner can transform the blade-edge of a distant war. Her migratory poems slip from voice to voice, from love to landscape to language, present to past, exile to return, illuminating the boundary that is also a border crossing between one person, one place, and another:
Dowries
We have crossed borders to reach
each other and lost land
chafes our touch. I carry
snowshoes, winter wheat, raven call, winter pocked by arsenic flakes from the mines.
You bring donkey sweat and spent bullets,
voices that shriek out, tear bright.
We offer them to each other-
gift and sacrifice.Domestic images and personal narrative surround a burning, incantatory sequence at the centre of the book, where poems circle Shawnandithit, a Beothuk who died in exile in Newfoundland in the nineteenth century, the last of her people. In giving voice to what is unknown, feared, lost, and silent, Crate’s playful language is itself powerfully involved in this act-often violent-of breaking and making anew. And whether these homes are stolen or lost or stumblingly found, Crate is unflinching even as her own homes are made and un-made, watching those “who wait on the porch steps/ eager to move into our youth,/ to reassemble our bones.”
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Foreign Park
$18.00Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes), 2016
Foreign Park situates itself in an epoch where prior assurances of the natural world’s solidity begin to slip. Poisons enter the Fraser River Basin. An oil slick approaches by night engulfing a fishing vessel, leaving its captain in open waters. Page after page, Foreign Park makes strange with its inhabitants. As it unfolds, it plots itself along the Fraser River overlaying myth and historicity with present day. These calm poems detail the effects of destruction on land and simultaneously explore family and community in Vancouver’s coastal cityscape. Foreign Park guides through subtle shifts in temperature and elevation in order to engage with questions on death, ageing, family and fidelity.
Praise for Foreign Park:
“Jeff Steudel’s Foreign Park measures an immediate world through the palpable juxtapositions of the local, what’s close to hand, organic flashes of the day’s objects that can be touched. The ‘foreignicity’ of his poetic park reveals the paradox of where and how we live, that in-between margin in the world where we ‘don’t need to know everything’ and ‘Every five minutes together [is] a new world.’ These poems shimmer in their aliveness.” (Fred Wah, former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate and recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry)
“Steudel so easily displays his unique poetic genius of invocation, innovation and juxtaposition again and again as the reader journeys through his Foreign Park. The journey is exciting at its best and still seemingly delightful at every twist and turn. This is a fine first offering from Vancouver poet Jeff Steudel and worthy indeed of reading cover to cover.” (Candice James, Poet Laureate, New Westminster, BC)
Most Anticipated Poetry selection, 49th Shelf
Excerpt from the book featured on the véhicule press blog
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Forests
$18.95From Odette to Hélène, then to Léonie, Ludivine, Sarah, Luce and finally to Aimée, Loup’s mother.
It would seem that a curse of tragedy and death decimated this family in the heart of the Ardennes Forest. But Loup is courageous, she wants to end the bitter legacy of fate and break the chain of abandoned childhoods.
Following Littoral (Tideline) and Incendies (Scorched), Forests is the third part of Wajdi Mouawad’s critically acclaimed dramatic quartet set in the painful wake of the past century.