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Grey Tote, The
$16.00Elegies on the death of the author’s parents.
The Grey Tote, Deena Kara Shaffer’s debut, is a collection of elegies on the death, in quick succession, of her father and mother. Scorning easy consolations, Shaffer’s poems are witty, epigrammatic, rhythmic, spiked with grief but ultimately dry-eyed “lessons in goodbye,” she calls them, “Sentences / cut.” In coming to grips with what to do “now that now/ has no them in it,” she has arrived at a book of poetry fiercer and truer than most written today.
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griddle talk
$18.95For 52 weeks, bill bissett and Carol Malyon met for brunch and conversation at the Golden Griddle in Toronto.
This sustained conversational encounter between Carol Malyon, who writes within the objective bounds of standard English usage, and bill bissett, one of contemporary writing’s most exotic practitioners, working with the visual forms of language in his own non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, produces, as if by accident, invariably astonishing social, moral and ethical critical insights. Each of these writers’ particular uses of language—the most radically different in contemporary literature—consistently foregrounds and interrogates the cultural origins of “common” perceptions that too often remain hidden and undiscovered in the dictionaries we search for “common” meaning: proof positive that each person’s perception of life’s most fundamental questions and answers is almost never shared, and is always and only ever subject to translation, even among those who “share” the same language.
Here is what they talked about:
Trouble and the Self
What is Forever
Does Belonging Exist
Luck and Life
We Need Not Hold Our Experiences Against Life
Is There a Script
The Role of Mysteries in People’s Lives
Time
Free Will and Wider Wiring
Families
God &/or the Loved One and Individual Freedom
Mortality and the Jigsaw Puzzle of Replicating a Parent in a Lover
Why “Shoulds” are No Good
Delusional Relationships
The Chemistry Metaphor
Censorship and Propaganda
True Love
Fact or Fiction—Where’s the Line
Do We Invent Everything We Go Through
Is Rationality a Costume
Can We Influence Larger Book Sales
Maybe We All Want to Move to Sweden
Just for Today I’m Confused About Religion
Tax Reform
Predictability
Stage Fright
Carol, What Is It
Them
Know Thyself and the Writer’s Delusions
Wondering What about the Stars and Our Friends
Childhood Versus Later On
Real Life—Does it Really Exist
All Those Prayers—Where are They Going, Exactly
Meaninglessness
Time and Relativity
Each Day We Wake Up and Realize They’ve Given Us Another Day
Everything is Answered
The Questions in Our Lives—the Balance, and What’s Peripheral
Dogs Give Unconditional Love, Why Can’t People
Life is Difficult and We are Up to the Challenge
Personal Happiness and Destiny
Federalism—Is It Too Late to Save It
The Payoff is Always Inside Ourselves
Cultural Translation
Can We Know Beforehand
Spirituality
Loss and Grief
Is This Real Life We’re Experiencing
Jealousy
Why Aren’t People in Love with Us When We’re in Love with Them
Do We Have Freedom Outside Our Imprintings—Can We Find Reciprocal Love if Our Imprintings Prevent That from Happening
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Grief Theory
$22.95From the acclaimed author of Where Things Touch comes a rigorous interrogation of grief as an intimate register of loss, and political transformation.
In Bahar Orang’s formally innovative collection, grief emerges as neither innocent nor private but as structured by war, empire, and diaspora. As intimate relations are continually traversed through geopolitical realities, the poet-speaker sifts through the debris of language alongside the likes of Fanon, Gramsci, and Césaire.
Moving between lyric fragments and essayistic meditations, the book deftly brings personal loss into relation with longer histories of colonial and imperial violence. In doing so, it poses difficult but necessary questions about the cruelty that can exist within empathy, the pleasure of righteous outrage, the fantasy of proximity to suffering, and the ways in which love and care themselves may reproduce domination.
This unique hybrid work resists linear narrative and reveals grief as an ongoing, unresolved condition. Ultimately, Grief Theory asks what it means to witness, desire, and remain implicated in the violent world we seek to endure and to understand.
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Griffintown
$21.95 -
Grimmish
$23.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD
Pain was Joe Grim’s self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being.
A superstar boxer who rarely won a fight, Grim distinguished himself for his extraordinary ability to withstand physical punishment.
In this wild and expansive novel, Michael Winkler moves between the present day and Grim’s 1908–09 tour of Australia, bending genres and histories into a kaleidoscopic investigation of pain, masculinity, and narrative.
Pain is often said to defy the limits of language. And yet Grimmish suggests that pain – physical and mental – is also the most familiar and universal human condition; and, perhaps, the secret source of our impulse to tell stories.
“The strangest book you are likely to read this year.” – JM Coetzee
“Grimmish meets a need I didn’t even know I had. I lurched between bursts of wild laughter, shudders of horror, and gasps of awe at Winkler’s verbal command: the freshness and muscle of his verbs, the unstoppable flow of his images, the bizarre wit of the language of pugilism – and all the while, a moving subterranean glint of strange masculine tenderness.” – Helen Garner
“A powerful blast of literary ingenuity and originality.” – Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip
“All the makings of a cult classic. It’s grotesque and gorgeous, smart and searching.” – Beejay Silcox, The Guardian
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Grin Reaping
$20.00“
Grin Reaping catalogues the foibles of the fictional Boyle family. In a series of fourteeninterconnected short stories and musings, Rudy Boyle, a Northern Ontario college Englishteacher stuck both in middle age and in the middle of his five siblings, transforms the strangenessof his everyday life into exaggerated home-movie prose. From the significance of tuna fish andBotox, the threat of coyotes and aliens, to the big-ticket items of mortality, gender, climate-change, and Armageddon, Rudy tackles a range of topics with a wry, self-deprecating wit. As hevariously shares such snippets, he exaggerates small and mundane situations into comiccelebrations of the life of the mind, never letting the truth get in the way of a great story. Hisreminiscences deal not only with the absurdities of human nature, but also encompass the grief oflosing family. Rudy is bedeviled by neurosis, and cowed before the insignificant things in hisworld. He talks largely about small matters and trivially about great affairs. It is the nature of hisdilemma and the dilemma of his nature.
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Grinder
$24.95A mob enforcer is pulled back into his old life in this “terrific read” (Ken Bruen, Shamus Award–winning author of The Dramatist)
“Razor-edged prose and a sympathetic antihero lift Knowles’s no-holds-barred crime thriller . . . Readers who like their mean streets really mean will be thoroughly satisfied.” — Publishers Weekly starred review
Two years ago, Wilson made a deal: he let his old boss live in exchange for a clean slate. He’s kept up his end of the bargain since then and stayed off the grid — working on a fishing boat off the coast of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Now, many miles from the city he once escaped, a man comes calling on Wilson with a gun in his hand and a woman in his trunk. And Wilson is pulled back into his old life as a “grinder” — working under the radar to quietly find out who is responsible for a dangerous mobster’s missing nephews . . .
All bets are off and before he’s done — everyone will pay.
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Grist
$20.95Shortlisted for the 2015 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction
“This is the story of how you were loved,” Penelope MacLaughlin whispers to her granddaughter.
Penelope MacLaughlin marries a miller and gradually discovers he is not as she imagined. Nonetheless she remains determined to make the best of life at the lonely mill up the Gunn Brook as she struggles to build a home around her husband’s eccentricities. His increasing absence leaves Penelope to run the mill herself, providing her with a living but also destroying the people she loves most. Penelope struggles with loss and isolation, and suffers the gradual erosion of her sense of self. A series of betrayals leaves her with nothing but the mill and her determination to save her grandchildren from their disturbed father. While she can prepare her grandsons for independence, her granddaughter is too young and so receives the greater gift: the story that made them all.
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Ground Rules
$24.95Ground Rules features writing from the second decade of one of the most active micro publishers in Canada, selected from a series of hundreds of publications lovingly edited, produced and distributed by editor/publisher rob mclennan. A follow-up to Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Ground rules includes a wide range of work by Artie Gold, Mark Cochrane, Suzanne Zelazo, derek beaulieu, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Nathana‘l, Lisa Samuels, Rachel Zolf, Sharon Harris, D. G. Jones, Julia Williams, Eric Folsom, Gregory Betts, Natalie Simpson, Monty Reid, William Hawkins, Emily Carr, Cameron Anstee, Helen Hajnoczky, Marilyn Irwin, Stephen Brockwell, Robert Kroetsch and rob mclennan.
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Ground Water
$19.95Colin Browne’s exciting new work Ground Water received a glowing review in The Georgia Straight (June 6-13, 2002 issue). In all map making, one begins with the representation of ‘ground’ and ‘water,’ and what grows or is constructed on these representations is rendered by a series of conventional symbols-the ‘elements of topography.’ This book of poems is an investigation of the elements of the spiritual topography of the 20th century, and a close examination of the conventional symbology passed on to the poet/map-maker by his ancestors-his father and mother, his grandparents, his aunts and uncles. It is a paralysing inheritance which is rendered here-an entire century, not begun with ‘the war to end all wars,’ but a century through which that great calamity of mechanized and mass-produced misunderstandings was perpetually reproduced.
These ancestors have abetted suffering they could never have imagined. Accessories to crimes against whole populations that made possible their pleasures and their grace, they’re humiliated and ashamed, mortified by themselves, by their indignity and complicity. Incapable of reversing the inhumanity of what they have created, they have left the traces of their deeds on the landscape, fragments of correspondence for their sons and daughters to decipher.
Within this wilderness of the 20th century, the green flame of life continually presents itself in these poems as an emergency-an emergence, a coming-out, a flower, a bloom of identity, shape and form, requiring immediate attention and action, asserting itself as mimesis, and constituting a disruption of the conventional representations of the symbolic.
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Ground-Truthing
$24.95Candid, poetic and forensic, Derrick Stacey Denholm’s Ground-Truthing walks the reader slowly and nimbly through the tangle of social, ecological and economic slash piles that dominate BC’s North Coast. Having lived and worked for twenty-five years as both a forestry field worker and a multidisciplinary artist, Denholm brings a rare perspective to how we can work productively and participate ethically in a life that maintains respect for the wild. Ground-Truthing explores a diverse terrain of communities that are as deeply wild as they are highly civilized. Carefully negotiating the conflicting value systems of industrial forestry, the culture of resource towns, the diversity of First Nations history and tradition, the stagnancy of government policy and the “Real Work” of the rainforest, Denholm gathers the perspectives of more than 150 academics, poets, scientists, journalists, loggers, activists, local citizens and mushroom hunters. He brings together the breadth of the local opinion, personal emotion and technical work that serves to influence the ongoing industrialization of the wild and human world – which are one and the same. Local in focus, international in scope and interdisciplinary by necessity, Ground-Truthing provides a dynamic alternate voice to the mainstream cycle of North Coast writing – which generally serves to memorialize the Euro-Canadian, colonial-settler narrative. Denholm argues that First Nations’ experience and wisdom, taken with the long-standing lessons provided by the wild itself, can provide us all with the models, principles and philosophies needed to live our lives – and not just in the rainforests of the North Coast of British Columbia, but anywhere.
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Groundwork
$17.95Amanda Jernigan’s Groundwork is epic in ambition and scope, a collection of poetic sequences, both intensely personal and mythopoetic, representing stages in the poet’s thinking about language and place, and form a series of parallel meditations on the past, present and the mythological constructs with which we seek to join them.
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Groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013–2023
$26.95Celebrating thirty years of continuous activity with well over twelve hundred publications to date, groundwork celebrates the third decade of rob mclennan’s Ottawa-based above/ground press, publisher of lyric, innovative and experimental writing across a wealth of chapbooks, broadsides and multiple simultaneous journals, including Touch the Donkey, The Peter F. Yacht Club and G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]. Following on the heels of the anthologies GROUNDSWELL, best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003) and Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013), groundwork pushes against the short-lived and the ephemeral of small and micro press publishing. Firmly situated in his home base of Ottawa, above/ground press revels in the possibility of expansive conversations between writers, writing and readership, and groundwork works to acknowledge mclennan’s deep and ongoing dedication to the work of hundreds of contemporary writers across North America and beyond.
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Growing and Eating Sustainably
$28.00The industrial food system, from production to consumption and waste, is a major contributor to environmental, social and economic problems. A few powerful multinational corporations have consolidated control of agricultural markets and wealth while many farmers struggle to make a living and millions of people go hungry every day. Consumer access to healthy and culturally appropriate food remains largely an option for only those who can afford it.
Responding to these destructive practices, global agrarian movements are calling for a transition to agroecology. Agroecological farming follows ecological principles for growing food in a way that respects diverse sociocultural contexts, connects urban eaters and rural growers and attends to power dynamics.
Growing and Eating Sustainably shines light on the process of agroecological transition by showcasing the experiences of growers and eaters in southern Brazil, a country where agrarian movements have long been at the forefront of pushing for more sustainable and just food systems. Through stories and photographs of people, landscapes, farms and farming practices, and urban spaces, this book communicates how to advance systems-level agroecological transitions by linking rural and urban areas and connecting diverse agroecological experiences.
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Growing My Way Home
Sad, shocking, and truthful, Growing My Way Home chronicles one woman’s struggle through events all too common among a People who have been separated from their culture and their language. From abuse to early involvement in the criminal justice system, from her experiences as a thirteen-year-old drug dealer, a fifteen-year-old parent, and finally an award-winning writer, artist, and filmmaker, Jenn Ashton has survived it all. A work of autofiction based on her teenage journals and fifty years of lived experience, Growing My Way Home documents a long journey to acceptance and understanding.
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Growing Up Oblivious in Mississippi North
$26.95An investigative journalist reckons with the cost of settler privilege.
In the last thirty years, various parties have exposed government archives recording the facts of Canada’s genocidal attempt to destroy its Indigenous populations, a gradual holocaust of segregation, poverty, coerced labour, avoidable infectious diseases, forced migrations, and even unethical and cruel scientific experiments, all while the descendants of Prairie settlers enticed by the same government to take over Indigenous territories prospered at their expense. While performative statements of gratitude for being allowed to stand on the territories of various First Nations have become standard features of Canadian public events, the statements of claim, academic literature, and multi-volume commission reports setting out exactly what we stole, who we hurt and how, have been read by few, and the policies and decisions which crushed generation after generation of Indigenous people are still not broadly known.
In Growing Up Oblivious in Mississippi North, investigative journalist Elaine Dewar exposes the governmental machinery behind the unacknowledged Jim-Crow era of the Canadian Prairies. The granddaughter of settlers saved during their first Prairie winter by the generosity of their Indigenous neighbors, Dewar explores how even well-meaning Canadians who glimpsed the truth of what was being done by the government of Canada in their names did nothing to stop it. Part memoir, part investigation, Growing Up Oblivious in Mississippi North tells the story of a Jewish girl from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who grew up in a society so segregated—its Indigenous people consigned to an alternate universe—that she failed to notice for decades.