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Showing 321–336 of 9248 results
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A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl
$18.95In poems that could double as paintings, M. Travis Lane harnesses the brush strokes of language to form a bridge between the artist and natural world in A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl. This is work that sees ?the reds / that glitter in the shaggy firs, / the yellow-mauves in shadowed snow, / the orange-hatched pine tops quivering? and captures it all in vivid detail. A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl is a vital new collection from one of Canada?s most important living poets.
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A Thaw Foretold
$18.95Written between one January and the next, A Thaw Foretold is a passionate exploration of themes that are as timeless and recurrent as the seasons. In language that is both precisely vivid and particular, embracing both colloquial directness and formal elegance, the poems confront the elementals of love and loss, mortality and remembrance. Longing and desolation and dread are powerfully evoked, but so, in counterpoint, are the consolations of shared happiness, comfort and hope. The suspension and tension implied by the title — the promise of flowing water that murmurs beneath ice — gives the sequence of poems unity as well as dynamic and propulsive momentum. The result is a collection that is richly textured, emotionally and intellectually resonant, and thoroughly compelling.
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A thin fire runs through me
$19.95How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in.
Each line a strip of skin torn from me.In A thin fire runs through me, Kim Trainor interrogates what it means to exist, to navigate the quotidian amidst the constant drip-feed of political and ecological disasters.
Written over an intense nine-month period in 2016 and 2017 amidst the stresses of heartbreak, depression, and the progression of a new love, Trainor’s exquisite sequence of short poems offers meditations on different hexagrams in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Incorporating fragments from reportage on current events, Jewish liturgy, and lyric poetics, she latches her readers to the present while acknowledging the inescapable presence of the past.
A thin fire runs through me grapples with Trainor’s own personal circumstance while contemporaneously documenting the tenor of our times, suggesting that “We peer into other lives; we absorb words, headlines, violent events. We see and we don’t see. These scraps are unintegrated, unintegratable, yet we carry them.”
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a thin line between
$18.00In what can be described as a verse-novel for its lyricism and rhythmic structure, Wanda Praamsma crafts a story that transcends geographic boundaries and time periods, by weaving together lives from her own family’s past, including her poet-grandfather and sculptor-uncle. Subtle in its life lessons, a thin line between works at ‘peeling away the I’s’ to explore concepts of self and family in flux. What emerges is a poignant, and at times humorous, portrait of a Dutch-Canadian family and a close look into a young woman’s exploration of her own being and creative life.
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A Thing of Beauty
$19.95March, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Édouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay’s Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana—The Fat Woman who is here finally named—is gravely ill and her days are numbered. How will he, with his exaggerated sensitivity, his visions, his ongoing struggle with “reality” pit his fertile imagination against this inexorable march of death? In five epiphanic visions that take us from a nineteenth-century London pub to a reworking of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, Marcel uses his gift of the creative imagination to break the eternal spiral of new beginnings, and to thumb his nose at despair and resignation.
Presented here, side by side, is Tremblay’s fictionalized account of the death of his own mother, so lovingly enacted in his new play, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. In what becomes a coda to his great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal cycle of novels, Tremblay creates, with grace and tenderness, a redemption and transcendent grandeur for these familiar and beloved characters: A Thing of Beauty.
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A Thoroughly Wicked Woman
$19.95On a foggy evening in November 1905, 48-year-old Thomas Jackson returned to his home on Melville Street in Vancouver after nine months of prospecting north of the Skeena. Jackson was happy because he had made an important gold strike. Four days later he was dead from strychnine poisoning. Any of the other four people living in the house on Melville Street could have slipped the poison into the mixture of Epsom salts and beer that Jackson took on the morning of his death. Reporters from Vancouver’s newspapers chose Jackson’s teary-eyed, fragile, 24-year-old wife, Theresa, as their first choice for the guilty party. Then as the days went by, their preference shifted to the dead man’s steely-eyed, light-fingered, American mother-in-law, Esther Jones. Suspicion also fell on the two boarders – Esther’s nephew Harry Fisher and Ernest Exall. All of them had the opportunity to plant the poison.
Eventually the police followed up on the newspapers’ revelations, the most important being that Harry Fisher was not Esther’s nephew but her son. Fisher fled to Washington, and in his absence his mother and sister were arrested–not for murder but for perjured testimony at the coroner’s inquest. What followed was a series of hearings and trials in the city’s courtrooms with fledgling lawyers trying to make their names in combat with the celebrated defence counsel Joseph Martin, KC. At the same time the newspapers, which were locked in a deadly circulation war, tried desperately to trump each other with juicy bits of information, all of it splashed on their front pages week after week. In the end the two women served time in the BC Penitentiary, but no one was ever tried for the murder of Thomas Jackson.
Acclaimed writer Betty Keller has based her sensational story of murder and intrigue on actual events that occurred in Vancouver’s pre-World War I years. -
A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream
$19.95A career-focused woman finds her life taken off course by an unexpected pregnancy and its challenging aftermath; a troubled doctor abandons her family on her daughter’s birthday, the three-tiered pastel layer cake in the passenger seat beside her; a young mother must contend with how to explain her husband’s suicide to their child. In her first story collection, Lesley Trites digs bravely into the dilemmas faced by contemporary women who must be everything to everyone, as they navigate the triangle of responsibilities between motherhood, work, and love.
Written with keen insight and deep affection, Lesley Trites’s A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream unearths pearls of wisdom from the secret lives of women who could easily live next door, drop off their kids at the same school, or work in the next cubicle.
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A Tidy Armageddon
$26.95“Samuel Beckett meets Stephen King in an absurd and eerie coming-of-end tale that should serve as some sort of warning.”— Peter Darbyshire, author of Has the World Ended Yet?“This book is the furthest apocalypse from Mad Max that you can get. Instead, it’s a transfixing and brilliant attack on consumerism and, in a way, humanity’s inability to look before we leap…”— Post Apocalyptic MediaThe world is transformed into what looks like a massive warehouse overnight, and the result is a suspenseful and action-rich tale as humanity is forced to face the scale of its consumptionA provocative eco-novel featuring an apocalypse like no other, A Tidy Armageddon describes the current world transformed. Civilization has been dismantled by an unknown hand and reassembled into a vast maze of blocks, each comprised of a single item, packed Tetris-style and stacked nine storeys tall: watering cans, electrical transformers, fake Christmas trees, helicopters, plastic spoons, and everything else human culture has ever produced. In rich, descriptive prose shattered by moments of suspense and action, the novel chronicles the journey of a diverse group of soldiers led by Elsie Sharpcot, a Cree sergeant and Afghanistan vet, who must reconcile a desperate hunt for her daughter with the responsibility to safeguard the recruits under her command. Passing with fear and wonder through this mausoleum of human excess, provisioning themselves from its treasures while searching for those they love, this band of misfits amalgamates into their own dysfunctional family as they race to outrun the approaching winter.
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A Tilt
$18.95Having practiced as a psychiatrist for many years, as well as having personally experienced years of intensive personal psychoanalysis, has given the poet, Farideh de Bosset, the opportunity to look at, and experience, life with an acute intensity of joy and pain. Each poem records the events of a woman’s everyday life, as well as the poet’s experiences of talking to, and healing with, patients, and friends and family, as well as the impact of literature and art, the countries she’s lived in and visited, and, of cours,e her dreams and her understanding of those dreams on her work, her creation of art, and her life. Aware of the everyday juggling between different structures of the psyche and the external world in each and every one of us contributes to the poet’s awe and admiration for the enduring nature of the human spirit.
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A Toilet Paper
$5.00‘A Toilet Paper’ is a humorous examination, from a historical linguistic viewpoint, of four commonly used words relating to our posterior orifice and that which comes out of it.
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A Town With No Noise
$21.95Samara and J., a struggling young couple, are off to J.’s birthplace, Upton Bay, a small town turned upscale theatre and winery destination. Sam has been hired by an editor friend to write a promotional piece about the place while she and J. stay with his grandfather Otto, a prominent businessman in his day. But their visit does not go as planned. Sam’s explorations of Upton’s tourist attractions lead her to ugly truths behind the quaint little town’s façade—discoveries that are counterpointed with vignettes of the town’s wealthy, elderly ruling class, painting a different picture than the one Sam’s friend expects her to provide. Tensions between Sam and J. worsen as J.’s true nature emerges and Sam begins to question both his values and his family’s past—especially after Otto tells them stories about his time as a German soldier during WW2. Back in the city, Sam’s opinions and judgments about what is right and wrong are tested when a shocking truth surfaces about her grandmother’s flight from Norway after the war, profoundly changing Sam’s understanding of who she is and who she wants to become. In A Town with No Noise, fact and fiction combine to ask difficult questions about the communities we build, questions that are as relevant today as ever: Who stays? Who is chased away? And who decides?
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A Traveler’s Tale
$18.95A Traveler’s Talebegins in a small village in Turkey where the protagonist, Jefferson Cooper, finds himself (despite himself). He has no idea why he is there, nor who he is. An apparent victim of some sort of selective amnesia, with a suitcase full of money and demonstrably a shady past, he sets out on a voyage of self-discovery. He travels to Istanbul, Mumbai, and Kerala, meeting all manner of people who seem to know him so much better than he knows himself. Along the way, he falls in love with a slender, ethereal person who keeps reappearing just when he seems on the brink of total desperation. It is Miryam who leads him to a realization of who he is and to his long-sought redemption.
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A Traveler’s Tale
$32.95The Traveler’s Tale begins in a small village in Turkey where the protagonist, Jefferson Cooper, finds himself (despite himself ). He has no idea why he is there, nor who he is. An apparent victim of some sort of selective amnesia, with a suitcase full of money and demonstrably a shady past, he sets out on a voyage of self-discovery. He travels to Istanbul, Mumbai, and Kerala, meeting all manner of people who seem to know him so much better than he knows himself. Along the way, he falls in love with a slender, ethereal person who keeps reappearing just when he seems on the brink of total desperation. It is Miryam who leads him to a realization of who he is and to his long-sought redemption.
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A Tree for Poverty
$16.00Originally published in a small edition in 1954, A Tree for Poverty was Margaret Laurence’s first published book. In this new edition, Laurence’s collection of Somali poems and stories is accompanied with a discussion of her life in Africa, and her in-depth investigation of the oral tradition of Somali literature.
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A Vain Thing
$19.95In A Vain Thing, Tom Wayman offers four genre-crossing novellas that explore how vanity influences our most intimate moments no less than our deepest-held social and political beliefs and actions.
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A Velvet Increase of Curiosity
$12.00This is the first book of poetry by the well-known painter, and her poetry reflects the influence of such writers as bpNichol and Tom Raworth. Downe’s poems are both intimate and emotionally powerful.