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Longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize
A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where-for better or for worse-we see ourselves for what we truly are.
“How to Get Along With Women is at once stunning and daring.”—Canada Arts Connect
“De Mariaffi’s writing is biting and captivating.”—The Book Stylist
Malls and Velcro, television and art galleries, restaurants and bars, drugs and alcohol are the backdrops and props of modern life in the city, but even the disenchanted and confused benefit from the ever-changing constellations and confrontations with other people and other dreams.
How do we scale up our imagination of the human? How does one live one’s life in the Anthropocene?
How to Hold a Pebble–Jaspreet Singh’s second collection of poems–locates humans in the Anthropocene, while also warning against the danger of a single story. These pages present intimate engagements with memory, place, language, migration; with enchantment, uncanniness, uneven climate change and everyday decolonization; with entangled human/non-human relationships and deep anxieties about essential/non-essential economic activities. The poems explore strategies for survival and action by way of a playful return to the quotidian and its manifold interactions with the global and planetary. Of loss no scale remains no seawall… Between one’s despairs / they will brighten / Hope’s in-built traces.
From award-winning, bestselling poet Jess Housty, a collection that offers nourishment through land-based medicine and ancestral wisdom.
Following their critically acclaimed debut Crushed Wild Mint, Jess Housty offers a new collection capturing connections between kinship, ancestral knowledge and spirituality. Drawing on Heiltsuk supernatural beings like Báxvbakvalan̓usiwa (the Great Cannibal at the North End of the World), these poems encircle the idea of the cannibal, a complex figure who is at times dangerous but also a generous conduit for spiritual gifts. They tap into the poet’s own wildness, love and tenderness—and explore the sweet, agonizing anticipation of shared feasts, both from the land and of the body.
In this sensitive critical examination of James Reaney’s plays, Gerald Parker places Reaney’s work in a national and international context. Parker discusses Reaney’s own vision of what theatre is, and considers individual plays with emphasis on the playwright’s passion for the geography and people of Southwestern Ontario. Parker analyzes the intricate fabric of Reaney’s plays from The Killdeer and Listen to the Wind through the Donnelly trilogy.
In 1991 an unnamed wealthy family–widely reported to be the Bronfmans–moved $2 billion out of Canada without having to pay the appropriate taxes. When CHO!CES, a Winnipeg-based social justice coalition, decided to take the federal government to court to force it to collect the tax, an amazing five-year odyssey through the legal and tax system was underway. A wild story of tenacious activists, public interest advocacy, and tax law.
How to Write is a perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody where writing as sampling, borrowing, cutting-and-pasting and mash-up meets literature. This collection of conceptual short ?ction takes inspiration from Lautréamont’s decree that “plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.”
Already early in the twentieth century, the modernist Ezra Pound asserted that poets should “make it new,” and of course by “it” he meant “the tradition”: the materiality of pre-existent writing. The assertion is by no means original, much less post-modern: John Donne, for example, argued centuries ago that “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”
How to Write is an instruction manual for the demise of ownership. A multitudinous dialogue of writers and subjects, words and contexts, it unleashes a cacophony of voices where authors don’t own their words, they merely rent them from other authors. Containing ten pieces of conceptual prose ranging from the purely appropriated through the entirely recomposed, and covering a range of texts from the anonymous to the famous, it includes samplings from, among many others: Lawrence Sterne; Agatha Christie; Bob Kane; Roy Lichtenstein; and every piece of text within one block of the author’s home. Its title story is an exhaustive record of every incidence of the words “write” or “writes” in forty different English-language texts picked aesthetically to represent a disparate number of genres.
With How to Write, beaulieu suggests writers and artists would be better served to “make it reframed, make it borrowed, make it re-contextualized.” By recasting the canon with cut-up directions for successful writing, catalogues of events, and lists of vocabulary, he gleefully illustrates Picasso’s dictum that “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
“at first: the suspension of / disbelief. then, comparison — the compulsion // to equate it”: Adam and Eve, hockey sticks and baseball games, the hairbrushes the dead leave behind, photographs and stains on the carpet, love in filthy apartments, someone’s cat hit by a car. Matt Robinson’s second collection of poetry catalogues the bits and pieces, the art and artefacts, the acts and atrocities that make up the living of lives. In poems whose images and metaphors weave into and around each other, how we play at it: a list articulates and exposes — at times even interrogates — how it is we “play” about our days. Grief; the epic stories and everyday myths we create and tell; the interaction of fathers and sons; the games we season our time with, the battles we wage; how, who, and what we love: all these appear as “a million dark spots — all // those shadows — strobe-dancing, cutting across” the page.
These are poems engaged with the personal, colloquial, and the more lyrically metaphoric aspects of language. Through a highly controlled use of the couplet and single line, employing a diction and syntax at times flowing and at others jagged, they seek to reflect some of the intra- and inter-personal dynamics that are — that might be or at least help move towards an understanding of — ‘it’; it is a swirling, explosive mixture of “an idea, some conjecture or / philosophy” and the “orchestrations of your arms. the guttural music: song.”
hoy-den: n. A high-spirited, boisterous, or saucy girl. Chronicling a year in Toronto, Hoyden follows the gradual rise and quick plummet of Abigail Somerhaze, a bright-eyed photojournalist wannabe who spends her weekends helping the homeless, developing her portfolio, and dreaming of driving down Route 66. But when her bank balance becomes frightening, she’s forced to suck up her fantasies and join a dot-com company on the verge of greatness. In doing so she devolves from a pretty woman with a keen eye and a keener wit to a bitter biddy on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Eking out an existence in a city where you are what you do, Abi struggles with swapping her soul for a steady paycheque, battles bon amis and bosses, veers further and further away from journalistic greatness, and comes face to face with herself. But can she say when and can she say how much? Grab some vino, turn on the jazz, and join Abi as she drunkenly tours the Corridors of Power, soberly teeters on the buttresses of poverty, and ultimately uncovers the admin within. Written with the quick wit of Dave Eggers and Helen Fielding, and the manic pace and pop culture references of Bret Easton Ellis, this book announces the debut of a remarkably funny new talent.