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Showing 3393–3408 of 9248 results
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I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago
$22.00I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago are the words nobody wants to hear from a fledgling poet behind a microphone. The warning works hand-in-hand with another poetry-world mantra that’s emblazoned on the submissions page of countless litmag websites: “Before submitting, read one of our issues to get an idea of what kind of poems we publish.” Implying as they do a lack of effort, expertise, or knowledge, these statements keep normies away from the proudly embattled form that is poetry.
But Carl Watts? first book of poetry criticism makes the counterintuitive argument that it is the nebulous lack of professionalism and prestige that makes poetry vital. Working his argument through a series of interlocking paradoxes, Watts shows how contemporary poetry creates meaning and value ? an especially pertinent finding at a time when we?re expected to always be competing in the neoliberal race for self-improvement. Watts suggests that, at last, poetry might get real work out of us, in the process locating and grounding us among real people and a real practice. -
I Know Something You Don’t Know
$20.00Amy LeBlanc’s debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t know, resides in the intersection of folklore and femininity. With fairy-tale lucidity and fluid voice, the poems in this collection weave through the seams between story and fact. This debut collection is alluring and noxious like hemlock, foxglove, and blooming wildflowers.
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I Know You
$20.00Eilidh, bright, headstrong and feisty, gets sparkling exam results that confirm her university place. Her boyfriend reveals he has deceived her. In the ensuing argument she is knocked unconscious. She arrives in 1984, in an Ethiopian refugee camp, where she nurses a dying child, then a wounded aid worker before wakening back home in present-day Scotland. Three days later, at an isolated beauty spot trying to come to terms with her ex boyfriend’s betrayal and her experience in Ethiopia, she encounters Walter, who is in the early stages of dementia. He is there because of a tattoo on his wrist that simply states the date and location of the beauty spot. Eilidh recognises Walter’s symptoms, takes him home and contacts his niece to come and collect him.
Over the following 48-hour period Eilidh finds herself transported to various locations in Europe and North America, and time periods from the previous fifty years. Each episode draws her further into an unexpected and unconventional romance. Eventually she travels to WW2 blitzed Liverpool and meets a fellow time traveller who explains that Eilidh faces a decision with life and death consequences.
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I know you are but what am I?
$18.95Kleptomaniacs, convicts, roof-walkers and homicidal hippies: here are children and adults, men and women, all struggling to define themselves. The stories in I know you are but what am I? are like snow domes – perfect little self-contained worlds that you can hold in your hand, turn upside down, shake until meaning settles in a hundred different ways.
Young Misha learns about the complexities of grownup love when his mother is bitten by a stingray. Oldrick must come to terms with his ex-girlfriend’s new lover and a belligerent barista in the midst of a smelly garbage strike. Bus-bound Marion, in love with a married man, finds solace in conversation with a convict and home-schooled Rational gets a tutor and learns that his ‘hunker in the bunker’ family isn’t quite what he thought it was.
‘Heather Birrell’s sentences conjure worlds. These stories scintillate. Smart, sharp, alluring, they’re full of the chance encounters, mysteries, missed connections and unexpected tenderness of contemporary life.’ – Catherine Bush
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I Like Who I Am
$12.95Celina is a young Mohawk girl who moves to her mother’s home reserve. She is teased by her classmates who tell her that she is not Mohawk and does not belong because she has blond hair and blue eyes. Celina starts to believe her classmates and decides not to dance at an upcoming Pow Wow. But her great-grandmother helps Celina understand that being Mohawk is not about how she looks but about what she feels in her heart. When the drumming starts at the Pow Wow, Celina decides to dance after all.
A beautifully illustrated story, I Like Who I Am explores issues of bullying and belonging as Celina looks for acceptance in her new community.
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I Made a Promise I Could Not Keep
$19.95Books and their writers can get into some pretty murky territory when they set out into the world. Some writers, who might be completely reasonable people in the rest of their lives, turn into liars and sneak-thieves when it comes to telling their tales. They might even make promises they know they can’t keep. They’re not necessarily setting traps or practising to deceive. Something seems like a good idea, and they go for it. Another word for that is “inspiration.”
Each of the essays in this collection about the morals of writing explores an aspect of what writers do, but you don’t have to be a writer to consider the same issues. You just have to be human.
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I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley
$29.95In this dark comedy taking place over twenty-four hours, a blizzard pummels Toronto as a beloved high school teacher coerces his teenage student to assist in his violent suicide forcing the student, his best friend, the friend’s bulimic mom, and a down-low cop to outrun each other, the storm, and the ghosts haunting them. I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley is a breathtaking and hilarious novel about the lengths people will take to erase themselves in order to matter.
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I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like
$24.95David Carpenter’s collection of essays explores a city boy’s love of the wild, a passion that has enriched his life from boyhood. At 80, this
irrepressible Saskatchewan raconteur examines his intense fascination with predators large and small, and his awe in the face of the variety of
creatures that may be out to get us—or who are out to get one another. How does this combination of fear and wonder affect our relationship with the natural world? And why has Carpenter personally been both drawn to, and repelled by, so many wild animals, including alligators, wolves, cougars, spiders, black bears, grizzlies, weasels, and of course, snakes—particularly deadly rattlesnakes?
The stories that fuel the essays in this entertaining memoir are as diverse as the animals—and insects!—at the heart of Carpenter’s inquiry. As a young man, Carpenter is working in Jasper National Park, and he’s lugging his banjo—hustling on his way to a paid gig—when he takes a short cut through the woods, makes a wrong turn and ends up at the dump. He looks across at some large animals. Horses? No, five, count ‘em, five grizzlies. Luckily a ranger on an actual horse leads him out of danger. He’s fishing for brook trout in the mountains with a friend, cooling their catch in a convenient snow bank. But the fish keep disappearing. He finds them cached under a nearby rock, and when he tries to pull one out, he’s in a tug-of-war with some hidden creature, small but fierce—is it a mink?
Encounters like these drive the author into philosophical conjecture, into reading everything he can get his hands on about these and other creatures as he contemplates our place in the wild, and the value of the wild in our lives. These essays are essential reading for those of us who share David Carpenter’s fascination with the predators that so fundamentally shape our understanding of wilderness and the necessity to preserve it. -
I Never Talk About It
$19.95Cupcakes, panda bears, break-ups, wearing sunglasses at night… The local and the universal come together in these 37 short stories, brought into English by different translators from all over the world. This project aims to show there are all kinds of ways to bring across an author’s voice in translation? at least 37 of them (one for each story). Translators include literary translation students, first-time and up-and-coming literary translators, world-renowned translators who have won major international prizes (Peter Bush, Ros Schwartz), some of Montreal’s best writers and translators (Dimitri Nasrallah, Neil Smith, Lori Saint-Martin), a retired high-school French teacher in Ireland, and francophone authors translating into their second language (Daniel Grenier, Guillaume Morissette). There are even people in there who (armed only with a dictionary and the priceless ability to write a beautiful sentence) barely speak French. Readers don’t find out the translator’s name until they’ve absorbed their work, with translators explaining their background and approach at the end. More than a fascinating translation exercise, I Never Talk About It is a long-overdue translation of one of the strongest stort story collections to come out of Quebec in recent years.
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I Promise
$18.95Catherine Hernandez’s literary career exploded with the 2017 publication of her award-winning novel Scarborough. Her latest, I Promise, marks her delightful return to children’s literature, having published her first children’s book, M Is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book, in 2015.
Featuring tender-hearted illustrations by renowned artist Syrus Marcus Ware, I Promise captures with love and honesty the intimate moments of parenting in all their messy glory – from dealing with a kid who doesn’t want to brush their teeth to looking under the bed for monsters to cuddling after a long day. This charming picture book showcases the many shapes, sizes, and colours that families come in, emphasizing that every queer family starts with the sacred promise to love a child.
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I Remember Lights
$24.95The first novel from award-winning poet Ben Ladouceur, I Remember Lights depicts a time when the world promised everything to everyone, however irresponsibly.
In summer 1967, love is all you need…but some forms of love are criminal. As the spectacular Expo 67 celebrations take shape, a young man new to Montreal learns about gay life from cruising partners, one-night stands, live-in lovers, and friends. Once Expo begins, he finds romance with a charismatic visitor, but their time is limited. When the fireworks wither into smoke, so do their options.
A decade later, during the notorious 1977 police raid on a gay bar called Truxx, he comes to understand even more about the bitter choice, so often made by men like him, between happiness and safety.
I Remember Lights is a vital reminder of forgotten history and a visceral exploration of the details of queer life: tribulation and joy, exile and solidarity, cruelty and fortitude.
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I Saw Three Ships
$16.95“By June, Philip’s view of English Bay, what’s left of it, will be utterly gone. It was always going to happen. For years now, it’s been getting harder and harder to see what’s out there. For years now, it’s been getting harder and harder to know what to do.”
Eight linked stories, all set around Christmastime in Vancouver’s West End neighbourhood, explore the seasonal tug-of-war between expectation and disappointment. These tales give shelter to characters from various walks of life whose experience of transcendence leaves them more alienated than consoled.
I Saw Three Ships captures a West End community vanishing under pressure from development and skyrocketing real-estate prices. As arch as they are elegiac, as funny as they are melancholy, these stories honour a cherished period in the history of the West End. Sometimes twisted, sometimes tender, I Saw Three Ships will speak to all who have ever been stuck spinning their wheels at the corner of Heathen and Holy.
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I see my love more clearly from a distance
$19.00Unromantic poems examining life, love, illness, and death on a ranch on the hard grass prairie. In Nora Gould’s one-of-a-kind debut, the Prairie itself is a central character: muse, mythic persona, the place of deepest solace and of deepest questioning. The poems focus with great firmness and technical command on the facts of daily life on the farm: impregnating cows, the neighbour kid picking off a coyote, cutting hay, getting water to the herd in a drought, dehorning. But Prairie anecdotalism this ain’t. What is breathtaking about this book is the relation between its exactness of observation and the grief, horror, and beauty that it documents. What the voice achieves, in its very gestures, is a kind of transcendence: not with the purpose of avoiding pain, but in order to make all of it–all of it–seeable and feelable by a human being.
“Fear,” as Gould says “resides in anticipation and in the afterwards, the what-might-have-been and the badger of again.” In the white light of the now, there is no room for it, there is room only for concentration, a precise surgical rendering of details, so that we may sense everything else–the unspeakable–disposing itself in the space around that blaze of attention.
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I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel
$16.95I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel is populated by a phony plastic surgeon, a gang of suicidal ducks, a seven-armed boater, a hostile pair of jeans, skydiving incisors, and a bizarre assortment of creatures eagerly transcending the often-menacing banality of the North American present.
I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel is Jennifer LoveGrove’s second book of poetry. This collection reflects and examines the culture of panic that infuses contemporary life, while relentlessly employing strange and startling imagery. Her unique poems are preoccupied with moments when the expected goes amiss, when your reality suddenly shifts into an unfamiliar realm — physically, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise. These poems seem friendly — frolicking at your heels like lost pets — but ultimately, they are not to be trusted. Look closely, you’ll see them foaming at the mouth …
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I Sing For My Dead in German
$7.95I Sing For My Dead in German is astonishing in its emotional impact. Revealing a young woman’s need for honesty in romance, in grief, and in family relationships. Mournful and erotic, these are poems of love and death that insist on the privilege of feeling.
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I Sleep in the Arms of Your Eyes
$20.00I Sleep in the Arms of Your Eyes is a reflection on love, freely given and loss fully lived. These poems are a contemplation on family life, and on the navigation through attachment, devotion and attempts at connection. They convey in brave simplicity of grounded language a sense of self where it belongs: “nose-touching-close,” “sustained and articulate.”