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Guided by the geography of land and mind, the familiar and the unknown converge in If There Were Roads by Joanna Lilley. A family shattered by a phone call, a monk who becomes a hermit, and a woman adjusting to living on the edge of the boreal forest, each finding their future from the experiences of their past. Pulled like the tide between the sea and the shore, If There Were Roads drives toward new vistas while reflecting on what has been lost in the process of moving forward. Lilley’s poems explore the paths we take from here to there when there are no roads to guide us.
If This Is Freedom continues the story of struggle for Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia after the American Revolutionary War. In the black settlement of Birchtown, times are especially hard for the former slaves. They face the difficulties of a hardscrabble existence and continued discrimination from their white counterparts.
Like many desperate Birchtowners, Sarah Redmond has signed an indenture agreement, a work contract meant to protect her rights and ensure a living wage. Sarah’s employers, the Blyes, do not honour the agreement, and Sarah and her family are all but shattered when Sarah takes a wrong step – one she will come to regret as it sets off a chain of unusual events that put her under further pressure. With her faith in the settlement running dry and the Birchtowners abandoning the settlement, Sarah is perplexed and soon faces the taxing option of whether to hold on to the only real life she has ever known or let go. At once a stand-alone story and a companion to Gloria Ann Wesley’s previous novel, Chasing Freedom, this story about moral courage and the enduring strength of dreams shares history with us in a way that is both honest and emotional.
If We Caught Fire brings two families together for a wedding in St. John’s, an event that sets off a summer of fireworks in the lives of the people around them.
Edie’s calm and contained life is knocked awry when her mother decides to marry a man she met online after just a few months of dating. The groom’s son, Harlow, is a joyful adventurer who shows up for the wedding and quickly recruits Edie as his sidekick.
Harlow runs toward risk and adventure with arms wide open, unconcerned about what other people expect from him. Edie plans every step carefully and keeps her dreams small and attainable, even when others encourage her to want more. Over a few months, they develop a connection that defies definition, a situation that leaves Edie queasy with fear and tingly with possibility.
Edie and Harlow (and the rest of their new unwieldy family) do an elaborate dance, trying to discover just what they are to one another. When Edie thinks she’s figured him out, Harlow reveals a depth and darkness she didn’t see coming. By Labour Day, they’ve created connections, tested boundaries, and found they’ve come together and apart in unexpected ways.
Winner of the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Translation
A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2020
Sliding doors open and close automatically, exit to the left, entrance to the right. Beyond it, cars go by, and pedestrians and cyclists. A large park behaves as if nothing has happened. The mirage of a world intact.
In an instant, a life changes forever. After he falls from a scaffold on the construction site where he works, the comatose David is visited daily by his wife, Caroline, and their six-year-old son Bertrand—but despite their devoted efforts, there’s no crossing the ineffable divide between consciousness and the mysterious world David now inhabits. A moving story of love and mourning, elegantly translated by Lazer Lederhendler, If You Hear Me asks what it means to be alive and how we learn to accept the unacceptable.
While in the middle of a divorce and in the process of reinventing herself, Doris Brown died suddenly in 1974. Two years later, a serial killer confessed to her murder. What propels this book is a desire to recover Doris’ life, which has been obscured by the spectacle of her death. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, captures the cadence of family stories collected through interviews the author conducted with her siblings. Essays and memories by Doris Brown’s youngest children, Colleen and Laura, appear alongside spoken word anecdotes that contain the family’s oral history and tell us who she was.
The essays in If You’re Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free?: Literature and Social Change focus on the interconnection of community/workplace/individual and how literature (and thinking about literature) has a role in social struggles aimed at making that nexus more liberatory. The essays’ topics include various social issues in contemporary writing–daily work, narrative, love poems, the teaching (and hence status) of poetry, and postmodernism.
In her much-anticipated debut collection, Christina Shah captures the landscape of heavy industry in Canada through the perceptive eyes of a poet.
From a poet working in heavy industry comes an eclectic collection of observations and experiences as a woman on the road and out in the field in traditionally male-dominated environments. if: prey, then: huntress is an exploration of vulnerability, agency and existential homelessness, replete with portraits of beer drinkers and hellraisers and urban landscapes. These poems illuminate the beauty and truth amid the concrete, twisted metal and scraped knuckles.
At a time when Western Canada is reimagining its resource-based economy, Shah’s poems position her as a wandering eulogist for old industrial ways of knowing—and for their greying practitioners in the mines, paper mills, shipyards and scrapyards that undergird modern life. The reader is invited into a world that, like the breath, is both dying and being born every minute.
Ignite’s unflinchingly honest poems tell the story of a broken emotional and physical relationship between a man and a woman, healed by a very physical process of self-discovery, which is sparked by the woman’s recovery of desire in a renewed connection between body, soul and earth. The language, sparse and evocative, almost disappears to get beneath the intellect, to create an intimacy with the reader, a collective energy, a human experience that we all share.
A groundbreaking new collection, Ignite: Illuminating Theatre for Young People gathers three plays for young audiences that feature “messy” and complicated creation processes: The Middle Place by Andrew Kushnir, verbatim theatre created from interview transcripts with shelter youth; And by the way, Miss . . . by URGE with the Ensemble, devised theatre created by women developed through workshops with girls, and made for exclusively girl audiences; and Beneath the Ice by Eva Colmers, a location-specific, cross-cultural piece that was enriched by Southerner and Northerner encounters in Canada. Accompanying each script are stories and voices relevant to the initial spark that led to their creation, including scholarly introductions; timelines of the creative journey; and contextualizing pieces that foreground the voices of playwrights, collaborators, and community stakeholders involved in the development process. All of these plays highlight specific ethical questions relevant to theatre practitioners and scholars for work concerning audiences of any age.
The bilingual Italian-English manuscript Il libro dei primati / The Book of Primates combines prose and poetry to revisit/reimagine the folkloric traditions of two American states where the author spent many years: the state of Maine and that of New York. In his reworking/recreating of these traditions, he looked at traditional poems, ballads, tales, legends, and revisited them through contemporary experimental language and contents. The result is a series of new texts, each the result of a contamination between the original texts and the author’s own re-imagining them, in light of modern settings and contents. This work is very far from being just a “re-writing” of traditional materials. Rather, it is an approach in which he re-generates the old tradition.
Enter the cross-cultural tale of gusto and enchantment, adaptation and loss, preserving the old ways of making a life. Presented in six acts with intermissions and curtain calls, it is a new form of literature presented in interactive libretto form. Read it silently, read it out loud, or step upon the imaginary stage of all life to commandeer the operatic recitative called sing/speak. Il Vagabondo is a love story-an opera rusticana of the people, by the people, for the people. It is all true.
Shortly after the first referendum on Quebec separation, four people in their forties encounter each other in Ile d’Or, the town where all of them grew up. The novel is about gold and greed and renewal and hope. About people who emerge from a frontier existence into the society of the late 20th century with the need to discover how their contemporary lives connect with their pasts: how growing up in a mining town in northern Quebec in the 1930s through 1950s shaped who they are today. They do this with the hope that confronting the past may better equip them for moving on with their stalled lives. Their pasts include alcoholism, scandal, suicide, ethnic and linguistic tensions as well as violence and divorce. As children they all experienced a substantial amount of shame largely because of adult behaviour beyond their control. They need to be reconciled with themselves through a reconciliation with the community in which they grew up shamed. One component of their shame relates to the languages they and their parents spoke, or did not speak, and how those languages were related to power and class. This particular shame and how they deal with the language issues now as adults runs as a leitmotif throughout the manuscript.
Marsha Pomerantz’s The Illustrated Edge is as close to a perfect first collection of poetry as you’re likely to find: long-distilled explorations of the human heart mixed with linguistic and formal exuberance and playfulness.
Includes author-curated discussion questions!
Mark Lisac’s Image Decay returns to the pugnacious world of backroom politics laid out in his award-nominated Where the Bodies Lie. Set again in that “unnamed capital city east of the Rockies,” where the Brutalist architecture of the downtown core reflects the body politic laid bare.
When a cantankerous ex-government photographer seeks ownership of his prints, the powers-that-be are determined to prevent the release of certain sensitive photos. Set in the 1990s, this political thriller delves into questions of identity and memory, established power and its fears and secrets, old stock versus newcomers, belonging and alienation.Image Decay investigates the intricacies of political manipulation, personal anxieties, and how history must be seen to be confronted.
Shortlisted, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing
Once, a single francophone settlement shared both sides of the Saint John River, until a political trade-off between countries split it down the middle. From that inauspicious start, the Maine-New Brunswick border, the first boundary to be drawn between the two nations, has served as a microcosm for Canada-U.S. relations.
For centuries, friends, lovers, schemers and smugglers have reached across the line. Now, post-9/11, mounting political paranoia has led to a sharp divide, disrupting the lives and welfare of nearby residents. An elderly Canadian couple’s driveway touches the border, leading to a Kafkaesque overreaction by Homeland Security. The Tea Party political movement advocates complete border shutdown. Once friendly neighbors have become increasingly isolated from each other.
In this timely exploration, Jacques Poitras travels the length of the border, from Madawaska and Aroostook counties through Passamaquoddy Bay to a tiny island still in dispute to uncover the arbitrarily drawn line that shouldn’t be there, almost wasn’t there, and can be difficult to find even when it is there. The stakes are high as New Brunswick and Maine re-imagine their relationship for the 21st century and communities strive to stay together despite the best efforts of parochial politicians, protectionists, and overzealous border officials.
Imaginary Maps reveals a city haunted by monsters, movie stars and jilted lovers; a city where hope and rage, sacred and carnal, mundane and surreal are uneasy neighbours. One with a downtown that swells with pleasures and pains too big for words, where every dead end is suffused with an unbidden kindness, ‘an accidental choreography.’