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In October 2013, Scott Jones was leaving a bar in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, when he was attacked, stabbed in the back, and left paralyzed from the waist down. In the months following his attack, Scott Jones’s story garnered international attention, not only for its brutality, but also for his uncommonly early decision to forgive his attacker. Furiously researching restorative justice practices and success stories, Jones sits down to ask himself the hardest question he’s ever had to answer: Does he have it in him to not just forgive his attacker, but to accept his new life as a disabled man?
Based on the incredible true story, I Forgive You explores the complexities of forgiveness, privilege, recovery, and self-love in Scott’s own words backed by a live children’s choir performing the music of legendary Icelandic band Sigur Rós.
Although poetry is one of the oldest art forms and cinema one of the youngest, a symbiosis exists between the two — an interchange of metaphor, rhythm, point-of-view. No surprise, then, that so many contemporary poets write about film and the magnitude of its effect on modern life. Featuring work by some of the most acclaimed poets writing in Canada today (and three from the USA), I Found It at the Movies includes poems inspired by the full range of cinematic history — from silent films to blockbusters, from neo-realism to cartoon, from Fred Astaire to vampires, and from all around the world. Entering this collection is an experience as beguiling as a trip to the movies itself. Among the poets included: Margaret Atwood, Don McKay, Michael Ondaatje, Steven Heighton, David W. McFadden, Karen Solie, Marilyn Bowering, Julie Bruck, Stephanie Bolster and Ken Babstock.
“I hate hockey!” is the first and last sentence in this novel that offers a great take on our love-hate relationship with hockey. Narrator Antoine Vachon blames the game for killing his marriage with his beautiful ex-wife (well, that and the power outage that brought her home unexpectedly to find him in bed with her intern). But hockey is a pretext for unlikely adventure in this sardonic roman noir that at times flirts with the outrageous.Antoine Vachon is a total loser living in a pitiful bachelor apartment after he has lost his wife and his job as a car salesman. When his son?s hockey coach is found dead, he is browbeaten into coaching the team for one game. He makes it through the game (to great comic effect), but things take a turn for the worse when they stop at a motel after the game. Who killed the former coach and why? Was Antoine?s son involved? Or his ex-wife? The late coach was liked by all and was a pillar in the community. He was close to his player, perhaps too close? Why is Antoine unable to communicate with his son?
i heard a crow before i was born.
i heard tsó:ka’we before i was born.
i heard a crow before i was born opens with a dream-memory that transforms into a stark, poetic reflection on the generational trauma faced by many Indigenous families. Jules Delorme was born to resentful and abusive parents, in a world in which he never felt he belonged. Yet, buoyed by the love shown to him by his tóta (grandmother) and his many animal protectors, Delorme gained the strength to reckon with his brutal childhood and create this transformative and evocative memoir.
Across chapters that tell of his troubled relationships, Delorme unwraps the pain at the centre of his own story: the residential schools and the aftershocks that continue to reverberate.
In this stunning testament to the power of storytelling — to help us grieve and help us survive — Delorme tells the story of his spirit walk as he embraces the contradictions of his identity. As he writes, “i heard a crow before i was born is a man looking back, and dreaming back, and seeing that life, in whatever form it takes, however harsh it might seem, is beautiful.”
In her uncompromising follow-up to 2012’s Sympathy Loophole, Jaime Forsythe offers a breathless cascade of evocative somethings: mysterious sounds, faint rumblings, biographies real and imagined, tabloid rumours, nagging memories, an animal stirring, a baby waking, a storm threatening, an escape hatch beckoning, and an inexplicable machine coughing into motion somewhere in the distance.
The poems in I Heard Something comprise a surreal menagerie – at times funny, chilling, and tender – of what it is to be a human at this very minute. Forsythe writes startling poems for the startled. Cup a hand around your ear as you read these poems – it’ll enhance the experience.
At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics an unknown Vancouver runner named Percy Williams shocked the sports world by capturing the 100- and 200-metre gold medals. Some said the feat was a fluke. It wasn’t. In 1929 Percy silenced naysayers by sweeping the US indoor track circuit, then he went on to set a world record in the 100 metres that would stand until the arrival of Jesse Owens. And in between he waged a speed duel with the fleetest men on the planet, a battle for track supremacy and the title “World’s Fastest Human.” Based on extensive research that included access to Percy’s private letters, diary and scrapbooks, I Just Ran is the first full-length account of this sports legend, one of the most famous Canadians of his day but now largely forgotten. It begins as the Cinderella story of a youth who conquers a sport dominated by American sprinters. Then it gets grittier, for success and fame had a dark side. I Just Ran follows Percy and his janitor-coach Bob Granger as they journey through the world of elite running in the 1920s and ’30s – a world that was not always pretty beneath the veneer of amateurism.
I 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.
Amy 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.
Eilidh, 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.
Celina 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.
Books 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.
In 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.
David 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.
Cupcakes, 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.
Catherine 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.