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The 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.
Unromantic 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.
I 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 …
I 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.
I 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.”
Fifteen-year-old Andrew has cool parents: his mother_s job is to discover and test electronic surveillance gear and covert law enforcement equipment; while his father is an environmental biologist and cook. What vaults Andrew and his family into action is a new guy, Brian Fiske; he shows up in their small village of Aylesworth with a very dark secret. Brian and his family are in the witness-protection program and are now in relocation. However, when the mobsters that Brian_s family have put into prison come looking for revenge and kidnap them, the adventure is on.
Armed only with their intelligence and high-tech gadgetry, Brian and Andrew must find a way to foil the kidnapers and find safety. Andrew_s instincts – along with his mother_s electronic skills and his father_s biological savvy – lead him on a suspenseful rescue mission that could end up in success or disaster. The measure of success will be in their ability to take responsibility for others and act quickly.
You could be married for over 10 years and still not know your spouse. You could think you knew everything about your dad but still he surprises you at your mother’s death bed. You think you know everyone in your small town but you’ll never know the dark secret your drinking buddy hides in his heart.With control, wit, and brilliance, Michelle Berry explores the hidden depths between individuals, families, and communities. Dysfunctional characters create tension in situations where they teeter on the edge of life. Psychological or situational twists pop readers’ eyes wide open and force them to pay attention. Berry uses rapid-fire dialogue to build tension and emotion. Despite the underlying dark tones, the stories carry life and hope, human kindness–and strangeness.Each story is a vivid snapshot of a raw moment in the lives of people at a crossroads. A married couple in the title story, “I Still Don’t Even Know You,” question the foundation of their relationship during a winter getaway. In “The Cat,” a life of endless purgatory stretches before a newly-wed husband. The wives in “Five Old Crows,” contemplate ways to pass the time ranging from murder to writing. And the title character in “Martin” drives around a boring country town with a shotgun in his car, his dissatisfaction with his empty life mounting as townspeople talk about recent mysterious murders.
“Daniel MacIvor’s plays have been labelled everything from postmodern to metatheatrical, but these are cold terms that do nothing to capture the warm, accessible soul of a writer whose honesty and compassion for both audiences and his characters is at the heart of all his work.” —Variety
Marlen and Hilda Jorgensen’s family has received two significant pieces of news: one, Marlen has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Two, a cosmic blast is set to render humanity extinct within a matter of months. It seems the coming Christmas on their Saskatchewan farm will be their last.
Preparing for the inevitable, they navigate the time they have left together. Marlen and Hilda have channeled their energy into improbably prophetic works of art. Hilda’s elderly father receives a longed-for visitor from his past, her sister refuses to believe the world is ending, and her teenaged nephew is missing. All the while, her daughter struggles to find her way home from Berlin with the help of an oddly familiar stranger. For everyone, there’s an unsettling feeling that this unprecedented reality is something they remember.
In this wise and funny memoir Ralph Benmergui, one of Canada’s beloved storytellers, shares his path from resident class clown and the son of Moroccan immigrants to gracing TV screens across Canada and into his third, unexpected, act in Hashpa’ah: Jewish Spiritual Direction. I Thought He Was Dead: A Spiritual Memoir is the perfect book for those looking to reinvent themselves at any time of life and Ralph Benmergui is the best possible guide for the journey.
Award-winning, bestselling author Camilla Gibb returns with her first poetry collection, a profound new work that examines our relationships to the earth and one another.
I Used to Be a Pisces is a deeply felt meditation on love and belonging, exploring changing landscapes, loves, and selves. In these poems, accompanied by her original collage work, Gibb generously invites us to engage with our surroundings, recognize the relationships that shape our existence, and examine our longing for restoration and regeneration.
Grappling with what it means to feel at home in a time of upheaval, and woven through with threads of hope, grief, and the persistent pursuit of renewal, I Used to Be a Pisces is a masterful poetic work from one of the country’s most beloved and celebrated authors.
I Want to be Buried Standing Up
A debut novel by an exciting new voice in Canadian literature, I Want to Die in My Boots weaves fact and fiction to tell the true-ish story of horse thief Belle Jane.
I Want to Die in My Boots is the untold story of Belle Jane, the woman who ran one of Canada’s largest cattle thieving rings in the 1920s, who brilliantly broke every taboo, took the names of five different husbands, and nearly followed the tragic end of her great hero, the outlaw queen Belle Starr.
Dark and daring, meticulously researched and mostly true, I Want to Die in My Boots is a lyrical, unconventional literary novel that gives voice to the unheard in a long-forgotten world. After leaving Montana for a third husband and the ranch she’d always wanted, Belle settles in Saskatchewan, before spending her final years in Penticton, reading tarot cards for strangers.
Written a century after her arrest, this fictional tribute to Belle Jane, an unsung hero in Canada’s west, is inventive yet thoughtful, a work of Prairie literary fiction that takes an edgy twist to history. I Want to Die in My Boots will appeal to readers of Annie Proulx, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and Maggie O’Farrell, and to viewers of Yellowstone and The Power of the Dog.
Some people claim they would like to walk away from their lives. Shelley A. Leedahl had the nerve to do it. Was it an act of selfishness, or self-preservation?
Provocative, candid, and engaging, these intimate essays explore the implicit complexities and contradictions when personal and professional lives both complement and clash. How can she be a good mother when her literary calling requires her to be away — sometimes countries away — from her school-aged children? How does she reconcile the fact she is often more comfortable with
strangers in foreign countries than with her own kith and kin? Yet personal experiences — including travels near and far, parental dilemmas, relationship breakdowns, new love, emotional chaos, and the care taken in creating gardens – also inspire the work.
New poems from award-winning storyteller and poet Joseph Dandurand.
Prolific Kwantlen writer Joseph Dandurand offers his latest poetry collection, following The Punishment and The East Side of It All, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Building on his legacy as a skilled storyteller, Dandurand continues to write about trauma, love, grief and forgiveness. These poems are about the streets, the East Side, self-pity, spirits and Dandurand’s people, the Kwantlen. As the jury of the 2022 Latner Writers’ Trust Award wrote, “his quotidian reflections read like parables, with startling economy.” After putting this collection down, don’t be surprised to find yourself saying “thank you,” too.