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Showing 3537–3552 of 9481 results
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If It’s No Trouble . . . A Big Polar Bear
$12.95Natalie’s finished her Christmas list. It’s really quite perfect with one little twist: A remote control scooter, some candy to share and, if it’s no trouble, a big polar bear.
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If Language
$20.00Most anagrammaticians satisfy their urge with the rearranged name of a celebrity (Marshall McLuhan = Malls launch harm) or perhaps, if more adventurous, a familiar aphorism (The Medium is the Message = The Media is the Muse’s Gem). The true devotees of the clan turn to games like Scrabble and Humbug. Gregory Betts’ If Language takes this one-time parlour game to its evolutionary extreme, constructing 56 paragraph-long perfect anagrams of an original seed-text. Each poem is exactly 525 letters; the same letters that echo throughout the book is radically different forms. These poems test the endless possibilities of the constraint. They tell the mystical history of anagrams, from its use by early scientists to escape Christian zealots to Rosicrucian symbology to Greek mythology to Kabbalism. They explore how individualities happen in words and limited vocabularies. If Language asks the question: what are the limits of individuality within a closed system? Betts uses his own experiences, relationships and uncertainties to explore this question with humour, with intellect, and with a manic obsession capable of turning a simple game into this wildly original exploration.
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If Pigs Could Fly
$16.95Written in three parts, master storyteller Arnason’s second volume of fractured prairie tales includes political fables, Ukrainian tales and fabulations, leaving no stone unturned in his parody of Canada’s political and cultural landscape.”Fairy tales on speed make great fiction.”–Rob McLennan, The Ottawa Express
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If Pressed
$18.00If Pressed–the second collection of poetry from Andrew McEwan—explores forms of pressurized and pressurizing language as a means to shed light on the depressions we live among.
Overlapping language of fear and speculation gain momentum in these poems, where layers of atmospheric and emotional lexicons—ranging from descriptions of the mid-2000s financial crisis and subsequent recession, to writing on melancholia from the 1600s, to weather reports and condo listings, to pharmaceutical sales pitches and literary book reviews—focus attention on the ways that anxiety so easily and completely infiltrates our daily personal and public experiences.
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If Tenderness be Gold
$22.95If Tenderness Be Gold is set in 19th-century and early 20th-century northern Ontario and Manitoba. An Irish mother, an Italian herbalist, and a Scottish midwife come together on the night of a difficult birth, and the result of their union has effects that echo through the generations.
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If There Were Roads
$17.00Guided 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.
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If This Is Freedom
$27.00If 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.
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If We Caught Fire
$22.95If 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.
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If You Hear Me
$22.95Winner 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.
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if you lie down in a field, she will find you there
$20.00While 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.
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If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free
$25.00The 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.
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if: prey, then: huntress
$19.95In 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.
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Ignite
$14.95Ignite’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.
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Ignite: Illuminating Theatre for Young People
$22.95A 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.
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Il libro dei primati/The Book of Primates
$20.00The 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.
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Il Vagabondo: An Urban Opera
$29.95Enter 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.