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Showing 3553–3568 of 9248 results
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In the Key of Red
$18.95Passion. This is the word at the heart of In the Key of Red, Eva Tihanyi’s sixth poetry collection. Tihanyi writes of love not only from the personal perspectives of daughter, mother, friend and lover, but also of a human being celebrating the world. Sometimes tender, sometimes searing, the one thing all of these poems do is sing.
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In the Land of Two-Legged Women
$22.95At the onset of puberty girls’ right legs are sawed off in Ramprend’s Beautification Ritual. In this dystopian novel, female stumps are desirable to men. Solanj’l– ‘l denoting one-leg– hates her inability to move freely and makes a wooden leg to enable her to walk, or step-drag, rather than be rolled in a chair or swing along on props. It’s an extraordinary thing to do because no artificial limbs exist in Ramprend. Her husband sees commercial possibilities in his wife’s invention and begins producing Glom’s Glamor Legs. The ability to move more or less on two legs, no matter how uncomfortably, opens new ways of thinking for the women. Solanj’l and Deba’l, wife of Hunak, Minister Second Only to the First, therefore start Gatherings of women, ostensibly to discuss Pleasure Ways with the wooden legs for the purpose of increasing husband happiness. Nevertheless, husbands are not always paramount in their thoughts. When items start disappearing in Ramprend and it is learned that women who live in the mountains outside the city have two legs and operate independently, Solanj’l and some of her friends are determined to put an end to the “Beautification,” no matter the cost.
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In the Lights of a Midnight Plow
$18.95The poems of David Hickey’s first collection, In the Lights of a Midnight Plow, glitter and startle. His is a writing deftly musical, where every detail and image has been carefully weighed, honed with a knife’s edge and poet’s ear to fit just so. The subjects are diverse, though his aim, always, is true: whether writing about nature, farming or domestic concerns, there is intelligence, beauty, humour and originality. Most importantly, there is language, the sparkle and sheen of it, the rythym, all of which tells us that a new and important voice is at work here.
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In the Midst
$24.95For over 40 years Warren Tallman, reader, critic, mentor, friend, confidant, host and impresario to writers all across North America has remained “in the midst” of the poetic discourse that time and again restores the body of his great goddess, Mother Tongue. He has been almost single handedly responsible for introducing the work of Canadian poets and writers to an international audience which now recognizes this work as some of the best and most important in the English language.
In this companion volume to the 1976 special issue of Open Letter, “God awful Streets of Man,” Warren Tallman introduces the reader to a world of literary companionship that has shaped the language and thought of late twentieth century North America.
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In the Name of Love
$22.95In the Name of Love is a thriller about the sex slave trade chock full of believable, well-developed compelling characters. Two women are the central focus of the novel – the one an unscrupulous criminal, the other her victim. Rimana, a young Indian woman, is thrilled to be headhunted by a company in Canada and pleased to escape her mother’s expectations of marriage. On the flight to Canada she meets Jug, a young Canadian man whose mother was Indian, and by the time they arrive in Toronto they are well on their way to falling in love. When Rimana doesn’t contact Jug after arrival he begins to worry that something bad has happened to her. Through a series of efforts to find her as well as one lucky coincidence, he and his two best friends, the daredevil Omar Khazana, and the over-cautious movie buff, Mark Willis, manage against all odds to rescue Rimana from the Yemeni sheik who has bought her and the traffickers who want her returned to the sheik. Along the way we learn the back-stories of two of the leaders of human trafficking rings who have themselves been shaped by violence and human trafficking. A woman named Nadira, who runs the opulent Toronto brothel, Paradise, and Sultan, a pimp who was mutilated as a result of his love for a trafficked prostitute that got away, and now runs a rival gang. With both Nadira’s goons and the police hot on the heels of Jug, Ramina, and Jug’s two friends, they realize that their only chance of survival is to enlist the support of Sultan, Nadira’s rival. Sultan offers them protection and uses them to trap Nadira. But can they survive Nadira’s wrath and cunning, as well as Sultan’s keen desire for revenge, or will they eventually become pawns in another gangster’s world? The novel exposes the ongoing existence of human trafficking in affluent countries, the violence that accompanies it, and the system of corruption and willing johns and buyers who keep it in business.
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In the Scaffolding
$17.95Readers and critics who warmed to the fine intelligence of his debut collection will be astonished and delighted to see how much Eric Miller has matured as a poet in the six years since Song of the Vulgar Starling first appeared in 1999. In the beautifully constructed and perceptive poems of his new collection, In the Scaffolding, Miller moves fluidly from one delight to another. Fatherhood and the imagined world of the infant, the overabundant complexity of Nature, the mind’s endless curiosity, and the inner life of birds are just some of the topics that fall under the lens of this versatile and vibrant poet.
Governor General’s Award nominee Lynn Davies says that Miller’s work shows “how words can move us into the process of recognition.” With his long, floating rhapsodic sentences and exquisite metaphorical structures, Miller has often been compared with the great Romantic poet Shelley. Certainly few writers today can match his gifts for expressive language and surprising poetic rhythms.
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In the Shadow of Crows
$19.95Connected via the fictional town of St Anne’s, a community along Nova Scotia’s western shore, each story takes its title from the children’s rhyme Counting Crows:
One for sorrow, two for joy,
three for a message, four for a boy,
five for silver, six for gold,
seven for a secret never to be told.Within each tale an individual (often from the same family, always from the same town) will note the number of crows in their midst and recall the poem as it relates to the prophecy and the story at hand. Between the last century and the current one, the characters (for the most part, women) walk a shifting landscape carved out by war, poverty, and patriarchal expectations. Beneath the gaze of a small town and these intelligent birds whose memories are unforgiving, we are as close as a heartbeat to the souls upon these pages.
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In the Shadow of the Vulture
$24.95Set in the desert on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border, this harrowing novel was inspired by an actual event: the abandonment to starvation and death of a “shipment” of Mexican immigrant workers. The sinister shadow of the vulture falls over every character in Ryga’s story—Ramon, the flesh-merchant; Juan, the bandito; Anastasio, the defrocked priest; Sandy, the tormented Vietnam vet; Antonia, the “puta” who can survive anything; Stretch, the neo-nazi chicken farmer. In a society as barren and relentless as the desert itself, all of them struggle for survival. Some of them make it. This is a novel that is not afraid to explore the depths of human despair, hope, and rage. It raises important questions about legal and spiritual aliens, and it lays bare the neo-conservative political strategy of the exploitation of labour as a solution to economic problems.
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In the Shadows
$19.95On a warm summer evening in June, cast members of the Thirties Show at Café Cleopatra make a gruesome discovery. Discarded like trash, the body of a young man lies crumpled on the roof of the legendary club situated in the former red light district of the city. A few hours later, in another part of the city, a man is gunned down in cold blood. What the victims have in common is a link to the Crémazie Division of Major Crimes. New acting chief Toni Damiano is devastated to learn that her partner may have intentionally corrupted evidence in the first-degree murder case at the Café. The chief sets up an operation that will either clear her partner or give her reason to arrest him. But she also fractures the trust and loyalty of a nine-year partnership. There is no pardon for betrayal, his or hers.
Fans of Kindellan-Sheehan’s previous thrillers–The Red Floor, The Courier Wore Shorts, and Where Bodies Fall, will not be disappointed as we follow and empathize with her ongoing cast of complex and compelling characters.
“Kindellan-Sheehan returns with another fast-paced, don’t-think-you’re-going-to-put-it-down-just-yet mystery. The quick tempo of the narrative is rivalled only by the author’s ability to both celebrate and condemn her characters’ flaws. You will be riveted by the ending!” –Brenda O’Farrell, Montreal Gazette
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In the Slender Margin
$22.00Originally published in 2014, In the Slender Margin was enthusiastically received and applauded for its respectful sensitivity in dealing with a subject that is still, to many, an avoidable topic of conversation: death and dying. Using her 20+ years’ experience working as a palliative care counsellor in a hospice as a springboard for exploration, Joseph probes our collective knowledge of that final life experience that we all must face.
Intimately personal and wise, this award-winning poet gives us a deep and profound musing, a “wise and lyrical meditation” on the slender margin, that mysterious slip of geography between life and death.
From the Preface:
“First published in 2014, In the Slender Margin was/still is, a meditation of sorts on death and dying. It did not prescribe then, nor does it now, ways to move through grief in order to find closure. I wrote the book as a way of understanding what I had seen in my years as a hospice counsellor. In the process of writing and thinking about death from many different angles, I found the brother I had lost many years ago and, fifty years after his death, was able finally to mourn and hold him close. COVID-19 has initiated many discussions about mortality. It is my hope that this book can add, in whatever way, to those conversations.”
Praise for In the Slender Margin:
“In the Slender Margin is intended as an exploration rather than a balm or solace, though it will no doubt be those things for some people. Its resonance comes, rather, from its intelligent open-endedness, its unflinching, simultaneous embrace of death’s reality and persistent mystery.” (Globe and Mail)
“A literate, free-association meditation on the final fact of life.” ( Kirkus Reviews )
“Intricate and beautiful . . . Provides an intimate language for grief and makes death a site of wonder as much as pain. . . . In her careful prose, her encounters with the dead, dying and mourning take on a kind of grace.” ( National Post
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In the small hours
$15.95Sometimes, knowing a person is
home, preparing a salad, helps.This debut collection of poems records the unanticipated images that crystallize as we contemplate the state of our lives in the small hours of the day. Inspired by the economy of the Western ghazal form, Erin Brubacher’s sparse poems chronicle the aftermath of a marriage and the many seemingly minor encounters which bring clarity, levity and a sense of pathos to our days.
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In the Terrible Weather of Guns
$14.95In the Terrible Weather of Guns is a book of poems and short prose pieces that tell the story of the life and times of Irish immigrant, Joseph Willcocks. Arriving in Upper Canada penniless in 1800, he was by turns a personal secretary, sheriff of the Home District, and publisher of the first political newspaper in Upper Canada. He was an elected representative in the legislature at York and fought valiantly for the British in the bloody war of 1812. In beautifully evocative language, John B. Lee’s study of Willcocks highlights the complexities of a talented man who crossed over to the Americans and died in dishonour during one of the most violent episodes in Canadian history.
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In the Vicinity of Riches
$19.95The richness of memory is a curse and a gift.
Twisting and turning against the soul-sicknesses of late-capitalism, Chris Hutchinson’s new collection of poems scrolls through myriad moods and aesthetic guises, by turns hallucinatory, despondent, and serene. Authenticity and artifice collide and collude. Political and personal boundaries blur as do the categorical divisions between content and form. Imagine an architecture of breezeways, a freeway of exit ramps, a literature of repurposed literary conventions, the past “re-presented” in endless waves of arrival.
Here we find a nostalgia for modernist disjuncture, there a yearning for symbolist depth, and everywhere a fondness for surfaces which, ironically, coax the reader to peel back the stylish veneer.
Haunted by a weird range of historical personages, while travelling from Houston to the moon and several places in between, the lyric “I” bears witness to its own endless destruction and reconstitution.
At once escapist and socially engaged, Hutchinson’s poems enact the ephemeral and fluid nature of our linguistic experiences, tracing those ecstatically tortuous processes by which we might sometimes find, even in the midst of loss, the value of our lives beyond the spheres of war, toxic rhetoric, and neo-liberal commerce.
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In The Vision of Birds
$16.95Long before the current rise of eco-poetry, Steve Luxton was writing powerful and exquisitely crafted poems about and set in nature. An avid fisherman, canoeist and hiker, he has explored and recorded in memorable detail the region around his home in Quebec. This important collection brings together for the first time Luxton’s best nature poems written over the last 35 years and includes new and previously unpublished work. Influenced by well-known fellow poets and Eastern Townshippers, F. R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, and D.G. Jones, Luxton has developed a mature and authoritative voice uniquely his own. Rich in language and metaphor, these poems dazzle at times with their depth and dissolve the barrier between Man and Nature. With a true and finely honed poetic gift, Luxton vividly portrays the natural world’s green particulars-what the Zen Buddhists term ‘The Ten Thousand Things’. Unsentimentally Post pastoral and also post Romantic, Luxton employs his eyes, ears, heart, and mind, with non-appropriating eloquence.
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In the Ward
$9.95“Like all but very few Canadians, I’ve had no real experience of the North — I’ve remained, of necessity, an outsider. And the North has remained for me a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about and, in the end, avoid.” — Andrew Hunter
Outsiders, dreamers, tall tales. Lawren Harris’s visionary North, his idea of North, was shaped in Toronto. In this fascinating little book, Andrew Hunter explores the historic Toronto of Lawren Harris: a city of great diversity and dense urban growth. Harris often painted in the Ward (St. John’s Ward), a downtown neighbourhood bordered by College and Queen, University and Yonge streets. The Ward was of deep significance to First Nations communities; it marked the end of the Underground Railroad for many fugitive slaves; it housed the city’s first Chinatown; and was home to the immigrant poor of Europe and the United Kingdom.
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In the Writers’ Words
$25.00Interviews with ten Great Canadian poets.
In The Writers’ Words Volume 2 is a collection of interviews of ten significant contemporary Canadian poets: Brian Bartlett, Roo Borson, George Elliott Clarke, Travis Lane, John B. Lee, Daniel Lockhart, Bruce Meyer, A.F. Moritz, Sue Sinclair, and Colleen Thibaudeau.
In this book, the writers speak in-depth about the importance of personal events in their lives, their aesthetics, the social and geographical contexts, historical background, the influence of other writers and the evolution of their poetry during their careers. These poets give a larger sense of the nature and the development of contemporary Canadian poetry.