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Showing 3649–3664 of 9248 results
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Invisible Dogs
$20.00Virtuosic poems tracking two intertwined themes: the breakdown of an obsessive love affair and the vicissitudes of middle age.
Invisible Dogs, Dempster’s fourteenth collection, is a complex but deeply coherent hymn to the difficult business of staying alive. This is a book for when it hurts so bad you hope you’ll die and are afraid you won’tÑnot because it offers consolation or the promise of a new dawn, but because it so compellingly documents the plain, hard, ungraceful, stumbling grief of the matter, and meets it with rare self-knowledge, wry humour, and an unornamented determination to go on living.
Dempster’s metaphors are like hairpin turns taken at breakneck speed. He has nerves of steel when it comes to self-examination, and it’s this relentless honesty and the emotional torque it induces that keep the voice on the road.
… He scrutinizes
the rearview mirror as if it were a bush about to spring
into flames, the past appearing closer than it really is.ÊÊ
Miles of missing her, those erratic white lines.ÊÊ
He keeps forgetting where he’s going Ð city,
corner store, centre of the universe. No wonder
arrival feels so temporary, like a borrowed bathroom key.
~ from “He Said/She Said” -
Invisible Generations
$24.95Born of Indigenous grandmothers and white grandfathers, Irene Kelleher lived all her life in the shadow of her heritage. Her local community in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley treated her as if she was invisible. The combination of white and Indigenous descent was beyond the bounds of acceptability by a dominant white society. To be mixed was to not belong.
Attracted to the future British Columbia by a gold rush beginning in 1858, Irene’s white grandfathers partnered with Indigenous women. Theirs was not an uncommon story. Some of the earliest newcomers to do so were in the employ of the fur trading Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Langley and elsewhere. And yet, more than 150 years later, the descendants of these early pioneers are still struggling for their stories of discrimination and segregation to be heard.
Through research, family records and a personal connection to Irene, Governor General award-winning historian Jean Barman explores this aspect of British Columbia’s history and the deeply rooted prejudice faced by families who helped to build this province. In Invisible Generations, Barman writes of the Catholic residential school that Irene’s parents and so many other ”mixed blood” children were forced to attend. We meet Josephine, a family friend who was separated as a child from her beloved upwardly mobile politician father. When her presence in his socially charged household became untenable, Josephine was dispatched to the same Fraser Valley boarding school. ”The transition from genteel Victoria to St. Mary’s Mission was horrendous,” she wrote. Yet individuals and families survived as best they could, building good lives for themselves and those around them. Irene chose to be a schoolteacher, and taught many children including Doukhobor children at a time when the Doukhobor community was vehemently opposed to their children attending school.
These stories along with many others have been largely forgotten, but in Invisible Generations Barman brings this important conversation into focus, shedding light on a common history across British Columbia and Canada. It is, in Irene’s words, ”time to tell the story.”
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Invisible Sea
$19.95Joseph Campbell: “The airplane has replaced the bird in the imagination as the symbol of the release of spirit from the bonds of earth.” Hence, Invisible Sea. Part critique, part celebration of technology, these poems explore the symbolic and mythical associations of the historical moment when human beings took flight and, in a sense, became Godlike. The opening section is in the voice of Wilbur Wright as he unlocks the mysteries of human flight and, consequently, pays a heavy price. The next section examines the stories of other early aeronauts, both legendary and real, from Daedalus to John Glenn, orbiting the earth. The title poem of the collection, a serial poem, scans the major discoveries of aeronautics, beginning with Da Vinci’s study of fluids and ending with trans-sonic flight.
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Involuntary Bliss
$20.00Even in death, he said, the novella’s power would bind us together, all of us who had read it, appealing as it did equally to our emotions and our intellects.
Intense and densely layered, Involuntary Bliss is the latest intriguing story from the award-winning young Canadian writer Devon Code. Situated in modern-day Montreal during a weekend in late August, two young men attempt to restore their friendship.
From the streets of Montreal’s Plateau to the mountainous hillsides of Machu Picchu and beyond, this high-spirited picaresque investigates themes of mortality, idealism, and transgressive art from the perspective of two young men, who have met up in modern-day Montreal during a weekend in late August in an attempt to restore their friendship.
Readers of literary fiction who appreciate stylistically sophisticated and edgy novels will happily lose themselves in this circuitous story that combines the dark humor and elements of psychological compulsion of Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño with the eroticism, narrative momentum and intimations of violence in the novels of Haruki Murakami.
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Inward to the Bones
$16.95In 1930, Emily Carr met Georgia O’Keeffe at an exhibition of O’Keeffe’s paintings in New York. Inspired by the idea of a bond between these two powerful painters, award-winning poet Kate Braid has expanded that momentary meeting into a passionate, revolutionary friendship. In Georgia O’Keeffe’s voice, she envisions what might have happened if the two women had visited each other in the landscapes that inspired their art: O’Keeffe’s New Mexico and Carr’s British Columbia. Thus begins an extraordinary journey through landscape, art and desire and inward to the bones. This Kate Braid classic was originally published by Polestar in 1998. It was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Prize. Inward to the Bones was a winner of the Vancity Book Award.
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Iolaire
$17.00December 31, 1918. The war to end all wars was over and nearly three hundred men were returning home to their families, long left behind. When the HMS Iolaire left port on her fateful journey she was overflowing with joyful soldiers who had survived the gun but would not survive the sea. It was the Beast of Holm that sank her that night, plunging the men into the frigid waters no more than 20 feet from shore. 205 died , 82 survived. Iolaire, Karen Clavelle’s debut collection of poetry, takes letters, news clippings and her own unique voice to stitch together one of the most tragic tales in maritime history.
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Irene
$12.95The poems in Irene, written before and after Cooley’s mother’s death, form an elegy to her. In Cooley’s words: “. . . it’s taken on some associations, connections with the Persephone story perhaps most obviously. The book is very personal, very close and emotional to me.””. . . [Irene] is dense, emotionally rich and moving.”–The Globe and Mail
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Iridium
$9.95Beautifully shaped and with language full of sensuous intimations, here is the latest volume of poems by Steve Luxton. From the tensile short lyrics of ‘Hermit Crab Song’ to the loosely sashaying rhythms of ‘Morning After: At the Dacha,’ Luxton’s sustained vision compels and fascinates. As G.V. Downes comments in Canadian Literature, Luxton is both original and aware, a poet ‘who sees with precision’ the Canadian landscape. Like the being in the title poem ‘Iridium,’ the reader is urged for a moment to relinquish the grotesque world of appearances to find shapes that sound, touch, and endure.
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Iridium Seeds
$10.95Poignant and sensitive, the poetry in iridium seeds is vocalized through complicated rhythms of abjection, tangible sound, and visual structures that are poems unto themselves.
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Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space!
$22.99In a galactic network known as the Keangal, where space is accessible.
Lieutenant Eileen Iris and the command crew of the S.S. SpoonZ haven’t a clue what it means to be disabled. An unexpected conversation with an intergalactic janitor brings up the question but offers no answers before he’s ‘ported away.
Unfazed, duties resume as Iris manages an overprotective guidebot; Security Chief Lartha and her sentient prostheses offer kick-ass protection; Mr. Herbert’s inventiveness is a godsend (although he’s not quite grasped how to flirt); Commander Davan’s affable personality comes through whether trumpeted, texted, or signed; and Captain Warq’s gracious but firm leadership keeps everyone at their best.
Until on one mission, where the crew tears through space.
Just a little bit.
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Iris and the Dead
$24.95This haunting exploration of love and desire, disability and madness, trauma and recovery, is a diaristic marvel for fans of Annie Ernaux.
Weaving personal memory with magic realism and folklore, Iris and the Dead asks: What if you could look back and tell someone exactly how they changed the course of your life?
For our narrator, that someone is Iris, the counsellor with whom she developed an unusual, almost violent bond. There are things she needs to tell Iris: some that she hid during the brief time they knew each other, and some that she has learned since. She was missing her mind the autumn they spent together and has since regained it.
Iris and the Dead unfurls the hidden power dynamics of abuse, offering a beguiling inquiry into intergenerational trauma, moral ambiguity, and queer identity.
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Iron Bars And Bookshelves
$34.95The Morrin Centre is at the heart of Quebec City’s history. It once housed Quebec’s common jail, the Presbyterian-run Morrin College, and the scholarly activities of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. Today, it is home to the city’s main English-language cultural center and library.The colorful stories of each of these institutions reveal unknown aspects of the tumultuous history of Quebec’s capital city and bring some of its forgotten characters back to life. This book takes you from the dark prison cells on the building’s ground floor to the stately library and college classrooms above it.Did you know that Quebec’s first French-language novelist, Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, did time in the jail, that Morrin College admitted women on equal terms with men some sixty years before Université Laval, or that the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec helped establish Canada’s National Archives? -
Iron Peggy
$16.95Peg is struggling for survival at her boarding school. Three über-cool “it” girls take aim at Peg and make her life utterly miserable. When her beloved Grandmother dies she just wants to disappear. Then an unexpected gift arrives; inside it, Peg finds three cast-iron Canadian soldiers. In despair, she throws them against the floor. How can they help her? They are so small, and the girls’ shadow is so big. But, miraculously, the toys come to life as Indigenous snipers from World War I, just in time to wage an epic battle against the girls. A powerful play that will appeal to audiences both young and old, Iron Peggy uses a creative and ever-surprising blend of voices and sceneries to tell this moving story. With 2018 marking the 100th-year anniversary of WWI, Iron Peggy is an excellent introduction to its history and a touching testimony that not only celebrates the First Nation participation in the war effort but also a young girl’s personal victory.
Iron Peggy, by award-winning, international Métis performer and playwright Marie Clements, was commissioned by the Vancouver International Children’s Festival and premiered at Vancouver’s Waterfront Theatre in 2019. (Adapted from Vancouver International Children’s Festival online presentation.)
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Ironworks
$35.00In Ironworks, hand-forged iron and photography meld together to create a body of images honouring the simplicity and function of nineteenth-century blacksmith-made objects, many discovered at the locations where they had been cast aside. Together Holownia’s photographs and Sanger’s poems reveal the tangibility of light and dark in the obsolescent and rejected. Printed in offset lithography with seven tri-tone reproductions.
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Irrelevance of Space and Other Stories, The
$21.95The Irrelevance of Space, ‘Trains’, ‘Remembrance’, ‘Fal-e-Hafez’, ‘Guantanamoo’, and ‘The Cyberdeath Files’ – stories thatrange in settings from Scandinavia to Canada, Eastern Europe, Iran, Cuba, and USA. And a story bridging Poland and India through a strange historical coincidence.
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Irresponsible Freaks, Highball Guzzlers and Unabashed Grafters
$9.95Bob Edwards, the Great White North’s equivalent to H. L. Mencken, remains a singular figure in Canadian journalism. His newspapers, published in Wetaskiwin, Leduc, High River, Strathcona, Winnipeg, Port Arthur, and most famously Calgary, skewered politics, society, and business leaders with a fearlessness and outrageousness rarely seen then, now, or in between.
As editor James Martin points out in his illuminating introduction, Bob Edwards seems more modern the farther back in history he recedes; he was the granddaddy of Gonzo Journalism à la Hunter S. Thompson, a freewheeling cultural critic in the spirit of Lester Bangs, a pioneer of satirical reform as evidenced in Frank magazine, and a spoofer of the po-faced reporting of his day in precisely the same way that The Onion is now.
Irresponsible Freaks, Highball Guzzlers and Unabashed Grafters features mountains of Edwards’s superb aphorisms, a generous helping of his longer and lesser-known works, and some choice items which have never before seen print, as well as miraculous archival discoveries and many cartoons from Edwards’s celebrated Eye Opener. It is a welcome addition to the Bob Edwards canon for those who thought they knew everything about him, and an eye-opening introduction to the uninitiated: “He was writing this stuff a hundred years ago!”