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Suzy Lake has been examining and critiquing ideals of the body, gender, and identity since the late 1960s. In her photographs, videos, and performances, she draws attention to social norms and constraints and aims to diminish the barrier between the viewer and the artwork.
Introducing Suzy Lake follows the artist in images across five decades, as her political ideals are forged in Detroit’s civil rights movement in the late 1960s; as she realizes her first successes in Montreal’s artist-led cultural boom of the 1970s in the post-Expo 67, post-Duplessis era; and since 1978 in Toronto, as she finds her home and hones her artistic vision. Influenced by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Lake’s work demonstrates the innovation and continued influence of the “Feminist Avant-Garde” on contemporary art.
Introducing Suzy Lake features almost 100 reproductions of Lake’s photographs, some drawn from celebrated installations, others from newly commissioned series. Complemented by essays by Allyson Mitchell, Robert Longo, Elizabeth Smith, Michelle Jacques, and Sara Angel, Introducing Suzy Lake reveals the richness and originality of Lake’s work and her stature as one of North America’s most influential contemporary artists.
Can two kids stop a sinister plot to steal the brain power of the people of Nanaimo?
Someone is delivering plates of scrumptious Nanaimo bars to every household in Nanaimo, and the people who eat them are behaving very strangely. Gordon Whillickers doesn’t get to eat his because, at the last minute, a hairy arm reaches through his window and steals them. He and Sophia chase after the thief and meet an amazing Sasquatch named Cheryl, who is also puzzled by the sudden appearance of the mouth-watering delicacies.
With the help of Cheryl and the technological wizardry of a local librarian, the two kids move ever closer to the alien creature at the centre of the plot. They must stop him before the Nanaimoites’ IQs are lost forever!
Jack Hodgins begins The Invention of the World with a ferry worker waving you aboard a ship that will take you not only to Vancouver Island but into a world of magic. The far west coast of Canada has always been regarded as a “land’s end” where the eccentrics of the world come to plot out the last best utopia. Hodgins both invents a world and shows how we continually invent that world in all its multiplicity. Past and present intermingle while hilarious farce rubs up against epic tragedy. Intertwined are a love story, a portrait of a nineteenth-century village, a clash between wild loggers and weight-watching town folk who have to wear a pig when they fail to meet their weight goals. Pagan myths rub shoulders with the harsh pioneer days of the British Columbia rainforest. As always with Hodgins, this novel is based on the portrayal of character. At the centre of the mystery is Donal Keneally, the mad Irish messiah who eighty years ago persuaded an entire Irish village to emigrate to Canada, there to become his slaves in the Revelations Colony of Truth. His heir is Maggie Kyle along with her collection of boarders in the old Colony of Truth building. Here truly is a novel that is itself an invention of the world.
‘Inventory’ is a collection of 58 object poems. Taking as a starting point the reciprocal relation between subjects and objects, the book explores the unique way that objects appear in an individual consciousness. Each object in this inventory exists on its own and also reflects the author’s experience, from the mundane stapler and tea bag, to the mysterious, extinct dodo bird, to entities that blur the line between person and thing. In this way, the collection highlights the often hidden dimensions of the objects we encounter, including their temporal, political, locational and psychic aspects. It offers an opportunity for readers to reconsider their own investments in what, by dictionary definition, should be static categories.
” ‘Inventory’ by Marguerite Pigeon examines life’s often forgotten elements. From her portrait of “meaning” to her idyllic details of a clothespin, Pigeon is a master of naked realism and organic descriptions of expression. Her first publication, ‘lnventory’, was short-listed for the 2010 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. The book explores the lucid philosophy of simple pleasures it’s a refreshing truth bound in a small package. ‘lnventory’ is a front-to-back read that meshes simplicity and intricacy in a witty and intelligent style. Pigeon’s work is a gem of purity in a complex world.” – Poetry is Dead Magazine
Cut loose at the end of a long and violent hockey career prolonged by steroids and numbed by liquor, ex-enforcer Billy Purdy discovers that the soon-to-be-published novel of a celebrated politician’s son is in fact Billy’s father’s own, taken word for word from the original published, and promptly forgotten, some forty years before. Allowing the ruse to continue, and in an effort to distance himself from his violent past, Purdy embarks upon an exotic, oftentimes absurd adventure in an attempt to reinvent himself in what he envisions to be a more cerebral and civilized image, in a world he has never fully been a part of, or developed the necessary tools to properly inhabit. Yearning for connection of any kind, yet seemingly unable to sustain it for any length of time, Billy Purdy comes to symbolize the alienation, frustration, and ultimate futility behind this quintessential Canadian dream.
An “intelligent and lively” companion to the hit BBC show starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Publishers Weekly)
“One of the best-researched books out there on the BBC Show, with great interviews of the show’s creators and primary actors.” — GeekDad
He’s been depicted as a serious thinker, a master of deduction, a hopeless addict, and a bare-knuckle fighter. His companion is a bumbler, a sympathetic equal, someone helpless in the face of his friend’s social inadequacies. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson remain the most-adapted fictional characters of all time. In 2010, when Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman stepped into the roles, they managed to meld many previous incarnations into two glorious performances.
Over Sherlock’s first three seasons, the Emmy Award–winning series has brought new life to stories over a century old and, with its Holmes and Watson for the twenty-first century, created a worldwide phenomenon. Investigating Sherlock examines each episode through in-depth and fun analysis, exploring the character development and cataloguing every subtle reference to the original stories. With biographies of Cumberbatch and Freeman, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle, Investigating Sherlock is great fun, and the ultimate guide to the great detective.
Virtuosic 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”
Born 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.”
Joseph 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.
Even 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.
In 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.
December 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.
The 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
Beautifully 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.
Poignant and sensitive, the poetry in iridium seeds is vocalized through complicated rhythms of abjection, tangible sound, and visual structures that are poems unto themselves.