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Shortlisted, George Bugnet Award for Fiction
Kalila chronicles the lives of Maggie and Brodie, whose joy collides with devastation when their daughter’s birth also heralds the news of her congenital heart condition. In this startlingly inventive novel, Rosemary Nixon braids light and darkness into a narrative chain pulled exquisitely taut.
Through Maggie and Brodie’s shifting viewpoints, the isolating impenetrability of hospital life, the mediation of physics, music, and family, Nixon propels the reader into unmapped emotional terrain where a shell-shocked family grapples with the horror, joy, and mystery of impermanence. The result is a spellbinding tale, provocative for the emotions and the intellect.
This collection of poetry recounts stories of Himalayan villages where education brings major inter-generational changes, promising freedom for women. Many of the poems centre on women’s lives, bodies, and the ways in which they are free to encounter the land, or held back from it, while recognizing the different ways women are regarded, from goddesses to mothers hungry for literacy. The book delves into the hardships of lives in secluded rural areas, including such elements as child marriages, girl-trafficking, and the decade-long terror of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. It further recognizes the sense of belonging while moving between places, and how one approaches, understands, and honours the land in which one lives. Karaikhola Flows is an attempt at cultural exchange with Canadian readers that speaks to all who move between places, who come from cultures that respect the land, and who respect women and their lived experiences.
Karenin Sings the Blues is a meditation sparked by the actors in Tolstoy’s 19th-century masterpiece, Anna Karenina. Entering this famous saga of derailed love, McCartney explores the repercussions and unintended consequences of Anna and Vronsky’s passion. Here, Anna Karenina’s cuckolded husband “sings the blues,” but Count Vronsky, too, bemoans his disappointed expectations.
McCartney imagines the anxieties of Anna’s children, the self-absorption of busybodies and in-laws, the ambivalence of servants and friends sucked into Anna’s romantic vortex. Set at the height of the industrial age, the roar of the train and the pounding rhythm and flying soot of the steam locomotive epitomize the vigour of McCartney’s poems. The same vigour and clear vision characterize the “California” poems, which deal with McCartney’s youth in urban southern California. Domestic chaos amid cultural inanity creates turmoil and fear. How is it possible to love a distant mother, a father off somewhere with a third or fourth wife, a wounded and angry brother, a terminally ill sister consuming everything? How is it possible not to? How can an adolescent know the difference between self-preservation and self-destruction? These concerns continue into adulthood and motherhood in “Persuasion,” the third section of Karenin Sings the Blues.
Accessible and always forthright, McCartney combines plain-speaking revelations about family and domestic life with literary criticism and witty cultural play.
A remarkable debut that expresses a humanism grounded in physiology. At the heart of Karyotype is the Beauty of Loulan, a woman who lived four thousand years ago, her body preserved in the cool, dry sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Karyotype’s poems range from the title sequence, which explores the DNA and woven textiles of this woman and her vanished people (a karyotype is the characteristic chromosome complement of a species), to the firebombing of the National Library of Sarajevo, from an abecedarian hymn on the International Red Cross “Book of Belongings” to the experience of watching the televised invasion of Iraq in the dark of a Montreal night. The Beauty of Loulan becomes a symbol of the ephemerality of human genetic and cultural texts, and of our chances for survival. And then there was Liu Baiqiang
sentenced to 18 years for “Counter-Revolutionary Incitement”
who attached words to the legs of locusts Tyranny! Long Live Freedom! and flung them over the walls
of his prison, into the air.
–from “On the ordering of chaotic bodies of poetry” “Karyotype is for me a crucial text in the work of re-imagining what it is to be human… I am grateful, as well as inspired, to find an artwork performing this essential task.” –Don McKay/
Kaspoit! puts speculative illustration to the most profuse series of crimes ever to take place on Canadian soil. Set in the lower mainland of Vancouver, the time is now – criminals are brazen, cops are cynical – and no one is trying to solve the disappearance of dozens of women.
Throughout, the novel conveys a savage, dystopian depiction of a netherworld teeming with gangland crime, sexual exploitation, betrayal and murder. The language is neologistic – jarring and vulgar – creating an atmosphere dense with bloodchilling dread, hurtling the reader through sinister, malevolent scenes with a velocity rarely seen in contemporary fiction.
Praise for Kaspoit!:
“… After William Pickton was arrested, media and activist groups had a field day speculating about why women were going missing from the Downtown Eastside for years before the Vancouver Police or RCMP appeared to notice. That’s the question Bolen tries to answer in Kaspoit! It’s a novel about perception and agendas, about how what we see, and what we think we know, are determined by what we’re looking for. … Bolen’s stripped-to-the-frame, dialogue-driven story will be as shocking to CanLit-conditioned sensibilities as a slap in the face with a bag of cold nails.” (John Moore, BC BookWorld)
“Kaspoit! is either a sublime literary work of near genius or is one of the most wretched wallows in the dark mire of the soul ever published. … Reader beware, Kaspoit! is not for the easily upset, but, if you can handle it, you’ll soon realize you’re reading a work of stark brilliance. … The story itself is so compelling that the reader returns to the book, though repelled by it. Finally, the conspiracy it posits is startling compared to the vague news coverage that the infamous pig farm case received.”(Les Wiseman, The Ottawa Citizen)
“a tour de force of thug-life horror, the book is a fictionalized account of what might have gone on at a certain Port Coquitlam pig farm where the DNA of 32 women was found during a massive forensic investigation. If you’ve ever felt that the publication ban on Robert Pickton’s speedy trial and conviction smelled strongly of cover-up, this is for you.” (Alex Varty, The Georgia Straight)
Käthe Kollwitz is revered in her home country, Germany, and around the world for her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Over the course of a five decade career, which included two world wars, Kollwitz’s subject matter focused on the lives and hardships of marginalized women. Given the turmoil and suffering of women and children around the world today, her powerful images resonate with an uncanny timeliness.
Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a leading 20th century German artist known for her drawings, prints (woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs), and sculptures. At a time when opportunities for women were limited, her achievements were extraordinary, especially as a printmaker in a field dominated by men. Over her long career, Kollwitz tackled difficult subjects and became an advocate for women’s rights and for the poor. She created prints and posters that protest war, poverty, hunger, and child mortality. Today, she is recognized as a strong, empathetic voice at the intersection between art and activism.
Kollwitz is often linked to the German Expressionists, but her bold and distinctive figural style and strong socialist convictions set her apart from any clearly defined art movement. Her art was a reflection of her own experiences, which included the tragic loss of her son Peter in World War I. In addition to self-portraits, themes in her work relate to the lives and suffering of poor women, the intimate relationships between mothers and children, humanitarian and social justice issues, and her ongoing dialogue with death.
This extraordinary publication examines the richness and depth of Kollwitz’s work with more than 100 colour reproductions of her prints, drawings, and sculptures, drawn from the comprehensive collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Also included are essays by Brenda Rix on Kollwitz’s life and her preoccupation with self-portraiture and an essay by the donor Dr. Brian McCrindle on building the Kollwitz collection.
Willard Freer lived in remote areas of northern BC for most of his life. Born in Kamloops in 1910 and raised in the Peace River country, Freer came to the Kechika River valley in 1942, where he worked for a number of years with famed packer and guide Skook Davidson. He then built a cabin about 35 kilometres to the north and spent the rest of his life in the valley, and at Fireside, an Alaska Highway lodge near the junction of the Kechika and Liard rivers.
By all accounts, Freer was a quiet, introverted person, who faithfully kept a daily diary from 1942 to 1975. Most of the entries are brief, but cumulatively they provide a detailed record of life in northern BC and southern Yukon Territory. Due to his proximity to the famed Alaska Highway and the historic Davie Trail, Willard encountered many of the Indigenous people who lived, worked and travelled through the Kechika valley, as well as casual visitors, bush pilots, government survey parties including the Geological Survey of Canada, major mining companies, and branches of the US Army in northern BC during World War II.
Willard Freer’s diaries are the most extensive written record of daily life in one of the most remote regions of British Columbia. Kechika Chronicler provides a voice for his story.
“Required reading for any person troubled by our world right now.” – Maureen Medved
Jake’s life is shaped by the Spanish Civil War and the not-so-civil wars that go on within families and intimate relationships.
With engaging wit and originality, David Spaner does for Vancouver what writers like Mordecai Richler and Philip Roth did for Montreal and Newark. Jake Feldman grows up on Keefer Street in the dynamic working-class immigrant neighbourhood of Strathcona in Vancouver. This is the first novel to bring to life the vibrancy of Strathcona and its largely Jewish Keefer Street.
Jake’s left-wing, rabble-rousing street politics of his youth eventually lead him to leave Depression-era Vancouver to join the international volunteers fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. But his return home is unheralded and his idealism is worn down by the mundaneness of everyday life and family conflict.
Fifty years later, he recaptures the passion of his youth during a reunion of civil war volunteers in Spain. Keefer Street explores how to preserve your idealism in order to live a life of purpose.
Born in Hong Kong to unwed parents, Stephanie Chitpin was transported illegally to the Island of Mauritius by Ah Pak, the head nun of a Buddhist temple with the help of Mr. Chui, a benevolent Chinese businessman. Ah Pak raised her as an orphan ward of the temple, Fook Soo Am, known as the Pagoda. Encouraged by Mr. Chui and in spite of Ah Pak’s opposition, she did very well at school. The scars incurred by classmates’ name calling (bastard, and more) the shame of being an orphan raised in a temple, tragic deaths, and other obstacles did not prevent her from pursuing her education and finishing high school at the age of 16. Although Ah Pak had other plans for her, Mr. Chui stood by her with diplomacy and tact throughout her school years and onto university in Canada on a scholarship.
Keep My Memory Safe poetically chronicles life in the temple and in Mauritius, and the move to Canada. This immigration story is totally unique as no other orphaned temple nuns are known to have gone on to acquire a topnotch education and become academics.
At age ninety-two, Ivadoile Spears is in the grip of early dementia. Alone except for a cat named Rose and an old cedar box filled with photographs, Ivadoile is stubbornly set on living out her remaining years in the now-vacant Tides Inn on Cape Breton Island. The only child of cold and withdrawn parents and widowed by the age of twenty-eight, a younger Ivadoile turned the Tides Inn into a retreat for the broken-spirited. But she had not been prepared for Ambrose Kane – a southerner who entered, bringing a cold wind in his dirty shirt.
Keeping Count, M. Travis Lane’s 18th collection of poetry, begins in the poet’s favourite terrain: short, condensed lyric that focuses on the natural world. “But pull a thread: music turns,” Lane writes, and the book progressively defamiliarizes the reader, moving from ecopoetry to a longer poetry of interiority in the second section, concluding with a final section that focuses on issues of mortality. As George Elliott Clarke has written so aptly, “If you have not read Lane before, prepare to travel: Like T.S. Eliot, she wants you to have a transporting experience in your imagination. If you have read Lane before, prepare for fresh astonishment. She is Homeric breadth and Sapphic brevity.”
Keeping the Peace
In his trenchant essay, Salutin explores and defends public education at a time when the public sector “dares not utter its name for fear of derision and worse.” He simplifies complex issues with the observation that “almost anything can work” if educators are genuinely committed and teachers are respected rather than demonized. He travels to Finland to study the world’s most successful public education system. He challenges the sacred cow of educational “choice” and emphasizes that public element of public education instils a natural pride in community and diversity, something no other form of teaching can offer.
Ken Danby (1940-2007) was one of Canada’s foremost practitioners of contemporary realism. Rooted in the Canadian psyche, nourished by his Ontario rural roots, Danby’s subject matter was broad and expansive, yet it was the images of Canadian landscapes and life that captured the public’s attention. At the Crease, a 1972 egg tempera painting depicting a nameless hockey goalie viewed from ice-level, was his best-known work, and for many, it defined him as an artist.
An accomplished painter, watercolourist, printmaker, and commercial artist, Danby’s career began to unfold with a modernist narrative in the 1960s and 1970s. It intersected with the fervent nationalism expressed in the music of Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell. According to art historian Patrick Hutchings, Danby’s paintings bring us “face to face with a moment of our own time.”
Ken Danby: Beyond the Crease, the first major book on Ken Danby’s creative practise in two decades, examines the depth and breadth of Danby’s work. Designed to accompany a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton, it features an essay by art historian Ihor Holubizky, a detailed chronology by Christine Braun, more than sixty reproductions of Danby&#s major paintings, including At the Crease, Lacing Up, Pancho, and Pulling Out, and dozens of archival photographs, as well as Danby’s own words about his life and work drawn from an unpublished autobiographical essay that he completed shortly before his death.
Danby’s work is highly collectable and can be found in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada; the Musée des beaux arts, Montreal; the Art Gallery of Vancouver; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Brooklyn Museum. Ken Danby became a member of the Order of Canada in 2001.
Welcome to Blakkat Theatre, home of the improv comedy troupe Kerfuffle!
Please permit us to introduce our Cast of Players:
NELLIE WOLFE: age 28, recent orphan, pregnant disabled avenger and sword thief
ANDY MCLEAN: age 21, redhead, devoted bike rider and aspiring Anarchist
CONSTANZIA FORGIONE: age 28, reluctant waitress, emerging gay poet and Nellie’s BFF
CALVAIRE PERSONNE: age 29, PHD candidate, brother to a living sister and a dead twin
SHERMAN SILVERSTEIN: turning 30, father, maker of Jesus Toast, married, for now
YOU, OUR AUDIENCE-PARTICIPANT: at every age, your input is an essential ingredient
Kerfuffle is a seriously funny book about serious matters. Jumping on and off stage, the troupe do their best to make sense and nonsense of their lives and the 2010 Toronto G20 protests. Uncertain which player is her baby daddy, nine-months-pregnant Nellie Wolfe wields her crutch as both prop and weapon to hunt him down. She bands with feminist friends to teach the troupe’s male members about the responsible use of their members. From hidden weapons to the marketing of Jesus Toast, simmering personal and political secrets build to an explosive on-stage reveal. It’s an inside-Anarchy exposé of G20’s crucible moments from black balaclavas to a burning police car to life inside the kettle. As satire at its best, it offers both belly laughs and a demand for justice.
In Kerosene, her debut book of poetry, Jamella Hagen weaves individual memories into a narrative that charts the process of orientation and growing maturity within shifting geographical locations.Patterned on the author’s own experience, the collection follows the story of a young woman’s life, encompassing the beauty and harshness of a childhood spent in the wilderness of Northern BC, the difficult process of adapting to city life, a period of extensive travel in South America, and her eventual return to the north. From a position of experience, the poet is able to contemplate the events of her lifetime with a thoughtful and sometimes gently ironic voice.Equal to the strength and wisdom of the memoir, however, is the richness and vividness of detail distilled through her clear and accessible style. Whether she’s describing enigmatic memories of her mother, the exquisite but steadily disappearing Perito Moreno Glacier, or the moonshine still on her kitchen table, Hagen has mastered the trick of animating fleeting moments with an elegant touch that evokes both familiarity and wonder.