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Modernist poet-painters Mina Loy and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven had many friends in common (including Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp), yet there is no record that the two ever met. Their non-relationship presents a curious “absent presence?* in modernist history.
Zelazo weaves lines of poetry by both women into an imaginary conversation, exploring the way their work has been suppressed, stitched, spliced, and edited by male editors and arbiters of taste.
Four strong women: Anjali, an Indo-Canadian single mother who eagerly accepts an African posting with her non-profit organization; Grace, her dedicated but dominating colleague, who opposes her; Fatimah, a farmer ousted from her home and fertile farmland, whom Anjali befriends; and Mary, Anjali’s kindly maid, who must secure the future of her son, Gabriel. In Land for Fatimah, Anjali involves herself in Fatimah’s quest to find new land for her scattered community, and is thrown into a web of intrigue that upturns her safe, orderly world. Capturing the warmth and vitality of Africa, illuminating everyday heroism, the novel explores expat life, the forced displacement of the poor and the complexities of development.
A startling, moving magic realist debut
Almost immediately upon Julie Bird’s return to the small port town where she was raised, everyday life is turned upside down. Julie’s Gulf War vet father, Marty, has been on the losing side of a battle with PTSD for too long. A day of boating takes a dramatic turn when a majestic blue whale beaches itself and dies. A blond stranger sets up camp oceanside: she’s an agitator, musician-impersonator, and armchair philosopher named Jennie Lee Lewis — and Julie discovers she’s connected to her father’s mysterious trip to New Mexico 25 years earlier. As the blue whale decays on the beach, more wildlife turns up dead — apparently by suicide — echoing Marty’s deepest desire. But Julie isn’t ready for a world without her father.
A stunning exploration of love and grief, Land Mammals and Sea Creatures is magic realism on the seaside, a novel about living life to the fullest and coming to your own terms with its end.
BC Bestseller!
Even before it was a city, Vancouver was a property speculator’s wet dream.
“There are more speculators about New Westminster and Victoria than there were in Winnipeg during the boom,” CPR Chief WC Van Horne warned a friend in 1884, “and they are a much sharper lot. Nearly every person is more or less interested and you will have to be on your guard against all of them.”
Ever since Europeans first laid claim to the Squamish Nation territory in the 1870s, the real estate industry has held the region in its grip. Its influence has been grotesquely pervasive at every level of civic life, determining landmarks like Stanley Park and City Hall, as well as street names, neighbourhoods, even the name “Vancouver” itself. Land of Destiny aims to explore that influence, starting in 1862, with the first sale of land in the West End, and continuing up until the housing crisis of today. It will explore the backroom dealings, the skulduggery and nepotism, the racism and the obscene profits, while at the same time revealing that the same forces which made Vancouver what it is, speculation and global capital, are the same ones that shape it today, showing that more than anything else, the history of real estate and the history of Vancouver are one and the same.
And it’s been dirty as hell.
About the Series: Land of Destiny is the first title in Anvil’s new series “49.2: Tales from the Off Beat,” an ongoing series dedicated to celebrating the eccentric and unusual parts of city history. From Jesse Donaldson, author of the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award finalist book This Day In Vancouver, and a host of other local historians, the series will be an in-depth examination of the weird, the wonderful, and the terrible, injecting fresh details into well-worn local lore, or digging deep into the obscure people, places, and happenings of the last 130 years. From psychedelic hospitals to town fools, from communist organizers to real estate scumbags, 49.2 will take pains to break down the myths surrounding the City of Glass.
Seeing through the eyes of others brings new perspective on the place we call home.
In Land of Many Shores, writers share their perspectives about life in Newfoundland and Labrador from often- neglected viewpoints. In this collection, Indigenous people, cultural minorities, 2SLGBTQ+ people, people living with mental or physical disabilities, workers in the sex industry, people from a variety of faiths, people who have experienced incarceration, and other marginalized and under-represented voices are brought to the forefront, with personal, poignant, celebratory, and critical visions of the land we live on.
Land of Many Shores is a collection of pieces that paints a vibrant picture of a province most of us don’t know as well as we think we do. The variety of experience against the backdrop of Newfoundland and Labrador broadens readers’ perspectives on Canada’s youngest province, helping us reimagine both who we are today and who we have the potential to become.
A poetic exploration of place and belonging, a quest that takes the speaker across the ocean in search of identity and origin.
The speaker in the poems that form Land of the Rock: Talamh an Carraig travels through Newfoundland and Ireland looking for meaning in words, places, and behaviour. Whether the subject is tourists on Fogo Island, conversations on Inis Oírr, flora and fauna of the Burren, or accents in Waterford, Nolan translates this sensory data into a narrative of someone seeking a sense of belonging in a lost ancestral culture. In Land of the Rock, the lost utopia of Gaelic Ireland, which is interwoven through Irish writing and consciousness, is reimagined and displaced across the Atlantic.
Inspired by the Rocky Mountains, ‘Land of the Sky’, the last poem in this collection, is a means of using detail from various distances to reflect on the socio-political and the human that is all around us. At the essence of all the poems in the collection: to explore the land through the distance of the sky and understand that which seems so grounded as– the sky– full of metaphor and near-unfathomable reflexes of histories. This collection is also a continuation of one of the projects of the previous poetry collection, Letter Out: Letter In defining and redefining love as an alternative to solidarity, with the added twist of drawing alternatives to diversity and democracy from the multiplicity of nature.
A story collection by award-nominated writer Andrew Forbes that rifles through the domestic and wild moments that make us human.
Escaping government-sanctioned flooding, obsessing over camera-equipped drones, violently mourning a lost brother, discovering a new passion in fencing, watching a wildfire consume a whole town: the stories in Lands and Forests survey the emotional landscapes of women and men whose lives, though rooted deeply in the land and their small communities, are still rocked by great cultural change. These are raw, honest character studies reminiscent of the work of Alexander MacLeod and Lisa Moore, but with a style and energy all their own.
“A gift to short fiction lovers—a spare, smart, thoughtful collection.”—Open Book
“These stories are elemental, wise, and beautiful.”—Alexander MacLeod, Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated author of Light Lifting
Poems from Trainer’s three previously published collections are gathered with recent poems in a single volume representing her work over the past decade. She makes the lives of obscure people shine forth with simple eloquence and is particularly skilled at capturing the attentive mind of a child confronting adult ambiguities.
The protagonist of this novel, twice exiled, first from his birthplace, Budapest, Hungary, and then from the United States as a Vietnam draft resistor who settles in Montreal, becomes obsessed with a poem by W.H. Auden and a painting by the Dutch master, Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, an allegory about the nature of suffering that leads to his attempted suicide, the subsequent chaos of his life, and to his ultimate redemption. Set primarily in Montreal, the novel also travels to the places of the protagonist’s past: the Europe of his childhood, the America of his adolescence, and the Montreal of his early adulthood through his memories and reflections. Despite its tragic-comic undertone, the novel profoundly explores the illusions we construct to provide value to our lives, the nature of love and the erotic, and the path towards compassion and meaning. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a subtly-crafted work, incorporating literary references, told in a fast-paced, engaging style. Alapi, known for his work on the writers of the New Underground as an editor and critic, presents a provocative edginess to his writing when it comes to sexuality and his lampooning of many of the sacred cows of our societal mores. As the British novelist Tony O’Neill wrote about his work: ‘Alapi has a unique gift and it’s one that most writers would kill to possess: he can move effortlessly from the poetic to the erotic, from the gritty to the heartbreaking, often in the space of a single paragraph.’
“May you live in interesting times.” So goes the ancient Chinese curse. In Quebec, we are always living in “interesting” times. Where else in Canada, perhaps even the world, do you have official language police that patrol the highways and byways of the province looking for missing accents, illegal apostrophes and on/off switches in the wrong language? Where else in Canada do you have to make sure that sign size matters? Is it 30% bigger or smaller than the other? Where else in Canada do you pause to consider how to say hello to someone before you actually do?
Launched in 2009 on St. Jean Baptiste Day, Poetry Quebec was an online magazine dedicated to showcasing the English-language poets and poetry of “la belle province.” Its founding editors and publishers — poets themselves — came from very different backgrounds but shared the desire to make sure the English-language poetry of Quebec got the attention it deserved.
In this book, some of the best and most innovative English-language poets of Canada — rising stars and award-winning authors — reflect on these and other questions of politics and poetics. Culled from the website and expanded for this publication, those interviewed include Rhodes scholar Mark Abley, Maxianne Berger, Stephanie Bolster (Governor General’s Award winner), Jason Camlot, Brian Campbell, performance poet Moe Clark, Mary di Michele (Trillium Prize nominee), Gabe Foreman (A.M. Klein Poetry Prize winner), Susan Gillis (A.M. Klein Poetry Prize winner), Charlotte Hussey, performance poets kaie kellough and Catherine Kidd, Angela Leuck, Steve Luxton, David McGimpsey (Governor General’s Award nominee), Erin Moure (Governor General’s Award winner), Robyn Sarah, Richard Sommer, Gillian Sze, Mahamud Siad Togane, and editors Endre Farkas and Carolyn Marie Souaid (winners, Zebra International Poetry Film Festival, Berlin).
Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Book of Poetry, 2012
This collection is as much about love and people in and out of relationships as it is about origins and the process of estrangement. The lantana is a flower of South American origin, and the ixora of Asian origin. The lantana, a creeper that grows profusely, often engulfing other plants, provides a ready metaphor for the consciousness of the Americas overcoming that of India in the Americas–the mainstreaming and divesting of yoga from its Indian origins being the most visible manifestation. This collection ranges widely in its geographical and historical concerns, from Canada to Guyana to India and places in between, exploring the contradictions in our lives: familial influences, terrorism, literature, politics, race, and the power of language and representation. As always in Persaud’s work, love is ever present. This is a collection that displays mastery over nuances of language, and is at once quirky and humorous as it continues an engagement with the theme of “place as muse.”
Victor Coleman is one of Canada’s best-known poets. Born in 1944 in Toronto, he has published many collections of poetry and has been active as an editor (especially with Coach House Press), a curator, and in general as an active force in all the arts. Lapsed W.A.S.P. collects more than a decade of Coleman’s work, including much that appeared in small editions, a process which has been a central part of his aesthetic stance. This is poetry that brings the body and the intelligence memorably together and challenges a reader.
Chosen as a “Best Book for 1996” in the Halifax Mail Star. Now in its second printing. Lardcake is a collection of original and frequently humorous poems that find their inspiration in the world of popular culture. Pleas to the spirit of Elvis Presley, monologues from Elly May Clampett and Darrin Stevens, mock epics about Babe Ruth in the underworld, valedictory speeches to please Oprah, lyrics occasioned by pork products and confessions from somebody who claims to have gone out with Beverly Hills 90210 star Shannen Doherty are all just part of Lardcake’s ingredients. A scholar of contemporary culture and literature, the poet is not satisfied with merely satirizing pop icons but in transforming their apparent realities into distinct celebrations of the powers of art and love. The poems, like the elegy for Alan Hale Jr. — the actor who played the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island — will naturally please pop aficionados but will also impress readers of contemporary poetry with their expressive details.
Fully immersed in the organic world, Larder is at once an elegant transcription of the spiritual nourishment that comes from our embrace of the earth and of the inevitable loss in our unwillingness to embrace sustainability. In her latest collection, McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.