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Winner, Best Atlantic Published Book Award
Shortlisted, New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
Writing early in 1962, Lucy Jarvis said she felt “just at the threshold of beginning.” Jarvis had studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the 1920s, later becoming part of the social realist movement, committed to an art “of the people”.
In 1941, Jarvis co-founded the UNB Art Centre with Pegi Nicol MacLeod, and together, they turned it into a place of creative effervescence. Passionate and single-minded, Jarvis threw herself into everything that she did and the results were nothing short of astounding. In a few short years, she and MacLeod had transformed their environment.
Yet, it wasn’t until the early 1960s that the unstoppable Jarvis set out on her own. She left the art centre and headed for Paris. In four extended stays during the 1960s, she immersed herself completely, living in French, attending the open studios, and connecting with other artists.
Her retreats to Pembroke Dyke near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, during the summer months allowed her to digest her experiences, and her art took on new life. The influences of both impressionism and post-impressionism emerged in her work, and her paintings became more boldly colourful, freer — more completely her own.
Lucy Jarvis: Even Stones Have Life is the first examination of Jarvis’s considerable body of work — what she painted, how she rendered it, and how her art permeated her life and her life permeated her art.
La Litière (1994), Rappel (1995) and Ressusciter (1996), published together here in English translation as Embedded, Apocalypse, and Resurrection respectively, make up a trilogy of plays featuring Gen-Xers Ludwig and Mae. Ludwig, trained as an engineer, hasn’t been able to find work since graduating some time ago. The fact that he is sardonic, philosophically inclined and suicidal hasn’t helped in this regard. Mae, on the other hand, is an actress who has never been out of work. Caught in a perverse relationship, she plays into Ludwig’s constant mind games until one day she decides she’s had enough. Embedded establishes their twisted Strindbergian relationship, while introducing the Philosopher-cum-Chinese Delivery Guy—the absurdist character who acts as a catalyst for the simmering emotional crisis about to explode. Apocalypse is a monodrama in which Ludwig stages his own suicidal ceremonial (along with unlikely allegorical characters such as a Pope, Giacometti’s Cow and a Leather-Clad Muse). Resurrection is Mae’s testimonial, where she confronts and reconciles herself with Ludwig’s death, breaks the cycle of their co-dependency, and finally comes into her own.
Together, these plays literally “stage” the internalized and therefore repressed failure of the search for an authentic life in art: the decorative nihilism of the post-modern ethos. Taking us on a cathartic journey from despair to exhilaration—at times perilous, comic, edgy and passionate—Ludwig & Mae releases its audiences from the artificial dark of the theatre into the liberating light of day, radiant with a new understanding: life does not imitate art, life makes art.
This trilogy established Louis Patrick Leroux as a leading figure of the Franco-Ontarian artistic renaissance of the 1990s. Rappel Apocalypse, in particular, was quickly identified as a turning point from what had become a stultifying, identity-driven literary tradition, to a burgeoning of artistic freedom and formal exploration.
Long-listed for the 2021 Raymond Souster Award!
Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Meredith Quartermain’s Lullabies in the Real World is a sequence of poems about a train journey from West Coast to East Coast that invokes a patchwork of regions, voices and histories. Her language zings with train rhythms as she unfolds a complex conversation with poets such as bpNichol and Robin Blaser.
This collection reflects and refracts Canada from diverse angles, and challenges colonizing literatures such as the Odyssey and various canonical British and US voices. As it moves from west to east, the book journeys back in time to interrogate historical events such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the exclusion of Acadians. It ends by imagining a time before or outside colonization.
Rich, playful and confrontational, Lullabies in the Real World widens the poetic lens of poetry to investigate the place of a colonial nation in history, and the place of a poet vis-à-vis the voices of other poets.
In his latest collection, Steve Luxton navigates the mid-passages, facing what his favourite character, the notorious Doc Holliday, terms “the wasting diseases: Life, sonofabitch Fate, Love.” Pieces both lyrical and serio-comic weigh sickness and personal mortality, the death of a shell-shocked father, and the shenanigans of this Age’s public life. In Luna Moth and Other Poems, the poet, by now well tutored in human fragility and frailty, discovers that being alive at all in this very odd world seems “stranger by far / than salvation or personal immortality.” Nevertheless, though Fear may be “the only deity, first and last,” Luxton also celebrates the deep beauty in the recesses of nature, and, redeemingly, “a little companionship.” With both formal and experimental elements, these vividly figured, emotionally compelling poems tantalizingly sing and tartly satirize.
Expansive and enveloping, Webb-Campbell’s collection asks, “Who am I in relation to the moon?” These poems explore the primordial connections between love, grief, and water, structured within the lunar calendar.
The poetics follow rhythms of the body, the tides, the moon, and long, deep familial relationships that are both personal and ancestral. Originating from Webb-Campbell’s deep grief of losing her mother, Lunar Tides charts the arc to finding her again in the waves. Written from a mixed Mi’kmaq/settler perspective, this work also explores the legacies of colonialism, kinship, and Indigenous resurgence.
Lunar Tides is the ocean floor and a moonlit night: full of possibility and fundamental connections.
Lunar Wake ebbs and flows like an ocean tide, bringing with it madness, romance, obsession, egoism: the uncontrollable forces that control our lives, reflecting the poet’s own ambivalence about the moon as a symbol and its lyric tradition.”Catherine Hunter’s is a full, assured and original voice. With its complex, driving rhythms, its clarity, playfulness, imaginative breadth and emotional range, it’s a voice full of surprises.”–George Amabile
Slow planetary rotation, the push and pull of the moon, a book–Paul Pearson’s debut collection of poems lays before readers a mapping and re-mapping of the familiar systems of order we rely on to survive the human experience. Reflecting on the principles set down by both Galileo and the Church, Lunatic Engine directs our gaze to the heavens, to the childhood home, to the womb, to the quiet moments of our daily lives to contemplate what comfort is offered by doctrines when staring down the barrel of birth, death, and everything in between.
Their name is synonymous with royalty and their stores were landmarks in virtually every Canadian city, but as the Eaton empire rose and fell in the last century with the company’s patriarchs, there was one woman equally deserving of credit. Flora McCrae Eaton was a visionary, a philanthropist, a socialite, a businesswoman, a world traveler, and a mother of six, but she also ushered in a shopping and dining aesthetic that revolutionized the retail and restaurant experience for generations of Canadians. Lady Eaton oversaw the architecture, staffing, and menus for more than a dozen grand dining rooms few have forgotten despite their eventual demise: the flagship Georgian Room (Toronto), the Round Room (Toronto — now the Carlu), Le Neuf (Montreal), the Grill Room (Winnipeg), and the Marine Room (Vancouver). For more casual fare Eaton’s offered soda and ice cream counters, snack bars, hostess shops, cafeterias, and bakery counters. Lady Eaton’s direction of the restaurants “created” a Canadian cuisine — chicken pot pie, cheese dreams, Waldorf salad, honey drop cookies, gingerbread, butterscotch pie, and Queen Elizabeth cake. Thirty recipes make this trip down memory lane as savory as it is nostalgic. Put on your gloves and hat and relive an era of elegance all but vanished. Lunch anyone?
In 1970, David Homel escaped the American draft by moving to Paris. But a hiking accident in Spain led to a harrowing journey through botched surgeries, opiate addiction, the loneliness of a crippled traveler, and the constant pain that would define his life for years to come.
Today, planning to stay in the game as long as possible, he has a few ideas about how to do just that. By confronting body image issues, performance anxiety, and the challenges of desire, Homel draws an affecting portrait of the battle between Eros and Melancholy. Which one will prevail in this story we call our lives?
Charlotte the spider… Wilbur the pig… Fern and Avery… and Lurvy, the hired hand. They and all the other characters from the timeless children’s classic that you remember so well are back, in author and small-press overlord Hal Niedzviecki’s first novel, Lurvy: a farmer’s almanac. A caveat: given the (ahem) rather significant changes in social mores since the first appearance of these jolly folk, happenings on the Arable farm are somewhat different than you might well remember them.
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006
It is the summer of 1965. The assassination of JFK has left John Dupre—and all of America— with Lyndon Baines Johnson, that Southern asshole with a public persona cut from an old rock and roll song: I RIDE FROM TEXAS TO ENFORCE THE LAW.
It’s oppressively hot, the kind of heat that makes it practically impossible to do anything, or even think straight—and if John’s brains aren’t addled enough by the temperature, there’s the endless obsession with girls—the persistent problems of his old flame Cassandra Markapolous and her younger sister Zoë. There’s also the massive Civil War novel he’s been studiously not working on. And to make things worse, LBJ’s starting to call up the reserves. This is John in that gruelling summer waste land, a fat, broke, horny, unemployed, draft-eligible, Buddhist Confederate, who, if he doesn’t do something drastic, is going to find his fat, broke, horny ass shipped overseas to get it shot off.
Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes is a delightful performance, a crackerjack novella that works on multiple levels, as intoxicating as a mint julep and as tightly wound as the spring in a homemade time-bomb.
Jan Zwicky is one of Canada’s most innovative intellectual figures. As a poet, philosophy teacher, and violinist, Zwicky strives to give voice to the ecology of experience. Whether reflecting on music, history, poetry, or the nature of thought itself, her work opens the reader to nothing less than the possibility of a different way of being. Despite receiving critical and academic praise culminating in nominations for two separate categories of the Governor General?s Literary Award, both in one year, Zwicky’s work remains mostly unknown; Lyric Ecology seeks to change this. This collection of twenty-five meditations from various contributors comprises the first formal consideration of Zwicky’s philosophy. It includes essays, poems, letters, reviews, and songs, all giving readers insight into her work, what it has achieved, and what makes it significant today.
“M” is Dead is a collaborative novella written by five writers
(Brian Kaufman, Annette Lapointe, Mary Ann Saunders, Michael V. Smith,
and Madeline Sonik) about a FTM (female to male) transsexual performance
artist known only as “M”. Through five voices we learn the story of M,
beginning with posthumous reminiscences from five friends who knew M in
an intimate, personal, or professional capacity. The friends only learn
of each other, and hear one another’s reflection of M, at a small,
private service organized by M’s friend and manager. Part Two is
comprised of reflections written by each of the five friends after the
service, after they have heard (and read) the words written about M by
the others.
M is Dead explores gender identity, loss, the notion of friendship,
the idea of “self,” and the social stigmatization still experienced by
many transsexual/transgendered individuals. Through the five narrative
threads we come to know M in all his layered complexity.
One of Canada’s leading visual artists, Charles Pachter, adds a Canadian twist to the alphabet book with his M is for Moose, a delightful and unexpected take on a form we thought we knew well.
Combining words and images, M is for Moose is both visually stunning and full of fun. It includes images from Pachter’s portfolio of famous paintings, including Joy Ride, with the Queen on a moose, and a young Margaret Atwood with flaming red hair. Covering the iconic to the playful, it celebrates our country, history, and culture while offering a spirited lesson in the ABCs.
An icon himself, Pachter’s work is collected globally. His M is for Moose is destined to become a classic of Canadian children’s literature.