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A Walrus Best Book of Fall 2024 • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year • Winner of the 2023 Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet
Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social fabric of neighborhoods, ushering in a new era of gentrification, and many even deadlier sins. When she is deposed as CEO of her firm, Céline must make sense of the charges against herself and the people in her elite circle. For the first time in danger of losing their footing, what fictions must they tell themselves to justify their privilege and maintain their position in the world that they themselves have built?
Moving fluidly between Céline’s perspective and the perspectives of her critics, and revealing both the ruthlessness of her methods and the brilliance of her aesthetic vision, May Our Joy Endure is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a dazzling social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art.
When the Mayan Calendar runs out on December 21st, 2012, all manner of possible disasters will befall the earth, from collision with a rogue planet to biblical flooding, to attacks by swarms of gnats. But just because life as we know it will come to an end, it doesn’t mean you cant survive and even prosper financially in the post-apocalyptic world.
Bob Robertsons ‘Mayan Horror: How to Survive The End of the World in 2012’ gives you all the vital information you’ll need to come through smiling after Armageddon wreaks havoc on the planet. All your questions will be answered: who are the Mayans?; Is Maya Angelou one of them?; Are oven mitts useful against the earths molten core?; Is there a team of disaster DJs and news-readers ready to swing into action on the Emergency Alert System and do they take requests?; Will the Diefenbunker protect you against landslides, unlike the one that crushed the Diefenbaker?; Should you start collecting pairs of animals?; ‘Mayan Horror:How to Survive the End of the World in 2012’ is the handbook youll want to have in your pocket when the Mayan Calendar ticks down and all hell breaks loose.
“Thran’s poems offer a meditation on the creativity involved in viewing, engaging with its productivity as well as its superfluity, spilling past the edges of what is represented to reflect the ways through which viewers come to imaginatively inhabit what is seen.”–Michael Borkent, The Journal of Canadian PoetryMayor Snow is about both the abdication and acceptance of responsibilities and inheritance: be they civic, personal, poetic. It begins with speaker-less evocations of corrupt and oppressive political atmospheres and ends with first-person narrative tales of domestic life in Al Purdy’s refurbished A-frame. All of these poems work in a shadow, be they forebears, tabloids, cultural markers or government watchdogs.In the opening and closing sequences, narrative devices act as smokescreens to abstract illustrations of power, with the central sequence reflecting on the subject of dislocation. Parody and paradox are closely intertwined throughout, with the authority of power disrupted through dark humour, unexpected images and the deep resonances existing in apparently innocuous things: a well-worn (and literally “powerless”) cabin, a baby daughter, a poem. The question of groundedness, whether literal, literary or familial, explores the terrain between the fearful and the familiar: “Go outside. / Listen to dogs howl. // How do we live / without power?”
Intentional mistranslations that set a meandering path through the maze of language.
Drawing on the patterns of words, speech, and identity we encounter in the wider world—subway ads in Mexico City, a Dutch-Japanese phrase book, multi-lingual airplane safety instructions, one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—the poems in Hugh Thomas’s Maze playfully translate the maze of languages and language into moments of amazement.
“A clever, complex debut, Maze will draw you into its labyrinthine, snakelike halls.”—Winnipeg Free Press
Winner of the Cover Design Award and Shortlisted for the Fiction Trade Book of the Year Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Shortlisted for the Second Annual Kobo Emerging Writer Prize — Literary Fiction!When her family’s car goes through the ice on Rainy Lake one cold March day in 1962, six-year-old Rebecca Archer is the only person her father is able to pull from the sinking vehicle. But as Rebecca grows up in a farmhouse haunted by the absence of her mother and baby brother, raised by a man left nearly paralyzed with grief, she wonders if her father really did save her after all.Eventually, though, Rebecca finds solace in the company of her friends: Chuck, the sensitive son of a violently abusive father; and Lissie, an Aboriginal girl being raised alone by a perfectionist white mother. As these three young people protect and support one another, Rebecca discovers that by saving Chuck and Lissie, she may also save herself.In her debut novel, Wendi Stewart tells the luminous, deeply imagined story of a young woman’s hard-won triumph over heartbreaking personal tragedy.
The Mean Game?John Wall Barger?s fourth book-length entry in what might be called, collectively, a savage comedy?bristles with allegories that explore human cruelty and suffering. Gathering narratives that feel both ancient and modern, Barger forges an apocalyptic vision without sacrificing poetry?s underlying sense of joy, humour and revelation. Part comic book translated from a dead language, and part nightmare dreamscape, The Mean Game is a must-read from one of Canada?s most kinetic writers.
Means extends the inquiry begun in the author’s first book Surplus (2006) by shifting terrain from the industrial to the immaterial, while hitting pause on the means of communication and opening lines to new means of resistance to capitalist hegemony.
For bpNichol, who called himself a writer who writes about the act of writing,” criticism was not only a means to address his own poetics and the textual practices of his generation; it was just as essential to his imagination as were his poems themselves.
Finally, after years of readers struggling to find or access many of Nichol’s innovative critical writings, this much needed and anticipated volume makes it possible to follow Nichol through his thirty-year-long thoughtful engagement with the process of creation. With essays, reviews, talks on poetics, letters, notes, photographs, and excerpts from interviews, editor Roy Miki has put together a provocative record of bpNichol’s always explorative approaches to the material conditions of textual production.
Representing a substantial collection of Nichol’s critical writing from the mid-1960s up to the year of his death in 1988, Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol puts him, rightfully, on the vanguard of Canadian literature and critical theory. This collection is essential to our sense of Nichol not only as a writer, but also as a person of exemplary generosity, imagination, and intellectual range.
Mark Kingwell is as at home discussing Battlestar Galactica as he is civility, can find the Plato in popular culture, and sees in idleness a deeply revolutionary gesture. In Measure Yourself Against the Earth, he brings his heady mixture of critical intelligence and infectious enthusiasm to bear on film, aesthetics, politics, leisure, literature and much more, showing us how each can help us to imagine and achieve the society we want. The concept of “the gift” unites many of these essays: it is in this idea, kingwell arguespersuasively, in which we may be able to refashion the real world of democracy. “An activist, fugitive democracy. A living democracy that is no opaque demand but a real thing—a society. Democracy: the gifet we keep on giving each other.”
Smart, engaged, and wide rnaging, Mark Kingwell’s Measure Yourself Against the Earth confirms its author as among our leading cultural theorists and philosophers.
Arthur Ellis award–winning William Deverell’s 1983 bestseller
An extremist warlord is about to unleash the world’s deadliest shock troops. The Rotkommando — an army of expert terrorists, political fanatics, and psychotic killers — is armed with a failsafe masterplan. Codeword … Mecca.
Now the Rotkommando is poised on the brink of a crazed kamikaze mission to nuke Israel and ignite World War III. Only three people on Earth have the power to stop them: a burned-out poet with delusions of grandeur, a devout nymphomaniac with a taste for blood, and a desert guru who communes with camels.
From Montreal, New York, and Washington to Paris, Berlin, and Saudi Arabia, Mecca thunders at white-knuckle speed through the knife-edge worlds of espionage and terrorism, where violence is a way of life and time is always running out …
Using the numerical structure of pi (3.1415), Mechanophilia is a collaborative epic poem by the American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne that follows the omniscient voluble conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet. Nao and Burgoyne, who have never met, began this project after discovering a mutual love of math and unending collaborations. This book, the first of four volumes presently completed, represents the first 1,000 digits of pi. Anachronistic in proportion, this work attempts to queer and rewrite myths in precise, restrictive numerical pi chronology, yet its verses remain free and ludic, time-travelling at will and often looping in present-day figures (Elon Musk, Lady Gaga, Cai Guo-Qiang, Phoebe Philo, Virgil Abloh, Donald Trump) and concerns. Feministic, irreverent, and supremely loquacious, Mechanophilia presents infinity as something reachable yet unrelated to linear time.
Still struggling with nightmares from the past summer, Terry tries to bury her secret guilt and enjoy her family’s first Christmas in Devonshire. But when a murdered man is found with a postcard addressed to her, Terry fears the repercussions from that fateful night in Egypt are becoming a reality.
After she receives a coded message from Awad, Terry and her best friend Maude are thrown into the hunt for a lost medallion, an artifact that possesses a great power–and a gruesome destiny. As each clue leads to more disturbing truths (and bodies), Terry begins to suspect she’s the real target of the search. When Awad goes missing, she becomes certain the Illuminati are involved, and has no choice but to risk losing the thing she cherishes the most to get him back.
But Terry will soon discover the secrets of the tomb cannot be erased by distance or power, because the ghosts of her past are closing in quickly… and this time, they refuse to stay buried.
A wide-ranging meditation by an accomplished poet on the uncontainable materiality of the world.
From yoghurt tubs to pop-up books to bobcats, from cement trucks to lost socks to the products of conception, Meditatio Placentae, Monty Reid’s twelfth collection, is a book about unruly stuff. Stuff that functions but also stuff that exceeds, stuff that dreams. A gathering of short poems wrapped into longer sequences, this is a book that pays attention to the world, in all its dizzying forms.
The poems in Meditatio Placentae cluster around certain ideas, experiences, narratives; sometimes they cohere, sometimes they only assemble, but they are always at crossroads where people and objects collide. In these poems matter itself–including the placenta of the title poem–is vibrant, and argues for its rightful recognition.
When the time comes, the broken water disappears
into the seam of itself, and then the carry-on full of small bones
articulated as an I will also disappear.
They will be expecting me then.
And what would be the point of hanging on?
Just to be the lining of belief, after belief itself is gone? (from “Meditatio Placentae”)
The poems in Kenneth Sherman’s new collection are by turns lyric, ironic, and prophetic, ranging from the personal to the political. In “A Walk Along Lakeshore Drive,” and “Spy Balloon,” Sherman shows himself to be a poet who listens to the voice of Canadian soil while being attentive to the European theme of the soul in conflict with the world and time. At the centre of the collection is the powerful seven-part poem, “Meditation on a Tooth,” a work which oscillates between history and science, never wavering from its spiritual quest.
Paal-Helge Haugen’s Meditasjonar over Georges de La Tour (Meditations on Georges de La Tour) was published in Norwegian in 1990, won the Norwegian Critics’ Prize, and was a finalist for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. The book consists of a series of thirty-four poems that emerge from Haugen’s long engagement with the work of the French painter.
The kinship between Haugen and La Tour can hardly be surprising to anyone familiar with Haugen’s poetry and La Tour’s paintings: light in all its aspects, including its absence, is central to both bodies of work. Haugen describes these poems as “meditations … on the charged stillness, sorrow and celebration in the marriage of light and dark.”
Haugen evokes, juxtaposes, and alludes more than he states, creating a dense web that joins his own world of imagery to La Tour’s iconography and atmosphere. These meditations rest on constant tensions between different centuries and belief systems, between different art forms, and between the different but allied sensibilities of the poet and the painter whose work he contemplates.