A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 4833–4848 of 9481 results
-
Muybridge’s Horse
$16.95Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General’s Award for PoetryShortlisted for the 21st Annual Trillium Book Award for Poetry in EnglishFinalist for an Ottawa Book AwardPart history, part invention, Muybridge’s Horse is a sensual biographical long poem that follows the career of Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth-century British-born photographer whose studies of bodies in motion led to the invention of moving pictures.Whether navigating hallucinogenic American deserts, violent coastal geographies, or a feral 1850s San Francisco, Rob Winger’s tale uses an inventive combination of poetic styles and voices, recounting early attempts to capture images on glass. Searching out stereoscopic beauty, Winger’s version of Muybridge carries portable darkrooms from the heights of Yosemite’s domes to the depths of the North and South American coastlines, and ultimately onto an 1878 race track, where a battery of fifty cameras settles a bet about a horse’s stride, forever changing the world’s understanding of movement.Charged with murder, accused of neurosis,compelled to record ruins and wage-slavery, Muybridge conveys the violence implied by the photographic act and the blunt details hidden behind our histories. Elegantly told, Muybridge’s Horse is an evocative exploration of history, personal obsession, passion and negatives.
-
MxT
$17.95Winner of the 2014 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry
MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.
‘Like the central conceptual apparatus, Queyras is smart and insightful in her work to expand and challenge the nature of language and poetry … Lend Queyras your ears, your minds, your hearts, your Time. She will reward you, repeatedly.’
– The Rumpus
‘A collection of gorgeous and cantankerous poems that ask testy questions of all contemporary poets,and for this, the book is a must-read.’
– The Globe and Mail
‘This year’s most devastating and enlightening Canadian poetry collection.’
– Telegraph-Journal
-
My Ariel
$19.95A poem-by-poem engagement with Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and the towering mythology surrounding it.
When I am a bitch I feel in such good company.
Nice girls never gave me anything but trouble,
Eating the ground out from under me, then waving
As I fall. Pity one has to die to see how liberating
Bad can be. But what news had I of my own self?
Words landed like razors, hours tinkled, suitors arrived.
Listen, you’ll think otherwise, but I tell you, betrayal
Is your Get Out of Jail Free card. Take it,
Don’t look back. Of course you will. Look back.
We always do, we who adore the muscle
Of our cashmere cells, a cock that makes
Our knees weak. Darlings, don’t be sweet,
Or serviceable. Don’t accommodate,
Write in blood or don’t bother …Where were you when you first read Ariel? Who were you? What has changed in your life? In the lives of women? In My Ariel, Sina Queyras barges into one of the iconic texts of the twentieth century, with her own family baggage in tow, exploring and exploding the cultural norms, forms, and procedures that frame and contain the lives of women.
-
My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems
$19.95Finalist, Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes
In her novels, poetry, and prose, Amber Dawn has written eloquently on queer femme sexuality, individual and systemic trauma, and sex work justice, themes drawn from her own lived experience and revealed most notably in her award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life.
In this, her second poetry collection, Amber Dawn takes stock of the costs of coming out on the page in a heartrendingly honest and intimate investigation of the toll that artmaking takes on artists. These long poems offer difficult truths within their intricate narratives that are alternately incendiary, tender, and rapturous.
In a cultural era when intersectional and marginalized writers are topping bestseller lists, Amber Dawn invites her readers to take an unflinching look at what we expect from writers, and from each other.
Includes a foreword by writer Doretta Lau.
-
My Beloved Wager
$24.95My Beloved Wager gathers essays by noted poet and translator Erín Moure, and records a quarter century of writing practice emerging from a city of exhilarating poetic and translatory possibility: Montreal. In her essays and linguistic-sculptural interventions on what poetry makes possible, Moure reveals why she has placed her bets on poetry as a way of life. In these works, the richness of poetry is laid bare as Moure challenges us to think more deeply about who we are as speakers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world.
-
My Best Friend Was Angela Bennett
$22.95It’s 1942, and the Nazi Juggernaut continues to crush Europe, while on the island of Newfoundland the loss of a generation awaits. Two girls who are best friends heading into their last year of high school visit a local park?and their lives are changed forever. The beautiful, talented Angela faces loss and then a darkness, a darkness so shameful that she cannot share it with anyone, not even her best friend. Dorothy faces the prospect of becoming the island’s first “lady lawyer,” one who offers hope for women seeking salvation from the chauvinism that dominates domestic life. A fearless examination of the monumental barriers that have stood in the way of women, My Best Friend Was Angela Bennett is a story of how a friendship endures through the most difficult of times.
-
My Blue Haven
$19.95Offshore. Tax avoidance. Swiss numbered bank accounts. These very words make tax collectors, lawyers and fraudsters gasp. And yet, as Alex Doulis vividly illustrates in My Blue Haven, they are also incorrectly associated with criminal activity.
In this easy-to-read narrative, Doulis is quick to dispel the perception that a vast majority of Canadians have regarding the offshore: namely, that it is used solely for tax avoidance purposes. The reality, Doulis reveals, is that for most people the offshore offers asset protection from the prying eyes of the Canadian government, keen on heavily taxing everything Canadians own.
Doulis’s groundbreaking work portrays the legitimate business reasons as to why operating certain undertakings from tax advantaged and less regulated environments are more beneficial than keeping these business ventures in Canada where they are prone to the government’s heavy taxation laws. Better still, Doulis outlines how all this can be achieved without having to move away from Canada.
Having previously sold more than 39,000 copies, My Blue Haven has been updated to accommodate the most recent and proposed changes made to the Income Tax Act. In short, Doulis’s book provides the enlightening answers to the reader’s burning questions on asset protection and tax avoidance.
-
My Body Is Distant
$24.95“My Body Is Distant is a trans, coming-out story like no other. Beautifully crafted, propulsive and by turns heartbreaking and funny, Paige Maylott offers us a guided tour of gaming communities and virtual romance, and how they can create collisions and liberation in real life.” — Farzana Doctor, author of Seven and You Still Look the SameAn electrifying and vulnerable memoir that invites readers into an intimate conversation about our digital and physical selves, gender, and belonging. In My Body Is Distant, Paige Maylott writes about her life — both virtual and IRL — as she explores her authentic self and sexuality through dream-like virtual worlds. While Paige dances in online BDSM clubs and hurls spells on virtual battlefields, she is swept into a fairy tale romance that pushes her into discovery mode: How can she transcend her carefully curated computer universe and manifest that happiness in the real world? As she discovers the person she is meant to be, Paige contends with a cancer diagnosis and an imploding marriage while struggling to convert an online love story into reality. When a humiliation at work provides the necessary push to transition, Paige finds the freedom to explore her new self.Part trans woman’s coming-out story and part heartfelt romance, My Body Is Distant follows Paige from a childhood obsession with the 1980s game Zork, through a health crisis and divorce, to, ultimately, an affirmation of authenticity and self-love.
-
My Camino
$21.95Reeling from the Night of Nights, an unexpected blockbuster art show, Floss, a transgender New York gallery owner, invites subversive installation artist Budsy and their best friend the Apostle John to cycle the Camino de Santiago. When Floss tells her friends about her shocking experience at the hands of the King of the New York art scene, the journey becomes an anti-pilgrimage—from spiritual discovery to revenge fantasy. Moving from New York to Spain to Dublin, My Camino is a book about misfits, identity, art and spirituality narrated by the audacious Apostle John whose telling sometimes rhymes, is often hilarious and is always a blistering account of the contemporary art world.
-
My Career with the Leafs & Other Stories
$18.95Brian Fawcett explores the connection between track and existentialism, pool and foolscap, tomato cans and the Knights of the Round Table. In the process, he becomes a horse, confronts the Red Menace and almost drowns himself. This book is for anyone who knows what it’s like to learn—literally and figuratively—the rules of the game.
-
My Chernobyl
$16.95While there, he meets his long-lost cousin, a beautiful, young Russian woman, who sets her sights on her wealthy relative as a ticket out of the radiation-blasted country. My Chernobyl is a quirky romance set in the existential old country, where cultures and ideals clash with touching and hilarious results.
-
My Darling Nellie Grey
$39.95In December 2005, stalled on a novel he was writing, George Bowering thought he needed a challenge. By the end of the year he had made a New Year’s resolution: write a poem a day for the 365 days of 2006. While working on Crows in the Wind, in January, he decided each monthly sequence should have a rule: something for the writing to attend to. So for February, each day’s piece had to have one sentence and two stanzas, then off he went; inventing ten further formal monthly compositional frames. As it happened, 2006 became fraught with personal challenges for Bowering—including a second marriage and a death in his new family—but he kept going, never cheating. The result of this uncompromising personal and formal discipline is one of the most fascinating books of poetry ever written.
Initially lacking a “subject,” the book’s metanarrative almost inevitably took the shape of an exquisite poetic autobiography that is at once both intensely personal and profoundly public. In it, among many other astonishments, we discover the deeply ambiguous roots of his father’s favourite folksong; we catch a ?eeting childhood glimpse of Bowering’s young mother, graceful as a gazelle, frozen in mid-stride like a Keatsian art-deco statue by the poet’s innocently Oedipal gaze; a complete history of Cuba in the context of US foreign policy in Latin America that gives an entirely new, but older, meaning to the date September 11; and the roots of tragedy that led to the “Balkanization” of Yugoslavia.
Throughout, the poet’s narrative personae assume the guises of a lifetime, reeling in and out of an ever-shifting “present”: a ?uid “here and now” that swirls over the gravel of a stream alive with recognitions, as all of the events of that imagined life become simultaneously present in their voices.
-
My Daughter Rehtaeh Parsons
$19.95Winner, George Borden Writing for Change Award
One of Indigo’s Best Books of 2021 So FarRehtaeh Parsons was a gifted teenager with boundless curiosity and a love for family, science, and the natural world. But her life was derailed when she went to a friend’s house for a sleepover and the two of them dropped by at a neighbour’s house, where a group of boys were having a party.
The next day, one of the boys circulated a photo on social media: it showed Rehtaeh half naked, with a boy up against her. She had no recollection of what had happened. For 17 months, Rehtaeh was shamed from one school to the next. Bullied by her peers, she was scorned by their parents and her community. No charges were laid by the RCMP.
In comfortable, suburban Nova Scotia, Rehtaeh spiralled into depression. Failed by her school, the police, and the mental health system, Rehtaeh attempted suicide on April 4, 2013. She died three days later.
But her story didn’t die with her. Rehtaeh’s death shone a searing light on attitudes toward issues of consent and sexual assault. It also led to legislation on cyberbullying, a review of mental health services for teens, and an overhaul of how Canadian schools deal with cyber exploitation.
My Daughter Rehtaeh Parsons offers an unsparing look at Rehtaeh’s story, the social forces that enable and perpetuate violence and misogyny among teenagers, and parental love in the midst of horrendous loss.
-
My Dinosaur
$18.00The figure of the father occupies a particularly significant place in Qu�b�coise literature–there’s a real fascination with fathers, and this recurring persona populates fiction, films, and the stories people tell of their families and themselves.
Thus, it’s not surprising that, as he witnessed his own father’s frailty, Fran�ois Turcot–one of Quebec’s most celebrated young literary voices–would write his own dedication to his vanished father, entitled My Dinosaur. In this, his first collection of poems to be published in English (and translated by renowned poet Er�n Moure), Turcot excavates, reconstructs, and pays tribute not just to the father, but also to the figure of the son, and to writing itself as key to story, emotion, memory, and history.
The dinosaur of My Dinosaur is that of the distant father, sought in mourning, by the son. With luminous and lucid writing, Turcot excavates the fossil gaze of his father, in an elated elegy composed of poems both tensed and open, minimalist and talkative, serious and droll, alternating the voice and writings of the father with the fictions and assemblies of the son–reminding us that a man’s story can only be told by assembling the shreds and bits that we’ve accumulated over the course of our lives. As prolonged metaphor for all disappearances and for the endurance of memory, Turcot’s meticulous assembly in My Dinosaur is a tribute to all our Dads.
Turcot’s surprisingly light and wryly humorous poems will resonate deeply with readers who are inquisitive about the role of family and memory in the construction of identity and self. Scholars who are exploring literary work on grief, and anyone who has lost a parent and felt grief but also curiosity about their lives will connect with Turcot’s reflections in My Dinosaur. And finally, fans of the poetics and translation practice of Er�n Moure will delight in this new work that has earned comparisons to Moure’s own elegiac work in Kapusta (Anansi, 2015).
-
My Eyes Are Fuses
$20.00Weaving together a modern retelling of Roman Empress Agrippina the Elder, a künstlerroman-inspired exploration of French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, and the contemporary portrait of an unhappily married mother, Bowman’s My Eyes Are Fuses is a bold exploration of tensions between freedom of art and the constraints of gender. Spanning centuries, these poems offer enchantments and antidotes, extract the poison from moments of pain, distil it down to a sweet elixir. Here, women are animals, witches, artists, rebels, imagined beyond their accomplishments, drawn together through time. With careful form, Bowman conjures a new chronicle for these women as time travellers, shapeshifters, goddesses akin to the three Fates, powerful beyond what their moments in time allowed of them.
-
My Favourite Crime
$24.95My Favourite Crime ranges across the world and over a wide array of contemporary issues. Divided into five sections, all united by a recurring consideration of how writing helps transform our understanding of our family, of ourselves, and of the world, the book addresses such disparate topics as: the author’s tumultuous relationship with his father, exploring his struggle to make sense of his father’s criminality as well as his own, and the temptation to lapse back into crime when one has been raised with it; the illuminated gospels on Patmos, the Greek island where Saint John composed the Book of Revelation and where refugees are locked up without food or water; an American soldier transitioning between genders while serving in Afghanistan; children accused of sorcery and exorcised in Kinshasa’s revival churches; and Indian women’s responses to their country’s rampant rape culture. Including articles about Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, Rwanda, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Québec, and the United States, My Favourite Crime is current, engaged, compelling writing not to be missed.