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The poems in McAuley’s All I Can Say for Sure range from personal archaeology and elegiac fictions of free translations to grammar wordplay for the initiated to a compassionately ironic look at the passing of life to rewired material extensions of our inner and outer spaces. McAuley’s meditations upon the details of quotidian life and historical personae are rendered with the syntactical precision of a linguist and the metaphorical density of a riddler.
All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been, Joe Fiorito’s second collection, establishes him as the preeminent chronicler of people in extremis. Drawing on the precison and unsentimentality that have become hallmarks of his poetry, Fiorito creates uncompromising mini-narratives about addiction, failed rehabs, incarceration, demeaning jobs, and homelessness; much of it derived from nearly two decades spent as a newspaper columnist covering daily life on Toronto’s streets. In poem after poem, Fiorito’s exact word choices, cold-eyed details, and crisp internal rhymes mete out moments both beautiful and harrowing: “her little finger curls a bit/she cut a tendon when she slit/ her wrist; she’d clenched/ her fist.” All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been is a moving exploration of brokeness by one of Canada’s most indispensable writers.
The writing of poetry is most often a calling of youth – passionate, distracted, purblind – rather than that of age, with its clarity, credible regret, and wisdom. What we may need more of is a senior poetry, a poetry of genuine felt experience that is for everybody, not just ‘Seniors.’ Lamonte Palmer’s work fits this description eloquently. In All I Want Is a Walk-On Part, Palmer, in his seventies, faces full-on the big questions – of Love, of the difficulty and rewards of relationships with others, of work – and seeks the answers and the redemption that prove available.
When the Disney Channel aired its original movie High School Musical in January 2006, they were expecting a fairly solid ratings response. What they got was a cultural phenomenon that not only launched the film into the stratosphere, but also turned its young cast into superstars. The first time the show aired, it drew almost eight million viewers; the next night, on a repeat airing, another six. The movie soundtrack hit No. 1 on the Billboard pop-music charts six weeks after its release, with nine singles from the soundtrack on the chart in the same week.
The May 2006 release of the DVD sold 400,000 units on its first day; Disney has a version that high schools around the country can license and perform; there are talks about a Broadway version, the sequel High School Musical 2 is scheduled to go into production in January 2007 for a summer 2007 airing, and the soundtrack album has gone triple platinum and remains in Billboard’s Top 20.
All In This Together: The Unofficial Story of High School Musical is a comprehensive look at the creation and making of this landmark film. It provides detailed profiles of its cast members, including Zac Efron, Ashley Tisdale, Vanessa Anne Hudgens, and Corbin Bleu. It explores in detail the film’s impact, following the cast as they promote High School Musical around the world, and providing all available information and conjecture about High School Musical 2. Timed for release in advance of the movie’s sequel, All In This Together: The Unofficial Story of High School Musical is the perfect collectible for the film’s millions of fans.
All Is Flesh collects in one volume Hugh Hazelton’s English translations of Yannick Renaud’s brilliant first two books of poems, Taxidermy and The Disappearance of Ideas, first published by Éditions Les Herbes rouges in Montreal.
Taxidermy is a discourse on time consisting of prose poems stretched to the very limits of detachment. A completely objectified couple, alternately speaking as simply “he” or “she,” strive to attain perfect control over their physical movements. Slowing them down, even stopping them, is equivalent in their minds to seizing and savouring the essence of the present and, by extension, to stopping time in their lives—an enactment of the romantic aesthetics of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Their attempts at “holding the pose,” as much for themselves as for each other, generate a tension in their voices—at once demanding, yearning and confessional—between the need for both static form and fluid movement in the choreography of their lives, which seeks to “occupy space unequivocally.”
The Disappearance of Ideas is a meditation on time that interrogates death and mourning, reminding us that “death remains the privilege of the living” and that “cathedrals tell us nothing more than the time on their stones.” Unsentimental and intellectualized, the poems generate their radiant intensity by drawing our attention to the part of mourning that remains unresolved and inaccessible in our memories, reminding us of “what we don’t know of stories.” But this absence, what remains unknown of the past to us, also haunts our futures, where “actions taken only hinder what should have been,” and “there is no second chance.” As Baudrillard has said: “Things live only on the basis of their disappearance, and, if one wishes to interpret them with entire lucidity, one must do so as a function of their disappearance.”
Christine Wright is having a bad day. She’s an ex-special forces soldier and a recovering alcoholic, and now her new career as a church minister has started off with the worst kind of bang. Could it be her reflexes are a little too twitchy for this job?
From the opening page, this fast-paced tale is all about a cover up: the burying of a body, while fending off an angry widow, and a very suspicious parishioner appalled by the loss of a precious church artifact. And then there’s the vengeful, terminally ill military-cop-turned-stalker who plans to get Christine locked up if it’s the last thing he does.
Among the many revelations and surprises we experience is the fact that we’re instantly on the side of the unfailingly flawed and irreverent Christine—who cannot imitate a perfectly pious priest even though her life so clearly depends on it. Mystic Julian Norwich, she of the famous “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” is the patron saint of this wickedly funny novel.
All Is Well for Katherine Walker’s readers despite, or because of, Reverend Wright’s many wrongs.
Louis, a young queer man, lives in Pointe-aux-Trembles, in Montreal’s east end, with his rap-obsessed, schizophrenic brother and their terminally ill father. While working at a Tim Horton’s, Louis dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian.
Delivered in short, addictive chapters, All Kidding Aside deftly juggles themes of love, class, and grief with poetic mockery and spare, electric banter.
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All Manner of Tackle brings together a selection of Brian Bartlett?s literary prose from the past three decades. One of Atlantic Canada?s finest poets, Bartlett has published reflections on poetry in a panoply of forms, including essays, reviews, journals, memoirs, tributes, columns, introductions, and interviews. All Manner of Tackle celebrates the Canadian poetry and poets he considers indispensible (including P.K. Page, Robert Bringhurst and Elizabeth Bishop), offering meticulous and in-depth readings that track poetry?s relationship to everything from mass culture to philosophy to the environment. As much memoir as it is criticism, All Manner of Tackle is a book that keeps ?a few kernels of faith in poetry as something that blazes trails rather than just doggedly follow[s] them.?
All Tom’s friends really are superheroes. There’s the Ear, the Spooner, the Impossible Man. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, the Perfectionist was hypnotized (by ex-boyfriend Hypno, of course) to believe that Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, she’s sure that Tom has abandoned her. So she’s moving to Vancouver. She’ll use her superpower to make Vancouver perfect and leave all the heartbreak in Toronto. With noidea Tom’s beside her, she boards an airplane. Tom has until the wheels touch the ground in Vancouver to convince her he’s visible, or he loses her forever. The tenth anniversary edition of Andrew Kaufman’s perennial favourite, All My Friends Are Superheroes , includes a new catalogue of superheroes and gorgeous illustrations by Tom Percival.
Ben Dunn has not been trafficking marijuana to his high school students. He has, however, been intimate with one, which is probably why the authorities come looking for him one afternoon. After a night spent in the drunk-tank, Ben commissions his friend’s help in planning a revenge-plot against the fellow teacher he blames for his forced removal from the school. In the end, however, he just wants to begin anew. To have his name cleared. To fix the things he’s broken. And to go back and undo the awful things he’s done. But he’s stuck in the present, where the past lingers and the future looms.
The story of one woman’s personal discovery of her Canadian-Ukrainian cultural origins and the impact of that invigorating discovery on her life. A must-read for those interested in the history of all the peoples who helped shape and enrich Canada with their unique cultures.
Six years ago, Joanna’s Streetly’s two stepsons and their boat disappeared into the ocean on an eerily calm night, barely 200 feet from Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, BC. All of Us Hidden begins with poems that inhabit Tla-o-qui-aht traditional territory, the remote summer whaling islet where Streetly lived for several years with her former partner and stepsons. In the aftermath of the boys’ disappearance, she returns to the island to document how both she and the island might have changed. Streetly’s poetry ripples out beyond location and loss, into a broader investigation of time’s capricious shaping and re-shaping of children, parents, Earth and the self.
A beautiful story of strangers who shape each other’s lives in fateful ways, All of Us in Our Own Lives delves deeply into the lives of women and men in Nepal and into the world of international aid.
Ava Berriden, a Canadian lawyer, quits her corporate job in Toronto to move to Nepal, from where she was adopted as a baby. There she struggles to adapt to her new career in international aid and forge a connection with the country of her birth.
Ava’s work brings her into contact with Indira Sharma, who has ambitions of becoming the first Nepali woman director of a NGO; Sapana Karki, a bright young teenager living a small village; and Gyanu, Sapana’s brother, who has returned home from Dubai to settle his sister’s future after their father’s death. Their journeys collide in unexpected ways.
All of Us in Our Own Lives is a stunning, keenly observant novel about human interconnectedness, about privilege, and about the ethics of international aid (the earnestness and idealism and yet its cynical, moneyed nature).
Longlisted for Canada Reads 2025
WINNER of 2 Alberta Literary Awards (the Memoir Award and the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction)
From the author of Dear Scarlet comes a graphic memoir about the obstacles one daughter faces as she attempts to connect with her immigrant parents
Beginning with her mother’s stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories – some epic, like her mother and father’s daring escapes from communes during China’s Cultural Revolution, and some banal, like her quitting Chinese school to watch Saturday morning cartoons – Wong carefully examines the cultural, historical, language, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family, seeking answers to the questions “Where did I come from?” and “Where are we going?” At the same time, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life.
A book for children of immigrants trying to honour their parents’ pasts while also making a different kind of future for themselves, All Our Ordinary Stories is poignant in its understated yet nuanced depictions of complicated family dynamics. Wong’s memoir is a heartfelt exploration of identity and inheritance, as well as a testament to the transformative power of stories both told and untold.