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All Books in this Collection
Showing 5137–5152 of 9481 results
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Octopus
$18.95Like its eponymous totem creature, the poems in Octopus are canny, slippery, and metamorphic. As apt to channel the confessionalism of Anne Sexton as the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature poetry of Ted Hughes, Warner’s voice ranges freely from the colloquial to the baroque. Over the past fifteen years, by harbouring and honouring such fraught tensions, Warner has been building one of the most taut and original bodies of work in Canadian literature. In Octopus we have him at his best.
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Octopus and Other Poems, The
$14.95The central metaphor of the collection The Octopus and Other Poems is the search for new life in the universe—to find something beyond ourselves, and simultaneously to be “found.”
The tension between wanting to understand, and giving in to the mysteries of the universe, culminates in the long poem “The Octopus,” in which former lovers debate the merits of searching for extraterrestrial life.
He considers it a futile and wasteful endeavour, particularly since there are “alien” life forms we don’t understand right here on earth, like the octopus.
She, on the other hand, comes to realize her enjoyment of the search isn’t about aliens at all, but about the pleasure of simply hoping for something new, something spectacular.
In the end, she believes that it’s the hope of the search that matters, not finding or being found, but looking.
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Oculum
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Oculum Echo
$13.95The explosions come in the night.
Miranda1, Mannfred, Grannie, and the one thousand children of Oculum must flee their farm, chased by the UnRuly. But there is hope: an old friend sends word of a book that may hold the secret to their survival.
Just as they begin their journey through the wasteland, Echo1 wakes from an eighty-three-year sleep and is given a mission to find the four domes of the children of Oculum, and to find the First One, whatever the cost.
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Odd Ducks
$17.95Welcome to the small town of Tartan Cross, Nova Scotia, where skeletons rattle in closets and past histories are so intertwined that the lives of four fortysomething, eccentric characters have become so complicated that something needs to change. In the comedy, Odd Ducks, award-winning playwright Bryden MacDonald positions his four characters at the brink of existential angst – and the action unfolds from there.
At the centre of the drama is Ambrose, an irredeemable reprobate and the type of guy who rants philosophically at the bar while mooching beer from his friends. He’s a narcissist who thinks he’s God’s gift to women. And he’s having an affair with Mandy Menzies, a charming and beautiful brunette who was the high school beauty queen but is now stuck in a marriage of convenience and a life of boredom. Her housekeeper, Estelle Carmichael, has seen it all, but her prickly exterior belies a loving heart. The dryly funny Freddy Durdle is the perfect counter-balance to over-the-top Ambrose.
All four oddballs seem stuck in their lives, but searing sarcasm relieves the boredom and crazy, everyday dramas aid their struggle to move on and keep things light.
Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
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Odori
$22.95In the spring of 1999, Mai Yoshimoto-Lanier falls into a coma after her husband loses control of the old Ford and drives over a bridge into the Belly River. Eddie dies. But Mai falls into the world of her great-grandmother on the island of Hamahiga somewhere between heaven and earth.
Odori is a novel that navigates through the glorious Ryukyuan Kingdom and the Golden Era of the Sho Dynasty, through bloody World War II Okinawa, and over parched prairies of Southern Alberta’s Rainmaker Hills — all the while exposing human sorrows, indignities, idiosyncrasies, failed faiths, splintered spirits, and an island culture so resilient, so embedded it becomes mythical. It tells of Mai’s journey into the world of an old kataribe storyteller, the ghost of her great-grandmother, where she hears of Tree Gods, Sky Gods and human lumps of clay – where her mother’s poignant war letters tell of sights and sounds that singe a child’s soul. In this dream world she has fallen into, Mai allows her basan’s tumble of words to fall gently on her ear as she creates painting after painting, sketch after sketch.
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oems
$20.00oems is a collection of thirty-six lipogrammatic poems composed entirely of flat words such as “sunrise” or “unconsciousness,” which contain no ascending or descending letters. Proceeding from the author’s lived experience of OCD, the book leans into obsessive-compulsive tendencies, attempting to exorcise them through overuse. In the spirit of rumination, these poems repeatedly circle one nagging question: namely, the matter of what remains after language has been sifted and sorted, sandpapered and planed. In chasing the frisson of a polished stanza, oems performs a personal reckoning with the pleasures of fixation, the virtues of sublimation, and the costs of erasure.
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Of Earthly and River Things
$19.95“One could do worse than to grow up on a river.”
In his new collection of essays, Wayne Curtis voyages back through the tributaries of his past, throwing a pastoral net over the backwaters of his childhood to ensnare the sepia-tinged moments of love, loss, and life lessons he gleaned through his rise to maturity on the waterways of New Brunswick. As Proust recalled his past through the delicate taste of a madeleine, so, too, Curtis ruminates on growing up on the Miramichi, albeit through the more uniquely Canadian flavour of the home-cooked doughnut. Curtis writes of the simple pleasures of fishing with friends, of one’s first unforgettable kiss, and of a father who teased his children that “all dreams that were told before breakfast had a better chance of becoming real.”
Of Earthly and River Things is at once a nostalgic trek through history and elegy for a vanishing culture, a world where its people were grateful to the river for its bounty.
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Of Floating Isles
$26.95An immersive journey into the author’s lifelong attachment to video games, revealing how they shape us, shatter us, and give us the courage to start again
Of Floating Isles is a captivating collection of personal essays that unpack the mystifying and often intimate roles that video games play in our lives. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, Kawika Guillermo explores the subtle yet transformative influences of video games in shaping them as a queer and mixed-race grandson of two preachers; as a traveller, immigrant, and games scholar; and as a father, caregiver, and mourner. Through a mixture of fanciful musing, rigorous inquiry, and unflinching self-reflection, Of Floating Isles reframes the gamer’s retreat from others not as social isolation, but as a quest for a different community, one where they feel seen, heard, and understood. This deep-seated longing to belong, Guillermo suggests, forms the imaginative worlds of video games and the floating isles they conjure.
By exploring their own lifelong attachment to video games, Guillermo shows how games can spark rage, confusion, and the desire to escape, but these emotions are not necessarily bad – they are the growing pains that many young people must work through. So too can games provide reflective realms to dwell, to imagine, and to build spaces for queer, trans, racialized, and neurodiverse groups. Envisioning games as forms of poetic interaction, Of Floating Isles boldly conveys their truth-telling powers: their ability to offer guidance in times of loss and hardship, and their power to reveal the oppressive mechanisms of our “real” world.
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Of Hockey and Hijab
$25.95In these thoughtful essays, Sheema Khan–Canadian hockey mom and Harvard PhD–gives us her pointed insights on being a modern and liberal, yet practising, Muslim, especially in Canada. Tackling a host of issues, such as terrorism and fanaticism, human rights post 9/11, Islamic law, women’s rights, sharia, and the meaning of hijab, she explains Islam to the greater public while calling for mutual understanding and tolerance. She tells us “Why Muslims are angry,” and protests, “You can’t pigeonhole 1.6 billion Muslims,” while calling on Muslims to “acknowledge the rise of fanaticism.” She explains the plausibility of Islamic financing and applies the Charter of Rights to Canada . “Can there be Islamic democracy?” she asks, and then, “Will Quebec adopt France ‘s peculiar brand of liberty?” Provocative and original, even-handed and conciliatory, these essays are an important contribution to an urgent modern debate.
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Of Human Bondage
$17.95When Philip meets Mildred, a disarming tea-shop waitress, he finds his yearning for art and experience consumed by his intense attraction to her. Mildred, for all her teasing, isn’t all that interested in Philip, but rather in flattery, possessions, and security. Yet Philip, in a powerful haze of passion and pride, obsessively pursues Mildred despite the anguish and emotional carnage that repels and binds them at all costs. Of Human Bondage is a grand story of lust, unrequited love, and the pursuit of beauty.
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Of Love
$20.00With echoes of Jacques Brault, Simone Weil, Baudelaire and Petrarch, in Of Love, Paul Bélanger continues his poetic quest for the sources of spiritual ecstasy. In this “body of song,” the quest includes a series of distinct women as representatives of the Muse: an exciting black woman; a woman met in a poignant one-time encounter; a medley of women with “a variety of skins,” who speak “the strangest of languages”; a lady for whom he lives out an epistolary passion; and finally a woman who is dying.
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Of Moose and Men
$22.95A search for the moose, the whole moose, and nothing but the moose
Whether you’re a wildlife specialist, an avid hunter, or an armchair veterinarian, Of Moose and Men provides a wealth of information about moose from all corners of the world. Follow Jerry Haigh on his adventures with moose both tame and wild, and get an overview of moose biology, including their specialized diet and the relationship between sex and antlers — where size really does matter. The book also covers the history of moose on Earth and the marked fluctuations in populations that have occurred over time. There are accessible chapters on moose diseases, moose and traffic, moose as a resource, and the surprising uses of moose as pets and dairy animals.
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Of Violence And Cliché
$19.95After the accident, William begins to see things differently. In fact, he begins to see things no person expects to see, including an orange tabby cat that speaks but can’t answer questions and a half naked, otherworldly woman who isn’t a woman at all. They offer him reluctant aid wrapped in riddles, as William tries to make sense of his new world and the creatures that seem to either goad him or fill him with trepidation. In the midst of this paradoxical universe that has revealed itself to him, William works his way up the petty criminal ranks, making money by fighting in unsanctioned boxing matches. A seasoned fighter, he is both exalted and manipulated by Arnie, a man who deals in sex slavery. William becomes a not-so-unwilling pawn in an international human trafficking syndicate and all too clearly sees the value of a dollar measured against human life. He navigates society’s underbelly while keeping his offensive game in check, not knowing if his next move will be his last.
William is a character that is layered in complexity and virtue just as much as he is simple and base. His relationships with women are both paternal and hedonistic and it’s through these relationships that his fate among the shadows is determined.
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Of Violence And Cliché
$8.99After the accident, William begins to see things differently. In fact, he begins to see things no person expects to see, including an orange tabby cat that speaks but can’t answer questions and a half naked, otherworldly woman who isn’t a woman at all. They offer him reluctant aid wrapped in riddles, as William tries to make sense of his new world and the creatures that seem to either goad him or fill him with trepidation. In the midst of this paradoxical universe that has revealed itself to him, William works his way up the petty criminal ranks, making money by fighting in unsanctioned boxing matches. A seasoned fighter, he is both exalted and manipulated by Arnie, a man who deals in sex slavery. William becomes a not-so-unwilling pawn in an international human trafficking syndicate and all too clearly sees the value of a dollar measured against human life. He navigates society’s underbelly while keeping his offensive game in check, not knowing if his next move will be his last. William is a character that is layered in complexity and virtue just as much as he is simple and base. His relationships with women are both paternal and hedonistic and it’s through these relationships that his fate among the shadows is determined.
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Of Violence And Cliché
$8.99After the accident, William begins to see things differently. In fact, he begins to see things no person expects to see, including an orange tabby cat that speaks but can’t answer questions and a half naked, otherworldly woman who isn’t a woman at all. They offer him reluctant aid wrapped in riddles, as William tries to make sense of his new world and the creatures that seem to either goad him or fill him with trepidation. In the midst of this paradoxical universe that has revealed itself to him, William works his way up the petty criminal ranks, making money by fighting in unsanctioned boxing matches. A seasoned fighter, he is both exalted and manipulated by Arnie, a man who deals in sex slavery. William becomes a not-so-unwilling pawn in an international human trafficking syndicate and all too clearly sees the value of a dollar measured against human life. He navigates society’s underbelly while keeping his offensive game in check, not knowing if his next move will be his last. William is a character that is layered in complexity and virtue just as much as he is simple and base. His relationships with women are both paternal and hedonistic and it’s through these relationships that his fate among the shadows is determined.