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Showing 5169–5184 of 9481 results
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Omens in the Year of the Ox
$19.00Omens, curses, the reading of entrails: means of grappling with what is out of our hands, beyond our ken.
Steven Price’s second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous beings — half-ghost, half-muse — whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on. In poems that range from free verse to prose to formal constructions, Price addresses the moral lack in the human heart and the labour of living with such a heart. Yet the Hopkins-like, sonorous beauty of the language reveals “grace and the idea of grace everywhere, in spite of what we do.”The pleasures of Price’s musicality permeate confrontation with even the darkest of human moments; the poems thus surreptitiously remind us that to confront our own darkness is one of the divine acts of which humans are capable.
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Omniscience
$15.95A phenomenal critical success when first produced by Western Theatre Conspiracy in 2004, Omniscience is much more than a murder-mystery set in a quasi-familiar contemporary landscape of high-tech urban warfare. The plot, not surprisingly optioned already for a movie, is redolent with untrustworthy “embedded” journalists manufacturing positivist pseudodocumentaries about the ongoing victories of our military forces over any and all stripes of vaguely defined terrorists, hell-bent on destroying the “wellness” of our contemporary “free society.” We recognize immediately the storyline’s seamless meld with everyone’s favourite post-9/11 reality TV show, the Evening News. On reflection, however, that recognition is strangely discomforting if not downright threatening.
Omniscience subtly and relentlessly begs the question of how many of our freedoms we have already lost to the institutions engaged in our surveillance “for our own protection” and the uses they make of the power over our lives we have voluntarily abrogated to them through our support of such phenomena as The Patriot Act, anti-terrorism legislation and Operation Enduring Freedom. But ubiquitous surveillance has become a fact of our everyday lives not only in our public acts, but also in our private spaces where increasingly every conversation we have is monitored for the purposes of corporate and careerist “quality control.” What is so unique about Omniscience is not its patently transparent storyline, but its dialogue which so utterly reconfigures language that nouns become verbs, making all human actions a reflection of “industry standards” and corporate “best practices,” and verbs become nouns, so that no one can do, and everyone just is—no independent thought or action is conceivable that is not based on its ideal and preconceived corporatist template. What is so unsettlingly disturbing about Omniscience is how perfectly accomplished Tim Carlson is in his “dialoguing” of the corporatist, military-industrial Newspeak of our age.
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Omphalos
$19.95When Eugene DeLint, the head of Omphalos, the world?s dominant philanthropic organization, is found murdered, Detective Kevin Beldon is called in. Beldon, who readers will be familiar with Detective Kevin Beldon from Lynch’s previous novels, Missing Children and Troutstream, has been on medical leave, and he brings along much personal and professional baggage: his wife Cynthia is a recent suicide, his absent son Bill is a disappointment, and his daughter Kelly, who began her legal career at Omphalos, is emotionally distant with him. Kevin is still disturbed from his failure the year before to have solved the so-called Widower serial killings. He still suspects that the escaped Widower was connected to Omphalos, and secretly he views Eugene DeLint?s murder as a last chance to solve the Widower case and so absolve his wife of the sin of suicide.
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On a First Name Basis
$16.95David, a successful novelist with writer’s block, has received some devastating news he’s kept to himself. Lucy, his housekeeper of twenty-eight years, has her own secret that she’s afraid to admit. As Lucy is getting ready to end her shift, David invites her to stay and have a drink, curious about the woman who’s been tending to his house all these years. But as the night sets in and the drinks start to flow, secrets reveal themselves, for better or worse.
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On Book Banning
$21.95A Finalist for the 2026 Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing • A Winnipeg Free Press Best Book of 2025
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
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On Borrowed Time
$22.95Finalist, Balsillie Prize for Public Policy and Victoria Butler Book Prize
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book
The Big One and what we can do to get ready for it.Mention the word earthquake and most people think of California. But while the Golden State shakes on a regular basis, Washington State, Oregon, and British Columbia are located in a zone that can produce the world’s biggest earthquakes and tsunamis. In the eastern part of the continent, small cities and large, from Ottawa to Montréal to New York City, sit in active earthquake zones. In fact, more than 100-million North Americans live in active seismic zones, many of whom do not realize the risk to their community.
For more than a decade, Gregor Craigie interviewed scientists, engineers, and emergency planners about earthquakes, disaster response, and resilience. He has also collected vivid first-hand accounts from people who have survived deadly earthquakes. His fascinating and deeply researched book dives headfirst into explaining the science behind The Big One — and asks what we can do now to prepare ourselves for events geologists say aren’t a matter of if, but when.
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On Browsing
$15.95Nominated for the 2023 Heritage Toronto Book Award
A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoon—and gaining new appreciation—amidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops.
Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and consigned to scrolling screens, On Browsing’s essays chronicle what we’ve lost through online shopping, streaming, and the relentless digitization of culture. The latest in the Field Notes series, On Browsing is an elegy for physical media, a polemic in defense of perusing the world in person, and a love letter to the dying practice of scanning bookshelves, combing CD bins, and losing yourself in the stacks.
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On Canadian Democracy
$19.95The foundations of Canadian democracy have always been underscored by its instability. In a country with such rich geographic, cultural, and communal diversity, the tenets of its democracy contradict the very nature of the nation.Canadian-made democracy was borne from the patriation of the Constitution from Britain only 42 years ago. Yet the trepid and impetuous actions of our political leaders have led to a complete failure in reforming this system. What remains is our current political system — an increasingly dysfunctional democracy.Canadians feel increasingly abandoned by their government, irritated by elections that bring no change, and further dispirited as economic disparity mounts. On Canadian Democracy addresses the affliction that is our country’s democracy and it seeks out the remedies and treatments to this failing system. Sparking discussion, challenging long-existing structures, and asking difficult questions — Manthorpe is determined to renew hope among Canadians through the means of reformation.
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On Class
$18.95A Hamilton Review of Books Best Book of 2023
Deborah Dundas is a journalist who grew up poor and almost didn’t make it to university. In On Class, she talks to writers, activists, those who work with the poor and those who are poor about what happens when we don’t talk about poverty or class—and what will happen when we do.
Growing up poor, Deborah Dundas knew what it meant to want, to be hungry, and to long for social and economic dignity; she understood the crushing weight of having nothing much expected of you. But even after overcoming many of the usual barriers faced by lower- and working-class people, she still felt anxious about her place, and even in relatively safe spaces reluctant to broach the subject of class. While new social movements have generated open conversation about gender and racism, discussions of class rarely include the voices of those most deeply affected: the working class and poor.
On Class is an exploration of the ways in which we talk about class: of who tells the stories, and who doesn’t, which ones tend to be repeated most often, and why this has to change. It asks the question: What don’t we talk about when we don’t talk about class? And what might happen if, finally, we did?
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On Community
$19.95Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction • Shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2024 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature • One of CBC Books‘ Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the Fall • A Tyee Best Book of 2023 • A CBC Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 • A Hamilton Review of Books Best Book of 2023 • An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of 2023
We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it’s slipping away?
We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.
Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community’s boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.
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On Lying in Bed & Other Essays
$22.95On Lying in Bed & Other Essays
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On Malice
$17.95One of The Globe and Mail’s Globe 100: Best Books of 2014
The fairground screamed. The mountains
and valley were gone. The fire was gone
too. The hanging ‘because’was gone too. The men were away
and my heart already dead
and the fairground monkey dead in my mouth.A spectre haunts a derelictNSA surveillance station on a hill in Berlin. Our posthumous selves cry to us from the Cloud. We’ve internalized the panopticon, but it still feels good to buy.
On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, undirected prayer and meta-chatter into a quartet of delirious song, a diorama of our new, totalized and ubiquitous armour. Channelling Spicer and Berryman, data-mining and inverting Hazlitt, Donne and Walter Benjamin’s son, these extended ghost-essays are lyric in their sonic and affective register but coldly methodological in their invented structures and repurposed illusions.
‘Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it’s all good.’ – Peter Gizzi
‘The flavor of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. Andit is not without its sinister edge.’ – Ange Mlinko
‘[Babstock] has not only irrevocably altered our poetic climate but briskly evolved multiple new ecosystems in which his fellow songsters can work and flourish. In the wake of On Malice, I think we should prepare ourselves for a raft of source-text experiments and procedural treatises. Because as Canadian poets, it’s Babstock’s planet we’re walking on.’
– Partisan
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On Mockingbird Hill
$24.95In the same vein of tree planters and lighthouse keepers, Mary Kelly flips the over-romanticized lifestyle of fire observers made popular by Jack Kerouac and shows us how lonely freedom really is. When Mary meets Daniel, a handsome quirky potter, sarod-player, and fire lookout observer, she falls in with a tribe of young people who earn a living by watching for smoke and fire in the mountain foothills of Alberta. For several summers, Mary commutes each weekend from Calgary to Daniel’s isolated post on Mockingbird Hill, where she gets a close-up look at the job in the clouds. Dissatisfied with her own job in a health food store selling vitamins and herbal remedies, she and Daniel concoct a plan to leave the city and move to the woods of interior British Columbia. On a remote acreage above Shuswap Lake, they erect a yurt, and dream up ways to earn a living without joining the local pot growers. Debt and unemployment ensue.
Disillusioned with the limited employment options in a rural community, Daniel rejects the pressure to sell his art work, and decides to go back to fire lookouts. In spring of 1992, Daniel is posted to Moose Mountain Lookout west of Calgary, a rocky summit at 8,000 feet. Unemployed, Mary follows him back to Calgary to resume their weekend visiting schedule and hunt for work. But that summer a series of betrayals and violence explode apart relationships and friendships, transforming the group of lookout friends.
On Mockingbird Hill is an account of the idealized lookout lifestyle made popular by Jack Kerouac. It is also a story of couple’s search for meaningful work. Kelly’s reflections look humorously on gender, and how sometimes, our lives mysteriously and briefly intersect with others, leaving an imprint and forcing us to look inward.
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On Nationalism
$21.95In 2025, threats made by Donald Trump and his government resulted in a surge of nationalism in Canada. Canadian nationalism isn’t without precedent, we’ve seen it before, off and on, going back to Confederation, but this moment is unique in that it comes because of outside aggressors who’ve inadvertently rallied a fractious country to (more or less) unite and assert Canadian sovereignty.
In On Nationalism, political columnist and commentator David Moscrop examines the recent phenomenon of Canadian nationalism, its complex construction, uses and abuses, and its intersection with history, identity, ideology, and capitalism, in an attempt to put the current moment into perspective and explore his own newfound “reluctant” nationalism.
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On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood
$18.00Winner of the 3rd Prize for Poetry in the 2017 Alcuin Society’s Book Design Awards
Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for the City of Calgary 2016 W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
Finalist for the Poetry category of the High Plains Book Awards
In his final years, Richard Harrison’s father suffered from a form of dementia, but he died without ever forgetting the poems he had memorized as a student and had taught to Richard as a child. In 2013, the poet feared his father’s ashes had been lost in the flood water that ravaged Alberta?a crisis that would become the inciting event and central theme of this collection. Combining elements of memoir, elegy, lyrical essay and personal correspondence with appreciations of literary works ranging from haiku to comic books, Richard Harrison has written a book of great intellectual depth that is as generous as it is enchanting.
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On Occasion
$24.95A twenty-first-century reconsideration of the occasional poem by contemporary writers.
On Occasion is a collection rooted in the tradition of the poem as an act of love, an act of protest, an act of visionary incantation, of remembrance, of a call to arms, and a much-needed balm.
The traditional ‘occasional poem’ has a bad rap: a tedious rhyming poem at a wedding or a dreary verse at a funeral. This is not that. These are poems for a tumultuous and complicated world, for occasions that may be celebrations or mournings, or anything in between; from life cycles, to earth cycles, to social cycles, editor Sina Queyras brings together a collection of poetry that speaks to moments of upheaval, revolution, and challenge. Poetry that people can turn to.
On Occasion contains over a hundred poems for different occasions, including writing by Suzanne Buffam, Heather Christle, CAConrad, Sue Goyette, Canisia Lubrin, bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, Lisa Robertson, Sue Sinclair, and A. E. Stallings.