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All Our Wonder Unavenged
$18.95A poet of osmosis explores the implicit relationship between matter and spirit, the interconnectedness of the universe.
In his first full-length collection since 1998’s Parish of the Physic Moon, Don Domanski writes with clarity of vision. He is a poet of the holiness of subtleties, a master of mindfulness and being. His writing is a form of osmosis, spirit seeping through the details of each poem, creating a marvel of metaphysics and language distilled to purest energy. Living in the moment here is synonymous with being the moment, a transformation that is stunning to inhabit.
The Star Bellatrix
the bride turns in a trance
red flowers fall out of her hands
endlessly into black spaceher desire is a hesitance
her body warm as if she were dancing
spinning on a floor her partner unbeheld.Intensely moving, these fluid poems open up our perceptions of what it means to be alive in a sentient universe.
“Poetry renews itself with each generation, but there is a source of poetry older than all the languages. Don Domanski writes close to this source, where autobiography is necessarily transpersonal, and the variegated finery of existent things is both secular home and sacred text. Each of his books, but especially this book, is a mirror for the inexhaustible.” — Roo Borson
“Each poem, beautiful, bewitching, unfolds with crystalline clarity and with a music that is both lush and subtle. Don Domanski’s poems are intimate, but intimate on a grand scale. As far as I am concerned, there is no better poet writing in English.” — Mark Strand
Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has published eight books of poetry. Two of his books (Wolf Ladder, 1991, and Stations of the Left Hand, 1994) were short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. In 1999 he won the Canadian Literary Award for Poetry. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been translated into Czechoslovakian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
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All Pure Souls
$16.95There’s a deadly August heatwave and Inspector Aliette Nouvelle is looking forward to her upcoming vacation. She’s been working hard, without much reward. Denied promotion to the coveted Commissaire’s post—which seemed practically guaranteed before the dubious Jacques Normand affair—she now finds herself working under the new acting Commissaire, Claude Néon, her former assistant. It’s hard not to be bitter.
When Claude presents Aliette with the report on the murder of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike who had been the star attraction at the upscale brothel known as Mari Morgan’s, he assures her it’s an open-and-shut case. The prime suspect is already sitting in a cell awaiting questioning and psychiatric evaluation. But Aliette’s instincts tell her that this is not quite as simple as it appears. Claude doesn’t always agree with Aliette’s methods, but he has learned from first-hand experience to trust her instincts: she’s still the best cop in la brigade. He reluctantly hands over the case and Aliette embarks on an unsettling journey, the strangely uncooperative putes’ clues leading her to a sisterly cult and the ancient goddess who rules it.
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All Shook Up
$19.95All Shook Up is a fast-paced, hard-edged, energetic page-turner featuring Eddie Dancer — Canada’s newest and toughest private eye who might have learned his craft at school with Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole, or Lawrence Sanders’ Archy McNally.
Two years as a city cop have convinced Eddie he’s better off working for himself. When he’s hired to track down a tough, professional bank robber, Eddie has no idea he’s about to pry the lid off a very nasty cans of worms — worms who will stop at nothing to put him in the ground. When he runs up against a pair of disgraced ex-bikers, he uncovers a macabre connection between the ex-bikers and the “fate worse than death” that has befallen many of the city’s hookers — a fate that leaves them, irreversibly, in a vegetative state.
Eddie wonders if he has bitten off more than he can chew, but with the help of his friend Danny “Many Guns,” Eddie uncovers evidence of a major conspiracy stretching from the city’s back streets and tattoo parlours to the very top of the prison system food chain.
Will Danny save his friend and partner from the “fate worse than death,” or will the bad guys finally get their revenge on the man who’s exposed them? All Shook Up is the first in the Eddie Dancer series — a fast read that mixes humour with a memorable plot, an impressive array of characters, and enough twists to keep pages turning to the very end.
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All That Belongs
$19.00Catherine, an archivist, has spent decades committed to conserving the pasts of others, only to find her own resurfacing on the eve of her retirement. Carefully, she mines the failing memories of her aging mother to revive a mysterious Uncle and relive the tragic downfall of her brother. Catherine remembers, and in the process, discovers darker family secrets, long silenced, and their devastating aftermath. Spanning decades between rural Alberta and Winnipeg, All That Belongs is an elegant examination of our own ephemeral histories, the consequences of religious fanaticism, and the startling familial ties–and shame–that bind us.
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All That Glitters
$17.95In 1914, Simon Dulac enrolls in a Canadian contingent of military police, a perfect cover for his real ambition—to comb the battlefields of Europe unhindered in his search for the legendary Templar treasure said to have been buried in Flanders in 1307. An inveterate and uncannily lucky gambler, Dulac encounters Nell, who has come to the trenches to practice suturing wounds, forbidden to nurses in her native England.
So skilled is Nell at her craft that she knits together torn and broken flesh with elaborate and beautiful embroidery, creating a rebus code which both reveals and conceals the most intricate secrets of her charges.
Haunted by the iron jealousy of their commanding officer, Dulac and Nell pursue their desires and risk everything in the greatest game of all.
Masterful, transgressive and erudite, Desjardins’s second novel constructs a narrative tapestry woven of the most elusive threads of meaning and signification.
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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
$22.95Winner of the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction; Shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction
In the morning fog of the North Atlantic, Valerie hears the frenetic ticking of clocks. She’s come from Toronto to hike on the French island of St. Pierre and to ponder her marriage to Gerard Lefèvre, a Montrealer and a broadcast journalist whose passion for justice was ignited in his youth by the death of his lover in an airline bombing. He’s a restless traveller (who she suspects is unfaithful) and she’s the opposite: quiet, with an inner life she nurtures as a horticulturalist. Valerie’s thinking about Gerard on assignment in her native New York City, where their son Andre works. In New York City, an airplane has plunged into a skyscraper, and in the short time before anyone understands the significance of this event, Valerie’s mind begins to spiral in and out of the present moment, circling around her intense memories of her father’s death, her youthful relationship with troubled Matthew, and her pregnancy with his child, the crisis that led to her marriage to Gerard, and her fears for the safety of her son Andre and his partner James. Unable to reach her loved ones, Valerie finds memory intruding on a surreal and dreamlike present until at last she connects with Gerard and the final horror of that day.
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All That Monk Business
$19.95Meet Buddy Monk, a barber, recently dropped by his social activist wife who has, for the last time, been deceived by her hypercompetitive husband’s attempts to win anything, anyhow, all rules be damned. She’s now trying her hand at waitressing, in a restaurant run by Buddy’s mother, which ought to go well. As for Buddy’s father, he’s been dead for 25 years, but when a retired fisherman finds his will the past comes roaring back into Buddy’s life, exposing a previously unknown family connection and turning on its head our barber’s relationship with most everyone in his ambit. All That Monk Business is a gritty, comic, emotional charge through Vancouver’s Commercial Drive and Downtown Eastside, a story of people coming to grips with the past while nourishing themselves through interconnections on streets ablaze with contrasts and eccentricities.
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All That’s Left
$24.95Darby Swank’s entire life changed when her Aunt Bea was brutally murdered one summer in their rural Saskatchewan community.
Following her gripping debut Friendly Fire, Lisa Guenther skillfully picks up Darby’s story a few weeks after the dramatic finale. Building her life anew, Darby makes new and lasting friendships and connections with recently found family members, including her charismatic cousin Brynny, a young woman leading an exciting and inclusive church in rural Alberta. Darby begins to make a name for herself on the Canadian music scene. Landing a sought after gig with an established Toronto band, Darby is thrust into the life of a working musician on the road. Still haunted by the violence hidden in her past, Darby must find a way to live at least partially in the public eye, as her music career takes off, and her Aunt Bea’s art and story become more and more well known.
Guenther’s second novel is a pressing account of a life wrecked by trauma, and rebuilt brick by brick with joy, love, and friendship. Guenther asks important questions of privacy, safety, and the vulnerability of artists in the public eye, while meditating on the importance of art and community.
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All the Birds of Nova Scotia
$47.95All the Birds of Nova Scotia aims to help observers evaluate bird sightings in Nova Scotia by focusing on the finer details of occurrence and identification. Compiling and evaluating a broad range of historical and contemporary data gathered by both ornithologists and amateur observers, Ian McLaren provides brief accounts of the status and key identification issues for all bird species, distinctive subspecies, and variations believed to have occurred in Nova Scotia up to 2010. In these accounts, readers can find answers to questions such as: Where does the bird normally occur? Is it common or rare, or becoming more, or less, common? Is it unusually late or early for the season? This book is required reading for any serious observer of Nova Scotia birds.
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All the Broken Things
$18.00Geoff Inverarity writes poems for people who don’t like poetry (and
those who do).In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that
have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do
dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents,
hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself. But it’s not all shattered
dreams and sad-luck stories here, there is hope and optimism too – in
the future, in the Now, and in the heat and power of the coming
generations. And there are poems of memory, poems for grandfathers and
aging aunts, children and lost loves. Inverarity also probes the the
multitude of possibilities “in this fallen world of compromises,” gently
reminding us that “we’re stockpiling for the short term / the long term
we don’t know. / No matter how much you prepare / there’s always
something new looming / like the Unexploded Grief Bomb.” It is a world
where we struggle to give back the past, to finally get to the point
“where the past does not exist” and “where all history is now.”The penultimate entry is “Mars Variations,” a wonderfully extended suite
of complementary poems, a time-traveling fractal narrative: a sci-fi
horror movie for the ears, referencing works as disparate as Julius
Caesar’s Gallic Wars and H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, Wordsworth’s
“Prelude,” and horror films like Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man along with
nods towards the various iterations of Godzilla; and of course the
classic 1962 “Mars Attacks” Topp’s Bubble Gum cards – which form a
framing device. The sequence explores the relationship between time,
fiction, and facts; between public history and private experience.The book concludes with a short Epilogue, assuring us that “one day, all
the broken things will be mended.” -
All the Daylight Hours
$18.00All the Daylight Hours, Amanda Jernigan’s second poetry collection, took shape over the course of twelve years, through many changes of setting and amid a changing cast of characters encountered both face to face and in the pages of books long lived-with and loved. The poems themselves ring changes on nature and artifice, love and loss, the power of language and the limitations of language, returning to these themes in a wide variety of registers. No less moving for being meticulously crafted, these elegies, epithalamiums, dramatic monologues, and meditations trace a human journey in which the mythological, the philosophical, the literary, and the personal interweave and converse.
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All the Gold Hurts My Mouth
$19.95Winner, 2017 ReLit Award
Katherine Leyton’s fresh and vibrant debut collection takes on the sexual politics of the twenty-first century, boldly holding up a mirror to the male gaze and interrogating the nature of images and illusions.
Confronting the forces of mass communication — whether television, movies, or the Internet — Leyton explores the subtle effects of the media on our perceptions and interactions, including the pain of alienation and the threat of violence simmering just below the surface.
And yet, for all its unflinching and raw lyricism, the poetry of All the Gold Hurts My Mouth is warm and searching, full of humour and hope. Engaging her readers with lush vocabulary and spare, tightly controlled forms, Leyton’s poems become a rich quest for identity, authenticity, and nature uncorrupted. Reaching gloriously from isolation and pain to connection with love, Leyton channels the wit of past feminists to create a manifesto for our time, an affirmation of what might be possible.
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All the Lifters
$14.95All the Lifters is a searing exploration of female sexuality told in a new hyper-charged poetic language. Spanning from childhood to adulthood, Esther Mazakian captures the intensity of obsession and desire in a distinctive voice that singes across the page as quickly as thought, following its strange and electrifying associative leaps from memory to reflection to immediate sense experience, synapse by synapse. This unforgettable debut collection encodes private cruelties, seduction, and the nightmarish reaches of psychic pain in a language so visceral and fresh that Mazakian’s readers cannot help but to take note of the arrival of a remarkable new voice.
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All the Names Between
$20.00Poems that form an eloquent, searching contemplation of “the warp and weft of being and nonbeing.”
All the Names Between is Nova Scotia poet Julia McCarthy’s meditative and crackling-with-dark-energy third collection. From her observation of “long-horned beetles… rearranging the landscape” to an apperception of “part of me /…seeded by dust / of meteors and asteroids,” McCarthy makes palpable, in richly layered imagery and with attentiveness that unfolds stillness, the “Singing Emptiness” that informs and quickens the crow’s flight, the stones’ weight, and our own being as we move in “the defined world both elegant / and maimed.” Concerned with both the inadequacy and the necessity of word to convey world, the poems move through a shifting landscape of seasons and creatures, of the remembered dead, and of scattered stones reading the Akashic field.
Grounded in the experience of presence, where the external and internal meet, a crossroads of consciousness where “a language without a name / remembers us” and the poem is a votive act, All the Names Between reflects the shadow-light of being, of what is and what isn’t, the seen and the unseen, the forgotten and the remembered where
every elegy has an ode at its centre
every ode has an elegy around its edges.
(from “Ode with an Elegy around its Edges”)Praise for All the Names Between:
“It is Julia McCarthy’s incomparable eloquence as a poet to, as an experienced photographer might, wield darkness as an ever more powerful lens to reveal the intricate beauty of the world as she finds it. And it is with this extraordinary vision, that McCarthy ushers us into her newest collection, All the Names Between, ‘where the dead gather like trees in their white coats’ and bats hover overhead, ‘lucifugal as ashes from invisible fires.’ These are poems scintillate with vision and stunningly intimate–showing us page after page the full, and exquisite measure of ‘night’s worth.’” –Clarise Foster, Editor, Contemporary Verse 2
“Here is a book of meditations for even those immune to poetry, a poetry with no comfort zones. McCarthy takes readers to a world where the marriage between solitude and nature gives birth to memorable, haunting lines, where the mystery of poetry lies just between the words. I have no doubt readers will embrace this book as their own.” –Goran Simić, author of Immigrant Blues and From Sarajevo, with Sorrow
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All the People Are Pregnant
$19.95“So what if I left language by the pier. Metaphor’s a raft,” declares Andrew DuBois as he leads readers through a fractured past and present — from “slummy memories of streets” to a “a charnelhouse (?) of possible clowns” — defamiliarizing, critiquing, and satirizing a wide range of conversational forms in the style of Wallace Stevens and Michael Palmer.
Yet, as “lives at time degenerate into victory competitions,” and the poet alternates between searching for an escape from the mundane and accepting that “merely being there together is a dull catastrophe,” we recognize that a formally wry, almost flippant, voice has become caught in language’s web. The surfaces of the poems begin to feel like thin ice, a brittle coating over which we skate for as long as it lasts. Danger lurks here: the poet must play the puppet, not the puppeteer and we must surrender, body and soul, into language as element.
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All the Things We Leave Behind
$19.95Shortlisted for the New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction
A novel of absence and adolescence by the author of the award-winning The Town That Drowned.
It’s 1977. Seventeen-year-old Violet is left behind by her parents to manage their busy roadside antique stand for the summer. Her restless older brother, Bliss, has disappeared, leaving home without warning, and her parents are off searching for clues. Violet is haunted by her brother’s absence while trying to cope with her new responsibilities. Between visiting a local hermit, who makes twig furniture for the shop, and finding a way to land the contents of the mysterious Vaughan estate, Violet acts out with her summer boyfriend, Dean, and wonders about the mysterious boneyard. But what really keeps her up at night are thoughts of Bliss’s departure and the white deer, which only she has seen.
All the Things We Leave Behind is about remembrance and attachment, about what we collect and what we leave behind. In this highly affecting novel, Nason explores the permeability of memory and the sometimes confusing bonds of human emotion.