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Wayman crafts poetry that captures how the everyday can contain the extraordinary.
The twenty-first century so far feels extraordinary, offering in its first quarter a global pandemic, catastrophic climate events, an unprecedented gap between the super-rich and the rest of us, new shortages in medical services and affordable homes, and more. The poems of Tom Wayman’s new collection, Out of the Ordinary, explore how such extraordinary developments can both arise from, and affect, the ordinary objects, environments and human relationships that surround us.
To probe this traffic between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the poems of Out of the Ordinary go deep, drawing on poetry’s almost-magical ability to discover links between aspects of our lives that otherwise seem far apart. The sections of this collection investigate some responses to this century’s quandaries, the enduring mysteriousness of nature as well as of our historic and cultural worlds, and what we find if we imaginatively enter a carrot seed or a raindrop. Other sections honour a friend lost during the pandemic, struggle with how to deal with such life-altering transitions, and marvel at the strangeness of this century’s literary milieu. “Poets are the janitors of the human heart,” Wayman maintains in a poem of that name, and he indeed demonstrates how poetry can make the ordinary shine brightly even in these turbulent decades.
Set during the dramatic Red River Resistance of 1869-1870 and the birth of Manitoba. The novel is told through the perspective of a young Irish-Canadian journalist, Conor O’Dea. Under mysterious circumstances, after working for the assassinated politician D’Arcy McGee, O?Dea is sent West, and to Sir John A. Macdonald?s horror befriends Louis Riel. Macdonald never understood Louis Riel and never really tried to. The story also includes the little known Fenian attack in Manitoba. If Louis Riel had supported his fellow Catholics, it could have been what the lieutenant governor called “A rough time of it?” But he didn’t. He supported Canada. Equal parts spy thriller and love triangle and, in a time of reconciliation, this poignant novel contributes to the complicated story of Canada. Henderson and Bouchard have managed the magnificent feat of starting a very important conversation about this great land for all of those who call it home.
This exciting anthology of short works by Canada?s newest playwrights focuses on one-act plays that feature a small cast (one to three actors) and can be performed in under an hour.
It’s often said that trees are the only form of city infrastructure that actually increase in value and capacity over time. So why have so many North American cities historically underfunded their care and maintenance? And why do we continue to indiscriminately mow down trees – and entire urban forests?
Out On A Limb answers these questions and more, as it explores the secret lives and extraordinary infrastructure benefits of trees in cities, the critical role urban forests can play in increasing climate resiliency, and how grassroots organizations can empower city leaders to invest in the urban trees and forests we love–and need.
In August 2000, Liza Balkan witnessed the beating death of a man named Otto Vass during an altercation with the police in the west end of Toronto. Called to the witness stand on a number of occasions over several years, Balkan kept careful track of the aftermath, then turned verbatim court transcripts, audio, video and text derived from multiple interviews with lawyers from both sides of the bench, officers, family members of the deceased, activists and artists, into Out the Window. This is a documentary theatre project that interrogates the subjects of policing and police violence, use of force, mental illness, racism, justice, memory, witnessing and theatre. It was created to be a malleable, inclusive theatrical investigation, one that has evolved over many years, responding to the times and to the layers of the harsh realities around police violence and calls for change. Its storytelling vibrates in the past and in the present. Out The Window is both a highly theatrical play and a public forum; a conversation that aims to continue forward. This book chronicles its process through various iterations and includes the script from The Theatre Centre/ Luminato Festival co-production in Toronto in 2018, directed by Sarah Garton Stanley.
Outbreak Diaries is an autobiographical series of diary style comics that take place from early in the COVID-19 Pandemic through to 2021 when vaccines were being widely distributed. The story is told from the perspective of a household where both members were working in essential services throughout the duration of the pandemic. This story presents first-person experiences from a frontline worker and his thoughts and impressions of the changes in the world, more specifically Vancouver. This memoir is very personal yet relatable.
There is something of the elemental in Outlasting the Weather, Patrick Friesen’s Selected and New poems 1994-2020. Over time, the elements shape new worlds. Wind carves a stone bowl, the earth receives our dead. The poems are archaeological digs through layers of a life lived without the certainty of belief. Covering twenty-six years and selected from eight previous volumes, the poems in this collection reject wisdom; rather, they are infused with the kind of knowledge that comes from having weathered many seasons yet still remaining open to wonder. Perhaps, writes Friesen of his late father, you are in that grave where we laid you but I am child enough to think the sky. And for a moment we all look up, transported, filled with the endless possibilities offered by a poet for whom poetry is a way of thinking.
The volume wraps up with, “New Work,” twenty-seven new poems that display the poet’s vast and prodigious talents.
Daniel’s ready to talk. And his friends Krystina and Jeremy are ready to help. But is it too late? Set in separate but simultaneous lunch periods at two different high schools, the teenagers are faced with acknowledging what drove them apart. At his new school, Daniel speaks to the Gay-Straight Alliance about the bullying and depression that forced him to move. He looks back fondly at the bond he formed with Krystina and Jeremy in history class and the trauma he faced from anonymous text messages. At his former school, Krystina and Jeremy are setting up for their first GSA meeting while grappling with the guilt of not doing more to help their friend. For the first time Daniel has an appreciative audience, but his friends face an empty room. The narratives intertwine as Daniel gains more confidence in his queer identity and Krystina and Jeremy try to assess their boundaries as straight people who want to create a safe space. By talking about mistakes, abuse, a suicide attempt and a move, the teens find comfort in perspective and power in numbers.
In Outside the Hat lies a landscape of CanaDada and SurRielism, populated by dancing medieval woodcuts, Franglais?-speaking dogs, sadistic provincial politicians and melodious bison. Including work culled from a plethora of micro?press chapbooks such as Mike Harris Made Me Eat My Dog, The Irridescent Phlegm of Bagpipers Glorious with Flu and The Stars Are a Pale Pox on the Sky’s Dark Chicken, this is the definitive Gary Barwin collection: stranger than you (can) think.
How does an “outsider” feminist read a contemporary Canadian literature that is profoundly inscribed with the contradictions of late 20th-century capitalism, nationalism and globalism, and with vigorous class, race and gender struggles for access to power and representation? What does “literature” become when its own strategies variously place history, genre, legitimacy and literariness into question?
Through readings of such diverse Canadian writers as Dionne Brand, Alice Munro, Jacqueline Dumas, Frank Davey, Claire Harris, Michael Ondaatje, Elly Danica, Robert Kroetsch, Nourbese Philip, bpNichol, Beatrice Culleton, Margaret Atwood, Rose Dorion, George Bowering, Lola Lemire Tostevin and Daphne Marlatt, Outsider Notes offers tough-minded reappraisals of canonictiy, modernism, postmodernism, marginality, and postcoloniality and opens a challenge to write and read “past the ideology of the nation state.”
A powerful diptych juxtaposing our rootedness in family love with a report from the precipice of planetary disintegration.
Sue Goyette’s outskirts is a tour de force. Its originality lies in Goyette’s refusal of despair, her conviction that the connections among people, their conversation, curiosity, empathy and awe, can help us see a way forward. Her aim is to find energy in human love, a way to walk the darkness rather than hide from it. This book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.
… Leave the gossip to the rivers. Photographs will be buried at the base of diseased trees. All eyes are distractible, smiles are especially alluring. The sump-pump
can’t get rid of the water and god, I am told, is a canoe-shaped hole in all of us. Books, those old grandmothers, are losing their teeth. Stay focused. Those aren’t stars, they’re
flashlights. Add, don’t divide. Love best those who have forgotten how. There are no favorites in this dark. Now scatter.
— from “Resist”
This large-format chapbook includes 13 full-colour reproductions of Holownia’s photographs, accompanied by 13 poems by Nova Scotia naturalist and poet Harry Thurston. A stunning integration of image, text, and typography, the book is typeset in Walbaum and printed offset on HannoArt paper.
Overheard by Conifers is John V. Hicks’ ninth volume of poetry, and he is, quite simply, one of the greatest living Canadian poets.
"It is not an exaggeration to say that each poem is a work of art…Hicks follows in the Great Tradition of the masters." Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature.