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Philipovna: The Daughter of Sorrow is a creative non-fiction based on my mother’s surviving the holodomor [the Ukrainian starvation] in the early 1930’s. It is the story of an orphan who goes to live with her aunt in a rural village in the Ukrainian countryside. The aunt swears on her dead sister’s Bible that Vera Philipovna, the daughter of a cobbler and seamstress from a small village in Chercassy, Ukraine will survive no matter what might befall the family. No one foresees the horrors that they will have to face between the fall of 1930 and the spring of 1933. In the end, out of a healthy extended family, only Philipovna, a cousin and the aunt survive. The acts of real savagery that are perpetrated on the village are unflinchingly narrated by a pre-pubescent girl, who also gives us a good grasp of the beauty and richness of the Ukrainian culture with its superstitions, customs and celebrations.
Imagining how the philosopher imagines is one way to read and learn a philosophy and is especially suited to the practice of poetry. Sometimes poetry has the ability to be the reality when philosophy can only describe it. Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being marches through the seasons as Jia-li, a mountain woman, and a girl philosopher inhabit their cosmos, sluicing philosophy of antiquity through twenty-first century existence. They imagine the world as the sages may or may not have.
“Vectoring through the personae of a Chinese girl and a Greek philosopher, Susan Andrews Grace’s Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being imagines a new Gnoticism in a delightfully accessible poetic narrative. This long poem posits anew the old meditation on “the one and the many” through Grace’s masterful poetic skill at sustaining the music in language while allowing some reflective distance from the disillusionments of the present. This is thought-provoking poetry, beautifully composed and close enough to touch.” — Fred Wah
“‘The Good is gentle, mild, and very delicate’: Susan Andrews Grace opens her new collection, Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being, with these words of Plotinus, which orient her poems within an ethics and aesthetics of compassion and delicacy. The philosophies of Plotinus and Laozi are re-imagined by a ‘girl philosopher’ attentive to nature’s changes in tulip, pomegranate, water, snow, pine tree, grass — in red of blood-birth, moon and cells. Susan Andrews Grace’s work in fabric arts is evident in motifs of embroidery, sewing, and knitting, in silks the colour of sky. In these poems, beautiful and ‘bold [in]intellection,’ poetry and philosophy converse. They are a delight to read and reread.” —Hilary Clark
THE PHILOSOPHY OF AS IF is a poetry collection that describes ideas that may not correspond with reality but help us to interact with reality better. Fiction writers often say that they tell a higher truth, but poets like to pretend that what they write is sincere, direct truth-telling. However poems are also fictions, and deal with what might be. Poets behave as if the world matches their models. The poems in this collection play on tension between desire and disillusion, between actuality and fantasy. The real yields what might be: the actual becomes the imaginary.
While many books focus on spells and magic, few have comprehensively addressed the philosophical underpinnings of nature-based faiths. Philosophy of Wicca fills this void. This book details Wiccan beliefs and reveals the “how” and “why” of this burgeoning religion, exploring its place within a predominantly Christian society. Beginning with the idea of Deity and its manifestation, the book explores how Wiccans relate to the Divine. Amber Laine Fisher investigates the evolution of the soul, addressing sexuality and gender, identity, personal discovery, and transformation.
Practical too, Philosophy of Wicca delves into issues faced by the Wiccan community: How to practice within a Judeo-Christian society, how to reconcile abstract theology with daily living, and how to make difficult moral choices within such a loosely structured religion. Drawing upon poetry, history, and myth, Amber opens multiple doors of understanding into the complexities of Wicca. Philosophy, language, and practice come together in Philosophy of Wicca to illuminate Wiccan theology like never before.
Phoebe’s Way is the story of a Saint John Ambulance therapy dog whose unsentimental lessons on aging propel this powerful work of fiction from author Pamela Ditchoff. Phoebe’s cross is carried throughout the rooms of Mersey House, a nursing home in Safe Harbour, Nova Scotia. Each chapter represents a station of the journey and an insight into the emotional weight born by the residents and those who care for them. Layered with symbolism in the precise and poetic language of Phoebe, this poignant story is for anyone who has felt the burden of time slowing them down, who has watched elderly loved ones live more in their memories than in the present, or who has ever loved a dog and witnessed how naturally they break through barriers with the promise of hope.
This volume explores the life and works of Phyllis Webb. These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study that contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author’s key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works.
Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps into the wilds of politics, philosophy, economics and her slim books speak volumes. If there is a sense of abandoned projects hovering as ghosts on the margins of her books it is a purposeful abandonment, an anarchist’s abdication of positions of power and authority.
Webb’s work points steadily towards the idea that the poem is not a commodity to be hoarded, but a response-ability to be shared, an aspect of the commons and our “common good.” The gradual dissolution of the lyric I traceable over the course of her writing career mirrors both the development of avant-garde poetics across the century and the anarchist inflected notion of the poem as a common property —an effect of language (the commons) and not the self (the private).
In this sense Collis reads Webb’s poetry as it conjoins (and simultaneously diverges from) various twentieth-century literary movements and moments—it is this tension in her work which makes Webb a modernist whose writing nevertheless provides an opening into postmodernism. Her work constructs bridges across numerous conceptual divides: the (porous) boundaries between poetry and painting, poetry and politics, modernism and postmodernism, the lyric and the long poem, the ontologies of the self and the other.
The changes across decades of Webb’s writing, Collis argues, mirror changes in the approaches of the twentieth-century avant-garde to questions of responsibility and abstraction, locating her work in the Image-Nation of radical, philosophically engaged poetries that have flourished throughout twentieth-century North America.
Behind the scenes with a pro wrestling and MMA legend
In this fascinating autobiography, Billy Robinson recounts his upbringing in post-WWII England amid a family of champion fighters, his worldwide travels as a wrestler, his time as a pro wrestling TV star, and his career as a coach to some of the biggest names in mixed martial arts.
For the first time, Billy Robinson sets the record straight on:
This memoir fills a crucial gap in the history of catch-as-catch-can wrestling and shares the intriguing details of Billy’s life, in his own inimitable voice.
A portrait of creative stagnation, digital saturation, and the strange, sideways momentum of post-modern life.
Laura has just received a prestigious grant to write her debut novel, and everyone around her agrees that things seem to finally be falling into place for her. Instead, she finds herself increasingly numb and detached from reality—half-heartedly meeting up with friends at the gym, struggling to fulfil her role as a daughter, and managing an abstract relationship with a married man. Haunted by lingering memories of a toxic youth she can’t escape, Laura is stuck in a strange limbo, unable to draw a cohesive plot for her life, her hopes, or her future.
Wry, elliptical, and intimate, Physical Education perfectly captures the quiet absurdities of the algorithmic age and the familiar ways in which we scroll, strive, sweat, and stall our way through the world. A smart, emotionally resonant work for readers of Jillian Tamaki’s Boundless and The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis.
The Piano Tuner is an outrageous dialogue between Bob, a blind piano tuner, and a prepared piano. Bob has been summoned out to a house on the prairie to tune a derelict piano, and he soon discovers that the piano has been “prepared” with sounds, objects and stories which Bob must confront in order to bring the instrument back into tune. A tragedy in the classic sense, The Piano Tuner follows Bob into his harrowing past, revealing the shocking murder of Bob’s former wife and his subsequent incarceration. But this is also a story of redemption. As Bob struggles to bring the piano into tune he rediscovers his long-lost son, Baby Boy; it is he who has filled the piano with the sounds, objects and stories and summoned the piano tuner.
It happened in Vancouver, just before ‘the sixties’ started. A whole generation of poets, writers and artists shook off the repression of 1950s Vancouver. Piccolo Mondo blurs the lines between the fiction and fact of those days, challenging both the boundaries of narrative and the rules of biography. This hilarious collaborative novel chronicles the coming of age of a generation, a city and a new literary culture.
How do you write about an artist who refused to be contained? Widely published and celebrated, Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was an influential Canadian artist and writer who gifted an extensive body of work that unfolded in nearly every dimension of media. Throughout his life, he continued to redefine his context for articulation. His early success and recognition as a painter and poet expanded to include a practice in photography, sculpture, film, performance and music improvisation. But his compulsion for articulation also manifested as a resistance towards resolution and an embracing of its provisionality.
Following the India-China war of 1962, the Chinese Indians (the Hakka), fearing suspicion and hostility, begin to emigrate. Twenty-year-old Jillian Wu leaves Calcutta to marry a man she has never met–Peter Chou, also a Hakka–with much anticipation, only to discover that he is gay. Forced by her husband to keep up the charade of a “normal” marriage, and pressured by her in-laws to have a child, she flees back to Calcutta, only to be disowned by her conservative family. A moving story with political overtones, set during a period of changing times and changing values.
One of Canada’s most successful homegrown buisnesses, Black’s Photography grew from a single store to a national, and international, chain. Robert Black, the former Vice President, weaves his own, and his family’s, story into the history of the company. Beginning with his great-grandparents, Robert takes the story through the generations, imparting what each had contributed to the success of Black’s.
Part family history, part autobiography, and part business history, Picture Perfect is a unique look at a unique family business that rewrote the book on photography. Black and his brothers used new methods of advertising, took advantage of every innovation, did their own photofinishing, and introduced the practice of printing 4 x 6 photos, when no one else was doing it.
Picture World�is the first complete book by the Danish poet Niels Frank to be published in English. By turns funny and serious, ironic and sincere, droll and sly, conversational and playfully inventive, it draws the reader into a set of contemplations that grows more and more complex as its elements recur, reinforcing and undercutting one another, casting light but also doubt. As a poetic sequence in twenty-four parts, this is a work of high ambition. Its signal achievement is to use an accessible voice to present a deeply nuanced composition.
As the title suggests, pictures play a special role. Visual images not only serve as metaphors and similes, but appear in the form of photographs described in the poems. Reviewing photos taken during travel and sojourns abroad, the speaker feels moved to offer both narratives and thoughts that the pictures inspire. In each poem the photos are grouped according to the motifs in them � windows, road signs, sunlight, etc. � and the speaker describes these photos for another person, who is unfamiliar with the motifs and their stories. Only at the end of the book does the reader understand who this other person is and realize the nature of the speaker’s connection to his listener.