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Playing with the Big Boys
$17.95How to crack the seemingly closed brotherhood of poker. Men do it. Boys do it. Even brothers and cousins and fathers do it. But for many women, it remains a mystery, a closed brotherhood of codes.
Much has been written about poker, but this is the first book that focuses on the needs of women. This is a book for women, by women, who want to claim their seat at the poker table — and win!
The information in Playing with the Big Boys comes in an easy-to-follow, lively, and practical presentation. Everything from the origins and basics of the game, to the variations, to strategies, and to the ways women can participate in tournaments is included. Readers will be led through the chapters by “Laura,” our card-shark heroine: How did Laura get started? How did she become her local winner? What advice can she give to other women for their home games or for possible casino ventures? And how can women contend with husbands, boyfriends, Big Boys — and take their money?
Beyond the fundamentals of 5- and 7-card stud, blackjack, draw games, and Texas hold ’em, the authors investigate the unusual variants such as Chicago, Indian Poker, baseball, lowball, hi-lo, and Anaconda. Betting receives equal treatment, and Laura gets to the heart of “when to hold them, and when to fold them.” Bluffing gets its own separate treatment, as does the problem of how to manage a losing streak — or a winning streak. And all told from a woman to other women.
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Playlist
$20.00Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems documents the life and practice of a writer who grew up in a musical household, spent his early adult years as a touring musician and his later years programming nightclubs, hotels, galleries and festivals. Modelled after the American folk music revival songbooks of the 1950s and 60s, Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introductions and ends with the songs – or in this instance, poems – to which they refer. In Playlist, introductions can act less as supporting words than as discrete stories, while the poems they are in service of can appear indifferent to story, sentiment and a writer who, in claiming to contextualize them, can only reduce them further.
The approach championed here is derived from Angela Carter’s writings on burlesque – the exaggeration in this instance born from binaries our progressive liberal culture claims to deplore but, often whimsically, deploys on its social media platforms, too often without regard for consequence. Though these poems aren’t expressly critical, their formal method of construction qualifies them as that subgenre of poetry known as the protest poem.
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Playthings
$19.95A hallucinatory, fragmentary, and tragic fictional telling of one of the most famous psychotherapy cases in history, Alex Pheby’s Playthings offers a visceral and darkly comic portrait of paranoid schizophrenia. Based on the true story of nineteenth-century German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, Playthings artfully shows the disorienting human tragedy of Schreber’s psychosis, in vertiginous prose that blurs the lines between madness and sanity. -
Please Stand By
$19.95“Donate to ABS. Do it for Courtney. Do it for his safety.” Preying on loving parents is second nature to Suzanne Foley. So is drinking to oblivion while shilling for the publicly-supported Alberta Broadcasting System (ABS). When new management from Toronto threatens to gut the station, Suzanne rallies reluctant coworkers to fight back. Sex with a younger man, intrusive memories and regular trips to the prescription counter aside, she pins all her hope on ABS surviving another day because as she tells Leslie, “It’s all I have.” Set in the throes of a bone-chilling Edmonton winter, Please Stand By lays to waste CanCon, the east-west divide, and secrets that can kill. Funny, wild and brave, Please Stand By is a fast and furious read for mind and heart.
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Plenty of Harm in God
$17.95Plenty of Harm in God is the story of Clare, twenty years old and accidentally pregnant, and her return from her native Newfoundland to Inisheer, Ireland. The goal of the journey is to fulfill a pact made five years earlier with her cousin Gillian, after a bizarre set of circumstances led to the end of the surreal and mystical life of Clare’s young mother Molly. Clare’s despair, and her belief that her genealogy is “poisoned”, have convinced her that death is the only answer but her search brings her back to people who believe in the possibilities her life holds. Plenty of Harm in God is about the decisions we make and those that are made for us, and the power of faith – whether it be in ‘God’, accident, or the simple possibility of change.
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Plots
$22.95Robin MacFarland is a smart, funny, self-deprecating journalist who works for the Home and Garden section of a major Toronto newspaper while she grapples hilariously with her weight, drinking and spirituality. The city news is slow and Robin has been assigned to dig up a real estate development story in cottage country near Huntsville, Ontario. Her editor has given her a long list of potential angles including water pollution, light pollution, traffic congestion, boat traffic, taxes, electricity costs, golf courses, fertilizer, algae blooms, land grants and native rights. Robin and her feisty best friend Cindy, a crime reporter, head north and immediately stumble upon a body mangled by a bear in the forest next to Robin’s cottage. Robin is suspicious that the victim’s death has been disguised to look like an accident, but no one, including her new boyfriend, cop Ralph Creston, believes the person was deliberately murdered.
The plot is anchored by the destruction of wilderness by land developers, but pivots around Robin’s humourous jaunt through middle age , a crucial social issue, and a bizarre murder weapon.
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Pluck
$18.95Pluck is a series of poems taking on issues of sexuality, female vulnerability and parenthood with delicacy and intent. In turn, Rosnau employs words that give way to feelings of both solid surety and waning doubts. From the harsh realities of sexual assault to the routine heaviness of child-rearing, Pluck‘s sharp portrayals evoke how “beyond the slick viscera, the sharp cries, the women brimming/ around the bed, is the memory of weight,” or how a narrator “tasted the wreck of [her]self in a thick drink.”
Rosnau often uses animal imagery to expose the primal innocence or ferocity of human nature, both of which particularly emerge in rural settings: “If you’re a buck and I’m a lion, perhaps we’re evenly matched to take on/ all of this. Come on, let’s pretend we’re wild together, fiercely protective/ of our brood.” The complex emotions of strength, happiness, doubt and loss of self are all experienced through the lens of parenthood, with an underlying, constant reminder that “other people do this better, I’m sure.”
Pluck also addresses struggles of the creative process and of finding meaning in a life dominated by domesticity: “I love a canned peach but, good Lord, if anyone mentions/ mine when I am dead, my time was not well-spent.” Rosnau’s words leave their mark, while at the same time wryly acknowledging the peculiar and untrustworthy juxtaposition of poetry with the everyday: “Whatever you do, don’t listen/ to directives, especially not ones written/ in a lame kind of pseudo verse.”
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Plunder
$24.95Frank Cork is back!
World War II rages across Europe, and the fate of Britain is hanging by a thread. In America, fierce debate splits the nation: will it answer the call to arms or cling to neutrality? Into the chasm steps Frank Cork, the wily investment banker and FDR’s moneyman. Frank is dispatched to London, tasked with building a war chest with more zeros than Congress has seen in its entire history; yet America has run out of money. As Frank toils on his clandestine mission from his splendid townhouse overlooking Hyde Park, battle lines emerge around the multi-billion-dollar fund. To succeed, Frank must outwit his formidable rivals—the Ambassador, the battle-hardened General, and the ruthless steel industry shill. But when the Luftwaffe unleashes its fury on London’s financial district, Frank’s family is no longer safe. Beset by bombs and politics, can Frank help FDR find a path to peace?
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Plush
$17.95True confessions, skinheads tattooed with angels, talking back, blood poisoning, pills, dolls, lust and loss, doctors lawyers merchants thieves, pop stars, drag queens, sestinas, sonnets, cops and truth tales. Messages of eroticism, pain, love, hope, and grace. Plush features five hot gay poets from Canada and America whose work is sublime, lush, and arresting and who share roots in theatre, activism, auto- biography, danger, and passion.
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Pluto’s Gate
$18.95In present day Montreal, a young woman by the name of Percy vanishes from the streets. The woman’s parents – her father, a famous musician, and her mother, a witch – are frantic. Soon after the woman’s disappearance strange phenomena sweep the globe: snow and ice fall of season in record amounts, blanketing whole countries. World-wide crop failures are announced, droughts become widespread, and then the worst happens: daylight fails to appear…. What follows is the epic tale of Percy’s voyage through the Underworld, whose rules of existence are as unfathomable as the mysterious red flowers that suddenly blanket its fields. As daylight touches the dark realm, Percy unwittingly becomes the permanent guest of the Underworld’s charismatic lord Pluto. And when her best friend Simon, a descendant of a long line of shamans, descends in an effort to save her, the three embark on a life and death race to figure out what – or who – has upset the balance between the two worlds.before it’s too late…. Wonder-filled, imaginative, and compelling, L.E. Sterling’s sophomore novel immerses readers in a magical world where existence itself is ordered by the tenuous balance between light and dark, and the story-filled pages of one remarkable book.
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Pluviophile
$18.95Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. Its poems continually revitalize form, imagery and sonancy to reconsider the ways we value language, beauty and body. The collection houses sonnets and other shorter poems between larger, more meditative runes. One of these longer poems, “The Place Words Go to Die,” winner of The Malahat Review’s 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, imagines an underworld where words are killed and reborn, shedding their signifiers like skin to re-enter a symbiotic relationship with the human, where “saxum [is] sacrificed and born again as saxifrage.” From here the poems shift to diverse locations, from Montreal to Kolkata, from the moon to the gates of heaven.
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Pochsy IV: Unplugged
$23.95The endearingly ditzy Pochsy is back in a new monologue!
Pochsy used to work at Mercury Packers. Where she packed mercury. Until her job got off-shored. Now she’s keeping suuuuper-busy taking gummies and thinking about rescue dogs, Joni Mitchell, gender, and pandas. And then she wins a cruise …
This is a dark comedy. Not for children. It’s like a concert inside a mind inside a body sailing the River of Contemporary Consciousness. Pochsy offers herself up as a kind of salve for your 3:33 a.m. worries and dreams, from neo-banking to the future of humankind.
This monologue follows the acclaimed trilogy of The Pochsy Plays, which have travelled the globe.
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Pockets
$14.95Brilliant experimental, surrealist fiction from the award-winning author of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew
A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments — both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of trilobite fossils, bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can’t help but try to fill.
A heartbreakingly personal and profound work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive, pocket-sized. Every reading brings new revelations.
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Podolo
$9.95World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2024.
When a group of tourists visits the deserted island of Podolo, one wants to rescue a feral cat they find there, and the others reluctantly agree. Unfortunately, the rescue proves more difficult than they expect—and they soon discover they’re not alone on Podolo. -
Poems by Gerard Legro
$22.00In the spring and summer of 1949, Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro—two teenage pranksters with the right mix of bad attitude and artistic ingenuity–composed, circulated, and performed a collection of poems on the campus of Black Mountain College, an experimental school located just outside Asheville, North Carolina.
Now, Book*hug is bringing this previously unpublished work to light for the first time in Poems by Gerard Legro, edited with annotations by noted Canadian poet and scholar Alessandro Porco.
Porco’s insightful work (including a critical introduction, explanatory notes, and rare photographs sourced from archival documents and historical materials) offers an enlightening exploration of a side of the Black Mountain College canon that’s rarely seen. Rich with aleatory compositional methods and found materials, and replete with scatological puns, doggerel rhymes, and surreal imagery, Poems by Gerard Legro was meant to be a critique of the ‘obscurity’ of modernist poetry from two disaffected teens in post-war America who were desperate to fight back against aesthetic and moral codes of maturity, propriety, and sophistication.
This unique and timely addition to the canon of Black Mountain College will appeal to poetry and art enthusiasts and students—especially those interested in twentieth-century American poetry and literature, the work of Black Mountain College scholars, and major art figures like Salvador Dali, Frida Khalo, Julien Levy, Ilya Bolotowsky, Herbert Bayer, and Josef Albers.
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Poems for a Phantom Lover
$19.95Starting with the reflecting pool beneath the Unicorn Amphitheatre on Isola Bella, Poems for a Phantom Lover pairs a selection of short poems with photographs culled from decades’ worth of research into the structure and symbolism of historic gardens, a study that has led Jennifer Dickson to question conventional assumptions about the place of gender identity and sexual role-play in the vivisection of an earthly paradise.
In the collection, sunlight caresses the timeworn fountains, pagodas and loggias populated by gods and idols, while ill winds rasp among the altars and monuments whose stones are steeped in blood. These are gardens of desire, of longing and betrayal, where torment festers under the flagstones and `the wounds of love / are suppurating stone.’