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questions I asked my mother

$12.00

questions I asked my mother is a seminal work of both Canadian and Mennonite literature.
Included in this new edition, poet and scholar Tanis MacDonald reflects on the the impact of Di Brandt’s poetry undercuts centuries of patriarchal culture. Powerful and lyrical, filled with humour and intelligence, [Brandt’s] language enfolds desire and hate, birth and death, mother and child.

“You can feel the warmth of the poets breath, sometimes gasping, sometimes singing, always affirming life itself. Read these poems. They will take your breath away.”
–Magdalene Redekop

Questions in Bed

By: Stewart Cole

$19.95

Incisive and intensely felt, Stewart Cole’s striking debut collection reminds us that we too live in an age of anxiety, disoriented by doubt, and up late, compelled to confront the unanswerable. Sirens draw us to the inevitable fact of human suffering, black-winged redbirds perch aloof above our daily commutes, sex denies and drives our hunger for fidelity, and the comet speaks before it strikes.

In an unabashed celebration of intellect and a visceral engagement with our shadowy impulses, Cole’s voice veers between the playful and the grave, pillow-talk and eulogy. And despite the odds, love — private, public, and free of false sentiment — emerges cloaked in a wit and intelligence at once elusive and warm.

From the urbane and civil to the lustful and dark, the poems of Questions in Bed, in an impressive synthesis of content and contour, depict the heat-seeking of our driven days and insomniac nights.

Quick

By: George Murray

$16.95

The highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly popular Glimpse

Quick is George Murray’s second collection of aphorisms — a form that straddles the lines between poetry, philosophy, humour, and prose. He describes these pieces as “poetic essences” — sometimes even as “poems, without all the poetry getting in the way.” Some are deep, some clever, some funny, some all three. The best, he says, should read like common-sense statements that have never actually been expressed.

Built out of more than 450 short statements, Quick is a series of thoughts and ruminations, any one of which could be an entire poem but instead has been compressed into a single profundity. Following his bestselling Glimpse, Murray continues to explore a wide range of themes: from deep existential disquiet to the comforts of the meaning of belief; from what it means to be alive to how the world deals with hate, love, the sublime, and the ridiculous.

Quiet Night Think

By: Gillian Sze

$21.95

“Quiet Night Think is a stunning work.” — Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time,” writes Wallace Stevens. In Quiet Night Think, award-winning poet Gillian Sze expresses her own definition.

During the remarkable period of early parenthood, Sze’s new maternal role urges her to contemplate her own origins, both familial and artistic. Comprised of six personal essays, poems, and a concluding long poem, Quiet Night Think takes its title from a direct translation of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Li Bai, the subject of the opening essay. Sze’s memory of reading Li Bai’s poem as a child marks the beginning of an unshakable encounter with poetry. What follows is an intimate anatomization of her particular entanglement with languages and cultures.

In her most generically diverse book yet, Sze moves between poetry and prose, mother and writer, the lyrical and the autobiographical, all the while inviting readers to meditate with her on questions of emergence and transformation: What are you trying to be? Where does a word break off? What calls to us throughout the night?

Quietly, Loving Everyone

By: Curtis McRae

$22.95

A striking debut collection by one of Montreal’s brightest young writers.

Quietly, Loving Everyone, Curtis McRae’s debut collection of stories, assembles a meditative and often profound cycle of portraits pulled from everyday Canadian life. A young boy raises James Dean from the dead, only to find out the cult icon is not the playmate he’d hoped for. A university student riddled with ulcers silently spirals after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. A young girl takes a road trip with her older sister to Cape Cod, and years later reconstructs the tragic circumstances behind what she remembers. A couple goes on a date at an old porn theatre that is the last remaining vestige of a neighbourhood that has moved on. McRae plays witness characters at those crucial beginnings or ends of relationships, with lovers, friends, family, and most importantly themselves.

Quiver

By: Anna Chatterton

$17.95

“She doesn’t care about me; she doesn’t even want to see me; she just pretends she does.”

Shy, fourteen-year-old Maddie wasn’t expecting to have to worry about taking care of herself just yet. Her sixteen-year-old party-girl sister Bea has scandalously moved in with their mom’s ex-boyfriend, and in turn their brassy mother Sheila has run straight to the comfort of another lover. Maddie is finding that an empty apartment is quiet and lonely, even though her time is normally spent reading comics in her closet. Feeling abandoned and vulnerable, she turns to her favourite superhero, Arrowette. Armed with a backpack filled with a bow and arrows, she embarks on a radical plan to join the army, where she thinks she will find a new family she can count on.

Meanwhile, Bea is second-guessing the whole dating an older man thing, and Sheila defends her unorthodox sexual candour, entertaining the ideals of freedom. When Bea and Sheila decide to come home for Maddie’s birthday, they’re faced with the pointed arrow of Maddie’s newfound power and the startling reality of the kind of family they’ve become.

Quiver Trees, Phantom Orchids and Rock Splitters

By: Jesse Vernon Trail

$24.95

A fascinating exploration of the world’s most unusual plants

Whether it’s an arctic heather that can create subtropical conditions within its leaves or a dwarf mistletoe that can shoot its seeds up to 50 feet away, plants demonstrate remarkable strategies in coping with and surviving their environment. They are often exposed to bitter cold, relentless winds, intense heat, drought, fire, pollution, and many other adverse growing conditions. Yet they are still able to survive and often even thrive.

Quiver Trees, Phantom Orchids and Rock Splitters: The Remarkable Survival Strategies of Plants showcases these exceptional plants with absorbing information and stunning photos that will inspire a new respect for nature’s innovation and resilience.

Qummut Qukiria!

$45.00

Winner, Melva J. Dwyer Award
Honourable Mention, Canadian Museums Association Award for Outstanding Achievement (Research)

Qummut Qukiria! celebrates art and culture within and beyond traditional Inuit and Sámi homelands in the Circumpolar Arctic — from the continuance of longstanding practices such as storytelling and skin sewing to the development of innovative new art forms such as throatboxing (a hybrid of traditional Inuit throat singing and beatboxing). In this illuminating book, curators, scholars, artists, and activists from Inuit Nunangat, Kalaallit Nunaat, Sápmi, Canada, and Scandinavia address topics as diverse as Sámi rematriation and the revival of the ládjogahpir (a Sámi woman’s headgear), the experience of bringing Inuit stone carving to a workshop for inner-city youth, and the decolonizing potential of Traditional Knowledge and its role in contemporary design and beyond.

Qummut Qukiria! showcases the thriving art and culture of the Indigenous Circumpolar peoples in the present and demonstrates its importance for the revitalization of language, social wellbeing, and cultural identity.

R Is for Reparations

By: Global Afrikan Congress

$14.99

Coming out of the innovative Book-in-a-Day event facilitated by the Global Afrikan Congress – Nova Scotia Chapter, R Is for Reparations invites readers to listen to the voices of young activists as they share their hopes and dreams about the global demand for redress, compensation and restitution for the horrors of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

This book is drawn from the voices of the children who participated in the Book-in-a-Day event and rode on an imaginary Underground Railroad Freedom ride, equipped with Elders who served as “conductors” and “station” stops. Their words address the tragedy and resulting political, social, and economic damage caused to African People by the slave trade, slavery, colonialism, poverty and anti-Black racism. Their reactions and reflections lead the contributions for this compelling, one-of-a-kind Alphabet Book suitable for all ages.

Rabbit Punch HC

By: Greg Santos

$32.95

In Greg Santos’s Rabbit Punch!, Marco Polo reminisces on his friendship with Kublai Khan over deli sandwiches, Wilfred Owen and Ernest Hemingway trade war stories at Hooters, and Senator John McCain remembers that fateful day when his father took him to eat bubble gum ice cream. With punchy poems that are intimate, dark, enigmatic, playful, and surreal, peppered with pop culture figures ranging from Batman, to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Paris Hilton to ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage, Rabbit Punch! delivers a poetic KO.

Rabbit Punch!

By: Greg Santos

$17.95

In Greg Santos’s Rabbit Punch!, Marco Polo reminisces on his friendship with Kublai Khan over deli sandwiches, Wilfred Owen and Ernest Hemingway trade war stories at Hooters, and Senator John McCain remembers that fateful day when his father took him to eat bubble gum ice cream. With punchy poems that are intimate, dark, enigmatic, playful, and surreal, peppered with pop culture figures ranging from Batman, to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Paris Hilton to ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage, Rabbit Punch! delivers a poetic KO.

Raccoon

By: Sean Kane

$25.00

The dream of an urban paradise comes true for the Raccoons of a small suburban city when they rise up, throw out their government, and create an ecological commonwealth. Touchwit, Clutch and Bandit are prepared to die for a free, healthy, and diverse city. But to earn their self-respect as citizens they must overcome their father Meatbreath, an autocrat obsessed with multiplying himself in a host of weaponised children. And to join a community of kinship they must find their future mates. Will the three cubs use the powers they have inherited from their father without being claimed by his evil? In this sometimes sentimental, sometimes heroic adventure story full of echoes of current issues and political personalities, Raccoons are the leading experts at survival, engaging the struggle for a better Earth with wonder, joy, and laughter.

Races

By: Valerie Jerome

$24.95

The inside track on an under-told story about the intersection of race and sports in Canada.

In the 1960s, Harry Jerome set 7 world records, including the 100-yard dash, earning him the title of the world’s fastest man. His grandfather, John “Army” Howard, was Canada’s first Black Olympian, running in Stockholm in 1912 against nearly impossible odds. Harry’s sister, Valerie, competed for Canada at the 1960 Rome Olympics. With Races, Valerie Jerome sets the record straight on her heroic family’s history, and the racism they fought along the way — from their community, the press, their country, and even inside their family home.

Races tracks Harry’s life through his inimitable athletic career and into his work as an advocate for youth sport and education. Bringing readers inside the Jerome household, Races reveals the hurdles they faced during the heavily segregated ’60s and the long reach of racism that plagued their family history.

A tale of courage and conviction, Races is the difficult, yet inspiring story of the Jerome family: what propelled them in life and on the track.

Rachel’s Children

By: Nora F Stovel

$14.95

A literary exploration of Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God.

Racin’ Jason

By: Elaine Wagner

$12.95

Racin’ Jason is an uplifting tale of one orphan boy’s unwavering faith in the abandoned Appaloosa colt that he raises and transforms into a racehorse. Jason develops a special bond with the colt that he names Binesi, or Thunderbird, for the noise his hooves will one day make when he gallops by the other horses. Jason enters Binesi in the annual Cochin horse races and the colt lives up to his name. No longer can Jason’s schoolmates call him “Racin’ Jason” in jest.

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