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Rebel Without Borders
$24.95This is a true story.
Marc Vachon was born in Montreal in 1963. He went from one foster home to another. He knows the injustices that the weak must suffer in any society. He knows the violence, the abuse, and the emptiness that life can offer in so-called developed countries.
He dealt with it the only way possible: through drugs and crime. He turned into “a bad egg” as he puts it.
Until the day when, escaping an unbearable situation at home, he came across Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Paris. Since he had some experience in construction, he was hired to supervise the logistics of a cholera camp in Niaminthutu, Malawi. From that point on, he drew on the survival instincts he picked up on the streets, delving into his work to forget the pain, never looking back. He made himself indispensable, quickly becoming the frontline logistician for MSF, moving mountains, commanding respect, afraid of nothing or no one, able to build shelters for tens of thousands of refugees in record time.
Power struggles often occur in the humanitarian sector, and Marc Vachon could never really accept them. They always seem to go hand-in-hand with injustice. This has inspired him to deliver a biting and fascinating review of humanitarian aid, or at least the way it is in the present “news-entertainment” era.
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Rebel Women
$18.95Rebel Women begins by moving in and out of women’s kitchens, parlours, meetings and wagon-rides on the eve and throughout Toronto’s 1837 Rebellion. The poems let the reader eavesdrop on the loves, fears, hatreds and courage of these feisty pioneers as they are engulfed by an uprising some did or did not support. The poems are based on the stories, gossip, and rumours that Kasper’s grandmother, Statira Catherine Shepard – the granddaughter of Joseph Shepard, a prominent leader of the Reform Party (after whom Sheppard Avenue is named) and the youngest daughter of Rebel Joseph (jailed for insurrection with his three brothers) – shared with the poet when she was growing up. Almost nothing has been written about the women who supported, opposed or endured the failed December Rebellion of 1837–certainly not in poetry. This collection honours these daring women, what happened to them, and how they took charge of their lives. This volume also features poems about Kasper’s impoverished, eccentric family and provide a glimpse of Toronto when it was still considered a “hick town.”
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Rebelion en la granja 2017
$10.95Broadly adapted from George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, this book narrates the transformation of fairly happy, functional farm, taken over by a bunch of farm animals led by some pigs, who succeed in driving away the ‘human’ masters who once ran the place. The rebellion, generally successful at the start, degenerated into a system dominated by the pigs, led by a pig named Napoleon and some of his loyal pig supporters who usurped all power even as they propagated their hatred of the “humans’.
Rebelion en la granja 2017 is a Spanish-language edition. An English-language edition, Animal Farm 2017, is also available. -
Rebellion Box
$20.00This explosive debut collection pushes against the limitations of gender roles, race, bodies and minds, and explores our insignificance and impotence in the universe. The concept of otherness afforded by a marginalized and neurodivergent perspective is brilliantly represented in this book.
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Rebellion’s Daughter
$22.00Spirited young Eunice will not settle for a woman’s lot in 1800s Canada. She sees the inequitable use of power everywhere, from her abusive father to the elite-ruled government, and she cannot help but challenge it. This historical fiction follows her escape from trouble into more and more trouble, through which her ignorance gives way to a more sophisticated understanding of her society. Impatient to claim a place in it, Eunice dresses as a boy in order to join a rebellion against the government. She lands in jail for stealing a rich man’s horse, and there, the stories of her socially marginalized female cellmates – in particular a young black prisoner – forces her to confront anew the startling injustices of race and social class and the institutionalized cruelty of prison. Readers will fall in love with Eunice for her integrity and tenacity against all odds.
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Rebellious Bodies and Radical Acts
$28.95A revolutionary anthology of essays and dramatic works by contemporary Disabled theatre artists
Rebellious Bodies and Radical Acts brings together some of the most innovative minds working in the realm of Disability theatre today. Through essays, poetry, interviews, and critique, these artists pull back the curtain on the creative process, revealing how they engage in the practice of performance. As Disabled people, their bodies and abilities defy the status quo, lending their exploration of this embodied artform an essential and overlooked perspective.
Each writer brings their expertise as an artist to the task of defining what is most urgent, compelling, and relevant in the ongoing evolution of their artform. The centrepiece of this book is the complete text of Alex Bulmer’s Perceptual Archaeology (or How to Travel Blind), a richly layered exploration of her experiences travelling across differing geographies and unexpected emotional terrain. Other writers share excerpts of their work, including Niall McNeil’s Beauty and the Beast: My Life, Debbie Patterson’s How It Ends, Audrey-Anne Bouchard’s Camille, and more.
These bold artists are pressing in from the margins, demanding a new era in the creation of live performance: one that engages a broader scope of lived experience, one that embraces Disability as opportunity, and one that welcomes the adventure of travelling in the unfamiliar.
Available in accessible digital formats.
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Rebound
$21.95HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARD NOMINEE
From basketball hoops to cricket bats, the role community sports play in our cities and how crucial they are to diversity and inclusion.
“The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.” For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It’s a story that plays out in sport after sport – team and individual, youth and adult, men’s and women’s. While the dazzle of pro athletes may command our attention, grassroots sports build the bridges that link city-dwellers together in ways that go well beyond the physical benefits. The pandemic and heightened awareness of racial exclusion reminded us of the importance of these pastimes and the public spaces where we play. In this closely reported exploration of the role of community sports in diverse cities, Toronto journalist Perry King makes an impassioned case for re-imagining neighbourhoods whose residents can be active, healthy, and connected.
“I couldn’t stop reading Perry King’s Rebound. An evocative essay about the transformative and uniting power of local sports in a city with residents from every country in the world, the book is well researched, entertaining, and informative. It spoke to my own experiences as a young athlete fitting into a new city when I first came to Toronto – and to the importance our city government must place on local recreation and sports if our city is to help all residents reach their potential. A fantastic contribution to understanding Toronto – and to the power of local recreation in any major city.” —David Miller, former mayor of Toronto
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Rebuild
$16.95Sachiko Murakami approaches the urban centre through its inhabitants’ greatest passion: real estate. Rebuild engraves itself on the absence of Vancouver’s centre, with its cranes, excavation sites, and bulldozed public spaces. Its poems crumble as the page turns, words flaking from the line like rain-damaged stucco off a leaky condominium, exposing the absence life inside the “stanza” of a despised “Vancouver Special.”
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Recent Mistakes
$8.95Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award (Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards).Recent Mistakes is full of stunning metaphor, erotic imagery and precise langauge.”This is a wonderful book, the words pushing at the limits of the lines, the poems overflowing the pages with the urgency of their invention.”–Malahat Review
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Recipes from The Red Planet
$18.00Suppose fiction is a mansion of mirrors where narrative, setting and plot are characters, and suppose this castle is haunted by Martians constantly rearranging, reversing and transElating its furniture of myths, fables and nursery rhymes. Let’s play space-wars, say the Martians, it’s just a game—our guns shoot words. You zap a Martian. She disappears, but it turns out this Martian is a master chef who even created a recipe for life. How are you going to get the recipe back?—to rebuild her carnival laboratory?
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Reckless
$22.95In this powerful new poetry collection, Andrea MacPherson deftly explores—and skewers—the ways in which a woman’s experience is invalidated by contemporary culture.
Visceral, candid, and revelatory, Reckless follows the complex trajectory of female identity in a world that consistently denies women their right to assert it. Tackling an array of urgent topics, including reproductive rights, the trials of motherhood, the pain of divorce, and sexual emancipation, MacPherson details the realities women face throughout their lives and conjures both their fear and bravery in the face of relentless judgment.
By urgently unpacking the impossible weight of gendered expectations, Reckless strips back limiting definitions consistently thrust upon women. Together, these poems become an unflinching portrait of “what a girl means” and a striking commentary on what the female body wants and endures.
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Reckless Women
$14.95Reckless women inhabit the spaces of these poems: women who dare to travel without maps or even “a single sign,” women who dare the seduction of cliff edge leaps into deadly waters, women who dare the midnight garden to ensure their crop. When Cecelia Frey considers the pain recklessness causes to others, she returns to the source that impels a reckless nature.
There Frey finds women who challenge the empty spaces of the psychic frontier, women who let themselves be seduced by the vanilla man (or is it the other way around?), female magicians, performing aquabelles, women “who toss their clothes from the balcony / and have nothing to go home in.” She also learns that recklessness is a dangerous game. That’s when poetry itself comes to the rescue.
When Frey reaches love’s end and is herself silenced, the poems speak that silence. When “cold camphor travels her veins,” the poems rant and defy, but they also instruct. They teach her to believe even when belief seems impossible. In the face of death, they speak of love. In despair of life, they assert that the trick is to achieve moments of joy. The female magician’s task is to pull off such tricks: “lark / from fire / its white wings raised / singing.”
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Reckoning
$18.95In this collection of short stories, A.S. Penne scrutinizes the all too human desire to be understood and known by others before first understanding and knowing oneself. “Summer About to Happen” reveals a teenager’s first foray into the realm of desire, which ends in shock as she understands her fantasy love will never materialize. The father in “A Different Kind of Wanting” struggles to come to terms with the death of a son he never learned to accept. “Heat” explores the meaning of friendship when a woman takes stock of the expectations she has of her partner and of her friend. In “Threshold” the superstitions of a confirmed bachelor convince him that a woman he works for is his intended soul-mate. The characters in Reckoning are adrift, reluctant to fully engage in their lives. Eventually, through a tumult of conflicting emotions, they come to a reckoning point and are forced to accept culpability for refusing to meet life and love head-on.
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Reckoning: A Poem
$17.95Reckoning is one long poem in search of itself, its own meaning. A synecdoche of verse, segments calling and responding to each other, like jazz musicians riffing back and forth in a late-night smokey speakeasy. Snippets of conversation make it through the air, across the space that seems vast even in its closeness. We are big, we are small, there is eternity in a birdcall. This is end times, yet beginnings surround us. They are there in memory, in grief, in happiness and in song.
Here is a master poet taking stock in later years. Adrift and grounded, lost in memories that are alive in the present and also lost to history, the artist’s mind cannot help but speculate and wonder about the navigation of it all. How does one chart the course? How did one chart the course? And what was discovered along the way? Joy, awe, grief, loss, wonder . . . “disappearing into the mind of the dream, / that opening,” and now all rolled into one ball of what, wisdom?
“what was my early life, banging away at that padlocked gate?
. . .
is this where
the return begins? starting over in old age, body
falling apart according to plan, and no blossoming
wisdom, kneeling on the muddy riverbank, thirsty
once again for mind,
. . .
and when
the brain falters the stories skew once more into
something unfamiliar, something from long before
you, and those pieces won’t be put together again,
not ever, will they?”
What connects us with the past? Memory and story. Each fragment a part of the whole. Without it we exist in isolation. Friesen’s deep and careful observations make Reckoning both intensely personal and universal.
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Reckonings
$7.95Lane is allusive, intricate, and technically ranging, while the abiding impulses of her work remain spirituously generous and affirmative. Few contemporary poets have her command of tone, able to shift from intense intellectual attention to private joy, from the ironical to the lyrical.
This is poetry both demanding and magnanimous. Reckonings is a very substantial collection which certainly enhances her reputation as one of Canada’s finest writers and brings her work to the wider audience she deserves.
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Reclaiming Faith
$24.95