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Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award
In her compelling debut poetry collection, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award, Melissa Bull explores the familial, romantic, and sexual ties that bind lives to cities. Rue takes us through its alleys, parks, and kitchens with a robust lyricism and language that is at once inventive and plainspoken, compassionate and frank.
In English, to rue is to regret; in French, la rue is the street Rue’s poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and motion. Punctuated with neologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the collection explores the author’s upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and loves across North America, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist father’s struggles with terminal brain cancer.
Praise for Rue:
Bestseller, Drawn & Quarterly
“Loaded with grief and delight, with love and death, with sex and solitude, the world of Melissa Bull’s poetry explores the abundance of human experience. In language that is both playful and whip-smart, we are invited into her world, her city, her most intimate rooms. With wit and sincerity she celebrates and mourns, and we are lucky to witness each and every breath.” (Suzanne Hancock, author of Another Name for Bridge and Cast from Bells)
“Melissa Bull’s Rue is a riot. Gritty, edgy, with a linguistic and emotional sensibility sharpened to a fine point in Montreal, Rue could have been written nowhere else. What wit, what playful, startling, and yes, rueful observations. Rue is a careening road trip through a life that is painfully aware of its own absurdities while fully in command of language as a force to shape and use.’” (Rachel Rose, Vancouver Poet Laureate and author of Giving My Body to Science, Notes on Arrival and Departure, and Song and Spectacle)
“In Rue, memories are tied up in the intersections of city streets and meaning is caught between the English (to rue meaning ‘to regret’) and the French (la rue or ‘the street.’) Bull’s poetry ploughs through the streets of St. Henri, Montreal and knocks down the boundaries between languages as well as between places and their memories. … everything in Rue, whether long-past or yet to come, feels sharply and violently present, like a ‘bruise, a tongue curling under it.’ In the end, every poem in Rue is a fragmented dialogue, a piece of (mis)communication: ‘Tonight I saw a movie where a couple argues, / no holds barred, the way we do, / and then laces themselves / tentatively back together again, the way we do.’ But even Bull’s vulnerabilities rebound as strengths, ‘unsheafed / unleavened umbilicus shrimp,’ and her words strongly resist de(con)struction.” (Contemporary Verse 2)
Todd Swift is one of Canada’s leading expatriate writers. Elegant, moving, and masterful, Rue du Regard forms the final part of a trilogy, following the acclaimed Budavox and Cafè Alibi. Written in Paris and London, Rue du Regard crosses the channel between these two great cities and between two kinds of poetry: experimental and mainstream. The book deals with looking: in, out, back, and ahead. In almost whiplash motion; certain moods, themes, and images from Swift’s earlier collections here snap forward, double-back. The universal accidents of travel and memory, love and desire, violence and innocence, are central.
In Rue Fabre: Centre of the Universe Jean-Claude Germain evokes a Quebec unknown to most English-speaking Canadians.
In the 1940s, for a young boy of Rue Fabre in Montreal’s East End, leaving the city constituted a veritable odyssey as he accompanied his father–a salesman of candy and cigarettes–on his rounds to the towns and cities surrounding Montreal. Travelling in his father’s truck surrounded by Cherry Blossom chocolates, Lifesavers, maple sugar cones, sugary strawberries, jelly beans and black balls, he discovers a strange and fascinating world, extraordinary individuals, and incredible situations.
In Rue The Day, Tanis Macdonald torques time and consciousness to scrutinize “what plagues us/what snaps our heads to/rights and won’t let us look/at look over look alive.” Written in the voices of a demanding “speaking subject” — a fury with a harpy’s vision and a muse’s asperity — and the woman writer whom the Fury takes under her terrible wing, Rue the Day is an elegy, an argument about the knowledge, and a conversation about contemporary femininity that shuttles between the frame of form and the long declarative line.
From Arthur Ellis Award–winning author Anne Emery comes a “winning mystery [that stands] on its own.” — Booklist
It’s 1989. The Troubles are raging in Ireland, bombs exploding in England. In this prequel to the Collins-Burke series, Father Brennan Burke is home in New York when news of his sister’s arrest in London sends him flying across the ocean. The family troubles deepen when Brennan’s cousin Conn is charged with the murder of a Special Branch detective and suspected in a terrorist plot against Westminster Abbey. The Burkes come under surveillance by the murdered cop’s partner and are caught in a tangle of buried family memories.
From the bullet-riddled bars of Belfast to an elegant English estate, Ruined Abbey combines a whodunit with a war story, love story, and historical novel, while exploring the eternal question: what is fair in love and war? It all starts with a ruined abbey.
About the Collins-Burke Mysteries
This multi-award-winning series is centred around two main characters who have been described as endearingly flawed: Monty Collins, a criminal defence lawyer who has seen and heard it all, and Father Brennan Burke, a worldly, hard-drinking Irish-born priest. The priest and the lawyer solve mysteries together, but sometimes find themselves at cross-purposes, with secrets they cannot share: secrets of the confessional, and matters covered by solicitor-client confidentiality. The books are notable for their wit and humour, and their depiction of the darker side of human nature ? characteristics that are sometimes combined in the same person, be it a lawyer, a witness on the stand, or an Irish ballad singer who doubles as a guerrilla fighter in the Troubles in war-torn Belfast. In addition to their memorable characters, the books have been credited with a strong sense of place and culture, meticulous research, crisp and authentic dialogue, and intriguing plots. The novels are set in Nova Scotia, Ireland, England, Italy, New York, and Germany. The series begins with Sign of the Cross (2006) and continues to the most recent installment, Postmark Berlin (2020).
From Arthur Ellis Award–winning author Anne Emery comes a “winning mystery [that stands] on its own.” — Booklist
It’s 1989. The Troubles are raging in Ireland, bombs exploding in England. In this prequel to the Collins-Burke series, Father Brennan Burke is home in New York when news of his sister’s arrest in London sends him flying across the ocean. The family troubles deepen when Brennan’s cousin Conn is charged with the murder of a Special Branch detective and suspected in a terrorist plot against Westminster Abbey. The Burkes come under surveillance by the murdered cop’s partner and are caught in a tangle of buried family memories.
From the bullet-riddled bars of Belfast to an elegant English estate, Ruined Abbey combines a whodunit with a war story, love story, and historical novel, while exploring the eternal question: what is fair in love and war? It all starts with a ruined abbey.
About the Collins-Burke Mysteries
This multi-award-winning series is centred around two main characters who have been described as endearingly flawed: Monty Collins, a criminal defence lawyer who has seen and heard it all, and Father Brennan Burke, a worldly, hard-drinking Irish-born priest. The priest and the lawyer solve mysteries together, but sometimes find themselves at cross-purposes, with secrets they cannot share: secrets of the confessional, and matters covered by solicitor-client confidentiality. The books are notable for their wit and humour, and their depiction of the darker side of human nature ? characteristics that are sometimes combined in the same person, be it a lawyer, a witness on the stand, or an Irish ballad singer who doubles as a guerrilla fighter in the Troubles in war-torn Belfast. In addition to their memorable characters, the books have been credited with a strong sense of place and culture, meticulous research, crisp and authentic dialogue, and intriguing plots. The novels are set in Nova Scotia, Ireland, England, Italy, New York, and Germany. The series begins with Sign of the Cross (2006) and continues to the most recent installment, Postmark Berlin (2020).
“… it’s the extravagance of Vaughan’s vision, together with his lyricism and humanity, that make it possible to walk with him into the darkness, into the place where we are all alone…” — Globe and Mail
Ruined Stars combines a penchant for formal experimentation with a unique, often engagingly puzzling devotion to language and its limits. RM Vaughan’s third collection, Ruined Stars explores his obsession with travel, magic, and sex — each subject layered and re-layered with the “confessional fictions” his poetry is famous for. Fans of Vaughan’s previous books can look forward to more baroque feats of word play, some gossipy asides, and the insights of a questioning heart.
An old woman in a white sari sits on a deserted train platform, burdened by a decaying suitcase and an old jewelry box. She has missed her train. Suddenly a young girl appears. “Can I sit beside you?” she asks the old woman. “I’m going with you.” Every second counts in this powerful play about connections and moments of departure. Rukmini’s Gold features ten stand-alone yet interconnected scenes set in geographically unique train stations around the world. Through the eyes of the matriarch, Rukmini, the play tracks the passage of one South Asian family, crossing continents and spanning a century. Exploring themes including love, class and caste, women’s struggles against patriarchy, colonialism, and the global movement of labour, Radha Menon’s cast of characters take us on life journeys where trains are missed, opportunities are squandered, and family members are separated in space and time.
2020 Sanhita Manch Playwriting Contest Winner, 2020 Sultan Padamsee Playwriting Contest
Runner-up, 2015 Toronto Fringe Festival New Play Contest Winner, and Recipient of 2015 Hamilton Fringe Festival Critics’ Choice Award.
Four generations of women. Four generations of stories. Years of secrets. Rule of Seconds interlaces the extraordinary lives of four genera-tions of one family in the Northern Ontario city of Sault Ste. Marie. The cyclical nature of themes and tragedy entwines the women and their histories. At age twenty-six, the narrator-protagonist Sheila recalls her past and that of her family in hopes of unearthing the cause of her painful epilepsy. Piecing together the depth of her troubled family history, Sheila discovers far more than she can cope with. Spanning from the 1920s to present day, the narrative depicts the unconventional life of Sheila’s great grandmother who owned a three-storey boarding house and ran an illegal speakeasy in the basement. Rule of Seconds is a story about four generations of hard women, defying the conventions of their era, time and again.
Prohibition in the United States created new opportunities for organized crime to make profits even they couldn’t imagine. It did not take long for the mobsters to push out the independent bootleggers and take control of the whole operation inside the United States. Their tentacles then reached into St. Pierre and Newfoundland, both of which had become legalized transshipment ports for liquor ? a real rum-runner’s heaven! Once it became clear that St. John’s was legally an open port for the movement of liquor the mob welcomed it as another St. Pierre. During the era of Prohibition in the United States, Al Capone emerged as the top mobster in the country. His capers made international headlines. Capone controlled the politicians, police, bootleggers, prostitution, and smuggling. He ruled a 1,000-man mob and his gross income was near $100 million annually. The tentacles of organized crime reached into Newfoundland in a big way. In Rum-runners and Mobsters: Prohibition’s 100th Anniversary Jack Fitzgerald leaves no stone unturned as he chronicles the start and end of the Prohibition era in Newfoundland, while exposing mobster involvement.
Carol Harvey Steski’s tenacious and unapologetic debut, rump + flank, explores the body in nature’s many incarnations: human, animal, plant, microbe, even chemical. The result is a fantastical poetic work that sheds light on what bodies–especially female ones–endure, probing the full range of experiences from pleasure and hope to deep loss and trauma.
These poems are piercingly humorous, sexy, and peppered with startling absurdities, but are grounded by an undercurrent of nostalgia (and a soupçon of feminist rage): mercury reproduces like funhouse mirrors, oysters are whole notes dropped into eternal song, cancer is a surly character taking and discarding lovers, a domestic chore turns dark as a mother channels her inner Lady Macbeth. Lush imagery melds with organic rhythms to spawn a visceral experience, a tendon-and-muscle-driven engine that readers can feel racing within their own bodies.
Rumrunners, The
Having developed an impressive reputation for his many novels and non-fiction works, Richard Wagamese now presents a collection of stunning poems ranging over a broad landscape. He begins with an immersion in the unforgettable world where “the ancient ones stand at your shoulder . . . making you a circle / containing everything.”
These are Medicine teachings told from the experience of one who lived and still lives them. He also describes his life on the road when he repeatedly ran away at an early age, and the beatings he received when the authorities tried “to beat the Indian right out of me.” Yet even in the most desperate situations, Wagamese shows us Canada as seen through the eyes and soul of a well-worn traveller, with his love of country, his love of people. Through it all, there are poems of love and music, the language sensuous and tender.