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Rotten Perfect Mouth is a wonderfully fresh first book by a poet with an intuitive ear for colourful, musical language. The poems are loose enough for the reader to flop down inside and stay awhile. They are a little goofy, personal, confessional, noisy, nostalgic, and maybe a little bit broken. They often contain boats, boys, and Toronto (street names and railroad tracks, dives and parks and kitchens) because those are the sorts of things Eva Hd is in love with. In Rotten Perfect Mouth, readers will discover a writer with her heart on her sleeve and her hand on her pen, capturing the world around her with startling immediacy.
To commemorate a tragedy.
This series of poems is a response to the 2012 mass shooting at a block party on Danzig Street, Scarborough (Toronto). The city’s east end becomes a source of poetic inspiration, and the two intersecting subway lines provide the organizing structure. From west to east, and north to south–Kipling to McCowan, Finch to Downsview–the stations on the way inspiring form, voice, and content, meditation, commentary, and geometry. The City is the Poem.
The Discovery Walk,
inviting my well-worked Clarks
to pry my feet from the confines
of the station,
wasn’t necessary to make
a most marvelous Discovery:
the bus sign, hung with steel
–from “Old Mill”
“You must find the Key. You are the only one who can.”
With these words, Ambrose Peters learns that the bedtime stories his parents told him are real.
On his twelfth birthday, he and his friends Stan and Aurora discover a curious note in the library of his home, an old estate in the heart of Toronto. When peculiar creatures start turning up, the three of them stumble on a mysterious world hidden in the wild spaces of their once-familiar city.
But Ambrose’s time is running out. With an ancient menace closing in on him, Ambrose must find the key to save himself, his friends, and the extraordinary—and dangerous—new world they only just discovered.
The Roughling is an epic adventure teeming with mystery, friendship, action, unforgettable characters and perilous secrets.
Marco Melfi’s Routine Maintenance offers a clutch of spare lyrics and object poems rooted in the everyday. Whether they are drawing portraits (a cobbler, coach, superfan), probing social phenomena (soccer tryout, cell phone ringing in a basilica, tossing leaves at the eco station), or describing the unusual lives of commonplace objects (birthday balloon, faulty porch light, parking stall puddle), Melfi’s poems are propelled by incisive observation, muscular rhythm, and a terse entwining of images and ideas.
Thousands of Canadian and international military and civilian performers have made the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo the world’s largest annual indoor show. First performed in Halifax in 1979 to mark the visit of the Queen Mother for the International Gathering of the Clans, the Tattoo has now become a permanent fixture, seen by more than a million spectators. With performances every year since 1979, it has more than lived up to its motto “Beòthaichidh Sinn An Cridhe Agus Gairmidh Sinn Dhachaidh Sibh” (“We stir the heart and call you home”).
This sumptuously illustrated book offers both an insider’s and a spectator’s perspective of the Tattoo over its 30-year history, providing both backstage and front-of-stage views of the event. Drawing from more than 75,000 photographs, this illustrated history of the Tattoo showcases the pageantry of this unique annual performance.
Ruby used to be a fiery, sexy, musical genius. But when she got pregnant as a teenager in the 90s, her life took a turn into banality. Now a middle-aged Indo-Canadian woman, she feels unseen and unheard by her white husband and struggles to communicate with her mixed-race daughter. When she discovers her husband cheating, she embarks on a quest to unearth exciting secrets from her past. To find what she needs, she drives straight into B.C.’s raging wildfires, accompanied only by the fantastical stories her mother used to tell about their ancient Mughal ancestry — a dancer named Rubina who lived in the concubine quarters of the great Agra Fort. This book is at once historical fiction and political romance, deftly navigating themes of mixed-race relationships, climate change, motherhood, body shame, death and the passage of time.
Paul Menzies is an out-of-shape, middle-aged advertising executive, who arrives at work one morning to discover he’s lost his job. Downsized. That evening, he stops by a bank machine to check his finances. Ahead of him, a scruffy young couple is arguing about the state of their own finances.
When the muscular husband, Victor Shriver, loses his temper and smacks his wife hard, Paul steps in and hauls the young thug backwards across the lobby.
Which is the only clear image caught by the bank’s security camera.
In the ensuing brawl, Shriver puts Paul in hospital for nearly a week. Despite the severity of his injuries, the cops have little choice but to lay charges against Paul for assault. Victor Shriver has found himself a sharp little lawyer, and between them they smell money, asking for $50,000.
Instead Paul offers to fight Victor, mano a mano, in a boxing ring. Three rounds. If Shriver wins, Paul will pay him and the assault charges will be dropped. If Paul wins, no money changes hands and the assault charges will still be dropped.
When she realizes there’s nothing she can do to dissuade her husband, Paul’s feisty wife, Valerie Menzies, hires Eddie Dancer to stop the fight.
But it’s too little, too late and when the heat of the media spotlight focuses on the “mismatched fight of the year,” even Eddie realizes he’s beaten. As the world’s press and the TV networks pour into town for the main event, Eddie finds himself reliving some unresolved issues of spousal abuse from his own past.
And once that lid is off, there’s no way Eddie can ever get it back on again.
When journalist Connie Kuhns approached Vancouver Cooperative Radio in 1981 to host a music program dedicated solely to playing music by women, there was some doubt at the station that there was enough music by women to fill half an hour—and besides, who would tune in?
Such was the underground nature of women’s music. Despite the doubters, Rubymusic Radio became a successful program, running for fifteen years, introducing listeners to countless artists through radio, magazines and newspaper columns and on stage at Vancouver’s annual Folk Music Fest, and serving as a powerful platform for the feminist movements taking place in Vancouver’s punk scene and throughout music history in the 80s and 90s. Rubymusic also served as the launching pad for Kuhns’ life-long passion—the preservation of the histories and stories of the women with whom she crossed paths on the airwaves.
Here is a time capsule of a pivotal moment in women’s music history, with special emphasis on the women’s music movement in Canada, including the only written history of the women involved in Vancouver’s punk rock scene. Rubymusic also includes over two dozen first-person interviews going back into the early 1980s, featuring a diverse group of women, including Ferron, Etta James, Roni Gilbert, Lillian Allen, Koko Taylor, Gloria Steinem, kd lang, Michelle Shocked, Amy Grant, Ellen McIlwaine, as well as essays on Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, and why Yoko Ono matters. Rubymusic: A Popular History of Women’s Music and Culture is a necessary reflection on fifteen years of radio history and forty years in music journalism that contains unparalleled stories of women who fought for the right to be heard.
The anthology, Rudy Wiebe: Essays on His Works, compiled and edited by Bianca Lakoseljac, examines Wiebe’s works and his achievements as an author, editor, professor and mentor who helped shape successful authors and encouraged a passion for Canadian literature. Intriguingly, while Wiebe’s writing has been labeled as “brilliant” and “magnificent,” it has also been seen as “challenging” due in part to his propensity for a rather Faulknerian turn of phrase and his use of multifaceted storymaking approaches, such as intertextual and intratextual dynamics, and the sociopolitical views and religious beliefs they embody. Rudy Wiebe’s literary work raises him to the status of a Canadian literary icon whose fiction and nonfiction are seen as major contributions to Canadian literature, and will continue to be enjoyed for generations to come.
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).