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Sharon Pollock is Canada’s best-known woman playwright. Produced nationally and internationally, author of a large and varied canon, she has had a long and illustrious career in the theatre. From backstage to onstage, from front of house to director’s chair, from actor to author, from teacher and mentor to artistic director of venues both large and small, Sharon Pollock remains an active, controversial, and prolific participant in the Canadian theatre scene.
Personal essays from diverse voices about their relationships to the fibre arts
Sometimes the reliability of a knit stitch, the steady rocking of a quilting needle, the solid structure of a loom is all you have. During the pandemic, fibre arts newbies discovered and lapsed crafters rediscovered that picking up some sticks and string or a needle and thread is the perfect way to reduce stress, quell anxiety, and foster creativity, a remedy to endless hours of doom-scrolling.
Knitting, crochet, embroidery, weaving, beading, sewing, quilting, textiles – the fibre arts fuel intense passions that can often border on obsession. Chances are that you or someone close to you is currently in an ecstatic relationship with yarn, thread, or fabric. As we struggle with the pressures, anxieties, and impacts of daily life, fibre arts are an antidote, mirror, and metaphor for so many of life’s challenges. Part time-machine, part meditation app, the simple act of working with one’s hands can instantly ease the overwhelming scope of living to a human scale and to the present moment.
In this anthology, writers and artists from different backgrounds contemplate their complex relationships with the fibre arts and the intersections of creative practice and identity, technology, memory, climate change, trauma, chronic illness, and disability.
Accompanied by full-colour photographs throughout, these powerful and inspiring essays challenge the traditional view of crafting and examine the role, purpose, joy, and necessity of craft amid the alienation of contemporary life.
Fred A. Reed’s fifth book on the Middle East and “the wars of the Ottoman succession” traces the roots of Islamic fundamentalism, as currently enacted by Hezbollah and other Islamic fundamentalist organizations, to the iconoclasts of sixth- and seventh-century Damascus.
The emergence of Iconoclasm, as sudden and overwhelming as it was catalytic, was at once the product of the forces released by the new social, political and religious teachings of the Prophet, and of their encounter with the Christian world at its far periphery.
They are forces that are quite alive and at large in today’s world, as the Western crusade against this latest prophetic dispensation of the Abrahamic tradition assumes a form both aggressive and invasive.
Shattered Images covers all of the major Islamic faiths in its search for the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements: the Shi’a, Sunni, Ismaili (and their connection with the Assassins) and many of the minor tributaries of Islam, including the “secular” (and related) Syrian Ba’as and Iraqi Bath parties.
As American tank turrets turn from Iraq and take threatening aim at Syria, current events increasingly confirm Reed as an astute expert on Middle-Eastern politics.
She is a complex novel in poetry and prose poetry, crafted with visual form and eloquent language. Penelope-Marie Lancet, an immigrant from Trinidad who lives in Calgary, yearns for a child to the point of obsession. She sees a child as her salvation. Her fervour results in a false pregnancy and in her denial she forms a belief that the child has been spirited away from her. As she formulates and executes a plan to retrieve her child, her personality fragments to the point of disintegration.
Penelope’s fixation begins with a tragedy that occurred when she was a little girl: her one-year-old sister lurched out of her arms and plunged to her death. Penelope never forgives herself and searches constantly for the “lost” baby that would make her whole. Hearing of a black baby adopted by a rich white couple, she concludes that this is her “stolen” child, and she steals him back. Little by little, her already fragile self fragments into at least six personalities, all of whom call their outwardly more composed manifestation “She.” Each of these personalities is unique, each speaking in their own voice and dialect. Dealing with differing levels of awareness of one another, the diverse personalities seek to find their purpose within the whole as they write letters to Penelope’s sister Jasmine, who lives in Trinidad. The more frenzied the letters become, the more they worry Jasmine. By the time Jasmine knocks on the door of Penelope’s Calgary apartment, the discord among Penelope’s different personalities becomes unbearable and her psyche unravels completely.
She is a collage that cuts across conventional boundaries and creates a visual form of poetry and prose. Claire Harris has created a brilliant amalgam of character and creativity.
CBC BOOKS ‘CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN 2024’
CBC BOOKS ‘BOOKS TO READ IN HONOUR OF THE NATIONAL DAY FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION’
The Sky Woman has returned to bring down the patriarchy!
This book is about a poet who may or may not be going crazy, who is just trying to survive in Winnipeg, where Indigenous people, especially women, are being disappeared. She is talking to a crow who may or may not be a trickster, and who brings a very important message: Sky Woman has returned, and she is ready to take down the patriarchy.
This is poetry, prose and dialogue about the rise and return of the matriarch. It’s a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self.
Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild is an important voice for our time. Her poems – angry, funny, sad – demand a new world for Indigenous women.
“A monologue must give voice to those who have been silenced. The speaker must urgently need to speak, to proclaim, to persuade, to incite, to inspire, to agitate, to fabricate, to contaminate or whitewash, to justify; the speaker needs approval, or absolution, or acclaim, or worship, or laughter or sympathy. The monologue can only happen if the speaker has an audience. The monologue is ultimately the electric interaction between the audience and the speaker.” —from the introductionContributors: trey anthony • Nina Lee Aquino • Maja Ardal • Catherine Banks • naila belvett • Tony Berto • Dionne Brand • Leanna Brodie • Ronnie Burkett • Alec Butler • Drew Carnwath • Robert Chafe • Elaine K. Chang • Sally Clark • George Elliott Clarke • Marie Clements • David Copelin • Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman • Deirdre Dore • Patti Flather • John Frizzell • Laurie Fyffe • Jonathan Garfinkel • Florence Gibson MacDonald • Tara Goldstein • Linda Griffiths • Alexandria Haber • Todd Harrop • Randi Helmers • Caitlin Hicks • Tomson Highway • Ryan Hughes • Janice Kulyk Keefer • Gabrielle Kemeny • Ann Lambert • Trisha Lamie • Wendy Lill • Bryden MacDonald • Daniel MacIvor • Joan MacLeod • Celia McBride • Sonja Mills • Monique Mojica • Colleen Murphy • Yvette Nolan • M. Nourbese Phillip • Sharon Pollock • Betty Quan • Janis Rapoport • Kevin Rees-Cummings • Kim Renders • Emma Roberts • Djanet Sears • Shelley Sereda • Ivana Shein • Emil Sher • Jason Sherman • Dalbir Singh • Danielle Skene • Douglas Burnet Smith • Emily Sugerman • Vern Thiessen • Judith Thompson • Kristen Thomson • Jackie Torrens • Nadine Villasin • Colleen Wagner • Irene N. Watts • Paula Wing • Betty Jane Wylie • d’bi.young.anitafrika
In she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two spirit story),Sharron Proulx-Turner combines poetry and history to delve into the little-known lives of two-spirit women. Regarded with both wonder and fear when first encountered by the West, First Nations women living with masculine and feminine principles in the same body had important roles to play in society, as healers and visionaries, before they were suppressed during the colonial invasion.she walks for days inside a thousand eye (a two-spirit story) creatively juxtaposes first-person narratives and traditional stories with the voices of contemporary two-spirit women, voices taken from nature, and the teachings of Water, Air, Fire and Mother Earth. The author restores the reputation of two- spirit women that had been long under attack from Western culture as she re-appropriates the lives of these individuals from the writings of Western anthropologists and missionaries.Sharron Proulx-Turner creates a new kind of epic as she bears witness to the past. With gracious concern for tradition, and sly, soaring language, she retells a vital chapter from the First Nations, and Canadian, story.
Winner of the Nelson Ball Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman Award
Minimalist poetry for maximalist times.
Sheets: Typewriter Works extends the minimalist explorations of Cameron Anstee’s first collection, Book of Annotations. Prompted by receiving the Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter that belonged to poet William Hawkins after his death in 2016, the works in this book explore how small poems operate through the freedoms and constraints of the typewriter as both a decaying machine and a mode of composition. Through engagement with writers and artists like Jiri Valoch, Barbara Caruso, Leroy Gorman, Cia Rinne, William Hawkins, Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi, and Norman McLaren, Sheets: Typewriter Works re-embeds the minimalist poem in the typewritten page.
Sheila Watson published the iconic novel, The Double Hook, in 1959 and influenced the writing styles of many Canadian authors who followed her, including: Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt and others. This is the first collection of essays devoted to all of Watson’s writing as well as her work as editor and mentor. The collection examines not only The Double Hook but also the first novel she wrote, Deep Hollow Creek (published in 1992), her short stories and the McLuhan connection. The contributors include: Caterina Edwards, E.D. Blodgett, Mary G. Hamilton, George Melnyk, Margaret Morriss, Margot Northey, Glenn Willmott, and Sergiy Yakovenko. The collection also features material from Sheila Watson herself, including her notes on “How to read Ulysses.” Joseph Pivato is editor and contributor. The cover photo is by Rowland McMaster from 1976.
Thomas Friesen has three goals in life. Get a job. Make friends. Find a good book to curl up with. After landing a job at READ, the newest hypermegabookstore, he feels he may have accomplished all three.
All is not peaceable within the stacks, however. Discontent is steadily rising, and it is aimed squarely at Munroe Purvis, a talk show host whose wildly popular book club is progressively lowering the I.Q. of North America.
But the bookworms have a plan. Plots are being hatched. The destruction of Munroe is all but assured. And as Thomas finds himself swept along in the maëlstrom of insanity, he wonders if reading a book is all it’s cracked up to be.
If you’ve ever thrown a book against a wall in disgust; if you’ve ever loved a novel that no one else can stand; if you obsess over the proper use of punctuation; this may be the novel for you. A weirdly funny story about bookish addictions, Shelf Monkey is the ideal novel for anyone who loves good books. Or hates them.
Shelley Niro is widely known for her ability to explore Traditional Stories, transgress boundaries, and embody the ethos of her matriarchal culture. A member of the Kanyen’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation, she uses a wide variety of media, including photography, installation, film, and painting to bring greater visibility to Indigenous women and girls.
Pushing the limits of photography, Niro incorporates imagery from Traditional Stories to focus on contemporary subjects with wit, irony, and parody. Throughout her work — in her portraiture, sculptures, landscape paintings, photography, and film and video work — Niro challenges common preconceptions about gender, culture, and Indigenous Peoples.
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch brings together 215 reproductions from Niro’s expansive oeuvre, including work published here for the first time. Also included in this career retrospective are three major essays about Niro’s work by Melissa Bennett, Greg Hill, and David W. Penney, as well as texts from seven guest artists, scholars, and curators. Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch accompanies an international touring exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian with the collaboration of the National Gallery of Canada.
The first book in English by acclaimed Chinese-Canadian writer Xue Yiwei, Shenzheners is inspired by the young city of Shenzhen, a market town north of Hong Kong that became a Special Economic Zone in 1980 as an experiment in introducing capitalism to Communist China. A city in which everyone is a newcomer, Shenzhen has grown astronomically to become a major metropolitan centre. Hailed as a Chinese Dubliners, the original collection was named one of the Most Influential Chinese Books of the Year in 2013, with most of the stories appearing in Best Chinese Stories.
These poems are filled with awe and celebration, sadness, and ironic humour as Shepherd explores the themes of human relationships with the natural world including connection, alienation, and the negative impacts of human activity on nature; interspecies kinship – ecological as well as animistic and shamanic; and intersections of ecology and industry.
Shepherd uses numerous voices and perspectives, and such arrangements bring about a variety of moods. Whether his subjects are starlings or tamaracks, woodchucks or grizzly bears, the ever-present magic of nature guides not only the mode but directs each poem’s tone toward some unique perspective:
Some spiders know the correct use of magic
knots to tie a cluster of Oregon grape
into one single dusty purple berry. If a
black bear swallows it under the right moon
he or she will become a powerful shaman,
able to speak the languages of spiders.
But while there is a dominance of the natural world found in the poems, they also reflect the numerous meanings of the title: a shift of perspective or point of view, physically moving or shifting position, transforming or changing form or physical appearance, shifting gears while driving a vehicle, working the night shift, and so on. The book’s title is also taken from the title of one specific poem in the collection that encapsulates some of these central ideas.
Living and working on the land and bodily experiences of specific places also have their place in Shepherd’s poems. These portraits ensure a kind of visceral connection or memory to the poems as they invite reader comparisons to their own work experiences:
Your job is to take the cement –
grey-green, ugly, utilitarian, dusty and not just dusty but
poisonous, abrasive, blocky, sharp-edged, impossibly heavy
and dangerous in slings from overheard lifts –
and transform it into something else.
Pull off the present disk,
fingers fat with heavy rubber gloves,
and whack the grinder wheel’s Velcro pad
down onto the next one waiting;
Shift is a collection of poems that leave an indelible mark that we humans are interconnected and that we are intrinsically bound to the natural world. They are poems that champion the beauty and resilience of nature and remind us that we need to protect our relationships with it.
Meaghan Marie Hackinen’s follow-up to her award-nominated debut South Away charts her unforgettable, twenty-five-day journey on the Trans Am Bike Race: a coast-to-coast ride across the entire North American continent from Oregon to Virginia. Without the aid of a support crew, Hackinen must rely entirely on her wits, ingenuity and sheer determination to finish this extremely challenging feat. A sports story with a unique theme, Hackinen writes about the Trans Am Bike Race as a cultural whole, as she encounters consequences and unforeseen repercussions of an underground, unregulated athletic endeavour. Shifting Gears is another expertly-delivered travelogue and a thrilling glimpse into a world of athletes driven to impossible lengths.