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Shortlisted for:
Mavis Gallant Nonfiction Prize Awarded by the Quebec Writers’ Federation
A comprehensive analysis, this book examines all the justifications and myths about the war on Libya and methodically dismantles them. It delineates the documentary history of events, processes, and decisions that led up to the war while underscoring its resulting consequences. Arguing that NATO’s war is part of a larger process of militarizing U.S. relations with Africa—which sees the development of the Pentagon’s AFRICOM as being in competition with Pan-African initiative—this account shows that Western relations with a “rehabilitated” Libya were shaky at best, mired in distrust, and exhibiting a preference for regime change.
Change your life with a proven method based on years of sound research, hard science, and personal trial and error
Having improved their lives with the slow carb diet, Patricia Haakonson and husband, Dr. Harv Haakonson, are bringing this revolutionary, balanced approach to nutritious eating to the world in Slow Carb for Life: The Ultimate Practical Guide to Low-Carb Living. “Slow carbs” are carbohydrates that are low on the glycemic index and convert to blood sugar over longer periods of time, allowing the body to accelerate fat burning and to avoid the negative health impacts related to eating highly refined carbohydrates. (S)low-carb living relies on a balance of portion control and choosing wholesome, healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and proteins.
What sets Slow Carb for Life apart from other low carb books is its
This complete guide includes everything for the novice and the long-term slow carber to lose or maintain the weight they want while eating well and enjoying a healthy and energetic new lease on life.
Finalist, New Brunswick Book Award (Non-Fiction)
The photographs of George Taylor (1838-1913) offer viewers a fascinating glimpse into nineteenth-century New Brunswick. Taylor’s career coincided with a period when photographers began to provide Canadians with images of the “wilderness.” Drawing on the knowledge and expertise of Indigenous guides, Taylor travelled not only through settled parts of New Brunswick, but also into the wilderness of the north, providing views of hitherto unfamiliar and unknown terrain and helping to popularize the outdoors as a venue for canoeing, hunting and fishing.
Taylor’s work is also a record of rural and farm life on the rich floodplains and intervals of the Saint John River valley, of daily life in Fredericton, and of the large-scale expansion of railways in the province. Captured in the “slow seconds” of his camera, George Taylor’s photographs illumined landscapes, people, and the seismic changes taking place at the cusp of the new century.
The first book of Taylor’s photographs, Slow Seconds presents a curated selection of one hundred photographs together with an account of the beginnings of photography and Taylor’s life and work.
The eagerly anticipated debut from one of Canada’s most exciting new poets
In her debut collection, Ashley-Elizabeth Best explores the cultivation of resilience during uncertain and often trying times. It’s a book built around day-to-day conflicts — poems about love, family, grief, power, and longing. Navigating the fault lines of popular culture and traditional poetry to assert that we are all history makers, Slow States of Collapse enters the landscape of personal narrative in an attempt to reconcile life’s little universal griefs.
Slow States of Collapse presents a world that is at once menacing and full of wonder and grace. It’s a poetry of “casual cruelty” and “kisses like / puncture wounds,” of “something too tender to touch” and “the threat of an intense beauty.” In this collection, illness confronts bedside manners while a migrant restlessness also paints remarkable portraits of shifting self-image, and in the process the nature of personal and political power is reimagined.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023
Backward and forward: a double book of mirrored poems about identity in all its forms.
This is a book of slow hours, days, and years – how they can collapse into one another, how it can feel like we are living one day repeating itself. From within this collapse, the speaker seeks connection everywhere. They visit their father’s birthplace, Jogjakarta; they listen to a stranger’s phone call at the Motel 6 in Alberta; they linger in the so-called ethnic aisle of the grocery store. From all of these places the speaker is discouraged but tries to imagine a future joyously incomprehensible to the present.
Slows: Twice is a collection of revisions and repetitions; every poem in one half of the book has an alternate version, or a mirror poem, in the other half. The poems are tied to themes of work and labour, consumption and waste, family and home, as shapers of identity and relationships. The act of revising and repeating – slowly – is meant to be a resistance to efficiency, a resistance to being an always-productive body under capitalism.
“The poems of Slows: Twice collect in resonance, contemplate the construction of selves, with modes of repetition, sequencing, and mirroring, the way language assembles an identity or points to itself as it points away. ‘The clouds // disappear the sky sometimes; or they become it.’ Storied and cubistic, palindromic and cleaved, Liem’s poems reveal relationships to time, noise, and duration, and the possibility of joy given painful pasts.” – Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
“T. Liem is one of my favorite poets working in Canada. I welcomed this book into my life like sudden sunlight. Slows: Twice is a book about how urgently we need to read differently. I loved its mischievous relation to form and expectation as well as its burning intelligence. I once described T. as an inheritor of the tradition of language poetry, but what Slows: Twice proves is that T. is less an inheritor and more so an innovator, an inventor in their own right. I read it in one frenzied sitting.” – Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus
“It’s breathtaking to watch words drip from a page into a silver river cutting through a canyon of time. T. Liem sculpts poetry with steady, curious fingers, pushing against the filaments we think hold us together that have been quietly collecting cracks, from buried violence and whispered histories to the fragile connections tying us together. Obits. captured my heart; Slows: Twice now affirms it.” – Teta, founder of diasporic Indonesian publication Buah zine
“‘For everything I was, I am now something else.’ Revision of self and world are core to this innovative, unruly book that manages somehow to be at once formally wacky and emotionally clear. These poems seem to ask: if language is a box heavy with histories and inadequacies and which we nevertheless must carry, can language also carry us somewhere, elsewhere, strangely? Rarely have I encountered a book so at home in the unresolved, in the tension between a longing for declaration and a commitment to questions. T. Liem’s work conjures the figure of Janus: god of duality and gates, one face facing an end, the other looking through a new door, right in the eye of a dream.” – Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
“T. Liem’s Slows: Twice is a fascinating exercise in revision and remaking, each repetition of its text accomplishing the arduous task of stretching time and geopolitical fixity. ‘asking and repeating/ we are made’ declares Liem, and that utterance produces the book’s essential maxim, ‘language is change/ changed by prosody.’ In between these cracks of time, language becomes a miracle suture for love and connection where the hard reality of one’s circumstances may produce infinite ruptures. This is a book that peers into the fissure, holding these moments of fracture as still and clearly as possible–a future of proximates.” – Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, the Swarm
A capricious comedy of errors, Small Apartments resonates with tremulous energy and quirky characters. Franklin Franklin is a fully realized and sympathetic protagonist in the vein of Ignatius Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces), a simple man who yearns for a land of pastoral serenity devoid of the irritations of contemporary urban life. An offbeat tale, Small Apartments is accented along the way by murder, strange fingernail collections, and the occasional blast from a treasured alphorn.
Small Apartments is now a majorly quirky motion picture starring Matt Lucas and Peter Stormare, and co-stars Dolph Lundgren, Johnny Knoxville, James Caan, Billy Crystal, Juno Temple, Saffron Burrows and Amanda Plummer.
Shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award
In this new novel by ReLit award–winning, Leacock-nominated writer Andrew Kaufman, the narrator eschews the usual avenues of mid-life crisis-sportscars, mistresses-and instead seeks meaning in the least likely of places: small claims court. There, he struggles to understand what’s gone wrong in his marriage, his career as a writer, and his relationship with his two young children.
With small observations, subtle investigations, and the pursuit of small-scale justice, he attempts to rebuild his faith in humanity through the framework of a court system that won’t let you sue for damages above twenty thousand dollars. Small Claims is a big dose of tenderness for the frailties of the heart.
“[Kaufman’s] prose is so refreshingly heartfelt and natural that he makes it easy to believe.”—The Coast
Rarely do we know what life will hold. When starting the adoption process, Jane Byers and her wife could not have predicted the illuminating and challenging experience of living for two weeks with the Evangelical Christian foster parents of their soon-to-be adopted twins. Parenthood becomes even more daunting when homophobia threatens their beginnings as a family, seeping in from places both unexpected and familiar. But Jane and Amy are up for the challenge. In this moving and poetic memoir, Byers draws readers into her own tumultuous beginnings: her coming out years, finding love, and the start of her parenting journey. Love imprints itself where loneliness lived, but sometimes love, alone, is not enough to overcome trauma. Little did Byers know that her experiences when coming out was merely training for becoming an adoptive parent of racialized twins. Small Courage: A Queer Memoir of Finding Love and Conceiving Family is a thoughtful and heart-warming examination of love, queerness and what it means to be a family.
small flames is, like its title poem, an arrangement of lambent coals which brighten their hot cores under the breath of the reader’s gaze. Quiet, contained poems flare up with the intensity of peak experience – in moments of childhood, womanhood, birth, death and the infinite in a cormorant’s flight or Chaucer’s tomb. Dina E. Cox has the extraordinary gift of having begun to write seriously only after her children had grown, and yet writing as though she were in her twenties – youthful energy, enthusiasm and passion seasoned already with mature wisdom. small flames is a story of beginnings, endings, and of new beginnings.
While small flames has not a single stand-alone haiku in it, the poet is schooled in the form and has published haiku as far away as Bulgaria. Even in the extended pieces, there’s hardly a formally Japanese poem here, but each, stanza by stanza in the longer ones, enacts the grace, precision and poignancies of highly disciplined verse. In the title poem, a sun-warmed field of lupins / burns as brightly, peppering / the transparent air with pungent /colour … In “The Gift,” where she’s present at the hospital when her father receives a diagnosis of the cancer which will end his life, After the doctor leaves / I search for something / concrete to hold onto: / in silence I soap each / of my father’s leathered soles, / awed by the intimacy / of fingers and toes, / and by his acceptance / of this macabre dance. These are the poems of a woman who has known in her life most things we all know, but has seen further than many of us are given to see.
In this vibrant debut, Jennifer Ilse Black combines prose, lists, and structural experimentation. Small Predators follows a collective of student activists as they cope with the aftermath of a violent political demonstration carried out against their university by a member of their collective, Mink. The story’s narrator, Fox, recounts Mink’s addiction to a form of physical self-harm, both a violence motivated by guilt of privilege and a method of coping with political vulnerability. As Fox navigates her anger with Mink, debating whether or not she should confront or forgive her, we discover that each member of the collective is performing their own acts of self-violence. As Canadian millennials, Fox and her friends were born into the era of climate anxiety–told again and again that more must be done to save humanity’s future at the same time that pipelines were expanded, rainforests were cleared, and chemical waste was dumped into the ocean. Struggling to imagine a resistance that isn’t futile, the young activists turn violently on themselves and each other, creating sites of political action and care within their physical bodies.
John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award, 2019
Saskatoon Award, 2021 Saskatchewan Book Awards
Glengarry Book Award Jury Short List, Recognition of Literary Excellence, 2021
In the early 20th century, as homesteaders in Saskatchewan are scratching out hard new lives on the Canadian prairie, William, an adventurer from New Zealand, brings his new bride, Louise, to the freshly broken earth of his farm near Watrous.
Physical and emotional isolation take their toll on everyone struggling to survive in the harsh landscape, and when William and Louise’s second child, Violet, is born “feebleminded,” it plunges Louise-a woman burdened with a dark secret-back into a time of shame and regret, even as the child draws out goodness and loyalty from her neighbours, Hank and Emily.
Then tragedy upends the family, and William, while struggling to raise and protect his daughter and find his way to forgiveness, must come to terms with the fact that no one is infallible.
“There can be no fullness without emptiness. And there can be no conversation without a void.”
Everyday conversation has always been a challenge for Julie, a lonely and anxious researcher who spends her days bent over a microscope in a basement laboratory. She struggles through lunchtime discussions with co-workers and one-sided exchanges with her withdrawn father and mute stepmother, attempts to understand her aphasic mother, and feels steamrolled in conversations with her game-show host brother and his extravagant girlfriend. At the end of each day, she goes home exhausted and indulges in soliloquies in which she lets go of everything unsaid. She tries self-help videos and a conversation workshop, but nothing can budge her verbal roadblocks. After being humiliated by her brother on live TV, she runs away from her city, her family, her job, and her life. Wandering in the woods, she meets Timothy, who is trying to end his life. Between someone who wants to leave the world and someone who would like to be a part of it, a meaningful conversation begins to take shape.
Stately and majestic, yet scuffed with wear and disillusion, the poems of Smaller Hours mount the sky like columns and fora of some archaic ruin. Through these ancient halls, Kevin Shaw tracks Eros, clearing away the rubble and polishing the marble, along the way exploring queer ways of keeping time. Music and movies, clocks and inventors populate these poems. History casts a shadow over all.
Kevin Shaw’s debut collection is a tour de force of control and grace; musical lines anchored by powerful rhythms dance into the reader’s ear. The speakers of these lyrics encounter Nijinsky in a waiting room, Ovid at the laundromat, or re-enact a devastating flood after a night of drinking. From a mixtape full of quarter-century-old regrets, to the sensuality of a harmonica buzzing against pursed lips, to the violence and hope of Stonewall, Smaller Hours collapses the past with the present and the personal with the public, taking a sideways glance at historical figures — inventors, poets, movie stars — from across a gay bar’s crowded dance floor.
“A Canadian master of the form.”—Gregory Cowles, New York Times
A former military policeman, a veterinarian, and a French poet walk into a bar and debate the Vietnam war. A couple of men who are part of a commune discover two dead bodies while out sailing. A woman hits a boy with her car and contemplates turning herself in. Two paramedics try to live and not burn out while dealing with so much death. A man on holiday in Venice is stalked by a pickpocket. A heartsick astronaut finds love on the moon.
In Smash & Grab Mark Anthony Jarman offers up a mischievous medley of stories that blur the lines between the real and the imagined. Continuing to chronicle the lives of the wayward and unlucky, it confirms its author as one the most adventurous guides to the absurdity of twenty-first century existence.