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Showing 6337–6352 of 9311 results

Sleep of Four Cities, The

By: Jen Currin

$15.00

“There hasn’t been a debut like this since Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susannah Moodie.” (Arc Poetry)

Powered by lush imagery and lyricism, the poems in The Sleep of Four Cities use the city as a metaphor for the complexity of self. This book invites the reader to take a journey through multiple cities – cities of memory, of desire, of imagination, of discovery, of loss – with only the map of language as a guide. The cities in this book are not always easily unlocked – they are at once tangible and invisible; they exist both inside and outside the speakers of the poems. Throughout the book, these speakers seek to discover what is within their grasp and what, like water, will slip through their fingers.

Praise for The Sleep of Four Cities:

“Jen Currin’s The Sleep of Four Cities comes into Canadian poetry with the same electric intimacy as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon brought to the drawing rooms of Europe a century ago, and with a similar omnipresent dimensionality burning on the shore between touch and cognition. Currin’s poems are reminiscent of Don Domanski’s or John Ashberry’s, except that with Currin’s every link between every seemingly random image is precisely contained by a rigorous set of story-telling rules. Think Marilyn Bowering’s Autobiography meets Erin Mouré in a gallery of brilliantly coloured painterly surfaces with their roots in wisdom literature and folk-tale magic, and you have a hint of it. With this volume, an entire tradition, with its roots in Latin American and Eastern European poetry, all shaped with the rigour of the New York School in which Currin trained, has the potential to inspire and define a generation. There hasn’t been a debut like this since Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susannah Moodie… ” (Arc Poetry)

“In The Sleep of Four Cities, you can let Currin’s language take you down alleys, over bridges and through gates, without a destination, and you are overtaken by surprise and variety.” (BC BookWorld)

“‘My mask hangs by a threat,’ writes Jen Currin, and indeed an air of menace suffuses these brilliantly erotic and dangerous poems. Currin is a startling new talent who bears watching.” (John Ashbery)

BC Poetry in Transit selection (poem displayed on Vancouver city buses)

Poems from The Sleep of Four Cities selected as Poems of the Day on US websites Verse Daily and Poetry Daily
Sleepers and Ties

By: Gail Kirkpatrick

$19.95

Grieving Museum curator Margaret returns to her childhood home to leave behind her sister Shirley’s ashes and attend the final reading of her will. Unbeknownst to Margaret, Shirley has left her eight million dollars and a letter asking Margaret to return to its former glory an abandoned railway line–a fanciful notion, everyone tells her, with no real legal binding. Embarking on an adventure that will test more than just an executor’s duty and loyalty to her sister’s legacy, Margaret is forced to make decisions now and for the future that will challenge and forever change a landscape, her career, her marriage, her friendships, and her very own legacy.
Sleepwalking Among the Camels

By: Tom Konyves

$12.95

Tom Konyves’ Sleepwalking Among the Camels includes compelling selections from his groundbreaking books No Parking (1978), Poetry in Performance (1982), and Ex Perimeter (1988) as well as a section of exciting new work. A must read for lovers of Canadian Surrealism.
Slick Reckoning

By: Ken Belford

$16.95

In these thoughtful, yet playful poems, Belford builds a poetry experience for the curious reader can open anywhere, read, and read on.

Although the phrasing of his lines is unusual, Ken Belford’s poetry is not easily forgotten. His poetry collections, like this one, his slick reckoning, are experiences the curious reader can open anywhere, read, turn the page, and read on. It’s not necessary to begin at the beginning nor to read to the end to get a good sense of what this poet is about. Read a little, or read a lot, he’s worth it.

Ken Belford is a timber framer. He has managed a northern wood lot, from which he has milled his own lumber, carrying out most of the timbers for his buildings on his back. These thoughtful, yet playful poems tell of powerful connections artfully made, of an earned sense of how things work, and an intimate awareness of the cycle of all things.
Slide

By: Barbara Myers

$14.95

In her debut collection, Slide, Barbara Myers plays with the eternal present, the nunc stans, taking us through time and space, over three continents, where people, places and events continue to co-exist in memory and in the body. “Instructions for the Era of Water” is the opening poem in a series focusing on the mysteries of change, evanescence and renewal. Here, where “the sea has taken its place leaning against the wall,” Myers contemplates “floating settlements” and “amphibious houses.” In another poem, a family takes summer swims while soldiers train across the river in Petawawa for duty in Afghanistan. Other poems explore science, cats and paradox–even the curse of corn on genetic modifiers. By turns playful and sober, the poems in these pages, which represent and distill ten years’ work, spring from experiences in Ottawa–its storied Lowertown where the author now lives–and Halifax, where part of her remains, while also taking in the communities in between, and the Ocean Limited, which crosses salt marshes back and forth into the peninsula of Nova Scotia. Whether in form, near-form, or free form, here are poems with an ear to sound and the music of language, accessible and seamlessly crafted.
Slinky Naive

By: Caroline Szpak

$18.00

In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways. Her phrases, her metaphors and similes, slam up against each other like strangers on the street. Apologies, changes in direction, barometric pressure, objects ping and ricochet, but some residual thing clings after the parting. We acknowledge, we recognize, we nod knowingly, and not just from familiarity but because her words have snapped our head forward. And we realize the dummy on her lap, frozen and smiling, is us, and the jaw drops from laughter and dismay, but just as often it drops in awe.

Advance Praise for Slinky Naive:
“The urban, visceral, longing-infused poems in Slinky Naive are fast, dense, and laser-focused. And when the lines are funny, and they often are, it’s like laughing before the blade comes down. Caroline Szpak is doing exactly what poets should do: she is doing something no one else is doing.” (Stuart Ross, author of Pockets and A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent)
Slouching the Dream

By: Spencer Butt

$15.00

Slouching the Dream: Poems about love. Poems about lust. Poems about heartbreak and professional wrestling. Poems about getting fat and poems about ghosts. Poems about tattoos. Poems about losing your hair and losing your lunch. Poems about getting married. Poems about getting rejected. Poems about Bigfoot, heavy metal and watching too much TV. Poems about fist fights. Poems about having kids. Poems about (not) having a life. Poems about the past and the future and getting older and not having a clue what you’re doing with your life but knowing that it has to, probably, maybe, hopefully all get better somewhere along the line, right?
Slouching Towards Innocence

By: Ron Norman

$19.95

Malcolm Bidwell is young, smart, and ambitious–and he’s just been hired by mistake by newly elected Premier Steven Davis as his “go-to guy” for every political mess that needs cleaning up. And there are plenty of messes–from a cabinet minister caught in a vice sting to the premier’s animal cruelty charge for killing a crow. Negotiating his way through the treacherous and wickedly funny corridors of power, Malcolm is forced to make difficult choices: between what’s right and what’s expedient, and between his old friends and his new career. Set in the quirky, combative, and darkly comic world of British Columbia politics–where your friends can be more dangerous than your enemies–Slouching Towards Innocence is a story of politics, love and life.
Slouching Towards Sirte

By: Maximilian Forte

$27.95

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.
Slovenly Love

By: Meira Cook

$15.00

Slovenly Love is Méira Cook’s third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. “A Year of Birds” sensuously explores erosion of self in the gain of new life in motherhood; “Blue Lines” concerns a woman and her double, the imperishable self she “left” to become the self she is; “Trawling: a biography of the river” introduces Heraclitus into the Winnipeg Flood of 1997, the Red River becoming a river of the mind; “Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville,” an extended meditation on varieties of dislocation between art and reality, focuses on Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph of the same title; “Tempestuous” is a passionate, Miranda-centred reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Each sequence is distinct, but together they explore a life of gap, fragment, flux. “Ah swift-wingèd youth,” says a voice in “Trawling,” “the world is, was, and ever will be full of wonder.” Slovenly Love, in its exhilarating renovation of words and forms, gorgeously confirms that.

Says she favours tattoos, impermanent
as the memory of these blue lines. Hey,
beautiful, throw me a line, she calls,
too low to hear. Every third word slightly
erased, as if blurred by a wet thumb. Always
known we are lost in a long poem, fragmented
to gloss memory, she says.
Nevertheless, she adds, treading water,
I am not as melancholy as I seem to be
when that complaint escapes me.

— from “Blue Lines”
Slow Carb for Life

By: Patricia Haakonson, Harv Haakonson

$24.95
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
- simple but comprehensive explanations of the science behind slow carb metabolism
- realistic and proven approach to changing eating habits and maintaining a slow carb lifestyle
- advice for special dietary needs (for example, growing teens, vegetarians, and diabetics)
- easy-to-follow daily intake guidelines for weight loss or weight maintenance
- handy built-in carb counter and food diary to make weight loss easy
- more than 100 delicious slow carb recipes for everything from breads, muffins, and cookies to soups, salads, sides, and entrees.
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.
Slow Moving Target

By: Sue Wheeler

$14.00

“Hear the rustle all down the block as people unwrap the box of the Fifties. Life will be a clock, a pet, it will wag its tail and lie down. Food will glisten in mounds on the breakfast tables and skirts will go taffeta-taffeta.” — from “Aldredge Place”

In her second book, Slow-Moving Target, Sue Wheeler unwraps more than the Fifties. She unwraps a whole shopful of environments and events, and winds them up and sets them down to delight her readers. There is no sentimentalizing here – either of people or of other places and times – and yet the writing is so consistently sharp, perceptive, and clear, that the overall direction is always towards hope, towards the light.

“Here is a poet who keenly observes the world and its people with humour and love. I will return to these pages again and again for their verbal surprises and unflinching honesty. While highly intelligent, these poems are not intellectual; they speak to us in language that packs a passionate wallop.” – Patricia Young
Slow Seconds

By: Ronald Rees, Joshua Green

$35.00

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.
Slow States of Collapse

By: Ashley-Elizabeth Best

$18.95

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.
Slows: Twice

By: T. Liem

$23.95

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
Small Apartments

By: Chris Millis

$16.00

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.