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Kim Clark believes that before multiple sclerosis began its insidious infiltration, there was no writing in her. That somehow the damaging changes that shut down certain functions in her brain also opened up other unused areas that housed a secret love affair with language and all its possibilities, its delicious sights and sounds and intimations.
The poems in Sit You Waiting are not about disease, but about everyday occurrences that have allowed Clark the luxury of contemplation through compulsory inertia and altered perceptions. They vary in form and texture while maintaining a musicality, a sense of playfulness within the words that carries you from BC’s beaches to Australia’s Nullarbor Plain, from the neighbourhood pub to the cemetery, from pot roast country to the passport office places where breakfast/ doesn’t matter/ any more/ than the notion/ of romance.
Light and darkness can be found here. They are woven through the rhythm and rhyme of the erotic ‘lips abandoned’, the humorous self-propelled breasts, the thought-provoking murmuration of starlings, and the distressing edge of pale comatose. Come in. Sit down. Wet your whistle.
Sita’s Story
Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey’s Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy. Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself in demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O – offering, along the way, a sincere contemplationof mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore. Unembarrassed by its literary allusions or its hi-lo hybridity, Sitcom’s strategic and encompassing voice is prepared for each comedic disaster and is, somehow, always ready for next week’s episode.
‘McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack.’
– The Washington Post
‘[McGimpsey] finds thehumanity hiding in the hilarity. This guy is as funny as David Sedaris, and more inventive.’
– The Ottawa Citizen
February 2021 to March 2022 was a period of great reflection for two of Canadabs most celebrated poets. Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt wrote collaborative poetry, formatted like a call and response. Ariel intended to write about urban Manitoba, the city and its trees, and Brenda was to write about rural Saskatchewan and birds. Over the course of the year, the matter of place took over and the intentions branched and flew apart. The poets wrote about the natural world and people making their way through it all. They wrote home as they found it, observing climate as it manifested in drought-stressed trees and stunted crops covered in grasshoppers, in wildfires and wildfire smoke hanging over the prairies. Survival, struggle, keen naturalist perception, and endless wit, bring forward the idea of hope, rejuvenation, and the generative power of community.
Poetry is the raging rapids and it is the little fish which doesn’t give up until the turbulent waters are behind it. Poetry is purpose, renewal and rebirth. Ancestors’ Words: My Heart Speaks is all of this and offers insight into the mind of an Indigenous man who lives with severe chronic pain and who found the strength through spirituality and poetry to put a life of alcohol abuse behind him forever.
Over the past decade, countless young Canadians, lured by adventure and the promise of well-paid work, have travelled to Asia to teach English in the many private language schools that have sprung up there. Although these schools provide new opportunities for Asians by opening up Western language and culture, those who have travelled to Asia to teach have as often found themselves the students. Alison Smith’s poems chronicle her experience teaching English in Japan, exploring this cross-cultural exchange in the clear, unadorned narrative voice that typified her debut collection.
“Combines the soothing sleuthing of Murder, She Wrote with the humble charm of All Creatures Great and Small.” — Publishers Weekly STARRED review
For readers of The Thursday Murder Club comes a lighthearted mystery with an incredible sense of place
It’s springtime in rural Manitoba, and the snow has finally left the exotic animal farm when an ostrich finds and swallows a shiny object. (Because this is what ostriches do.) Cue veterinarian and amateur sleuth Dr. Peter Bannerman, who surgically removes the object, which looks like an ancient Viking artifact. Soon after, people around are horrified by a series of animal mutilations. This sets Peter, and his talented sniffer dog, Pippin, on the hunt for answers. Peter begins to suspect a link between the Viking artifact, the mutilations, and a shadowy group of white supremacists on the internet.
Before long Peter and Pippin are in over their heads, and the only way for them to get out alive will be to unmask the mastermind before they end up among their victims.
Here is a collection intended to showcase Mavor Moore’s dramatic talent—these are theatre pieces stripped to the bare essentials of character sketches in quick, subtle lines; dramatic conflict, development and resolution with a minimum of props; and an emphasis on the performer’s resources as an actor, rather than the externals of scene changes and stage contexts. This collection includes his latest two-act play The Apology, and five one-act plays: The Store, The Pile, Getting In, The Argument and Come Away, Come Away. These plays have all been performed in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
A delightful illustrated book of advice for kids preparing to leave grade school. Filled with perspectives on choice, failure, self-worth, dreams, and priorities, and told in a simply inspiring way, Six Things is a great gift for students leaving grade six, filled with wisdom for people of all ages.
Life is full of those moments, good and bad, that define you, make you whole, and provide direction to your journey. Richard Scarsbrooks brilliant debut collection of poetry, Outtakes, uncovers the moments that we keep hidden deep inside us, that steer us through the currents and eddies of the everyday.
And now we are 60. To mark this momentous occasion, the editors at Goose Lane have selected six tiny perfect stories for your reading pleasure. Authored by some of Canada’s finest writers, they come from the sweep of Goose Lane’s publishing history. Each story will be individually bound and gathered with the others in a nifty sleeve as a collection, or they may be purchased individually in eBook singles. Here’s what you can expect to find in this sexagenarian sextet:
ALDEN NOWLAN’s “A Boy’s Life of Napoleon,” a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan’s first novel, The Wanton Troopers, written in 1960, but published posthumously in 1988.
The beguiling “Woman Gored by Bison Lives” from DOUGLAS GLOVER’s 1991 GG-nominated story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour.
Giller Prize-winner LYNN COADY’s unforgettable Christmas story “The Three Marys,” adapted from her award-winning debut novel, Strange Heaven, published in 1993.
Commonwealth Prize winner SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN’s glittering story “Simran” from her 1996 debut collection, English Lessons and Other Stories.
KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER’s haunting “What Had Become of Us,” from her 2003 debut book of short fiction, Way Up.
The extraordinary “Knife Party” from a new collection of stories by MARK ANTHONY JARMAN, forthcoming in the spring of 2015.
While immersed in the work of editing and publishing trade books at Gaspereau Press, Andrew Steeves has also produced an eclectic array of letterpress-printed, limited-edition books and broadsides. In this book he revisits sixty of these projects, chronicling the influence that using traditional book-arts tools has had on his thinking about culture, design and manufacturing. His frank commentary explores the wider implications of practising handwork in the digital age, exploring the relationship between art, craft and community.
Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies is a double-stranded book of intense lyric reflections on the fundamental essences of things.
Gary Geddes’s ancestors fished herring off the Orkney Islands, but his own fishing takes a different form. His new poetry collection, Skaldance, weaves in and out of the history of the islands like the wind, ocean, and invaders that have shaped the unique Norse-Scottish landscape and culture of the Orkadians.
An outsider with a stake in these remote northern islands, Geddes takes on the role of Skald, the poet of Old Norse tradition, who reports on love, politics, and the past. With wry, quiet humour or bold theatricality, Geddes establishes connections with a people and a land where his forebears lived long ago. Neolithic voices, Viking graffiti, and a fourteenth-century Venetian voyager all have their say in the polyphony of speakers created by Geddes.
So, too, do Armada refugees, Hudson’s Bay Company recruits, and Italian POWs in these breathtaking poems that transcend period and time. Like the Scottish film Breaking the Waves, the tragic events of these poems are made bearable by moments of black humour. Yet, Geddes’s long narrative poems also reverse the process, disarming readers with laughter before delivering the emotional punch.
Whether light-hearted or tragic, ironically detached or passionately engaged, the poems in Skaldance are deeply felt, intelligent, witty, and exquisitely crafted.