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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Songs For The Cold Of Heart

    Songs For The Cold Of Heart

    $29.95

    Nuns that appear out of thin air, a dinner party at the Goebbels’, Quebec’s very own Margaret Thatcher, a grandma that just won’t die (not until the archangel comes back)…Songs For The Cold Of Heart is a yarn to rival the best of them, a big fat whopper of a tall tale that bounces around from provincial Rivière-du-Loup in 1919 to Nagasaki, 1990s Berlin, Rome, and beyond. This is the novel of a century?long and glorious, stuffed full of parallels, repeating motifs, and unforgettable characters?with the passion and plotting of a modern-day Tosca.

  • Songs for the Dancing Chicken

    Songs for the Dancing Chicken

    $16.95

    In Songs for the Dancing Chicken, Emily Schultz’s debut collection of poetry, the films and life of acclaimed director Werner Herzog become linguistic launch pads, jumping off points for subtle investigations into everyday life. Like her subject, Schultz uses hypnotic images to imbue that everyday life with profound insight.

    While fans of Herzog will recognize the details of his amazing life and words from Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo, Stroszek, and Nosferatu, Schultz finds the intersection between Herzog’s art and her own poetic voice with authority and verve.

    Songs for the Dancing Chicken is part fan letter, part dark cultural translation, and much, much more.

  • Songs from a Small Town

    Songs from a Small Town

    $19.95

    Inspired by a true incident of mass hysteria in Le Roy, New York in 2011-2012, Songs from a Small Town (in a Minor Key) is a novel written as a series of stories from different points of view. It examines a mysterious condition that strikes only teenage girls in a small farming town–their arms twitch and jump, and they can’t control the movements–and while people speculate about what is causing the disease, no one knows for sure. As the stories progress, various facets of this bizarre phenomenon are explored, dark secrets come to light, and the hysteria grows.

  • Songs From This and That Country

    Songs From This and That Country

    $27.95

    “A visceral depiction of the inhumanity of oppression, Songs from This and That Country is, at its core, an unforgettable story of the evocative resonance of one’s past.” — Don Aker, bestselling author of The First Stone

    It is 1996: a mortar shell explodes, shredding nine Sarajevan citizens, while a Canadian opera singer and others huddle together in horrified solidarity;
    thirty years earlier: a mother gives birth to a caul baby, a strange child who seems able to will events into being;
    forty-five years earlier: a young man returns home from the Italian front and his hair has turned snow white;
    600 years earlier: a young woman leaves her father, a despot under the Ottomans, to meet the witch Baba Roga from whom she learns that father and Turk are not so very different;
    and back in 1996: a young opera singer, estranged from her parents, sings about all of this and contemplates killing her father.

    Songs from This and That Country is an inter-generational story that examines the reality of age-old ethnic conflicts between Serbs-Croats-Muslims, exposing these divisive and acrimonious relationships as recursive and mirrored in the lives of first- and second-generation families. As a blend of family drama, historical fact and fairy tale, Songs reflects a South Slavic immigrant experience, WWII infantry service in 1940s Italy, the Bosnian conflicts in the 1990s, and the rise of a second generation Serb-Canadian opera singer–all set in relief to a Slavic fairy tale in the time of the Ottoman Empire.

  • Songs like White Apples Tasted

    Songs like White Apples Tasted

    $14.95

    Songs like White Apples Tasted

  • Songs My Mother Taught Me

    Songs My Mother Taught Me

    $19.95

    Republished with a new introduction, this is Audrey Thomas’s classic coming-of-age novel about madness, loneliness, despair and escape.

  • Songs of Exile

    Songs of Exile

    $20.00

    The poems, arranged chronologically, give an impressionistic account of the poet as an immigrant, in quest of her inner voice and her core self, in the new land. They reveal intense isolation, despite engagement with the so-called political, religious, and cultural disparities between the two countries. The poems tell the story of how the speaker comes closer to her roots by leaving her country behind. They reveal her concern about the Middle East; the negative associations with her country, Iran; her preoccupation with the possibility of reconciliation between the three Abrahamic religions; her concerns about her family back home, and her newly found friends and lover. For the persona in these poems, the political is personal.

  • Songs of My Surrenders

    Songs of My Surrenders

    $20.00

    Frenetic, fervent and musical, Songs of My Surrenders is the follow up to Marc di Saverio’s highly acclaimed epic poem Crito Di Volta. 

    Following in the footsteps of great Modernist and Romantic poets, and yet paving a path that is unmistakably his own, contemporary rebel-poet di Saverio offers a deeply romantic and darkly spiritual array of masterful sonnets, senryu and haiku, alongside select translations from Émile Nelligan, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Giacomo Leopardi. 

    At its heart, Songs of My Surrenders offers an overpowering vision of a decaying civilisation, insisting that the cure is found in passionate and unconditional love, and in urgent spiritual renewal.

    A wind of dust blows my tears

    Into the daisies of the jetty where I wait

    For you continuously; is it true

    What they say, that you no longer love

    Me? I will wait here, still. I will not move.

  • Songs That Remind Us of Factories

    Songs That Remind Us of Factories

    $18.95

    The poems in Songs that Remind Us of Factories explore how weremain connected: to the world outside, to our ideas of home, toeach other, and to ourselves. In their searching, these magpie poemsstrike a balance between wound language and quiet meditation,the arched-brow wisecrack and the emotionally frank gesture. Theresult is an honest and playful sequence of poems that plumb ourmyriad reactions when small wildernesses occasionally come inside.The book’s final section asks whether we may not be tooconnected. They mine a world of rapid technological and commercialgrowth for its poetic potential, focusing on work in call centres,postmodern spaces where the walls of dying suburban malls havebeen repurposed with “fishnets of fibre-op” and “chain gangs ofchopped desktop/Dells”; where “you’re licked/ before the call comeskicking in.”This is a poetry that refuses to stagnate in one mode, wearingall manner of poetic hats while always avoiding drab lyrical sentiment.With a jumpy musicality and a taut line, these poems wanderfar, zeroing in on moments of daily connection while also openingwider their frame of reference to explore the often fractured linkswe have to family and loss, science and religion, the idealized ruraland the newly urban.

  • Songs Upon the Rivers

    Songs Upon the Rivers

    $34.95

    Before the Davie Crockets, the Daniel Boones and Jim Bridgers, the French had pushed far west and north establishing trade and kin networks across the continent. They founded settlements that would become great cities such as Detroit, Saint Louis, and New Orleans, but their history has been largely buried or relegated to local lore or confined to Quebec. In this seminal work, Foxcurran, Bouchard, and Malette scrutinize primary sources and uncover the alliances between early French settlers and voyagers and the indigenous nations.

  • Sonia

    Sonia

    $24.95

    After Sonia Cornwall’s father died in 1939, her mother inherited the Onward Ranch and a huge debt. To make the ranch viable, a nineteen-year-old Sonia traded paintbrush for pitchfork, labouring alongside the male ranch hands. But after marrying Hugh Cornwall in 1947, Sonia had time for painting once again. She learned techniques from some of Canada’s most celebrated artists who came to visit the Onward Ranch, and later her home at the Jones Lake Ranch, such as Peter Aspell, Molly Bobak, Jack Hardman, Herbert Siebner, Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson, Joe Plaskett, Cliff Robinson and Zeljko Kujundic. Tales from renowned Cariboo Chilcotin personalities bring Sonia’s story to life: old-timer Willie Crosina recalls pitchforking hay to seven hundred head of cattle in sixty below Fahrenheit, and filmmaker Peter Elkington describes the now-defunct home veterinary procedures practised by Sonia’s husband, Hugh. Independent and driven, Sonia developed a distinct style that captured the nuances of the rugged interior in oils, mixed media, pastels and watercolours, doing for British Columbia’s Central Interior what Emily Carr did for the Coast. The Honourable Judith Guichon, Lieutenant-Governor of BC, describes Sonia’s paintings as “very real, warm, alive.” Sonia Cornwall died in 2006, but her paintings continue her important legacy of connecting us to rural life and the beauty of simple and unexpected places.

  • Sonja & Carl

    Sonja & Carl

    $19.95

    Sonja Danychuk, a serious and introverted student with dirt-poor immigrant parents, takes pride in her intellectual and academic achievements—essential skills to help her survive and eventually leave small-town Davenport in Northern Ontario. When her father is cut down by a fatal heart attack, Sonja must find a way to pay for university, so she agrees to tutor Carl Helbig, her high school’s hockey star and NHL hopeful, despite her strong aversion to his jock-like persona.

    Carl graduates and heads toward becoming Rookie of the Year for the Boston Bruins, but concussion-prone, he finds himself in the brain trauma unit of the Toronto General. He and Sonja are once again drawn together, but this time the risks are life-threatening. Sonja is faced with a decision that will impact both her and Carl, and their uncertain future.

  • Sonnets from a Cell

    Sonnets from a Cell

    $22.95

    *Winner 2024 Raymond Souster Award* Longlisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award* Winner 2023 Alcuin Award* Poems for and about the incarcerated.

    Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters’ debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters’ own days “caught between the past and nothing” and to the structures that sentence so many “to lose.” Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace.

    Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.

  • Sons and Fathers

    Sons and Fathers

    $18.95

    When an early-morning phone call from a former childhood friend threatens to derail the political fortunes of a popular PM, his director of communications must dig deep into the past to salvage the present. Part political and literary coming-of-age story, part lyrical meditation on friendship, family, and mortality, Sons and Fathers traces the fortunes of three men who develop their respective ability for manipulating words and people in the long shadows cast by their accomplished fathers. Filled with insights about the nature of politics, journalism, and fatherhood, this semi-autobiographical first novel established Daniel Goodwin as a unique voice in Canadian literature.

  • Sooner

    Sooner

    $16.95

    Eschewing prevailing poetic fashion, Sooner reimagines poetry as a kind of cubist fascination, at times even a fascination with fascination itself.

    In Sooner, Christakos’s most tender, lucent book to date, we find the delusory spiral reasoning of artistic schools; the fluid politic of desire, gender and domesticity; the recurrent trials of revulsion and arousal – all shined through Christakos’s unique prismatic style to emerge in new, striking and often dissonant syntaxes.

    This is the music of a keenly tuned mind listening to all of its stations at once, a poetry of menace and possibility, clear sight and ambiguity, love and darkness, jealousy and light. If to know is to feel precisely, as another poet once suggested, Christakos makes it clear the opposite may be just as true, and that the devil is still in the details: You don’t know what you think or feel. You only think and feel you know, and wave from the window…

    Praise for Christakos’s last book, Excessive Love Prostheses:

    ‘[It] begs the question, Is Margaret Christakos the love child of David Cronenberg and the queen of the confessional poets, Sharon Olds? … Much of this writing shocks for its originality.’

    Georgia Straight

    ‘Beautifully restrained poetry shot through with sardonic humour and rendered even more interesting by Christakos’s seriously playful manipulations of language.’

    Calgary Herald

  • Sophrosyne

    Sophrosyne

    $20.00

    Because fear can transform into confidence, recklessness, the kind of power you can’t imagine until you’re inside it. And then, once you’ve felt it, you can’t feel alive when it’s gone. Sophrosyne. You understood this feeling. I know you did, though you never said it. I saw it, instead, on your face when you danced.

    Sophrosyne is one of only four virtues identified by Socrates – four traits which, if lived deeply, define who we are as human beings. But sophrosyne is a concept our culture has long forgotten. “”Self-restraint,’ ‘self-control,’ ‘modesty,’ ‘temperance’ – none of these terms expresses the essence of the word.

    In this provocative new novel about desire and restraint in a digital age by acclaimed author Marianne Apostolides, 21-year-old Alex is consumed by the elusive problem of sophrosyne for reasons he cannot share with others. While Alex’s philosophy professor believes studying it will help shed light on the malaise of our era, Alex hopes it will release him from his darkly disturbing relationship with his mother. As he attempts to uncover his mother’s truth, Alex is drawn inside an amorphous, indefinable undercurrent of love and violation. Only through his lover, Meiko, does Alex open into a new understanding of sophrosyne, with all its implications.

    Reminiscent of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Sophrosyne asks readers to surrender themselves to the book’s logic and language. Infused with a sensuality balanced by its intellect, Sophrosyne reads like “the music’s rhythm… soft like wax and supple, warm,” pulsing through your veins.