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All Books in this Collection
Showing 657–672 of 9248 results
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Any Other Woman
$19.95In the early twentieth century, Andrew Zak proposes to Rosalia Patala in a letter. New to North America from Slovakia, Rosalia boards a train from New York to Crowsnest Pass, AB, where she marries a man she knows only through the written word. They bear and lose their first child, fear the dangers of hazardous coal mines, and raise a family of four children on their homestead.
But this story contains holes, and Monica Kidd, a journalist and great-granddaughter to Andrew and Rosalia, is compelled by them. In prose as beautiful as her poetry, Kidd describes her life-altering journey toward uncovering the mysteries of her family’s past. Did Andrew and Rosalia court? Why did they each leave Slovakia? Years later, in present day Canada, Monica travels from her home in Newfoundland back to Alberta and then Slovakia, where she trails the ghost of Rosalia in search of why she, and the thousands of women like her, launched themselves into the vast unknown of becoming frontier wives.
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Any Waking Morning
$18.95The poems in Any Waking Morning probe deeply into love, loss, and life’s darker dilemmas. They seek pathways and meaning, interrogate endings and life changes, and tap the creative energy engendered through art’s ekphrastic cycles. While foregrounding the influence of contemporary ideas on the author’s poetic explorations, the collection returns inevitably to images, insights and experiences from the Caribbean and the author’s early life. Unfolding in four sections: “The Way Light Falls,” “Unmasked,” “Beyond Convergence,” and “Fragments and Heartwood,” Soutar-Hynes’ images are vividly pictorial.
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Anything but a Still Life
$35.00Finalist, Ottawa Book Award (English Non-Fiction)
A Globe and Mail’s Spring Book Preview SelectionMolly Lamb and Bruno Bobak shot to prominence as war artists during the Second World War. Marrying shortly after the end of the war, they moved first to Vancouver and then, in 1960, to Fredericton, where they settled permanently. Molly’s paintings were vibrant and colourful, featuring dynamic crowd scenes and wildflowers that seem to wave on the page. In contrast, Bruno painted near-abstract cityscapes, stunning landscapes, and distorted bodies wracked with inner torment, work that is unique in Canadian art.
In this book, acclaimed author Nathan M. Greenfield brings to light the private and public lives of two of the most important figures in 20th century Canadian art. Greenfield combines archival research into Molly’s diaries and letters with dozens of full-colour reproductions of their work, archival photographs, interviews with friends and contemporaries, and an analysis of paintings by both artists. The result is an intimate portrait of the art and lives of Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak: their critical acclaim, commercial success, and a turbulent marriage that lasted over fifty years.
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Anything But Hank
$19.95In Anything but Hank! Lebowitz and Wells combine the whimsical humour of Lewis Carroll with the adventure-narrative balladeering of Robert Service to spin an unforgettable tale of a baby–and a pig!–in search of a name. Their quest takes them from the city to the mountains, as they seek an audience with the wizard and his baby-naming Mexican beaded lizard. The story, accompanied by the gorgeously lush paintings of Orchard, is a delight for readers of all ages.
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Anything but the Moon
$17.95George Sipos is acutely aware that life, in its strangeness and beauty, will always elude whatever he can say about it. Exploring northern British Columbia, the mountains, harsh winters and human isolation, the tension between the humble recognition that words are inadequate and the insistent urge to capture what he sees and feels gives Anything but the Moon its blend of quiet reverence and meditative urgency.
Anything but the Moon is George Sipos’s first collection, but his poetry is richly mature. Exploring how alien nature can feel and yet how familiar it is as well, Sipos writes lush lyric poems about driving his truck or listening to the sounds of a henhouse, reflecting upon how everyday experiences slip through our fingers, never to be fully understood or completely articulated.
Revealing a doubleness of sight, Sipos shows a fine-grained attention to the sensuous details of what he sees and experiences, yet simultaneously maintains a broader, philosophical view of the mysterious whole. Even as he celebrates place and the difficulties and preciousness of human relationships, he portrays the sense of something vanishing. The result is a collection of highly reverent and contemplative poems which demand that readers slow down, look and think.
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Anywhere but Here
$16.95Anywhere but Here is an external representation of the inner turmoil of exile. Using magic realism tropes, it follows a family on a journey back toward Chile from Canada. They drive in a convertible along the desert border between the U.S. and Mexico, each with different emotions about the North they are leaving and the South they are approaching, reversing their refugee flight, refusing the state of exile. The father and his two young daughters encounter an increasingly fantastic range of characters. They are encircled by past, present, and future in a collective vision that takes them, and the audience, into the compelling experiences of people crossing and guarding the border. Threaded through the external journey is the internal search for home in an unstable world. With the arrival of the mother of the family, they confront the costs of exile and the true nature of home.
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Aphelia
$18.95Capturing the emblematic ennui of a brooding Montréalaise, a millennial novel by one of Quebec’s brightest young feminists.
Montreal is in the grips of one of its summer heat waves, when searing temperatures have a way of making its residents cast aside their better judgment. A young twenty-something works the night shift at a call center, her only company the disembodied voices of the customers who call in to complain. She spends her night off drinking with her friend Louis at “their” bar, while her successful boyfriend sleeps. His career allows her the pleasures of his spacious, modern condo, a new existence. She likes feeling undefined, still up for grabs, even as the middle-class trappings of her relationship threaten to shape her.
In the stifling humidity of such surroundings, her life is turned upside down when she grows obsessed with Mia, a beautiful woman she meets one night at the bar. Then there’s the woman who’s gone missing, whose face is constantly on screens across the city. How can she stem the drift away from her relationship, she worries, when her former lover B., who was both violent and magnetic, is always in her thoughts?
All these orbits are set to collide, as the heat wave shows no sign of breaking and emotions reach record highs.
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Aphelion
$14.95Aphelion is about distances, simultaneously belonging to two countries but being rooted in neither. In her first collection, poet Jenna Butler fluently explores this rift, sounding out the meaning of home from the perspective of a British-born Canadian. Written in experimental free verse and containing a selection of anti ghazals, Aphelion’s subject matter, physical appearance on the page, and the way it is read aloud all reflect these elemental distances.
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Apocalypse Child
$24.95Carly Butler was a lively, imaginative child being raised by her strong and independent mom, DJ, in 1990s Montana. They were a dynamic duo, working on housing projects and bringing music to the local church. Then, a whisper of a threatened future began to grow louder: Y2K was coming.
Believing every conspiracy theory and Evangelical Christian prediction they encountered to be true, DJ and a young, impressionable Carly set out on a lonely path. Taught to prepare for the worst and to fear her girlhood dreams as warnings from God, Carly and her mother flee to the Canadian wilderness, leaving behind Barbies and Nintendo for chopping wood and shooting empty bottles for target practice. They connected with other Evangelical Christians preparing for doomsday, but were often stranded alone, without electricity, for weeks at a time as the winter—and the apocalypse—approached.
But what happens when the world doesn’t end, after all?
Apocalypse Child is a startling memoir about growing up in a tumultuous home, coming of age in isolation, and trying to figure out how to connect as an adult when your education has consisted of conspiracy theories, survivalist measures, and religious doctrine. From doomsday preparation and ideologies of purity and paranoia to motherhood and explorations of a burgeoning queer, Mexican-Indigenous identity, Carly Butler takes us on a gripping journey of resilience, self-discovery, and searching for community.
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Apocalypse of Morgan Turner, The
$19.95Morgan Turner’s grief over her sister’s brutal murder has become a rut, an everyday horror she is caught in along with her estranged parents and chilly older brother. In search of a way out, she delves the depths of a factory abattoir, classic horror cinema, and the Canadian criminal justice system, as it tries her sister’s killer and former lover, who is arguing that he is “Not Criminally Responsible” for his actions because of mental illness. Whatever the verdict, Morgan — with the help of her Chinese immigrant coworkers, a do-gooder, and a lovelorn schizophrenia patient — uncovers her own way to move on.
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Apocalypse One Hundred
$17.00Welcome to the Apocolypse! and it has arrived, not with a bang, but with the white noise hum of tabloid news and and the promise of the internet.Richard Scarsbrooks Apocalypse One Hundred strips back the veneer of our screen filled lives to expose every nip and tuck.Each one hundred word poem from the Apocalypse peeks over the event horizon to see the noise and distraction that bind us to this world, hemming in thought and imagination.To learn more . . . just click here!
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Apocrypha
$24.95Apocrypha, a shaped collection of writing by Stan Dragland produced over two decades, is a passionate meditation on the meeting of life and literature, and a text of rumination, invention, and rhapsody. Dragland looks at the texts of strangers and colleagues, including Michael Ondaatje, Roy Kiyooka, Robert Kroetsch, Fred Wah, Matt Cohen, Agnes Walsh, and others, weaving together personal reminiscences with theoretical and critical looks at their work.
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Apollinaire’s Speech to the War Medic
$18.00Apollinaire’s Speech to the War Medic is to Canadian poetry what Francis Ponge’s steaming brioches are to Parisian cobblestone. In other words, this is a book that revels in the that-which-gets-left-behind and is just plain old fascinated with the plop of things. Metaphor is plundered as a doorway into the attic of the basement of objects and animals and phenomena, and inside you’ll find poem-studies about hammers, tigers, grass, fire, cat piss, killing floors and many other oh my’s. You’ll also find several poems about the works and days of artsy folk like Samuel Beckett, Cy Twombly, Gertrude Stein, Kathe Kollwitz, Louise Bourgeois, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, and John Cage. Dear Reader, you’ll even find to your ev.er.la.sting enjoyment a pantoum about your keyboard and a sestina about your (sorry!) George Bush. You’ll also see a lyric flashing devil horns. What else? Why, a poem about the sea, a poem about a moose, a poem about a frying pan. Apollinaire’s Speech to the War Medic is object-stew—please eat it up, yum.
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apologetic
$17.00Capturing microscopic moments in time and nature, Carla Funk’s poems bring the world to a momentary standstill. Funk translates vivid description and feeling into her poems, both testing and playing with traditional poetic form. Her writing reflects the natural world and tells the story of life’s experiences. Apologetic’s poems experiment with expressing thoughts and emotions in formal poetic traditions, confining words to metrical lines or rhyme schemes. Many deal with the natural world, moments in time spent outdoors, in gardens, and capturing fleeting impressions in the human experience. Playing with form and content, Funk evokes the idea of a flesh-and-bones body (the poetic structure) carrying a spiritual entity (the poem’s meaning). “Highway 16 Sonnet” uses the traditional sonnet form to capture a gruesome snapshot of roadkill as a harsh reality of travel on a Canadian highway. “Ring Around the Moon” describes in 5 verses of four lines each, the experience of taking out the garbage late at night and observing the beautiful night sky, something hallowed above the stench of waste.
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Apologetic for Joy
$17.95Apologetic for Joy is a lush collection from a unique new voice whose palette of subject matter ranges from artistic anatomy to dislocation. Hiemstra-van der Horst’s poems reveal a sensual awareness and an imaginative escape into intricately woven poetic worlds, rich in sensual detail and metaphor. Her gentler sketches of quotidian moments peel away to reveal an artist and poet whose careful observations of the world undertake the difficult translation to page and canvas.
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Apostrophe
$19.95you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome / you are a man / you are a little confused / you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome …
“Apostrophe” is:
a) a figure of speech in which a person, an abstract quality or a nonexistent entity is addressed as though present
b) a poem written in 1993 in which every sentence is an apostrophe
c) a program — apostropheengine.ca — based on the 1993 poem that hijacks search engines in order to extend the poem infinitely
d) a book of poetry written using the websiteThe answer: e) all of the above.
Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry’s Apostrophe contains all of these things, except the search engine (but you can visit that any time you like). Each line from the original poem has become the title of a new poem generated by the program’s metonymic romp through the World Wide Web. Phrases rub against each other promiscuously; poems and readers alike come to their own conclusions. The results are by turns poignant, banal, offensive and hilarious, but always surprising and always unaffected. In other words, everything a book of contemporary poetry should be, and then some.
Poet and scholar Charles Bernstein has suggested that Apostrophe may be related to Freud’s notion of the uncanny, a somnambulistic drift that appears aimless yet somehow always returns to “you.” Apostrophe is an entirely new kind of poetry: neither stable nor unstable, sections come and go, but the overall shape of the poem remains vaguely familiar, like a trick of memory.