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  • Suicide Psalms

    Suicide Psalms

    $15.00

    ‘Suicide Psalms’ is both hymn and visceral scream-of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off of the ledge. Even though the media has recognized suicide as an epidemic, it is still not “talked” about outside of grief management and support groups. The subject remains taboo, and those left behind face a legacy of silence, shame and guilt. The poems in the first section of the book “Suicide Notes” attempt to answer the question “why”? Their density of language, slippage of syntax, sound play, repetition, and visceral imagery engender both empathy and relief, as each poem bears witness and pays homage. The work also addresses a larger collective malaise: the disintegration of society and “self,” the loss of innocence and exploitation of youth, and the hopelessness and despair that smoulders under the veneer ofcorporate greed, rabid consumerism, and the resultant addictions, aberrations and violence.

    “And so it is that those friends who have lived close to suicide become the prophets who might lead us through the gathering darkness of our despairing ecocidal age-into more honourable, tender, sustainable ways of living together on this groaning, delicate, crying earth. ‘That something better rises out of the ashes.’ This is Rowley at her heart stammering, howling, apocalyptic, playful, musical best.”- Di Brandt

    “The poems of Mari-Lou Rowley’s ‘Suicide Psalms’ are deft, double-edged, ‘kill sites bedded with violets,’ songs of violent beauty. Scalene: the constantly shifting, sharpening edges and angles (no two sides ever the same) of ‘Suicide Psalms” three movements balance, ultimately, in a perfect complex structure. Dissonant; harmonic. Rowley’s poetry, as always, a snapping, synaptical singing, stinging electric. In the necessary, unpredictable climate of ‘Suicide Psalms’, ‘the windfingers/all possible points of entry/conclusions/ways out.’”- Sylvia Legris

  • Suitable Precautions

    Suitable Precautions

    $19.95

    Suitable Precautions

  • Suliewey

    Suliewey

    $16.95

    Award recognition for My Indian

    ***2022 ATLANTIC BOOK AWARDS: APMA BEST ATLANTIC-PUBLISHED BOOK AWARD – SHORTLIST***

    ***2022 BMO WINTERSET AWARD – LONGLIST***

    ***2022-2023 HACKMATACK AWARD: ENGLISH FICTION – SHORTLIST***

    ***2022 IPPY AWARDS: MULTICULTURAL FICTION: JUV/YA – SILVER***

    Suliewey: The Sequel to My Indian continues the story of Mi’kmaw guide Sylvester Joe, whose traditional name is Suliewey, as he seeks out the last remaining Beothuk community.

    In My Indian, Sylvester was hired by William Cormack in 1822 to guide him across Newfoundland in search of Beothuk encampments. In fact, he followed the advice of his Elders and guided Cormack away from the Beothuk.

    In this sequel, having parted ways with Cormack at St. George’s Bay, Sylvester decides to go out on his own in search of the winter camp of the last of the remaining Beothuk.

    Written as fiction by two Mi’kmaw authors, Suliewey: The Sequel to My Indian supports Mi’kmaw oral history of friendly relationships with the Beothuk.

    The novel reclaims the settler narrative that the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq of Newfoundland were enemies and represents an existing kinship between the Mi’kmaq and the Beothuk.

    Rich in oral history, the descriptions of traditional ceremonies and sacred medicines, the use of Mi’kmaw language, and the teachings of two-spirit place readers on the land and embed them in the strong relationships described throughout the book.

  • Sum

    Sum

    $18.95

    Sum

  • Summer in Furnished Rooms

    Summer in Furnished Rooms

    $20.00

    Summer in Furnished Rooms reflects on the passage of time and breathes new life into people and places that disappeared long ago. From Gregorio Fuentes, skipper on Ernest Hemingway’s boat and inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea, to toucans and paradise tanagers undulating in waves of colour on a Colombian wildlife preserve, to the old red-brick Empire Theatre on Ogilvy Street and the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, showing there in ’64, Marc Plourde invokes a life’s experience in resonant narrative verse.

  • Summer of My Amazing Luck

    Summer of My Amazing Luck

    $14.95

    Summer of My Amazing Luck: The Play is the story of Lucy and Lish, two single mothers who live in the Winnipeg housing project, Have-a-Life. When her mother was murdered, Lucy “didn?t grieve properly,” and tried to fill her emptiness with sexual encounters. When she became pregnant, she couldn?t really say who the father of her child was. Now Lucy and her infant son Dill are in Have-a-Life, trying to survive in the welfare system. Her best friend Lish has her own troubles. She pines for Gotcha, the street performer who stole her heart along with her wallet. So, Lucy decides to bring Gotcha back in a series of postcards. But maybe Lucy?s made it too real. When Lish gets a postcard telling her Gotcha is heading to Denver, she decides they have to find him. They set out in a borrowed, old, beat-up van, full of toys and kids. With all the humour, compassion, and intelligence of Miriam Toews? novel, this inventive stage adaptation takes audiences on a hilarious and heartbreaking journey as Lucy discovers that this may be the summer when everything changes.

  • Summer of The Dancing Bear

    Summer of The Dancing Bear

    $20.00

    Summer of the Dancing Bear is a historical novel about the “rite of passage”of 14-year-old Kata befriended by a gypsy clan. The novel explores Kata’s search for a viable identity, acceptance of death, and understanding of love, through her journey of solving the mystery of the disappearance of a two-year-old girl that occurred when Kata was eight years old. The story evolves within a village community polarized by racial intolerance between the villagers and the gypsies, where she grows up under the tutelage of her grandmother. It is set in 1960s Yugoslavia, still reeling from the horrors of the Second World War.

  • Summer Point

    Summer Point

    $16.95

    When Sarah’s parents decide to spend a weekend at her grandmother’s cottage on Northumberland Strait in New Brunswick, Sarah reluctantly tags along. She has no idea that the people she meets and the nature she absorbs this weekend will change the rest of her life. It is only years later, on a return visit with a new lover, that she realizes the power of place. Summer Point is a compelling tale of memory, childhood and home.

  • Summer Sport: Poems

    Summer Sport: Poems

    $17.00

  • Summerland

    Summerland

    $34.95

    Summerland completes the publication project Talonbooks began in 1990, with the publication of The Athabasca Ryga, a collection of Ryga’s early writings from his Alberta years until 1963. The 1960s, after the Rygas moved to Summerland, British Columbia, were a period of growing artistic strength and commercial success for Ryga, culminating the creative triumph of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. The largely unpublished writings included in Summerland show him return, after the success of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, to the large, difficult political and social questions which had inspired him from the earliest days of his long intellectual journey of self-discovery.

  • Summers in St. Andrews

    Summers in St. Andrews

    $24.95

    Summertime in late 19th-century St. Andrews was more than a vacation by the sea, it was a lifestyle. “Discovered” by a wealthy few who felt the need for a seaside retreat, the town soon became a haven for the elite seeking respite from the heat of the sweltering cities throughout North America. Luxurious hotels such as the Algonquin, clean air and outstanding resort facilities attracted minor and major nobility, stars of stage and screen, and politicians such as the Fathers of Confederation Sir Leonard Tilly and Sir Charles Tupper, who were joined by the glitterati and scions of “old money” from Canada, the United States and beyond.

    Originally published as No Hay Fever and a Railway in 1989, this new edition of Willa Walker’s classic volume draws upon archival records and the author’s own memories as she lovingly recalls the exceptional little town and its permanent and summertime residents.

    With an eye for detail, she describes many of the cottages and homes and the summer society that was established at this quaint seaside community. Updated by her sons Giles, David and Julian, this new volume includes all of Mrs. Walker’s original stories, including delightful tales about some of the eccentricities of the summer residents as well as up-to-date information on many of the elegant summer homes.

  • Summers in Supino

    Summers in Supino

    $17.95

    Every summer Maria and her husband, Bob, went to their little house in the Italian village of Supino, and every year it was a new adventure. Only in Supino would you find a pizzeria in a sheep pasture, a seafood restaurant hidden in the woods, or an electrical cord draped from one balcony to the next so neighbours could share power. In Supino, they celebrate the first figs of the season; host watermelon, azalea, and artichoke festivals; and take pleasure in the magical view of the stars in the summer sky.

    Written with humour and heart, Summers in Supino is Maria Coletta McLean’s memoir of these summers with Bob, as she becomes accustomed to the town her father grew up in and the peculiarities of the people who live there. Cousin Guido argues with their neighbour over who can plant a grapevine and therefore reap the harvest. Villagers debate whether one neighbour can trade the installation of some terra cotta tiles and the use of a pizza oven (he has yet to build) for the land beneath Bob and Maria’s patio. And as Maria comes to understand her connection to this wonderful place, Bob proposes they open a coffee bar on the piazza.

    Full of wonderfully vivid stories of Italy, Summers in Supino also explores loss, grief, and the restorative power of community.

  • Summertime Swamp Love

    Summertime Swamp Love

    $18.95

    In an earlier collection, ?An Auto-erotic History of Swings,? Patricia Young explored the sensual/sexual realms of humanity. With this new collection, she shifts her creative attention to the mating habits of animals, birds, fish and insects. With a sense of awe and bemusement, the poems in this collection address, embody and sometimes become the animals through which they speak. Each animal is a mystery; each poem expands on the strangeness of the mystery. Merging scientific evidence with speculative love stories, the poems are playful, insightful and ripe with reflections of our own animal selves. Young plays unabashedly with her readers’ erotic imaginations to hilarious and poignant effect. Muscular, exotic, dense, rich and elastic ? these poems are miniature, wildlife docudramas.

  • Sun of a Distant Land

    Sun of a Distant Land

    $19.95

    Twelve-year-old Souleye has just immigrated to Montreal from Senegal with his family. He wants to become “from here” as quickly as possible, but Canada and Senegal prove to be two completely different worlds, and their new lives don’t unfold as planned. Beyond the daily grind of finding an apartment, schools, and jobs, young Souleye (whose only friend renames him “Soleil” – Sun) has to contend with what it means to be black in a predominantly white society, a foreigner among the locals. And that’s all before his father’s mind begins to fall apart…

    Poignantly translated from the French by Claire Holden Rothman, David Bouchet’s Sun of a Distant Land is by turns charming and tragic, an epic contemporary vision of what it means to be uprooted, and what it takes to plant roots in a new land.

  • Sundog Season

    Sundog Season

    $19.95

    Co-Winner of the 2006 Ottawa Book Award for English fiction, whose jury wrote: “The Sundog Season is a nuanced portrayal of small-town life, seen through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a northern Ontario mining town. This part coming-of-age, part mystery novel is witty and wise, packed full of memorable characters and original situations, all beautifully written.”This first novel tells the story of a boy whose life changes when a mysterious, menacing new police sergeant arrives in town. Setting out to discover the taciturn officer’s secrets, the young narrator must sift through gossip, fortune telling, and signs in the sky. “The writing,” W.P. Kinsella said in Books in Canada, “is exceptional, clear, straightforward, allowing us to see and hear the characters as if they were in the room.” He also praised the novel’s “subtle but wonderful plot twists.”The Sundog Season drew wide critical acclaim for its wintry images of Northern Ontario and its vivid characters. “Remarkable.” The Gazette (Montreal). “Adept.” The Globe and Mail. “Extraordinarily skillful.” The Chronicle-Journal (Thunder Bay). “A joy to read.” The Ottawa Citizen.The Sundog Season’s particular appeal for young adult readers was highlighted when it was short-listed for the Ontario Library Association’s White Pine Award. And for its chapters that evoke the atmosphere of a small-town Canadian arena, Dave Bidini, author of The Best Game You Can Name, cited The Sundog Season in The Globe and Mail as being among the finest hockey books.

  • Sundre

    Sundre

    $16.95

    An unsettling secret joins husband and wife as they sift through layers of recollection in a quest to find comfort, philosophical acceptance, and ultimately forgiveness.Set on a family farm in Sundre, Alberta during the late 1960s, at a time of transition when farming was shifting away from tradition, Sundre is a haunting meditation on the limits of love and mercy, on the natural and the unnatural.Told in a tone that is as dignified as it is unsettling, Sundre builds to a foreboding and fundamental revelation in a mood reminiscent of Sam Shepard’s best drama. Sundre is an homage to a way of life bygone and to lasting hard-earned truths.