A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 6849–6864 of 9311 results
-
Tenure
$21.95Saved from certain death on the Whistler-Vancouver highway after his luxury car malfunctions, Mark Morata feels honour-bound to reward his rescuer, Geoff Pybus, with a token of his undying gratitude. Geoff, a frustratingly humble university professor, happy with his family’s lot in life, only wants the impossible: for his modest, straightforward wife to get tenure at her university.
Luckily, Mark is a man for whom impossible is just another word. As a sophisticated importer-exporter of certain recreational substances (“drug lord” is such a cliché), Mark gets to work on the academic world with the same relentless nature that helped him climb to the top of the cartel. However, the hallowed campus halls reveal an environment that is vicious and corrupt beyond anything he has ever encountered in the drug business…
-
Terra Incognita
$18.95Titled after the Latin term for “unknown land”–a cartographical expression referring to regions that have not yet been mapped or documented–Terra Incognita is a collection of poems that creatively explores various racial discourses and interracial crossings buried in history’s grand narratives. Set against the similarities as well as incongruities of the Canadian/American backdrop of race relations, Terra Incognita explores the cultural memory and legacy of those whose histories have been the site of erasure, and who have thus–riffing on the Heraclitus’s dictum that “geography is fate”–been forced to redraw themselves into the texts of history. Finally, Terra Incognita is a collection that delves into the malleable borders of identity and questions what it means to move physically and spiritually, for our bodies to arrive and depart, our souls to relocate and change their scope.
-
Terra Magna:
$59.95It took JC Roy years of painstaking dedication and travel to paint a scene from every town on the island of Newfoundland. And after seeing that grand vision made available to all in Fluctuat Nec Mergitur: JC Roy’s Newfoundland, Roy headed north to finish the second half of his magnum opus. With Roy’s singular brushwork, palette, and vision displayed in gorgeously rendered full-colour reproductions, and text in English, French, Innuaimun, and Inuttitut, Terra Magna is a magnetic tribute to the cultures and landscapes of The Big Land. Elegantly designed and remarkably affordable, this vibrant art book completes an imaginative project like no other and stands as an entirely unique testament to one artist’s exhaustive and passionate commitment to a place.
-
Terrarium
$19.95Shortlisted, Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Raw, confessional, and often messy, Terrarium continues Matthew Walsh’s exploration of Queer identity and desire against the lonely highs and lows of depression and addiction.
In this new collection, Walsh begins where their debut collection, These are not the potatoes of my youth, left off. Writing in their trademark conversational style, Walsh wanders from Toronto parkettes “with remnants of magnolia leaves” to California, “a long/black cocktail dress the night lights/amethyst and citrine against the arm/muscle of the sea,” their voice intimate and exposed, a whisper between friends or lovers.
And then, when they ruminate on influences and themes as diverse as the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Gwendolyn MacEwen, the vagaries of Instagram, and the reimagination of Miss Havisham in a Toronto bathhouse, they offer readers the opportunity to think deeply or laugh loudly, reaching out to close the gap between us.
-
Test Piece
$22.95FINALIST FOR THE 2023 DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE
Ways of Seeing meets Mary Ruefle in these visual-art-inflected poems
Though they started from Sheryda Warrener’s impulse to see herself more clearly, the poems in Test Piece ended up becoming more expansive meditations on seeing and vision. They engage with the process and practice of art-making, and specifically with abstract minimalist works like those by Eva Hesse, Anne Truitt, Ruth Asawa, and Agnes Martin.
Not-seeing/not-knowing is a motif, as is weave, grid, pattern, rhythm of interiors, domestic life. These poems are informed by collage, by the act of bringing images and lines together. With their echoes and reverberations (hand, mirror, body, clear, form, face), a greater complexity is revealed.
“In conversation with visual art, mirrors, and the traces of self we assemble through encounter, Sheryda Warrener’s Test Piece holds an expansive place to dwell with the phenomenological. Interacting with event and object, reflection and parataxis, the writing asks us to consider contingent spaces and the matter of matter and meaning making. The poems adhere as arrangement, as a consideration of relationality. ‘What does she whimper in the dog’s ear? / How earthly we behave, believing we’re alone.’” – Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
“Sheryda Warrener’s newest poetry collection unspools as a complex weave of repeated motifs, ritualistic gestures, and deeply embodied observations. I’m especially struck by the influence of twentieth-century women artists within the collection: meditations on Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, and Sherrie Levine’s works structure much of Test Piece. Palimpsests of photographed interiors, where living and writing collide lyrically and randomly, combine with floating textual cut-ups of variegating transparency. This concretizes, perhaps, how the poems bloom forth from experimental assemblage: ‘her body holds/the long blue sentence of it…’” – Marina Roy, artist and author of Queuejumping
-
Testament
$20.00On June 6, 2012, Vickie Gendreau was diagnosed with a brain tumour. In between treatments, between hospital stays and her “room of her own,” she wrote Testament, an autofictional novel in which she imagines her death and at the same time, bequeaths to her friends and family both the fragmented story of her last year and the stories of the loved ones who keep her memory alive, in language as raw and flamboyant as she was.
In the teasing and passionate voice of a twenty-three-year-old writer, inspired as much by literature as by YouTube and underground music, Gendreau’s sense of image, her relentless self-deprecation, and the true emotion in every sentence add up to an uncompromising work that reflects the life of a young woman who lived without inhibitions, for whom literature meant everything right up until the end.
In this way, Testament (translated by talented writer and translator Aimee Wall), inverts the elegiac, “grief memoir” form and plays with the notion of a last testament, thereby beating any would-be eulogists to the punch.
-
Texas
$18.95A diplomat is captured by supposed insurgents and is waiting in a room for his execution. Texas is a provocative story of death against the backdrop of ugly and uncompromising politics. It is also a meditation on empire, imperialism and American hegemony. The writing borrows heavily from philosophy and poetry. A book full of unique visions, written by a writer who has an ear for cadence.
-
Text and Context
$22.95A handbook for script work and directing in the theatre, Text and Context: The Operative Word is essential reading for post-secondary students and young directors in the theatre, as well as an effective resource for other disciplines, including actors, designers, and production personnel. Part 1: Text describes the method of text investigation that Greenblatt has developed and employed over his four-and-a- half decade career, including a variety of exercises. It is a highly pragmatic and non-academic approach to discovering the essence of a script in order to reveal its potential for interesting and unique interpretations. Part 2: Context explores the various ideas, philosophies and precepts Greenblatt uses when directing for the stage, following the order and rhythm of most rehearsal processes. It challenges misconceptions about the position of the director, and debunks traditional assumptions that are harmful to a truly creative and inclusive process. Part 3: New Text examines three genres of theatrical works: Theatre for Young Audiences, New Play Development, and Devised Work, which utilize the principles of text analysis and directing found in the first two parts.
Sprinkled with personal anecdotes, Text and Context: The Operative Word offers theatre practitioners techniques for communication and artistic collaboration, reimagines traditional hierarchical structures, and provides tools to create healthy, truly creative, highly productive, and more equitable processes of theatrical practice.
-
Text Me
$19.95An English-Italian bilingual collection of love poems, Text Me expresses through language and metaphor the many ways to say “I love you.” Calabrò’s poems often evolve from the experiences of the body: from sensual impressions, “Your cheek on my weary shoulder / the day pales, your lips pale / up, up, one more wing-beat / till we run out of oxygen”; to image, “In cold blood / the ice contrail of a Phantom jet /stabs the blue. / Like a blade in honey / you plunge your gaze into my heart”; to memory , “We met and I kissed you / already consumed by the need to betray you.” Although rooted in Calabrò’s Mediterranean, these poems have a universality which give voice to our common burden of love, sorrow and guilt.
-
Text Messages
$22.00Text Messages is the first multi-genre collection by Montreal-based Iraqi hip-hop artist, activist, and professor Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman.
Composed entirely on a smartphone during air travel and married to artwork from comrades, Narcy’s writing speaks of the existential crises experienced by diasporic children of war before and during imperialism in the age of the Internet. Narcy’s verses span the space between hip-hop and manifesto, portraying a crumbling, end-stage capitalist society, visions for a new reality, and the myth of multiculturalism in post-9/11 North America. The wordsmith hollows and transmogrifies the grotesque excess of the West by juxtaposing McLife with images of death, destruction, and trauma in the East.
From the depths of apathetic consumerism arises a voice of spiritual self-realization that explodes the misrepresented, mythical monolith of Islam in the West and with the rubble builds healing through intelligent resistance and radical love.
“Young boys and girls trapped in Walmarts—
our consumer interim camps.
A family-friendly, discounted freedom.
You don’t see what the Internet can’t.Not our land or home.
Not your mans or holmes.
Not your towers or domes.
Not your power or drones.” -
textual vishyuns
$24.95Although internationally recognized as a pioneer of visual, concrete, sound and performance poetry, few people recognize bill bissett’s work in the visual arts to be of equal aesthetic importance. While his drawings, paintings, collages and three-dimensional assemblages were the subject of a 1984 Vancouver Art Gallery solo exhibition, Fires in th tempul, despite bissett’s substantial and ongoing contributions to the practice of the avant-garde tradition in art, very little critical work exists on his poetry, and almost no theoretical discourse exists on his visual work.
In textual vishyuns, Carl Peters attributes this to the fact that bissett’s entire body of work consists of an integrated aesthetic praxis of “the whole art”; that his drawings, paintings, collages and assemblages—challenge artistic conventions of visual language in the same way that his poetry challenges linguistic conventions of syntax and grammar to escape the strictures of Western modes of binary and hierarchical thought and perception.
With a focus on the technique of “the continuous line”; the related and carefully constructed ambiguity of the figure/ground relationship; and his technique of “molecular dissolve” to allow his subject and its environment to escape the frames and margins of representational art; Peters argues that in bissett’s artistic practice all things breathe because all things exist in the immediacy of the moment, which is, as well, spatial.
Drawing primarily from statements and manifestos of aesthetic theory by practitioners of the major modernist movements of impressionism, cubism, fauvism, surrealism and abstract expressionism in the visual arts; the poetics of Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, Charles Olson and bpNichol; and the experimental films of Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, David Lynch and David Cronenberg, here, finally, is a book that locates bissett’s textual and visual artistic praxis within the larger context of the history, theory and practice of art.
-
Textures
$20.00In Zimbabwe, John Eppel and Togara Muzanenhamo epitomise the ideal of the poet dedicated to excellence in form as well as content. There are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets but, as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary usefully explains, poetry is “Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through its meaning, sound, and rhythm….” In their arrangement of words and creation of sounds and rhythms, John Eppel and Togara Muzanenhamo promote this classic view of poetry.
-
th book
$19.95New poems from Canada’s shaman of sound and performance poetry, bill bissett.
bissett’s innovations in sound poetry, have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun n sumtimes joy byond binaree constraints if evreething goez what is aneething accepting nihilism lettr texting as an approach 2 heeling sorrow denial.
-
th book uv lost passwords 1
$24.95a novel uv pomes threding thru each othr th main charaktrs langwage n all uv us hedding off in all direksyuns ths book asks is langwage lost wev had creativ langwage
almost 7 thousand yeers we still dont undr stand each othr veree well dew we want 2 thru th mysteree loves n rapturs speekth book uv lost passwords 1 is the new book from beloved Canadian poet bill bissett, recent recipient of the Order of Canada. It expands on his multivalent and long-standing poetic practice by rearticulating the novel as a radiant field of sound, image, story, memory, dream, and fantasy. It criss-crosses geographies, hopping on planes and between planes to get to th breth uv th pome and everywhere else. th book uv lost passwords 1 oxygenates the brain and soul.
-
th influenza uv logik
$17.95What is logic? Isn’t it a sickness we create? Useful for certain things, but not paramount in helping us be & share & change. Angels are rising in spirit places, helping us through & set against a back-drop of deaths, tortures, imprisonments, AIDS, big religious right-wing power control grabs, unroyal families, increasing poverty & the growing under class. Hierarchical constructs, elected or not, try to dislodge, shifting icons are dissolving & there is a nostalgia for what never was.
But we are not collapsing under others’ controlling: Our selves are infinitely dispersing. There is no palace and we are already inside it. There is much to celebrate. We board, fly & land & through the miracles of being, loving, needing & the wonders of language, though even the pilot is missing.
-
th last photo uv th human soul
$17.95bissett has remained on a permanent world tour for more than thirty years, writing this book while on a European reading circuit that included performances in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Dublin, Paris, Mainz, Trier and Berlin.