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All Books in this Collection
Showing 6977–6992 of 9481 results
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Ten-Headed Alien
$18.00Ten-Headed Alien draws from sci-fi and poli-sci, prog rock and politics, climate fiction and ancient mythology to create poems that are at once global and personal. The opening sections of the book take the reader on a harrowing sea-to-sky epic, from a drunken plane crash in the BC interior to the quiet beaches of Crete. Mythological creatures battle for the attention of an inverted mermaid, bionic pigeons flee their creators, barflies conjure soulmates, balloon farms exist on the moon and pigs, of course, fly. From Lake Nipissing to the moons of Jupiter, these poems travel around the world (and off it) united by the language of human fragility, and a sense of the body as engineered, temporary and exquisitely sad.
The book’s final section brings an uncanny ten-headed alien to Earth and the apocalypse that unfolds is complex and devastating. Ten-Headed Alien, broad in scope, revels in strange, protean imagery to explore the swamps between our natural and technological worlds.
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Tenant, The
$23.95When famous author Amy Ellis relocates to Germany for a year with her family, she hopes to find the cure for a bad case of writer’s block which is preventing her next novel from hitting the shelves. With her vacation home accidentally double-booked by a kindly but unexpected tenant, and terrifying international headlines, Amy’s new book practically writes itself. But will the plot and peril prove too much?
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TENDER
$18.95Within the contours of TENDER lie field notes from a life lived across multiple affinities, kinships, and desires. Equally visual and textual, TENDER is a beautifully complex collection spanning thirty years of curious inquiry into our shared human–animal condition. Laiwan traverses diverse terrains – the body, land, language – which are rooted in her courageous and uncompromising history of activism and in experiences of building community across and beyond difference. TENDER offers a radical and decolonizing cleansing of all that oppresses and alienates. The words and images in this collection reveal the heroic struggles of gendered, raced, and sexual differences from a place of incredible tenderness and vulnerability. Laiwan’s words imprint in us the need to breathe our animal skins back to life after the scarring of fearful states of abandonment and betrayal. Read as a retrospective and as a continued call for a passionate caring for one another, TENDER offers us freedom in the face of limitation: a working at setting free. Each section of the book captures a moment in time and feeling. Ghostly images are choreographed to leave us alerted to longing and hope, absence and presence. It is as if the entire collection were a garden at different stages of growth, with the inevitable decay and renewal that each season brings. Haunting, political, and defiantly sexy, Laiwan’s voice is a guiding force.
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Tender
$22.95The poems in Tender chronicle the experiences of Black people, especially of Black women, in their quest for self-
determination and their desire to live full, complex, unencumbered lives. Employing her skills as a documentary filmmaker, Hamilton combines reclaimed historical accounts, memories and stories to engage subjects such as intergenerational trauma, racial violence, the silencing of girls and women, and the loss of children. Running throughout her work is a yearning for genuine equality and freedom, and an understanding that a better future begins with engaging honestly with our past. -
Tender Buttons
$15.00A seminal text in the history of poetry and poetics, Tender Buttons was originally published in 1914 and is considered one of the great Modern experiments in verse. At one time or another it has been thought of as a masterpiece of Cubism, a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax. Despite the fact that it was written by an ex-pat American, the text of Tender Buttons has had massive influence on Canadian poetry and poetics for nearly three quarters of a century. Therefore, Book*hug is pleased to produce the first Canadian Edition of this important text in a publication that pays homage to the original 1914 edition.
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Tenderman
$18.95“I grew up in a blue-collar town ten minutes down the road from a white-collar town. And I’ve spent most of my life uncomfortable in both places.”
With these opening words, accomplished poet Tim Bowling outlines the central tension that acts as a vital force in his newest book, Tenderman—the dichotomy between the sensitive poetic observer and the tough, working-class subject. Bowling returns again to the shores of his BC hometown that exert such a strong hold on his imagination, but through his focus on the tenderman figure, he also demonstrates wry self-awareness in doing so. The tenderman (a crewman on a salmon packing boat), who represents a fiercely independent everyman, acts as unintentional muse to the collection; its poems are often delivered through dialogues between poet and fisherman, reminiscences of their shared childhoods, or narratives delivered by the tenderman himself.
As always, Bowling’s verse is stunning in its haunting portrayal of West Coast imagery, depicting both natural beauty (“the Spanish silhouette/ crouched in warm salt dark”) and the grim realities of fishing (“The kicks and slaps of a hold of dying fish—/ hands in an auditorium”) with effortless grace.
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Tent of Blue
$22.95Tent of Blue, Rachael Preston’s richly conceived first novel, seduces readers with images of captivity and escape. Passing back and forth through time, the novel has its beginnings in England before and during the Second World War. The present is a somewhat seedy mansion-turned-apartment in Vancouver’s Shaughnessy neighbourhood and the beaches of Kitsilano and Jericho in the 1950s. The future, or at least the fantasy, is the unattainable Salt Spring Island.
In this astonishing novel, Preston creates characters that are trapped by cruelty, poverty, war, and their own minds and bodies. Gradually they awaken to the fact that they carry within themselves the possibility of freedom and the power to achieve it. The novel’s images of war-torn beaches, cold, dank theatres, and travelling by bicycle through the streets of Vancouver will linger with readers long after the book is closed.
The book tells the story of Anton, a boy of almost sixteen, who suffers the challenges of a clubfoot and Yvonne, his mother, a dance teacher who spent her youth in the decayed music halls of 1930s England. Grotesquely mistreated by her drunken mother, fourteen-year-old Yvonne finds fleeting freedom with a Russian-born dancer. After his death, needing to provide for herself and Anton, she falls into the grip of a brutal impresario and eventually migrates to Montreal and shortly thereafter to Vancouver. Yvonne alternately spurns and smothers her son as she plays the only two roles she knows: victim and victimizer. Both have been imprisoned their whole lives: Yvonne by her fear of her abusive mother, of losing her lover, and of Harold, the man who sweeps her into his control and makes her his wife. Anton has been a prisoner of his physical handicap, of Yvonne’s unhappiness, and of Harold’s hold on both his and his mother’s life.
In their Vancouver apartment, Yvonne and Anton struggle to live heroically despite the scathing violence of love. Yvonne opens a dance school where she teaches her few ballet students. Anton struggles for respect and independence and finds a measure of freedom through his wheelchair and apartment bound neighbour, Tom Hart, a World War I vet, who supplies Anton with an old bicycle. Anton tries to return the favour in the only way that he can imagine. Dickensian in its complexity, Tent of Blue marks the career debut of a fascinating new Canadian writer.
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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…
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Terminal Solstice
$23.95A global catastrophe of frozen time brings humanity to a standstill. Power grids crash, planes disappear into oceans, and highways become scenes of deadly carnage. But a ruthless conspiracy cult remains unaffected, and it’s growing fast. In the eerie silence of an immobilized city, three characters endure a harrowing quest for survival. Sean Minogue’s gripping debut novel probes a fraying world at the mercy of a mysterious phenomenon.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.