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Shortlisted for the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Shortlisted for the 2024 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
The islands of an archipelago are isolated above sea level but attached underwater; connected yet separate. archipelago, the debut poetry collection from Laila Malik, traces fragments of family, becoming and unbecoming against the shifting shorelines of loss, multigenerational migration, and (un)belonging.
Malik’s lyrical poems intertwine histories of exile and ecological devastation. Beginning with a coming of age in the 80s and 90s between Canada, the Arabian Gulf, East Africa and Kashmir, they subvert conventions of lineage, instead drawing on the truths of inter-ethnic histories amidst sparse landscapes of deserts, oceans, and mountains. They question why the only certainties of “home” are urgency and impossibility.
At its core, archipelago is a letter to the daughters who come before and after, a quiet disclosure of barbed ancestral legacies that only come into focus through poetry.
From twirling tassels to dead playmates Archive of the Undressed is a sharp, darkly comic look at the image of women in a society between changing sexual mores. Jeanette Lynes brings her iconic style to these poems, fearlessly critiquing attitudes towards women, poking at Canadian identity and finding something sexy in the settlement of “The Queen’s Bush,” Northern Ontario. A wickedly pointed and funny collection, Archive of the Undressed will overturn any reader’s belief that poetry is boring.
Arctic Notes & Prairie Places
In the 1920s, Canada’s claim on the Arctic archipelago was tenuous at best. In 1880, the United Kingdom had handed over control of the area to the expanding dominion, though much of the area was still unoccupied and unexplored. The North-West Mounted Police, later to become the RCMP in 1920, were assigned the territory by the Canadian Government. For years, little was done to assert this control; over time, remote detachments were established throughout the archipelago and annual ship patrols were conducted to resupply these posts as well as to demonstrate to the world that Canada was indeed administering to its Arctic.
But the need to reinforce sovereignty—and quickly—was driven by increasing threats on the horizon. The Americans, Danish and Norwegians were particularly active in the Arctic, posing sovereign challenges from both individuals and their nations; Dr. Donald MacMillan, American, went north with an American Naval Aviation Unit in 1925 with a stated objective to search for new land. He had somehow, concerningly, avoided applying for permits to enter the Canadian Arctic. The Danish Anthropologist and polar explorer Knud Rasmussen was rumoured to be populating Ellesmere Island with Greenland Inuit (Inughuit) to the obvious threat of both the Muskox population there as well as Canadian Arctic sovereignty. Meanwhile, the Canadian Government was wrestling with the Norwegian Government, as well as Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup, over ownership of the Sverdrup group of islands.
Something drastic had to be done. Legendary RCMP Inspector, Alfred Herbert Joy, joined by young but robust recruit Reginald Andrew Taggart of Ireland, as well as the renowned Inughuit guide, Nukappiannguaq, embark on an 1,800-mile dogsled patrol to the outer fringes of the archipelago. As tensions rise and negotiations with Norway threaten to escalate, the three men face treacherous conditions and unexpected obstacles on a journey that takes on mythic proportions. In Arctic Patrol, Lieutenant Governor’s Medal winner Eric Jamieson uncovers the fascinating history of Canada’s fight to secure its Arctic territories in this thrilling tale of international politics, polar exploration, and human endurance.
Shortlisted for Best Cover Design at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, ageing punk Lor Kowalski is unsure of his sanity. He is haunted by hallucinogens and harbingers, strung out on broken stories that he cannot piece together into a lucid whole. Forced to join his old band from a life he’d rather forget, he is dragged north under the spell of a mysterious ad for an Arctic festival tour. As the band members unspool across the surreal snowscapes and frozen wastelands, rogue CSIS agents are hot on their increasingly iced-over heels. But what are ageing punks to rogue agents? Subversive and irredeemable, spectres from a past that must be erased with extreme prejudice. Randy Nikkel Schroeder’s Arctic Smoke combines coked-up magic realism with a wound-up cyberpunk style.
Longlisted, First Nation Communities READ Award
Honourable Mention, Alcuin Society Book Design Awards (Prose Illustrated)
Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity offers a conversation between Indigenous Peoples of two regions in this time of political and environmental upheaval. Both regions are environmentally sensitive areas that have become hot spots in the debates circling around climate change and have long been contact zones between Indigenous Peoples and outsiders — zones of meeting and clashing, of contradictions and entanglement.
Opening with an Epistolary Exchange between the editors, Arctic/Amazon then widens to include essays by 12 Indigenous artists, curators, and knowledge-keepers about the integration of spirituality, ancestral respect, traditional knowledges, and political critique in artistic practice and more than 100 image reproductions and installation shots. The result is an extraordinary conversation about life, artistic practise, and geopolitical realities faced by Indigenous peoples in regions at risk.
1656: a Boston court sentences a ship’s captain to sit in the stocks for two hours for “lewd and unseemly behavior” on the Sabbath. His offence? Arriving home that Sunday after three years at sea, he had kissed his wife. 1968: J. Edgar Hoover tries to ban the recording “Two Virgins” because the cover depicts John Lennon and Yoko Ono stark naked from both directions. 1994: Lorena Bobbitt castrates her abusive husband and throws the offending organ across a highway — only to see it reattached and star in pornographic movies. 2000: A stripper sues her plastic surgeon because her bottom looks like her top after he stitches breast implants into her buttocks. These are just some of the many cases detailed in Ardor in the Court! Spanning all legal history, from the Bible onward, the book covers a variety of sex-charged legal cases, some involving such famous people as Larry Flynt, Jimi Hendrix, and Charlie Chaplin. Not just for lawyers, Ardor in the Court! will appeal to those curious to learn about historical cases where sex meets the law.
something like wait for me
in the braille of scars
tonight can i suggest a little punctuation
circle half-moon vertical line of astonishment
a pause that transforms
light and breathÂ
into language and threshold of fire
Even as vowels tremble in danger and worldly destruction repeats itself on the horizon, Ardour reminds us that the silence pulsing within us is also a language of connection. In these poems, intimacy with the other is another astonishment—a pleasant gasp, a “pause that transforms light and breath into language and threshold of fire.” Since her first book appeared fifty years ago, Nicole Brossard has left us breathless, expanding our notion of poetry and its possibilities.
‘[Nicole Brossard] is a wholly singular writer, part of a larger movement of Quebec Women’s writing, part of feminist writing,avant-garde writing, part of lesbian writing, but wholly, unequivocally, herself.’ – Sina Queyras
Are We on Yet: Insider Tips on How to be Interviewed (and other essential media skills) teaches you how to be interviewed. Revealed by a veteran award-winning broadcaster, these tips will enhance your profits by giving you the ability to have radio and TV producers begging YOU to do an interview. You will be told exactly what to do and how to develop media savvy. Short, concise, funny and to the point, these practical, effective and easy-to-use insider techniques will enable you to enhance your product and do justice to your brand.The author is so convinced that his techniques will work for you that he is willing to make a personal no-hassle money back guarantee. If after trying his suggestions for three months, you have not improved your ability to communicate and hype what you want to sell, just return the book with your proof of purchase and you will get the purchase price cheerfully returned to you. Now how many media training operations will make this kind of guarantee?
Are You Ready to Be Lucky? If so, meet Roslyn, a spirited divorcée eager for new beginnings. Meet Duncan, a British conman with a penchant for collecting ex-wives. Meet Floyd, a hard-living contractor who can fix anyone’s house but his own. Irritating, vulnerable, hopeful, they ricochet off one another, trailing a mess of family and friends, all of them trying to beat the odds and find happiness. With razor-sharp wit, Rosemary Nixon takes on the chaos and absurdity of friendship, marriage, divorce, and betrayal—and the heart-pounding, breathtaking, always astonishing complexities of luck and love.
The poems in Arguments For Lawn Chairs don’t trust your grandmother’s cooking. They have visited Pangea, they have visited Toronto and Montreal, the B.C. Gulf Islands, Tiberias, the tailing ponds near Sudbury, and they are still not satisfied, are still unconvinced, still need more proof. They are suckers for dovetailed boxes, winter fire pits, houses that sit not quite true, a rent garbage bag spilling its guts on Queen Street. The poems in Arguments For Lawn Chairs are devoid of hope, but are joyful nonetheless.
The title character Ari could have stepped out of a traditional folk tale straight into the day before yesterday. Son of a monstrous, unscrupulous mother and a faint-hearted father, he catches a glimpse of a life that would be to his liking when he encounters a young woman who …. but you have to read the novel to find out how the rest of Ari’s life pans out.
This story – part memoir, part historical fiction – spans a period of one hundred years, from 1914 to 2014, with the main emphasis being on the years of the two World Wars. It concentrates on the lives of real people –the author’s parents, the author, a young pilot from New Jersey in WW1, and others – as well as some fictional characters, who all lived through one or both of the wars and were profoundly affected personally by them. Arise the Dead I focuses on World War I where the author’s dad took part in the Battle of Loos (September 1915) and where he was wounded.
This story–part memoir, part historical fiction–spans a period of one hundred years, from 1914 to 2014, with the main emphasis being on the years of the two World Wars. It concentrates on the lives of real people–the author’s parents, the author, a young pilot from New Jersey in WW1, and others–as well as some fictional characters, who all lived through one or both of the wars and were profoundly affected personally by them. Arise the Dead II focuses on World War Two where the home of the author’s parents was bombed in late 1940 during the ‘blitz’ on London.
We are mesmerized, enthralled. A young, armless girl, tangled in the brutal arrowhead wire of glistening ivy, stares with dead eyes. If I had arms, I would embrace my shaking body. I would lift my hands to my face, cover my eyes, hold the aching scream in my mouth.Combining Wiccan ritual magic, Gnosticism, alchemy and of course Madeline Sonik’s dazzling writing and storytelling, this magic-realist novella relates the story of a young woman who loses her arms in a freak home-accident and embarks on a quest for them in an absurdly complex and callous world. Sonik’s gripping prose leads us through new but eerily familiar surroundings as the heroine follows an extraordinary path of enchantment, marriage, agony, ridicule, ritual and self-realization.Arms is both a work of fiction and a magical text of healing, and as such is the first work of its kind to be published in North America. It was written, originally, as a black cord dissertation for the 13th House Mystery School and as a transformational incantation to assist those who read it in the recovery and rebirth of the creative imagination. Arms is a rare story with a powerful fairy-tale, classical element that will prevent it from escaping the reader’s mind and will coax re-reading for even the squeamish and the skeptical.