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Showing 7041–7056 of 9481 results
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The Alphabet Game
$21.95A member of the sound-poetry collective, The Four Horsemen, winner of a Governor General’s Award for Poetry and writer of Fraggle Rock, bpNichol was one of Canada’s most important poets.
All of Nichol’s writing is distinguished by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. The astounding range of Nichol’s practice included musical theatre, children’s books, comic book art and collage/assemblage. Broadly spanning the history of Nichol’s work, The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader includes both classics and esoteric treasures. From the early typewriter poetry of Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer and Nichol’s life-long work of poetry The Martyrology, to the heartbreaking prose of Journal and the whimsical autobiography of Selected Organs, this collection maps the literary career of this enigmatic poet.
For first-time readers of Nichol, this comprehensive collection is a perfect introduction to his groundbreaking work; for loyal Nichol fans, this reader is the the long-awaited compilation of his less readily available work.
‘His wit, along with the seriousness, was there to keep the language free and untethered, to keep the poem aware of its roots, like a tuxedo worn with bare feet in a muddy river … No other writer of our time and place was so diverse, attempted so much, and never lost sight of his intent.’ – Michael Ondaatje
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The Alphabet of Aliens
$20.95The dream-like, eerily atmospheric prose poems in this collection interrogate margins and melt points of migrancy. Intensely personal, it is at once an ambitious autobiography and a dream book, a diary and a field guide. Here, the hybridity of the form serves both as a device of subversion and as an ocular pointing at space and stars, forests and rivers, rupture and belonging. Here wounds multiply in a potato. The soul can be photographed. A mirror hides in a discarded baguette. A phantom-like empty coat in Bardo becomes a bloated pumpkin. The mood is playful, the tone deliberately whimsical giving voice to discourses on passage, arrival and rootlessness of migrant diasporas. Regarding migrancy as an act of self-preservation, disavowing discourses of deservingness and viewing migrants (in the context of Robert Bly’s “Stealing Sugar from The Castle”) as one encompassing class of “sugar-seeking” ants, these poems create constantly shifting rooms for the coexistence of contradictions. The funny, enchanting, fantastical poems capture the life of ants, the art of tea, the virtue of fish, Greater Toronto at the turn of the century, the terrors of personal and collective histories and a mind dealing with the sentence of place here and elsewhere.
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The Amazing Mazie Baker
$24.95When author Kay Johnston first met Mazie Baker, she came to know her as the reigning queen of bannock, selling out batch after batch of fluffy, light frybread at local powwows. She soon learned that Mazie, a matriarch and an activist, had been nurturing and fiercely protecting her community for a lifetime.
In 1931, Mazie Antone was born into the Squamish Nation, a community caught between its traditional values of respect-for the land, the family and the band-and the secular, capitalistic legislation imposed by European settlers. When she was six, the police carried her off to St. Paul’s Indian Residential School, as mandated by the 1920 Indian Act. There, she endured months of beatings, malnourishment and lice infestations before her family collected Mazie and her siblings and fled across the border.
Once in Washington, the Antones weathered the Depression by picking fruit and working in the shipyard. After the war, the children were old enough that the family could safely return to their home on the Capilano Reserve. At sixteen, Mazie began working at a cannery; she packed salmon for eleven years, all the while learning to defend herself from supervisors and fellow packers foolish enough to make her a target. Mazie married her sweetheart, Alvie Baker, and together they raised nine children. Part of the legacy of residential school was that Mazie and her generation were alienated from their culture and language, but through her children, she reconnected with her Squamish identity. She came to mourn the loss of the old style of government by councils of hereditary chiefs and to criticize the corruption in the band leadership created in 1989 by federal legislation.
Galvanized by the injustices she saw committed against and within her community-especially against indigenous women, who were denied status and property rights-she began a long career of advocacy. She fought for housing for families in need; she pushed for transparency in local government; she defended ancestral lands; she shone a bright light into the darkest political corners. Her family called her ch’sken: Golden Eagle.
This intimate biography of a community leader illuminates a difficult, unresolved chapter of Canadian history and paints a portrait of a resilient and principled woman who faced down her every political foe, unflinching, irreverent, and uncompromising.
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The Ambassador of What
$19.95Slogging through the miles of a city marathon, an 11-year-old boy encounters small miracles; about to marry one of her patients in a home for the elderly, a nurse asks her estranged son to come to the wedding and give her away; home from university, a young man has Christmas dinner with his hard-up dad in a bistro behind a rural gas bar. Men and boys and maleness, money and its lack, the long haunt of childhood, marriage and divorce — these lie at the heart of The Ambassador of What. Driven by an ear for how we talk, how we feel, how we fail, and how we love, these are tough and tender stories that take hold, and linger.
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The Amber Garden
$19.95The stunning and beautifully crafted conclusion to The Alchemists’ Council series
In Book Three of The Alchemists’ Council trilogy, eternal conflicts between the Council and Rebel Branch escalate. Secrets about time-travel manipulation are revealed, uncomfortable truths about alchemical children are discovered, and Council dimension itself begins to disintegrate. Amidst this fallout, the Amber Garden dissolves, conjoined pairs suffer torturous separation, alchemists die in the process, and Cedar is banished to the outside world where she endures a living death within her conjoined partner.
Efforts of both alchemists and rebels to resolve the dissolution of Council and Flaw dimensions prove futile. People of the outside world experience ever-increasing political turmoil and the risk of environmental collapse. Mercifully, the alchemists have woven a thread of hope into an alchemically inscribed book, which they release into the outside world with the purpose of attracting new Initiates to Council. At first, Initiate Virginia appears to be a disrespectful interloper with whom Jaden loathes to work. However, their combined scribal efforts prove astoundingly powerful — so much so that they are sent through time to inscribe critical messages into ancient manuscripts. Events associated with one such manuscript lead Cedar to propose a solution to the dimensional fallout: all remaining alchemists must permanently vacate Council dimension.
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The Americans Are Coming
$19.99An invasion? For teenagers Dryfly Ramsey and Shadrack Nash, poor and ignorant in the world’s terms but rich in the lore of the magical Miramichi, the annual influx of American anglers, with their money, fishing gear, and thirst for salmon seems like one, and it sets the stage for action. A cast of quirky, unforgettable characters — Nutbeam, a large-nosed, floppy-eared hermit; Shirley, Brennan Siding’s toothless postmistress and Ramsey family matriarch; and Buck, who appears once a year to sire another child — conspire to capture the imagination in Herb Curtis’s now classic novel. And what of the Whooper, that mystical beast whose cries result in amazingly tall tales?
In The Americans Are Coming, the voices of Brennan Siding ring out in the rich vernacular of New Brunswick’s Miramichi region, a world immersed in myth, folklore, and the sulpherous belch of a nearby pulp mill, and where ghosts and demons are as real as the Lone Ranger or the spring run of gaspereaux. With a new afterword by David Adams Richards.
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The Amethyst Cross
$9.95World-renowned cartoonist Seth returns with three new ghost stories for 2024.
When Margaret finds a cottage to rent in the moorlands for her visiting Aunt Dorothea, she pays no mind to its rumored dark history. But when Dorothea goes missing only days after her arrival, a haunting tale of greed and murder soon comes to light.
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The Analyst
$18.95In her latest collection, Molly Peacock, one of Canada’s most beloved poets, tells the story of the decades-long relationship she’s had with her psychoanalyst, who returned to painting after surviving a stroke. By translating techniques of visual art into language, The Analyst guides us through galleries of breathtaking settings and portraiture, leading us on a search for authenticity behind the illusions of pose.
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The Anarchist Banker
$20.00A new Interpretation and a new English Translation with the original Portuguese Edition
The story of The Anarchist Banker takes place in a Lisbon café where the narrator meets an old friend, now a wealthy banker. He questions his friend about his anarchist origins and discovers to his amazement that the banker still considers himself to be an anarchist. The story revolves around the banker’s vigorous defense of his position and his assertion that he is the only genuine anarchist among the banker’s so-called anarchist friends. This is a bilingual English/Portuguese edition.
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The Anatomy of Clay
$18.95Taking off from the Promethean myth of human creation, Gillian Sze’s second poetry collection explores the “anatomy of clay” and the individual as a sentient mystery. At times reflective, instructional, playful, or strange, the first section, Quotidianus, offers observational poems, which recount intimate and ordinary moments often missed, overlooked, or forgotten. Sze tugs at the fabric of habit and amidst the urban mundane finds her subjects in a woman waiting for the bus, a neighbour who talks to his plants, a girl smoking after a storm. The following section, Extimacy, takes a lyrical and confessional turn, veering inwards, dealing reflexively with the materiality of inner life: the self as ingredients, the self as experiment, the self as animal and artist. The Anatomy of Clay finds exceptions in the most prosaic conditions and the ineffable distinctions between people, selves, objects, and histories.
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The Angel of Solitude
$17.95The Angel of Solitude presides over the lives of eight young lesbian women who strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia, their pasts and their differences are abolished. As the narrative unfolds, we realize that none of the women are present directly—they come into being, and live their lives, only in and through the memories, observations and imaginations of each of the others. Thus, their mission to establish a fortress for themselves remains inconclusive; they have too much to overcome, both within themselves and in the world at large, to abandon their individual struggles for the sake of a group.
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The Angel’s Jig
$19.95Long-shortlisted, 2017 ReLit Awards
Facing the dwindling years of his life, an old man waits for his turn on the auction block, hoping to be sold to a family as decent as the one he is leaving. It is not the first time he has been here, and it may not be the last.
Mute in life but loquacious on the page, the old man tells the colourful story of his rootless life. Abandoned by his family and first auctioned off at the age of seven — “Ladies and gentlemen, this boy may not be a rare gem, but he is certainly worth a look” — he moves from one farm to another, taking comfort from the people around him.
Daniel Poliquin’s picaresque novel revisits an all-but-forgotten era, when orphaned children and the elderly poor were auctioned into a form of indentured servitude. Narrated through the eyes and ears of an unforgettable protagonist, The Angel’s Jig is a joyous meditation on identity and the unpredictable voyage of existence.
A French language finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book Award, Le Vol de l’ange now appears in this lyrical translation by award-winning translator Wayne Grady.
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The Animal in the Room
$23.95LONGLISTED FOR THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumes: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history.
Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body — really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary – about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world’s creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators.
“Oh the pleasure of inhabiting the mind of an animal like Meghan Kemp-Gee! Her poetry is curious, restless, uneasy, and imaginative; it is also highly disciplined, unfolds in precisely measured lines. Watch for brilliant uses of repetition — the slipperiness of meaning, its ever-doubling character, is on full display, played out in deft linguistic twists. A deadpan delivery amplifies the oddity of what’s encountered: arsenic-drunk wildcats, chlorinated orchids, the ‘one painful spot of blue’ in a deer’s eye. I can’t say strongly enough how grateful I am to have read this collection; don’t miss it.” – Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems
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The Animal Library
$13.95The Animal Library marks the debut of a remarkable poet – a poet of the flesh, his own and that of the animals he has lived with all his life, whether real or imaginary. Jason Camlot’s father was a furrier and he grew up in a world where, inevitably, “baby fur gets in your eyes” or in “your mouth.” In dreams, the poet becomes a whale corpse “washed up/ on a very pale beach/ and hundreds of flies came,/ and people,/ to see the tusk,/ spun like coral glass.” And as the boy grows up, images, at once curiously literal and yet surreal – images of being devoured or skinned alive – stay with him. The beauty of this collection is one of the mot juste, a concreteness and precision, coupled with a superb sense of rhythm.
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The Animal Sciences
$18.95The Animal Sciences is like a science fair project. Take a group of friends – the missing Robin, crazy Kookla, jealous Duffer, lost Autumn and Latvian Igor – add baking soda and vinegar, and watch what happens. As the story rockets back and forth between the past and present, the consecutive anecdotes start to coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts, and we begin to see how the different atoms – the characters – of this particular molecule are interdependent. We come to suspect, too, that just as the laws of nature make that baking-soda volcano inevitable, so too do they rule human relationships, making volcanoes out of some chemical reactions and warmth out of others. Maybe, just maybe, human sciences aren’t so different from the animal ones.
What is it that makes us human? Could it be love?
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The Animals
$23.00In a quaint tourist village, Dorn makes miniature scale models displayed in the local shops. Yet life is far from idyllic; he suffers under the thumb of a rich, philandering younger brother and an unloving father, and cannot find the courage to admit his love to Ravenna, the ungainly schoolteacher.
Life takes a strange turn when the government-sponsored “Wild Home Project” is introduced and wolves, rats, minks, otters, and bears move into villagers’ homes. Soon, Dorn receives a mysterious commission, finds a body in a park, and has several run-ins with a former classmate-turned police officer. When fire breaks out, Dorn takes on the unlikely role of hero in the hope of changing the course of his life.
A realist novel with the air of a fairy tale, The Animals is a surprising, funny, and thought-provoking story that explores the nature of relationships faunal and human, and reminds us of the challenges of finding one’s place in society . . . and that living with a wolf is not a very good idea.