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An impressionistic long poem in twenty-two parts by Stefan Rose about residence life through a reimagining of the 60-history of the Trueman House residence at Mount Allison University. Typeset in Lanston Garamond and printed offset on Rolland Zephyr Antique Laid paper.
Winner of the 1994 Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Award. "This is a book showing tremendous awareness of language and an acute interest in character and situation." Canadian Book Review Annual.
Unmarried and pregnant in 1968 Winnipeg, teenager Myrl Coulter found herself at a loss. Unable (and perhaps unwilling) to support her child, Myrl’s parents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. After being sent to a home for unwed mothers, Myrl gave birth in a desolate hospital room and then found herself at the mercy of the closed adoption process that seemed determined to punish her. Myrl was left numb and filled with questions that no one was able to answer. In ‘The House with the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers ‘, Dr. Myrl Coulter reflects on the family politics and social mores that surrounded closed adoption in the 1960s, and examines the changing attitudes that resulted in the current open adoption system and her eventual reunion with her firstborn son. The book is an intimate, honest look at the way personal histories combine with political truths, and Coulter mixes revealing personal details with sharp political observations. ‘The House with the Broken Two’ could be called a personal essay or a feminist apologia, but perhaps most importantly, it is a book about motherhood in its many variations.
“A memoir, an adoption narrative and a grief mosaic, this winner of Simon Fraser University’s 2010 First Book Competition is a beautifully written volume in the genre of creative non-fiction.” -The Winnipeg Free Press
” ‘The House with the Broken Two’ portrays a vivid and unsettling picture of Canadian sexual politics and social policy as it related tothe consequences of extramarital sex. Before World War II the public and private agencies made small attempts to keep single mothers and their babies together, but when the 1950s paradigm of the perfect nuclear family took hold in North America attitudes changed. Girls like me were not young women who needed a helping hand,’ Coulter writes. Instead we were seen as somehow delinquent and definitely unfit as mothers.’” – The Rover
Grieving the diminishment and death of his elderly mother, John Terpstra finds solace in a seemingly unusual place: the stories (both historical and fanciful) of the nineteenth-century houses in his Hamilton neighbourhood and of the families which have inhabited them. With a well-honed knack for the circuitous route, Terpstra tackles weighty questions like ‘Why must we die?’ by following his imaginative curiosity into the bricks-and-mortar matters of our daily lives, understanding that the dwellings we construct do more than just shed the weather, but are also physical manifestations of our notions of ‘family’ and ‘home’.
Hunde/fräulein: Dog/nanny. For five and a half years (1995-2001) Kathy Mac lived in Sambro Head, NS, looking after anywhere from four to twelve English Setters. The post entailed maintaining the ocean-side doghouse and looking after the many, varied houseguests of the hundemutter – ocean activist Elisabeth Mann Borgese, youngest daughter of Thomas Mann. These poems take their tone from the days and dogs that inspired them – by turns extravagant, intense, celebratory, wistful.
Sheldon Zitner summed up his career in a seven-word poem: “Here lies, as usual, a Jew d’esprit.” The genial wit of “Trial Epithet” informs the whole of this deeply moving collection by a poet and scholar whom A.F. Moritz describes as “a man of the world in the best sense.”
Whether he is celebrating life’s infinite creativity, recognizing the joy imprisoned in a wheelchair-bound man, or affirming art’s mission to outlast atrocity, Zitner unswervingly follows Rilke’s injunction to join “work of the eyes” with “heart-work.” In the collection’s title poem, Zitner states that “we invent the world we love, /and like the painter’s eyes, our own /persuade the hard discrete details /. . . to surrender to a luminous belonging.”
Throughout this wonderful collection, many such revelatory moments are caught and many details rendered with equal luminosity. Writing completely without sentimentality, Zitner nonetheless composed his poems with an underlying tenderness and a sadness always held in check by his characteristic urbanity and his epigrammatic wit.
The Hunt on the Lagoon is Zitner’s final work. These last poems, and all his poems, are things into which he breathed his spirit, and where he can still be met. A poet to the last, The Hunt on the Lagoon is a fitting monument, an inspired book about absence and loss, about the transience of bliss.
Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Shortlisted, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
A feral girl roams the dense forests of nineteenth-century France, stealing food from remote farmyards and avoiding human contact. Seen on one of her thieving missions in the village of Freyzus, she is chased by suspicious townspeople to the edge of a deep gorge, where she jumps and disappears, vanishing into village legend.
On the other side of the gorge, in an abandoned estate, Peyre Rouff lives out his self-imposed exile. Following a horrific hunting accident, he now focuses all of his attention on intricate taxidermic dioramas, keeping his thoughts from wandering too close to the day he lost everything.
When Peyre encounters the wild girl, they find a link in their mutual estrangement from conventional society. He provides her with her material needs, while she brings light to places Peyre had thought dark forever. The two achieve an easy coexistence. But the careful patterns of the life Peyre has made for himself begin to unravel, and when the wider world learns of the girl’s presence at the estate, Peyre is forced to confront not only his choices and their consequences, but society itself.
In The Hunter and the Wild Girl, award-winning author Pauline Holdstock spins a haunting tale affirming the persistence of life, the power of human connection, and the fundamental urge to be free.
Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Shortlisted, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
A National Post Best Book of 2015
“The Hunter and the Wild Girl is powerful, almost elemental storytelling, an achievement not only of craft but of raw emotion. It pulses with vitality, building to a stunning, shattering conclusion.” — Robert Weirsema, Vancouver Sun
“A rich, immersive experience. Pauline Holdstock’s is the kind of prose you get lost in.” — National Post
The story begins with the crack of splintered boards and bones as a feral girl crashes out of the hut where she’s been held against her will and into the scrubland of southern France. Townsfolk chase her to the edge of a deep gorge. She leaps and vanishes into legend — and into the territory of Peyre Rouff, a once-renowned hunter who spends his days fending off his own demons in an abandoned château.
Pauline Holdstock sets this absorbing novel in the blurry territory between myth and reality. The girl and the hunter inhabit radically different worlds. The wild girl’s is rooted in the physical, a source of food and danger, Rouff’s in the cerebral, an existence patterned to prevent him from the destruction of despair.
When their two worlds unexpectedly collide, this odd pair of outsiders forms an unlikely bond. The girl’s untamed spirit and volatility shakes the hunter from his solitude. The hunter’s unexpected kindness provides the girl with a sense of connection. But when the wider world learns of the girl’s presence, Rouff is forced to confront both his choices and their consequences.
Wild and unpredictable, lush and sensually evocative, The Hunter and the Wild Girl courses with mythical life blood, resonant, disquieting, and fathoms deep.
In this illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, master wood engraver George A. Walker provides an uproarious reinterpretation of the classic poem as seen through the convex lens of contemporary American politics.
***49TH SHELF UTTERLY FANTASTIC BOOK FOR FALL***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS WINNER, SUSPENSE***
***NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS FINALIST, PARANORMAL***
Sissy and Ava Hush are estranged, middle-aged sisters with little in common beyond their upbringing in a peculiar manor in downtown St. John’s. With both parents now dead, the siblings must decide what to do with the old house they’ve inherited. Despite their individual loneliness, neither is willing to change or cede to the other’s intentions. As the sisters discover the house’s dark secrets, the spirits of the past awaken, and strange events envelop them. The Hush sisters must either face these sinister forces together or be forever ripped apart.
In The Hush Sisters, Gerard Collins weaves psychological suspense with elements of the fantastic to craft a contemporary urban gothic that will keep readers spellbound until the novel whispers its startling secrets.
Once again northern Canada’s best-known storyteller takes us on a tour of the town of New Totem on the “Vast Northern Prairie.” We meet again with the Trotter family and their friends in this second book of tall tales based on growing up in the Peace River country. A hilarious collection of nineteen short stories, The Ice Cream Bucket Effect makes you wish you were there to share in Ma Trotter’s good home cooking and in the misadventures of young Fudgie and his cohorts.
Spooked by some ball lightning on his wedding night, repressed young Catholic Griffith Smolders interprets this as a sign and abandons his conjugal responsibilities by escaping through the window, enduring a series of misadventures along the way involving, among others, con men, murderesses, shipwrecks, and autodidact biologist hermits. Giving chase, his betrothed, Avice Drinkwater, finally runs Grif aground in a tiny island community, and prepares to exact her revenge.
Set in the rough-and-tumble late nineteenth century backwoods, The Iconoclast’s Journal is wildly kinetic, a madcap picaresque and comic anti-romance by one of the most inventive writers at work today.
The Ignis Psalter is a beautifully written novel that explores coming of age in a rural area of New Brunswick haunted by a prolific, almost artistic arsonist, who may just be one of the family. Danny Jacobs draws from a facility with words that has already won him awards as both a poet and an essayis, to fashion a novel that is moody and imagistic, drawing the reader into a world of small town characters illuminated in fire.