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Somewhere between joyous affirmation of British Columbia’s splendour and momentous grief for the destruction of a once thriving salmon culture comes the newest work from acclaimed poet and novelist Tim Bowling. The Lost Coast is a lyrical, impassioned lament for the home Bowling once knew and for the river and creatures that continue to haunt his imagination. Raised in Ladner, BC, by a gillnetting family, Bowling was a fisherman himself until the mid-1990s. The loss of the West Coast’s salmon culture is felt deeply by Bowling; this is a betrayal of his birthright and a decimation of his children’s heritage. The Lost Coast asks hard questions of politicians, fishermen, fish farmers, industrialists and of the three million people currently inhabiting Greater Vancouver. What is the story behind the pioneers who built this province? What is the secret life of the killer whale and the great blue heron? And above all else, who caused, and continues to hasten, the diminishment of the Pacific salmon, British Columbia’s most totemic creature?With a poet’s attention to details of the spirit, and a novelist’s flair for character and story, Tim Bowling elevates his cherished homeland to the realm of enduring myth.
Fraught with fatal mishaps and disastrous near misses, the missions of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States defined an era and exemplified the global socio-political conflict of the Cold War. The Lost Cosmonauts by Ken Hunt is an elegy to humanity’s fledgling efforts to explore outer space, and to those who lost their lives in pursuit of this goal.
This wide-ranging collection of poems looks deep into the largely unexplored cosmos for experiences of the sublime, not only in celestial bodies and mythical figures among the stars, but also in those astronauts and cosmonauts who dared to explore them.
2008 Winner of the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s PoetryThe Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder is an unusual collection of poems that combines craft, innovation, humour and down-to-earth insight in a focused and riveting read that will charm poetry buffs of every stripe.The poems in The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder subversively and imaginatively inhabit the voices of characters from Wilder’s famous Little House books–human and non-human, animate and inanimate–but launch them in new directions. Rather than acting as extensions of Wilder’s stories, the voices, characters and details in the poems become vehicles for modern-day questions and observations.With titles like “Ma’s Green Delaine Dress,” “Mary’s Fingers,” “Pa’s Rifle” and “Pa’s Penis,” the poems in The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder are anything but conventional. Peculiar, gripping and exquisitely crafted, The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder is an unforgettable new collection.
The Loyal Daughter is a novel in stories, told from the perspective of mother, daughter, and granddaughter and spans the 1940s to modern day. A young woman in a village in Communist China finds herself scrapping her way through the crowded streets of Hong Kong. She immigrates to an isolated Northern Ontario city and finally settling in Toronto. When she finds herself stuck in a small apartment above a clothing store, with four kids, her mother, two siblings, and a husband who is never home, the promise of a new beginning fades. Filled with heart-breaking sacrifices, struggles, and secrets that shape her identity, The Loyal Daughter stands testament to a woman’s true resilience.
“What a lucky girl!” Everybody who has adopted a daughter from China has heard that one. And every parent has said, or thought, in reply: “No, we’re the lucky ones.” This anthology sets out to explain why people who have adopted children from China feel as though they’ve won the lottery.
Since the late 1980s, as many as 7,000 Chinese-born girls have been adopted annually and now live in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe. They are officially orphans, victims of a rigorous birth control policy limiting most families to one child. These thousands of girls have formed an international Diaspora, a human wave with no exact parallel and yet numerous points of comparison — sharing issues with war orphans from Vietnam or even with Chinese workers who built the New World’s railroads.
The memoirs collected in The Lucky Ones are organized beginning with infertility, moving to acceptance of a multiracial family, anticipating the adoption, reflecting during the trip to China and, at last, grappling with an odd destiny — turning terrible beginnings into happy endings.
The story of these girls is compelling as a narrative of hope and optimism but it may also become a story of dislocation and crisis of identity. These baby immigrants add unusual texture to the lives of the families they join — they come here not by choice but by someone else’s design.
For fans of Patrick Dewitt and Henry David Thoreau comes The Lunatic—the debut literary novel from the author of two previous non-fiction books, Michelle B. Slater, PhD.
Set during the height of the Occupy Movement of 2011, 28-year-old Nell Harding starts an experiment—alongside her faithful animal companion Argos—with the goal of crafting a different kind of life for herself. Despite Nell being a rare books librarian, she’s not immune to the lures of digital distraction, and she wonders if it’s possible to create a meaningful life off the seductive digital grid.
Using herself as a test subject, Nell unplugs to see what will happen, leaving New York City to return to the Berkshire Hills of her childhood. What she finds is a life far more challenging, surprising, and—ultimately—rewarding than she could have possibly envisioned.
Drawing from Slater’s background as a scholar of comparative literature and lover of conservationism, the novel engages with the work of poets, novelists, and philosophers, including Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Emerson, Musil, Broch, and more. Nature lovers and modern-day philosophers won’t be able to resist the tempting question—is absorption possible in the age of distraction?
The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists with change, the imbalance that for a time makes everything lucid, all the details adding up to much more than only an “us.” The visible goes beyond mere facts in these poems, transformed into the deeply seen — and therefore sacred.
The problem with daylilies
is the usual contemporary twaddle: how is it
we know anything
now that you’re gone.
What do you mean
now that you’re gone?
What do you mean
daylilies?
At 2:21 am on September 8, 1896, authorities in Nova Scotia killed an innocent man. Peter Wheeler — a “coloured” man accused of murdering a white girl — was strung up with a slipknot noose. The hanging was state-sanctioned but it was a lynching all the same. Now, a re-examination of his case using modern forensic science reveals one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Canadian history.
On the night of January 27, 1896, 14-year-old Annie Kempton found herself home alone in the picturesque village of Bear River, Nova Scotia. She did not live to see the morning. Shortly after midnight, Annie was assaulted and bludgeoned with a piece of firewood. Her killer slit her throat three times with a kitchen knife then coldly sat and ate a jar of homemade jam before fleeing into the night. The senseless and brutal slaying devastated the town and plunged her parents into a near-suicidal abyss of guilt and grief. At trial, the prosecution’s case focused on the inconsistencies in Wheeler’s statements, the testimony of two children who placed Peter near the house on the night in question, and the detective’s novel analysis of the physical evidence.
It was one of the first trials in Canada to use forensic science, albeit poorly. Wheeler’s defense team called no witnesses and did little to challenge the evidence presented. The jury deliberated less than two hours before declaring Peter Wheeler guilty of murder.
The trial itself was a media sensation; every word was front page news. Several papers each ran their own version of “Wheeler’s confession,” an admission of guilt supposedly authored by the condemned man. Each rendition tried and failed to make sense of the conflicting timeline. With every new iteration, it became clearer that the case against Wheeler was not as airtight as the detective in charge, Nick Power, and the media had proclaimed.
The Lynching of Peter Wheeler is a story of one town’s rush to judgment. It is a tale of bigotry and incompetence, arrogance and pseudoscience, fear and misguided vengeance. It is a case study in media distortion, illustrating how the print media can manipulate the truth, destroy reputations, and so thoroughly taint a jury pool, that the notion of a fair trial becomes a statistical impossibility. At the height of the Victorian era, the media created a super villain in the mold of Jack the Ripper, the perfect foil for its other creation, super-sleuth Nick Power. The masterfully constructed narrative was perfect, save for one glaring detail: Peter Wheeler did not kill Annie Kempton.
Sparse and elegant poems by the author of Songs and Dances. A subtle rhythmic sense and distaste for redundancies characterize this volume, which will appeal to readers who appreciate lucid effects and metaphorical economy.
Rome, 1221. On the death of Dominic Guzman, founder of the Order of Dominican Friars, a list of three names is locked away with the depositions attesting to Dominic’s beatification, and a copy is sealed in an icon of the Virgin Mary that is eventually carried to New France.
This list is the thread that binds the fates of ordinary people caught up in the grand sweep of historical events. The Madonna List traces the lives of two nineteenth-century men across three continents, where each finds himself intertwined with a woman who has been visited by the Virgin Mary.
Bernad Birous is an ambitious and arrogant young Genoan of the merchant class who desires to use the power of the Church to serve his worldly aims, and who comes to believe that he is the chosen of God. Martin Goyette is a young artist from the rural parishes of Lower Canada who becomes enmeshed in the doomed Lower Canada Rebellion of 1838. Their very different lives are drawn together in a penal colony in New South Wales (Australia), where fortune, ambition, and faith determine their fates. A web of mystery, violence, love, betrayal, and tragedy finally leaves one man standing and one broken when the shattering secret of The Madonna List is revealed.