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A collection of essays, reviews, personal reflections and interviews that offer a welcoming and insightful tour of contemporary Canadian poetry, as well as cultural studies on topics ranging from clothespins to eulogies. Anita Lahey, former editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, Canada?s most distinguished and lively poetry journal, brings together here her thought-provoking Arc essays with appreciations and reviews of a who?s who of Canadian women poets, including the exquisite (and rebellious!) formalist Diana Brebner, ?miniaturist? M. Travis Lane, grand dame P.K. Page, the long-neglected Dorothy Roberts, and Gwendolyn MacEwen, whose dramatic life and death unfortunately persist in overshadowing the legacy of her work. She writes on her Polish-immigrant grandmother and on growing up as the daughter of a cash register repairman, and engages in probing discussions with eminent Canadian authors Stephanie Bolster, John Barton, Joan Thomas and Alice Munro.
A sweet and moving picture book depicting Ari’s gender journey from childhood to adolescence in order to discover who they really are.
Meet Ari, a young person who doesn’t like to be called by their birth name Edward: “When I think of the name Edward, I imagine old kings who snore a lot.” Throughout this beautiful and engaging picture book, we watch Ari grow up before our very eyes as they navigate the ins and outs of their gender identity; we see how, as a child, they prefer dolls and princess movies, and want to grow out their hair, though their father insists on cutting it short, “because thatâs what boys look like.” At nine, they play hockey but wish they could try on their mother’s dresses; at fifteen, they shave their face, hoping to have smooth skin like the girls. At sixteen, they want to run away, especially from their father, who insists, “You’re a boy, so you have to act like one.” Who will Ari become?
Moving from age six to adolescence, The Name I Call Myself touchingly depicts Edward’s tender, solitary gender journey to Ari: a new life distinguished and made meaningful by self-acceptance and unconditional love.
From old school dispensation to Zombie apocalypse: on change, loss and rapid transformations.
The Narrow Cabinet is a book about change, loss and the struggle to understand what the hell is going on in a world experiencing such rapid transformations. The movement is from (a) an old dispensation of tough minded, rugged living and surviving troubled times through (b) a narcissistic sinkhole of complacency leading ultimately to (c) a zombie apocalypse. That is the general trajectory, but the work itself complicates the tropes. The old dispensation is by no means a paradise, nor is it dealt with nostalgically. The seeds of all the trouble are there from the start. But there is something admirable in the strength and fearless grit we find during that phase. In the sinkhole phase, the voice flits between depressive angst and lunatic outrage as oppressive forces exert ever more stubborn pressure. Here the speaker begins seeking the cause of the trouble that worsens until ultimately manifesting as zombie culture. With the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse, the terms of the illness become apparent.
Finalist for the 2021 Rasmussen & Co. Indigenous Peoples’ Writing Award
The Narrows of Fear (Wapawikoscikanik) weaves the stories of a group of women committed to helping one another. Despite abuse experienced by some, both in their own community and in residential schools, these women learn to celebrate their culture, its stories, its dancing, its drums, and its elders. Principal of these elders is Nina, the advisor at the women’s shelter. With the help of Sandy and Charlene, Nina uses Indigenous practices to heal the traumatized Mary Ann. This is a powerful novel&151;sometimes brutally violent, sometimes healing, sometimes mythical, and always deeply respectful of the Indigenous culture at its heart.
In 1945, Alfred Adams, a respected Haida elder and founding president of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC), was dying of cancer. After decades of fighting to increase the rights and recognition of First Nations people, he implored Maisie Hurley to help his people by telling others about their struggle. Hurley took his request to both heart and mind, and with $150 of her own money, started a small newspaper that would become a powerful catalyst for change: The Native Voice.
At that time, the Welsh-born Hurley had been an advocate for First Nations clients in court. She did not have a law degree, but was graced with the courage and confidence to challenge all who stood in her way. When defending a First Nations woman accused of stealing a hotel clerk’s wallet, she seared the hapless plaintiff with such a withering cross examination that his off-colour rejoinder earned him a night in jail for contempt after he refused to pay the fine.
After Hurley launched The Native Voice, it became the official newspaper of the NBBC, one of the largest democratic First Nations organizations in the country, but she continued to serve on the editorial board as publisher and director for many years without remuneration. At a time when telecommunication was expensive and often inaccessible in Aboriginal communities, The Native Voice reported relevant news and stories of everyday life to First Nations throughout the province, including hard-won rights such as the right to vote provincially (1949) and federally (1960). As the official publication of the NBBC, the Voice chronicled both the realities of Aboriginal life and a vision for the future, enabling and inspiring overdue change in Canada.
Maisie Hurley’s dedication to improving the lives of those she referred to as “my people” was honoured through several First Nations naming ceremonies by people of the Skeena, Squamish/North Vancouver and Comox areas. The story of the NBBC, The Native Voice and Maisie Hurley offer an inspiring testament to the power of cooperation and vision to create powerful change.
Christopher Dewdney has been working on the The Natural History for two decades. He describes it as a book about high summer, though according to his natural history the fingers of summer reach in both directions of time: as early as March and as late as November. This is a sensual book, in love not only with foliage and creatures, weather and landscape, but also with the textures of language, the rhythm of English itself; not just Anglo Saxon and Germanic, but also its southern Latin heritage blowing like a scientific sirocco up from the Mediterranean. A compendium of particulars written from the inside of its subject, The Natural History evokes the timeless moment of perception itself. And while it is set in the present, the whole geological past of the planet is represented, so that an event occurring on a summer day in current time will be juxtaposed with an event occurring during the Silurian epoch, some 440 million years ago. Revised, augmented, and presented in its entirety for the first time here, The Natural History is one of the most beautiful and erotic bodies of work this country has to offer. As Stan Dragland has commented: “The New-Old World of this long poem… is sensuously and conceptually so immediate that orgasm and epiphany are one in it. This is writing, and reading, as immersion.”
“There is no one else in this country… who has so persuasively chipped away at a rock face to reveal the poetry striated just beneath the surface.… These intelligent, uncompromising sensual poems are not for the rapid reader, but anyone who lingers with them a while will be amply repaid.”
— Quill & Quire
For more than three decades, Lucien — one of the most notorious characters in the history of the novel — has haunted the imaginations of readers around the world. Remarkably, the astounding protagonist of Gabrielle Wittkop’s lyrical 1972 novella, The Necrophiliac, has never appeared in English until now.
This new translation introduces readers to a masterpiece of French literature, striking not only for its astonishing subject matter but for the poetic beauty of the late author’s subtle, intricate writing.
Like the best writings of Edgar Allan Poe or Baudelaire, Wittkop’s prose goes far beyond mere gothic horror to explore the melancholy in the loneliest depths of the human condition, forcing readers to confront their own mortality with an unprecedented intimacy.
A bold new play about the secrets we keep, from one of Canada’s best playwrights
Simon and Denise reside in a modest house on a quiet street, their life blissfully low-key and unassuming. But when it comes to light that their next-door neighbour has been hiding a disturbing secret, it forces the couple to re-examine the past, leading the audience to a surprising conclusion that asks hard questions about the bonds thatunite us.
Finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation
Sandrine’s father is dead, and her mother has vanished into her grief. Alone and suffering from an incurable disease, the eleven-year-old girl finds companionship in her doctor, Tiresias, who morphologically changes sex in unpredictable ways (and seemingly without anyone noticing). A transformational tale about the mysteries of identity and the power dynamics that surround it, The Neptune Room pieces together life’s terrible but tender metamorphosis, opening a door onto a universe of beauty, mourning, and renewal.
The Nerves Centre is a series of poems about performance (and other) anxiety, told through the jittery stop-and-start actions of a stagefright-afflicted Performer who can’t speak while on stage. The Performer’s linguistically vaudevillian performances are punctuated with sound poems that capture the moments of panic she experiences. Constructed from recordings of actual panic attacks that were poorly transcribed by increasingly confused transcription software, then reshaped into poems for the page, these sound and breath pieces create a palpable experience of a Performer caught in the moment of panic. These are poems with roots in vaudeville, silent comedy, Beckettian mime, sessions with your therapist, and stage fright. Never judgemental, always hopeful that this time the performance will work, Szczepaniak brings a slapstick sensibility to every poem, a deep compassion for anyone struggling to find their voice, trying to speak, or having trouble with a pesky boulder.
In her early twenties, Alma met a tree-planter and fell in love — not with the man but with his strangely romantic work. Now, after several seasons of planting trees out west, the tough-minded hero of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s visceral first novel has come home to northern Ontario to help reforest the ravaged landscape with a gang of filthy ex-hippies and idealistic students. Baking by day in the hot sun and tormented by mosquitoes and blackflies, Alma and her fellow planters relieve their backbreaking toil at night with sex, dope, and alcohol. But her brief passionate affair with a charismatic newcomer named Willem raises the ire of Karl (whose amorous attentions she has deflected in the past), and he viciously rapes her. Pregnant and alone, Alma flees to an abandoned mining camp where she and Willem once made love. There, with the help of the camp’s single weird inhabitant, she constructs for herself and her unwanted baby an increasingly ominous new life.
Weaving together Alma’s story with an ancient Flemish folktale about a peasant girl’s magical hold over a lustful count, Kuitenbrouwer links the power of narrative with the passion for self-realization. The Nettle Spinner is a gritty, sensuous debut that portrays sex with startling clarity and violence with peculiar tenderness.
The #1 National Bestseller
Shortlisted for the 2019 Speaker’s Book Award
Nominated for the 2019 Heritage Toronto Book Award
“Barclay combines his admiration of the band with his knowledge of the music industry to make a clever, touching, and very informative book that may well be the definitive work on an important piece of Canadian pop culture.” — Publishersweekly.com, starred review
The long-awaited, first-ever print biography of Canada’s band!
In the summer of 2016, more than a third of Canadians tuned in to watch what was likely the Tragically Hip’s final performance, broadcast from their hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Why? Because these five men were always more than just a band. They sold millions of records and defined a generation of Canadian rock music. But they were also a tabula rasa onto which fans could project their own ideas: of performance, of poetry, of history, of Canada itself.
In the first print biography of the Tragically Hip, Michael Barclay talks to dozens of the band’s peers and friends about not just the Hip’s music but about the opening bands, the American albatross, the band’s role in Canadian culture, and Gord Downie’s role in reconciliation with Indigenous people. When Downie announced he had terminal cancer and decided to take the Hip on the road one more time, the tour became another Terry Fox moment; this time, Canadians got to witness an embattled hero reach the finish line.
This is a book not just for fans of the band: it’s for anyone interested in how culture can spark national conversations.
In 1943, the New Brunswick Rangers were sent to Britain, converted into a heavy weapons support unit, and shipped off to Normandy.
Originating as a 19th century militia, the New Brunswick Rangers were placed on active service for the first time during the Second World War, serving first in the Maritimes and Newfoundland. In 1943, the Rangers were sent to Britain, where they were converted to a heavy weapons support unit, armed with machine guns and mortars in preparation for the invasion of Normandy.
In this illuminating account, Matthew Douglass uncovers their participation in the war: their arrival in Normandy and their contributions to the battles in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. Present at many of the critical moments of the campaign, the Rangers participated in the Battle of the Falaise Gap, which cleared the way for the advance on Paris and the German border; the Battle of the Scheldt, which secured the vital supply lines of the port of Antwerp; and the Battle of the Reichswald, when German resistance on the west bank of the Rhine was finally broken. Drawing on archival photographs and original source documents, Douglass’s account of the Rangers’ wartime experiences is a crucial piece in understanding the role of heavy weapons support units on the Western Front.
The New Brunswick Rangers in the Second World War is volume 27 of the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.