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On a dreary morning in April, 1893, John Marshall, a Portuguese immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse, his body cold and lifeless. The farmer’s face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shocked and unfortunate neighbour who discovered the body rushed to Huntingdon railway station to summon the authorities. An autopsy, coroner’s inquest and murder investigation followed. Only two days later, a local handyman named Albert Stroebel was arrested for Marshall’s murder. Stroebel was an unlikely killer: short and physically disabled, locals considered him a harmless “boy” who seemed much younger than his 20 years. The young man the community knew was not capable of murder, and locals were shocked to imagine that Stroebel could have killed the man who had treated him like family.
But something had gone tragically wrong on the night Marshall died. Unravelling the mystery would take nine months and two lengthy trials that seized the attention of local communities on both sides of the Canadian-American border, splitting them into pro- and anti-Stroebel factions. Newspapers devoted page after page of coverage and throngs of spectators squeezed into the courtroom galleries. The first trial in New Westminster ended with the jury hopelessly deadlocked, the second in Victoria found him guilty and set an impending date for his execution. The heaviest hitters of BC’s political and legal establishment took part including former and current premiers, an Attorney General, and a future Supreme Court justice.
When the second trial ended with a guilty verdict and death sentence many in the public howled in protest, convinced that a young man had been condemned to die for a crime he did not commit. And the dramatic events would not stop there. With the condemned man sitting on death row, the case would take more twists and turns that would lead Albert Stroebel to the shadow of the gallows.
“When I was thirteen I was raped by the Paper Bag Rapist. I was with my younger cousin at the time, and neither one of us ever saw him—he used a paper bag to cover his own head or those of his victims. Not that we would have seen him anyway; a gun was held to the backs of our heads and if we turned around he’d kill us. He only had one bullet left, he said, so he’d have to chop up my cousin while I watched, then shoot me. By the time the attack was over and we were left lying in the mud, we were both different people.
I had wanted to write a play about this experience for years; propelled by my anger at how often rape was portrayed in a titillating, shocking, gratuitous way on screen or stage. Rapists were evil and the victims were only that: victims.
But, how would I stage it? How would I tell the story? Why would I tell this story? After a decade of chewing over these questions, the image of a young tree lying on its side came to me. A man was chopping an axe through its centre. A girl in a harness spun out of control above him. The sound of their breathing filled the space. The seed for The Trigger was planted.
The Trigger is for the 170 victims of the Paper Bag Rapist, their families, the communities affected by this predator, and every human being who has ever been sexually violated and lives with that experience in their core, which comes to the surface in intimate relationships, because, let’s face it, when one is raped, there is physical intimacy with the attacker. The Trigger deals with the ripples of this kind of violation.”
Cast of 5 women.
The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen years. Deeply centred in domestic life, Goyette’s work is informed by a muscular lyricism. These are poems that push the limits, always true to their roots.
“This is a fresh new voice with a tense lyrical intelligence. This is a collection to begin everything with, a cure for silence, secrets that arrive with a steady eloquence.” –Patrick Lane
An A-to-Z compendium that finds the wonder in information overload.
The Truth About Facts makes intimate the seeming noise of information and facts by using the tradition of the alphabet book to get back to basics: to make room for wonder, devotion, and a reinvigorated role for poetry in both quick and methodological thought. Vautour leads his readers on an info-drenched, abecedarian jaunt that is both tongue-in-cheek and unquestionably earnest. Ranging from topics as assorted as Brazil Nuts and Juggling to meditations on Rememoration and the Zodiac, The Truth About Facts moves between the surety of aphorism and the anxieties of critique.
“The Truth about Facts subtly and satisfyingly illuminates already existing connections in the seemingly far-flung.”—Canadian Literature
“If, like me, you find yourself randomly clicking through Wikipedia articles late into the night, you will love this delightful ramble through the facts.”—Sachiko Murakami
Poems exploring the idea of home and the difficulties of a deeply ambiguous relationship to that word.
— At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft’s The Truth of Houses is an elegant and honest debut collection. While very intimate — even startlingly intimate at times — the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective. Reading them, we eavesdrop on the uncovering of a personal vernacular that might allow the present to be better lived; we have the sense of overhearing a particular yet eerily familiar inner struggle — a struggle for insight, for an equanimity with which both narrator and fortunate reader might re-enter life anew.
All of which is to say: the houses aren’t fooled
the houses know the five truths
The truth of light: you will see before you understand
The truth of motion: escape is an illusion
The truth of trees: your busy life will dissolve into the soil
The truth of windows: what protects can also maim
The truth of peace:
despite all the other truths
knowing will come to you wearing one hundred faces
contain you as once you contained your
own blood
— from “The Truth of Houses”
People die. Secrets don’t.
Sam Hutchings was looking for a writing muse. She hoped that the family cabin at Bird Lake would spark her keyboard, a fire that had been smothered by self-loathing, cheap wine, and her daughter Meg’s summer vacation. An innocent stroll down memory lane begins to unravel the story Sam had heard about her father: What did he do for a living? How did he actually die? Those who know the truth are nearer than she imagines, and protecting their secrets is worth killing for. As the old family stories begin to disintegrate, can Sam and Meg figure out the actual story? And can they uncover the dangerous plot by ex-U.S. military men — before it’s too late?
Set in the mid-1980s between Canada and Thailand, The Two Faces of Paradise rockets Ted Smith onto into the scene with this skillful debut. After being conscripted into service by his older brother, Robert Percy reluctantly agrees to return to South-East Asia to find his missing niece-by-marriage, Edith Weston. Armed with little more than grave misgivings and an unruly collection of skeletons in his backpack, Robert sets out for Thailand in search of Edith: daughter of privilege, spurious deserter, one-time confidant and clandestine lover. The Two Faces of Paradise is a treatise on travel and the internal journey of the traveller. It is a redemption story of family, devastating loss, and love.
The collected poetry, covering a 50-year span from 1970 to 2020, of one of Canada’s most influential writers, literary critics and publishers. His work has been described as a “multidimensional oeuvre that includes autobiography, politics, the quotidian, myth, tragedy and humor.” And D’Alfonso himself has been called “a philosopher who puts on the mask of the poet in order to better grasp the ambiguities of our world.”
An essay on thinking typographically. Includes references to architecture, design, language and poetry.
You’ve heard of The Big Sleep, right? Well, it’s a new century – time for The Ubiquitous Big
Anyone with even a modest fetish for cultural icons from the 40s and 50s will love the way pulp fiction, fashion, media war coverage and movies are splintered and reconfigured in The Ubiquitous Big. Samuels reveals how timely that period was while he simultaneously exposes our present-day reliance upon these things as cultural and historical motifs. Samuels examines the past in order to ironically question ‘what is now?’
The Ubiquitous Big imagines life in the age of hyper-modernity as a play with a splintered script and countless actors, its narratives unfolding against a backdrop of cultural obsessions with iconic celebrity, physical beauty, war and conquest. Built around helter-skelter transformations of found text, film-noir dialogue and overheard conversation, this is our world seen from atop a narrow ledge between horrified fascination and sardonic humour. The result is a book of playful poetry with a serious trigger finger.
Essential advice for fans and fighters
MMA is one of the world’s fastest-growing sports. The Ultimate Guide to Preventing and Treating MMA Injuries offers professional and amateur fighters and fans alike the sound professional advice they need to prevent and treat injuries, find a good training camp and partners, train smarter — not harder — and choose the right equipment. Dr. Jonathan Gelber translates complicated medical topics into a guide full of practical, easy-to-follow information, complete with step-by-step photos and diagrams. From joint injuries to preventing infection, from muscle strains to the hot topic of head injuries and concussions, Dr. Gelber outlines all the need-to-know details.
Featuring advice from more than 40 UFC Hall of Famers and champions, as well as many of MMA’s top athletes and elite trainers, The Ultimate Guide to Preventing and Treating MMA Injuries is a must-have for anyone serious about today’s fight game.
“If you like hockey and travel, you’ll love this book.” — Rick Vaive, Leafs captain and three-time 50-goal scorer
The Ultimate Leafs Fan attended every Toronto Maple Leafs contest of the 2018–19 NHL season and in this lively account makes it his mission to figure out what makes fans bleed blue
Through 89 games, from October to April, Mike Wilson, a retired Bay Street trader, traveled to 31 rinks to document stories of Leafs love. Mike took every conceivable mode of transport, stayed in team hotels and on the couches of family and friends, then went into the cheap seats, private suites, the streets, sports bars, hotel lobbies, and many other unique locations where Leafs Nation gets together, to gather tales both hilarious and heart-wrenching. Media personalities, former players, and NHL celebrities gave Wilson their thoughts on what fuels the Leafs passion.
With a foreword from club president Brendan Shanahan and colourful souvenir photos, The Ultimate Road Trip allows fans to vicariously experience the journey of a lifetime, and explores the passion of the sign-waving, fully costumed diehards who fill arenas from Alberta to Anaheim.
Freedom, truth, and justice are taken for granted in some countries. In others, they are aspirational. And yet in others, they are deemed justification for persecution, punishment, and silence.
Through first-person essays and short stories, the contributors to The Uncaged Voice share their brutal yet heart-rending tales of fleeing the oppressive regimes of their homelands, where freedom of expression and the press is an ideal, not a reality, and where totalitarian forces attempt to subjugate, if not annihilate, all forms of dissention.
From war correspondents reporting across dangerous “no-go zones,” to female journalists escaping conservative and patriarchal tyranny, to independent newspaper editors risking imprisonment or worse to criticize authoritarian states — these fifteen writers-in-exile continue to write, sharing both the suppressed truths of their past and the hopes they have for the future in Canada, their chosen place of asylum.
With introductions by editor Keith Ross Leckie and Mary Jo Leddy, The Uncaged Voice tells often-silenced stories, not only of censorship and persecution, but also of the strength and resilience of those unwavering in their fight for the freedom of expression.
Contributors include: Aaron Berhane, Gezahegn Mekonnen Demissie, Alexander Duarte, Ava Homa, Abdulrahman Matar, Ilamaran Nagarasa, Luis Horacio Nájera, Kiran Nazish, Pedro A. Restrepo, Maria Saba, Kaziwa Salih, Mahdi Saremifar, Bilal Sarwary, Savithri, and Arzu Yildiz.