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All Books in this Collection
Showing 8513–8528 of 9492 results
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Three Songs by Hank Williams
$16.95The characters in Three Songs by Hank Williams travel lonesome roads. Often packing little more than bitterness and pain, this rough-and-tumble collection of characters are all striving for peace and healing–a testament to a genuine faith in the fundamenmtal goodness of humanity in spite of frequent wrong turns or stretches of bad luck. Wharton navigates through the geography of the prairies, the Rockies and the coast, and each story reflects a familiarity with its setting and taps into the promise that each offers.
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Thresh
$12.00
THRESH: to beat mechanically, to drub to whip. Thresh is a sensual linguistic trip through the daily violence of affluence. Voyeuristic and punishing the language in this collection addresses the unlikely mechanistic rumblings of the sex doll factory floor; the progress of the Stations of the Cross; and the intricacies and polarities of female purification. Each poem lovingly hammers, pounds, teases and scratches at the fallacies of control and ownership. “ready? flail.” -
Thrillows & Despairos
$18.00Like Frank O’Hara in New York or Carl Sandburg in Chicago, some poets draw their creative energy from the city around them; Chris Chambers is such a poet. But he is also a nature poet. Revealed through his poetry, Toronto is a city of equal parts nightlife and wildlife, a crucible and a chrysalis, a vessel in which things smolder and transform. What would Toronto look like through the lens of a visionary Polish filmmaker? How does a city dream? These poems are generous with imagery and verve. They speak lovingly about a connection with a place, and in their whimsy and good nature, ascend to the universal.
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Throaty Wipes
$18.95In 1934, Gertrude Stein asked ‘What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose.’ Throaty Wipes answers this question and many more! How does broadband work? Does ‘chuffed’ mean pleased or displeased? What if the generations of Adam had mothers? Through her signature fusion of formal innovation and lyricism, Holbrook delivers what we’ve been waiting for.
‘Here is language that has a joyous physicality, reminding usthat language and, therefore, poetry is first and foremost a physical act involving the muscles of the lips, tongue and jaw; here is language that, for all its playfulness and humour, is honed against the hard edges of a post-postmodern, globalized world. Formally adventurous, Throaty Wipes refracts a mash-up of consumer society replete with Disney Princesses; Barbie dolls; Biblical myth; romantically adapted fishing instructions; the hard, hard work of birthing; surgery; thebody in all its vulnerabilities; medical procedures; running; and PIN numbers for starters. Holding it all together is an overarching intelligence shot through with a lambent compassion for the ultimately fragile human condition. Throaty Wipes shows us how poetry is always about risk-taking inside and outside of language.’ – M. NourbeSe Philip
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Through Disassembled Houses of Perfect Stones
$24.95The weight of history lies on the spine of memory. That heft and delicate balance are palpable in these rich poems that echo with grief, longing, and observed beauty. From the silence and complexity of the northern wilderness to the vast prairie landscapes stretching across the province, Through Disassembled Houses of Perfect Stones explores self, ancestry, and community through poems which dwell on the page with a satisfying density of imagery. Combining careful observation with sensitive reflection, this work examines the poet’s memory and experience as a father, son, husband, and descendent of European settlers married into an Indigenous family living in Northern Manitoba.
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Through the Bamboo
$18.95Twelve-year-old Philly is literally pulled into an action-packed adventure while mourning the loss of her lola when she opens an old book and finds herself tossed into the fantastical land of Uwi.
In Uwi, memories are stories, and all stories are forbidden since the datu’s storytelling-loving wife died and his youngest daughter Nale disappeared. Now his remaining daughters, the Sisters, rule with darkness in their hearts. So when Philly appears, the duwende believe that she is Nale and the key to saving Uwi. Can Philly save them all while searching for her lola to bring her back home?
Similar to The Wizard of Oz, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Alice in Wonderland, this unique Filipinx-Canadian tale inspired by Philippine mythology shows the value of keeping memories alive and explores how families deal with loss.
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Through the Eyes
$15.95Through the Eyes is award-winning playwright Don Druickís acclaimed tour de force for a solo actor. Set in the Versailles of the Sun King, this play is the story of the great Italian artist, Gianlorenzo Berniniís visit to France in 1665. The Italian finds himself in an opulent and dangerous world, bristling with cruelty and intrigue, tyrannized by passion and violence. Bernini is commissioned to carve a bust of the king; the resultant clash between these two great egos is fearsome to behold. Survival itself becomes a compelling issue.
Critical Comment
ìThe script reveals Druickís verbal artistry: the evocation of the various characters and episodes is vivid; each interpolated character has its own rhythm; and the two-act piece is carefully constructed as a coherent whole through variations in pace and tone that are inscribed in the text.î
ó U of T Quarterly, Winter 2006
ìDruickís play…. is a series of miniature scenes crackling with emotion and politics, created with tiny, subtle brush strokes…. Music and a sense of rhythm infuse his work.î
ó Jon Kaplan, Now
ì…. one of Canadaís finest playwrights….î
ó Robert Crew, Toronto Star
ìYou can…. almost smell the danger of the place.î
ó Kate Taylor, Globe and Mail
ìFrom its very first moments, Druick conjures up the poisonous atmosphere of a world ruled by fear and rumour where truth is merely the whim of an absolute monarch.î
ó Christopher Hoile, Eye
ìDruickís script is vivid and delicate, a sensitive and sensuous piece of writing alive with colour and texture, its images polished like marble until they gleam.î
ó Jill Lawless, Now
ìThe magic of Through The Eyes is that it captures the obscene opulence and the intricate, repressed relationships of the Court of Louis XIV… using only one actor and a bare stage.î
ó Elisa Kukla, Eye
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Through the Eyes of Asunder
$17.95Through the Eyes of Asunder is a poetic journey through the life of one once broken, in heart, spirit, and mind. It starts and it ends with hope, and takes the reader through despair, grief, sorrow and sadness, with moments of introspective happiness and love.
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Through The Mill
$29.95Girls and women played an important role in the industrialization of Canada—particularly in the cotton textile industry concentrated in Quebec. Until the end of World War I, they accounted for more than half of the workers who toiled in the province’s cotton mills. Contrary to conventional wisdom that women were most often quiescent, short-term workers who undercut unions’ organizing efforts, female cotton workers demonstrated remarkable levels of labor activism and militancy across time. Through their participation and their changing roles within working-class families, these girls and women were instrumental in helping to transform Quebec into the increasingly modern industrial society associated with the Quiet Revolution. Central to the author’s research are 84 oral interviews with women workers who were employed in two important manufacturing centers, Valleyfield and Magog. Complementing the rich body of information obtained from the interviews, the author has used an array of primary and secondary sources to explore the textile companies’ motivation for employing girls and women, their recruiting methods, the demographic composition of the labor force, and working conditions. Patterns of continuity and change are examined within the context of prevailing economic conditions, cultural and social attitudes, and technological developments. Through The Mill, one of few in-depth studies of the lives of women industrial workers in Canada, is an invaluable contribution to feminist labor history. -
Through the Waspmouth I Drew You
$20.00Marrying the precise yet nuanced language of his earlier work with new, invented vocabularies and usages, Nicola Vulpe draws deep into the origins of language to confront what it means to write poetry or attempt any artistic endeavour, or, indeed, continue in a world where so many of us struggle, literally, not to drown. Written to be read aloud, to be heard like a poem in the most ancient oral traditions, Through the Waspmouth is a synesthetic work that arouses our senses and our intellect. We come to this poem as to a new language, a language whose details and mechanics are opaque, but which, like a child turning to innate linguistic resources, we nonetheless somehow understand, and into which we are drawn and held in thrall.
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Thrum
$16.95“To get at turn away.” In Thrum, her second collection of poetry, Natalie Simpson reveals how making sense is not always the same as making meaning. Her supple and agile poems seduce the weary reader away from representation and toward sound, texture, and absence. Here, a sentence is no longer a sentence, but “a word in pieces, plastered, faster,” which “crumbles” on the page into strange and luminous syntactical patterns that create new and better pathways for meaning.
Roughly woven, rough to touch.
Small words stealing fog. The rest are tongue flicks.
Home is how hard you eat your heart out.Simpson writes in a tradition that begins with Gertrude Stein and includes many contemporary Canadian and American poets, such as Lisa Robertson, Harryette Mullen, Anne Carson, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Dennis Lee, Nicole Brossard, and Juliana Spahr. Like the authors and the work that has influenced it, Simpson’s free writing engages with language non-representationally and pays close attention to sound, rhythm, and energy within the sentence, often in dialogue with phrases from other poets. Not limited to the literary, Simpson also recontextualizes snippets of language from other discourses, such as news, advertising, and law.
Thrum records a poetics of process. Immersing herself in loosely strung lines and repeated phrases, Simpson’s speaker seeks refuge in disordered language, in the alternative logic of poetic devices. For Simpson, the act of writing and unwriting is a movement toward beauty and hope, an opening. Sound and rhythm. Syntax and punctuation. Tension in the sentence. Torque. Making strange, Simpson reveals, is making sense, and placing pressure on language through poetic devices uncovers its beautiful absurdities, its languid uncertainties. -
ths is erth thees ar peopul
$17.95The quest in this latest fusion of song, sound, performance and visual poetry from bill bissett is for a human condition outside the perpetual terror of the twenty-first century—a terror based in an irrational fear that the loss of our ideologies, our homemade gods and bombs will leave us impoverished and vulnerable to the ambitions of others. “I call you again over a vast linguistic valley,” offers the poet. “The brain is a soft flower, tremulous in its aspecting, and wanting to trust, we lose what we seek and find what finds us. This is earth. These are people.”
This tireless quest to find the delight of discovery, wonder and truth in what at first sight seems foreign, mysterious and apparently “incorrect,” defines both bissett’s latest book and his singular poetic genius. The joy of discovery and recognition in our encounter with the poet’s unpunctuated, uncapitalized phonetic spelling and visual presentation offers us a reward in direct proportion to our willingness to engage the work by abandoning all of the baggage of the learned expectations we bring to the act of reading—allowing the words and their new echoes to cross the “vast linguistic valley” that is redolent with the imaginative possibility of entrances to others as they actually appear, and not as we expect them to be.
As always, bissett pushes his linguistic palette here into realms that ideographically lend access to his intellectual discoveries. His introduction of an occasionally determined capital A in the middle of a word or phrase, representing “a tent on a mountain,” echoes the profound spirituality of this book, and its suggestion that “The mind is a kaleidoscope—discouragement—satisfaction—and finding the way again. There are no happy endings. Happy moments, yes. The drama and all the poetic approaches continue to be.”
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Thumbscrews
$10.00The 2007 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry Winner!
Thumbscrews is a poetic engagement with the aesthetics of sadomasochism and consensual pain. It employs the techniques of mannerist poetry to constrain language as ropes, cuffs, or shackles that might be used to constrain the body. Each poem can be taken as a miniature sadomasochistic encounter where language is tied up, beaten, and twisted into submission. This book abuses language; language begs for it. Thumbscrews engages with the sexual subculture of BDSM in content as well as in form. It explores the erotic ’scene’ and the prevalence of role-playing in the kinky bedroom, examines various settings as ‘pervertable’ locations, and chronicles a series of embarrassing trips to the emergency room. Poems are shaped from the hobbled language of email, visual representations of pain, and odes to various implements.
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Thunder Road
$16.00In a flash, the world Ted Callan knew exploded. The fire on the patch had burned everything to the ground, including his marriage. Now he’s on the road looking for a fresh start. What he finds is a mysterious young woman named Tilda who tells him he’s destined to be a hero or die a quick and painful death.When three stout men break into his hotel room, bind him to the bed and carve his skin with a stylus it appears she was right. The next thing Ted knows, his body is covered in an elaborate norse tattoo, complete with the power of the Gods. As he seeks out the three men who assaulted him, Ted learns that the creatures of Norse mythology walk in the world of humankind and some of them want to see it burn.Accompanied by the trickster Loki and the bequiling Tilda, Ted wants nothing more than to have his old life back. No more tattoos. No more smart-ass Gods. No more mystic powers. The problem is, if he succeeds, it might just be the end of the world.
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Thunderstick
$14.95Jacob is an alcoholic reporter, his estranged cousin Isaac is a worldly photojournalist just recently returned to Canada-and their editor pairs them up to cover a story on Parliament Hill. The problems start when Jacob vomits onto the Prime Minister, an act which is mistaken for an assassination attempt. While in jail, the cousins get information which sends them on a madcap romp to try and track down what might be the story of their lives, involving a government coverup, an international fugitive and a lesbian love nest in the Northern Ontario woods.When their car breaks down, stranding them in the woods in the middle of the night, Jacob and Isaac finally face up to their painful shared past, and come to terms with what has divided them for all these years.Thunderstick has been produced in Toronto, Saskatoon, and Edmonton, where it drew standing-room-only crowds. One paper described the characters as “An aboriginal Oscar and Felix.”
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Thy Woman’s Weeds
$18.95“Frailty, thy name is man.”
Lady Capulet wants to look younger, while Goneril longs to play Lear. Viola is weary of her “woman’s weeds,” and Desdemona needs an intimacy coach. As a director tells Lady Macbeth to sexualize her unsexing, Ophelia stages her death to escape Denmark—all while a chorus of actresses get candid about what’s happening behind the scenes.
Daringly irreverent and innovative, Erin Shields doesn’t hold back in this fierce feminist examination of Shakespeare’s canon, exposing how his representation of women plays out in rehearsal halls, dressing rooms, and social dynamics behind the scenes. Neither a love letter nor a breakup text, Thy Woman’s Weeds is a collective scream giving voice to the unwritten verses of Shakespeare’s iconic characters and the women who play them.