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Showing 8513–8528 of 9248 results
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Tumbling for Amateurs
$22.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 FIDDLEHEAD POETRY BOOK PRIZE
A reimagining of an instructional text on tumbling supports poems about the amateurishness of being human.
Tumbling for Amateurs is a reimagining of James Tayloe Gwathmey’s 1910 book of the same name, published as part of Spalding’s Athletic Library. Bookended with “Propositions” on why tumbling is a skill that everyone should learn and “Extracts from Letters of Support,” each verso poem in this collection pairs with a recto illustration based on drawings from the source text. In the spirit of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, word and image work for each other, creating something more than just an instructional manual.
Tumbling is, well, a metaphor for everything. And we all are, well, amateurs. Experimentation abounds in these poems and manipulated pictures. There are anaphoras, list sonnets, erasures, palimpsests and concrete poems, all working from tumbling’s limited vocabulary and central focus of acrobatics and gymnastics. In this experimentation of form and text is a search for the lyric, for an emotional connection when one isn’t always possible, in bodies, in movement, in desire. “We measure our lives by what our bodies can do.”
“We have no other way to touch each other. / Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other.” Like the tumbling acts from which they spring, Gwathmey’s poems are delightfully performative. They leap, loop, and reconfigure familiar forms into fresh and acrobatic new intimacies. Slyly queering his source text — an early 20th century tumbling manual for young men salvaged from the dusty closet of family history — Gwathmey transforms instruction into seduction as he conducts a tender and playful archeology of desire.” – Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book
“Matthew Gwathmey’s poems, springboarding from a genre of fitness manual popular in the early twentieth century, tumble us into the present through tests gamily set for body and mind. As ripped as his gymnast protagonists—evoked so fetchingly in the book’s illustrations—Gwathmey writes a poetry eschewing the lyrical in favour of a stripped-down, athletic language that gives shape to ‘what must remain / nameless.’ There’re so many ways to read ourselves into Tumbling for Amateurs. Go toe to toe with these poems and they’ll tone up your grip on what poetry is.”
– John Barton, author of Lost Family“Gwathmey’s poems go together like a troupe, somersaulting through the vocabulary of the way a body moves. They turn the still past into this moving present.” – Paul Legault, author of The Tower
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Tuner of Silences, The
$19.95“Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa.”—Doris Lessing
“By meshing the richness of African beliefs . . . into the Western framework of the novel, he creates a mysterious and surreal epic.”—Henning Mankell
Mwanito Vitalício was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears. Mwanito’s been living in a big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. He’s been told that rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, that they wait for an apology from God. In the place his father calls Jezoosalem, Mwanito has been told that crying and praying are the same thing. Both, it seems, are forbidden. The 8th novel by NY Times-acclaimed Mia Couto, The Tuner of Silences is the story of Mwanito’s struggle to reconstruct a family history that his father is unable to discuss. With the young woman’s arrival in Jezoosalem, however, the silence of the past quickly breaks down, and both his father’s story and the world are heard once more. The Tuner of Silences was heralded as one of the most important books to be published in France in 2011, and remains a shocking portrait of the intergenerational legacies of war. Available for the first time in English.
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Tunes for Dancing Bears
$24.95Every year, 2.6 million babies are stillborn around the world; in Canada, one in every 125 pregnancies ends in a stillbirth. It is September 1991 and Lydia has just given birth to a stillborn child in Montreal. As she and her husband, Dr John Gabriel, grapple with its after effects, their lives and relationship come under inevitable scrutiny. Lydia, the daughter of poor Greek immigrants, fears she has failed her husband as well as his more prosperous Greek family. Their marriage had been shaky from the start and the stillbirth seriously threatens its very foundations, including John?s commitment to fidelity. Tunes for Dancing Bears plunges deeply into the complexities of grief and the limits of our self regard. A touching story of family, immigration, hope, and what it really means to make a life for ourselves.
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Tunirrusiangit
$45.00Two generations of Inuit artists challenging the parameters of tradition.
Kenojuak Ashevak shot to fame in 1970 when Canada Post printed The Enchanted Owl, a print of a black-and-red plumed nocturnal bird, on a postage stamp. She later became known as the magic-marker-wielding “grandmother of Inuit art,” famous for her fluid graphic storytelling and her stunning depictions of wildlife. She was a defining figure in Inuit art and one of the first Indigenous artists to be embraced as a contemporary Canadian artist.
Ashevak’s legacy inspired her nephew, Timootee (Tim) Pitsiulak, to take up drawing at the Kinngait Studios. In his relatively short career, he became a popular figure, known for drawing animal figures with a hunter’s precision and capturing the technological presence of the South in Nunavut.
Tunirrusiangit, “their gifts” or “what they gave” in Inuktitut, celebrates the achievements of two remarkable artists who challenged the parameters of tradition while consistently articulating a compelling vision of the Inuit world view. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, opening on 16 June and continuing until late August, Tunirrusiangit features more than 60 reproductions of paintings, drawings, and documentary photographs. Completing the book are essays by contemporary artists and curators Jocelyn Piirainen, Anna Hudson, Georgiana Uhlyarik, Koomuatuk Curley, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and Taqralik Partridge that address both the past and future of Inuit identity.
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Tunnel Island
$24.95Set on an island in BC’s Salish Sea, a richly imagined and often hilarious collection of linked stories by Bill Gaston, a master of the art of short fiction.
Eleven stories feature a cast of characters striving to overcome pasts that often include a catastrophic error. On Tunnel Island, moral misjudgments, semi-legal schemes, and antisocial gaffes abound as characters seek a remedy for what ails them: loneliness, heartbreak, grief.
Jack ekes out a living doing odd jobs and minding the estates of absent owners, until he takes a lover’s bad advice and rents their houses through Airbnb. A dying woman retains her wry Wiccan sense of humour while lovingly ministered to by her partner — in between his trips to hand out Halloween candy at their door. The almost mystical disappearance of a toddler is revisited years later when her parents remarry in a surreal outdoor ceremony.
Highly original and empathetic, Tunnel Island is electrified by dark undercurrents that jolt and illuminate by turns. Bill Gaston’s bighearted vision of life on a heavily forested island immerses readers in a world rendered tender and tolerable by human folly and our stumbling attempts at redemption.
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Turing Machinists
$9.99At seventeen, Del’s world seems to be falling apart. He’s managed his Asperger’s well, has a solid group of friends in his special needs class at school, and even manages to get by among people who don’t understand his brand of communication. But his parents are splitting up, and Del is certain he can save his family. To do it, he decides he needs to live out his father’s dream of musical stardom. He gets together with some of his friends and they form The Turing Machinists, an all-Asperger’s rock band. But they’ll need help – and Del seeks that help in the form of his neighbour, a reclusive rock legend who would rather have nothing to do with the music scene.
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Turkana Boy
$16.95In this contemplative novel-poem, Jean-François Beauchemin invites us to share in the inner world of the grieving Mr. Bartolomé, who, following the mysterious disappearance of his young son, wanders and wonders, seeking to transcend his pain by encountering something larger than himself. Continuously occupied by the memory of his lost son, Bartolomé’s quest leads him from the city to the countryside and then to the edge of the ocean, where he marvels at the beauty of nature but cannot penetrate its mysteries.
Through reference to the two-million-year-old “Turkana Boy,” the fossilized remains of a boy found in 1984 near Lake Turkana, Kenya, Beauchemin addresses processes of memory and the long history of human evolution. Beauchemin’s character Bartolomé sees in the lives of the boys—separated by nearly two million years—a kind of twin destiny. Has the passage of millennia changed the intensity of human feeling at the loss of blood relations? “Who knows what they had felt? Had the same emotions, those associated with incommensurable loss, broken their bodies, as they had his? Over and above morphological differences sculpted by the passage of millennia, was there something resembling a permanence of feeling, a sort of eternity for the murmuring of the heart, transmitted through the ages by the bonds of blood?”
Turkana Boy offers a poignant examination of grieving and one man’s search for understanding. This surrealist narrative is punctuated with magnificent musings on the world and startling questions about what it means to be alive.
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Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter
$20.95Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter takes the reader from Lebanon’s olive groves to Montreal’s frigid winters and underground malls. These closely connected poems present a narrative threaded with the rich traditions of the Middle East, from its dazzling varied food to its bustling Arabian marketplaces and passionate politics.
A lover longs to be reunited with his beloved. A woman mourns the loss of her father and must find her place in a male-dominated culture, while another must relinquish her unborn child. Honest, accessible, and humane, Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter is a strikingly moving and powerful sequence of poems exploring themes of alienation, intergenerational disconnection, love, and loss.
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Turn Us Again
$20.95Called to his dying father’s bedside, Gabriel Golden’s life is turned upside down after receiving his mother’s journal. The journal chronicles his mother’s life in post-war Britain, her genteel upbringing and her eventual marriage to Gabriel’s father, a complicated man raised in an aggressive, Jewish family who drinks to escape financial worries. Gabriel is shocked as the novel reveals dark secrets about his parents’ relationship, shaking Gabriel’s preconceptions about his father – and himself.
Based on a true story and winner of the H.R. Percy Novel Prize and the Beacon Award for Social Justice, Turn Us Again is a powerful exploration of the dynamics within family relationships, enticing the reader to embark on a journey towards a more complex understanding of the issue of abuse.
Read the review by The Chronicle Herald
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Turning Back the Fenians
$16.95In the early 1860s, Irish immigrants in the United States were eager to help the Fenian brotherhood overthrow the British in Ireland. The American Fenians’ mission: to invade British North America and hold it hostage. New Brunswick, with its large Irish population and undefended frontier, was a perfect target. The book tells how, in the spring of 1866, a thousand Fenians massed along the St. Croix River and spread terror among New Brunswickers. When the lieutenant-governor called in British soldiers and a squadron of warships, the Fenians saw that New Brunswick was no longer an easy target, and they turned their efforts against central Canada. The Fenian “attacks” and the demand for home defence fanned the already red-hot political debate, and a year later, in July 1867, New Brunswick joined Confederation.
Turning Back the Fenians is volume 8 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
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Turning Left to the Ladies
$18.00In 1977 Kate Braid got her first job in construction as a labourer on a small island off the coast of British Columbia. Never in her wildest dreams did she plan to be a construction worker, much less a carpenter, but she was desperate to stay on the island and had run out of money, along with all the options a woman usually has for work — secretary, waitress, receptionist. Turning Left to the Ladies is an autobiographical account of the fifteen years she worked as a labourer, apprentice and journey carpenter, building houses, high rises and bridges. She was the first female member of the Vancouver union local of the Carpenters and the first full-time woman teaching trades at the BC Institute of Technology. It is a wry, sometimes humorous, sometimes meditative look at one woman’s relationship to her craft, and the people she met along the way.
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Turning Mountain
$17.00“An astonishing array of elements come together to reveal a shrewd poetic voice…” – Allan Safarik
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TV Goes to Hell
$16.95As a natural heir to the long-running television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural has risen to prominence with a strong cult following, and this collection of essays from contributors around the globe investigates the genre-bending series’ cultural footprint both in North America and abroad.
The book explores topics such as folklore, religion, gender and sexuality, comedy, music, and much more, and offers a brief guide to all the episodes as well.
Supernatural follows brothers Dean and Sam Winchester as they encounter and battle evil beings such as vampires, shapeshifters, ghouls, and ghosts from a multitude of genres including folklore, urban legends, and religious history.
Contributors to the collection come from the U.S., the UK, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Spain, and Austria.
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Twelve Opening Acts
$18.95Alongside his dozens of fascinating and award-winning plays, and in addition to this great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal series of six epic novels, his translations, adaptations, librettos, and acute portrayals of human emotions in a state of both crisis and redemption, Michel Tremblay has left his readers with three magical keys to the secrets of his great literary achievements.
The first of these, Bambi and Me [Les Vues animés, Leméac, 1990], is a memoir of the movies that shaped his imagination as a child-those he watched in fascination and spent hours deconstructing with his mother, and those he watched on his own.
The second, Twelve Opening Acts [Douze Coups de Théâtre, Leméac, 1992], is an account of Tremblay’s discovery of the theatre as an adolescent: from his first breathtaking recognition of how the imagination is actually a public construct, while watching a performance of Babar the Elephant at the age of six; to his winning of the CBC drama competition with his first play, Le Train.
Between these parenthetical stories, Michel Tremblay offers the reader an entrance into his discovery of the theatricality of life itself-the personal dramas of his homosexuality, the death of his mother, the increasingly frail withdrawing of his father, even the completely unintentional, almost apolitical creation of his nationalist awareness-are recounted in narratives at once devoid of judgment, but at the same time ennobled with a complexity and intensity of passion operatic in its scope and merciless in its sweep.
This is the most ruthless and unsparing, yet tender and evocative insight Tremblay has ever offered into the creation of his literary genius.
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Twenty Years at Play
$29.95Vancouver’s New Play Centre led the way in developing and producing the work of playwrights from Western Canada for the emergent Canadian theatre in the 1970s. The New Play Centre has been a major force in Canadian cultural life for two decades; it retains its dual role as playwrighting workshop and production company and remains an important facility for dramatists to reach national and international audiences.
To mark the New Play Centre’s twentieth year, Talonbooks presents a collection of eight of the finest plays produced by the company from 1975 to 1989: Herringbone by Tom Cone; Ned and Jack by Sheldon Rosen; Something Red by Tom Walmsley; Dreaming and Duelling by John Lazarus and Joa Lazarus; War Babies by Margaret Hollingsworth; Under the Skin by Betty Lambert; The Idler by Ian Weir; and The Wolf Within by Alex Brown. All of these plays have been produced throughout Canada, and often abroad, and remain in active production today. Each script appears in its most current form, with the playwright’s latest revisions, along with biographical and production data and photos.
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Twenty Years of Multiculturalism
$19.95How does one measure ethnicity? What are the costs and benefits of multiculturalism? Where is the multicultural literature, theatre and folklore of Canada? What can the medical and other caring professions do to respond to the multicultural clients they serve? These are some of the broad issues tackled by the eighteen writers whose work appears in this volume.