A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 8513–8528 of 9481 results
-
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.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.”
-
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.
-
Thyme Travellers
$24.00Thyme Travellers collects fourteen of the Palestinian diaspora’s best voices in speculative fiction. Speculative fiction as a genre invites a reconfiguring of reality, and here each story is a portal into realms of history, folklore and futures.
A man stands on the shore waiting to commune with those who live in the ocean. Pilgrims stretch into the distance, passing a stone cairn with a mysterious light streaming from it. Two Australian women fervently dig a tunnel to Jerusalem. Men from Gaza swim in the sea until they drown, still unconcerned. A father and son struggle to connect over the AI scripts prompting their conversation.
Building on the work of trailblazing anthologies such as Reworlding Ramallah and Palestine +100, this volume is the first of its kind in Canada. Editor Sonia Sulaiman brings together stories by speculative fiction veterans and emerging writers from Australia to Egypt, Lebanon to Canada.
-
Tibetan Sky
$39.95Tibetan Sky
-
Ticket Masters
$26.95?
In the spring of 1975 a trio of neophyte businessmen backed an old Chrysler onto a sun-baked Arizona driveway and convened in their new office. The garage start-up, dubbed Ticketmaster, would come to achieve such market dominance over the following decades some critics would denounce the company as an unlawful monopoly. Yet its path to the top was far from inevitable and Ticket Masters analyzes the legality and ethics behind the actions of Ticketmaster, including its recent merger with Live Nation.
Ticket Masters, based on first-person interivews with the key players, is a character-driven story that explores the actions and impact of the iconoclasts guiding Clear Channel, Ticketmaster, Live Nation, SFX, MusicToday, and StubHub, while folding in related tales of trustafarians, scalping syndicates, old-school music promoters, and would-be Internet tycoons.
Ticket Masters answers such questions as: Just what is included in a service fee and why does it vary with the price of a ticket? Why am I forced to pay for parking when I’m taking public transportation to the concert? and Who really pockets all of that money?
This guide to the concert industry looks into cubicles, conference rooms, and booking agencies and includes interviews with promoters, musicians, and corporate executives with connections to both Ticketmaster and the bands. Special attention is paid to the touring activities and ticket-selling practices of the Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, U2, Dave Matthews Band, and the Rolling Stones.
-
Tidal Fury
$20.00Tidal Fury intermeshes styles in narratorial strands. A love story — he was “a literary device, and then I discovered we knew each other intimately.” An aged narcissist who wields power and invokes a subtext on the social politics of power. A poet whose muse is Medusa. Tidal Fury is a poetry on the edge of the text of an interior ocean of fury and passion.
-
Tide Road
$19.95Shortlisted, Thomas Head Raddall Award
When Stella disappears, leaving her toddler and husband behind, her mother Sonia, a widowed farm wife and former lighthouse keeper, struggles to face the possibility that her daughter may not have slipped through the ice. She may have been pushed.
In a intensely memorable narrative with the deceptive pull of an undertow, Sonia’s past, a flotsam of lost dreams, bruised hopes, buried love, wells up to meet her. Confronted with her own history of choices and failures, Sonia is compelled to revise her perception of her daughter’s life and dramatically change the way she lives her own.
Compton is a deft draughtsman of character, whose powers of description, timing, and astounding revelation coalesce into a splendidly nuanced account of the unguessed-at legacies of a life shaped by choices.
-
Tideline
$18.95A wildly theatrical tale of war and individual discovery, Tideline tells the personal story of Wilfrid, a young man born in Montreal, who struggles to bury his father in his parent’s homeland. There, he acquires friends who all dream of a better life, and confronts a country scarred by war, where an additional corpse is one too many. Followed by Scorched and Forests, Tideline is the first part of Wajdi Mouawad’s critically acclaimed dramatic quartet set in the painful wake of the past century.
-
Tiger in The Skull
$12.95Tiger in the Skull makes available for the first time in a single volume the range, substance, and variety of Lochhead’s work.
-
Tiger Poems
-
Till the Boys Come Home
$17.95A century after the beginning of the Great War, the contributions of the Maritimes to the formation of the Canadian Expeditionary force remain relatively unexplored. Till the Boys Come Home examines the conduct of the war through the eyes of one particular agricultural and coal-mining community.
As the clouds of war gathered across the Atlantic, the people of Queens County found themselves caught between the forces of tradition and change, struggling to balance military service with their commitments to domestic industry and charitable volunteerism. While their contribution to the overall military effort lagged behind that of the province at large, they were nonetheless determined to supply comforts to men at the front and to remind them that they were not alone in their fight — suggesting that, in the community, peoples’ sense of patriotic duty extended to their main business of feeding and fuelling the province. With few exceptions, the men and women of Queens County supported the war by taking care of their own — both those from the county who volunteered for service and the families they left behind.
Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Curtis Mainville discusses patterns of military enlistment and labour; the intersections of local, regional, and national politics; and the ongoing tensions between the war effort and domestic needs, Till the Boys Come Home links the experiences of Queens County’s men and women on the home front to those of their brothers and sisters serving overseas, resulting in a rich portrait of a community at war.
Till the Boys Come Home is volume 22 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
-
Tilling the Darkness
$20.00In Susan Braley’s debut poetry collection, Tilling the Darkness, a young woman born into a family of eleven navigates the inequities of gender roles on the farm and in the church. In this dramatic rural setting—birth and death sudden in the barn, the seasons vivid over the fields—she experiences first-hand how swiftly seedlings become stalks ploughed down, how easily she and her sisters are discounted. Tilling the Darkness explores how we all undertake this tilling ritual, season after season, in the finite field of our lives. Our darkness may be a calamity we seek to escape—a grave, a war, a grief—and our wish is the promise of renewal. In these powerful poems, it is often women who, even in the face of injury and erasure, turn dark to light. Braley’s poetry traces how this woman, after leaving the farm, comes to appreciate the complex, bountiful legacy of her early life.