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Showing 8609–8624 of 9481 results
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Town Limits
$11.95“Sometimes this town is too damn small,” writes Heather Pyrcz. Yet Town Limits, her first collection of poetry, is anything but frustrated by the geographical boundaries of its small town Nova Scotia setting. In her writing, Pyrcz shifts smoothly from community to family to intimacy, always finding focus in the strange mix of irony, beauty and truth that envelopes her world.
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Toxemia
$22.95In this alchemy of anger and love, history and memoir, Christine McNair delves into various forms of toxicity in the body—from the effects of two life-threatening preeclampsia diagnoses to chronic illness, sexism in medicine, and the toll of societal expectations.
With catharsis and humour, Toxemia pieces together the complexities of identity, motherhood, and living in a body to reveal deeply recognizable raw truths. McNair captures the wrenching feeling of loss of control in the face of an overwhelming medical diagnosis and the small, endless moments in life that underscore it: worrying about mortality in the middle of the night, revolving medical appointments, self-doubt, and all the ways in which illness interrupts.
Toxemia unravels the toxicities that haunt the human body from within and without. Combining lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs, and more, this hybrid work dips between the sacred and profane, exposing—and holding—some of our greatest fears.
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Toy Gun
$22.00Toy Gun continues the exploration of character and fate on the streets of Vancouver that began with the novel Stupid Crimes (1992) and continued in Krekshuns (1995). Written in the style of the “hard-boiled” detective thriller, Toy Gun is very much a literary treatment of contemporary life in one of the world’s most densely populated urban centres. The novel focusses more closely on the stormy life of the protagonist, parole officer Barry Delta-his loves and losses, his misfortunes, foolishness and struggle; all push Delta in directions he seems never able to predict or comprehend. Toy Gun also follows several of Delta’s more “challenging” cases, offering rare insight into the mental machinery of the criminal recidivist, while exploring with bleak humour the moral pressures of being another man’s keeper.
Praise for Toy Gun:
“Dennis Bolen has managed to make the unsavoury engrossing in his imaginative novel.” (Globe and Mail)
“If there is such a thing as a sensitive Bukowski, then Bolen is it… enough convincing debauchery to both shock and compel readers.” (Vancouver Sun)
“Toy Gun suggests that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ that what is wrong with individuals is also wrong with the system and thus, with society as a whole. … The mock-epic conventions suggest that Barry Delta is the modern urban hero, wounded, wounding, plodding, passive-aggressive, alone in a hostile city, doing battle over the telephone, in offices, on buses, in the street, suffering defeats, retreating from bed after bed. He has a key to the city, but he cannot find a gate. Like the parolee’s toy gun, it may get him what he wants, but for sure it will get him killed. So, even if the protagonist is not particularly likeable, even if his redemption is so tentative as to feel suspect, the book has much to offer – the story, the style, the Vancouver setting, the jaundiced critique of a starved and almost-abandoned correctional system, and of the larger society wants to do right but is constrained by fear and the bottom line. The plot perfectly informs the theme of good intentions with ineffective insufficient follow-through. How very Canadian. How self-revelatory. Bolen forces us to face things about ourselves that we would really rather not admit.” (J.M. Bridgeman, Prairie Fire)
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trace
$17.95“I support you when you need, so that you support me when I need.”
An elegant and sweeping story of a Chinese family’s history, trace follows the footsteps of four generations as their homes and identities are challenged. Jeff Ho brings life to his great grandmother, grandmother, and mother through considerate storytelling as they recount their pasts, leading to a paralleled present.
Great Grandmother fled the Japanese during World War II by escaping China into Hong Kong, a traumatic event that’s rippled down the family line. Grandmother married into the family after a childhood of poverty that will always stay with her. Mother decided to leave Hong Kong for Canada with her two sons, pursuing more opportunities, though dissatisfied with her son’s desire to focus on the piano rather than math. Though pain is a constant, there are plenty of wisecracks, games of mah jong, and familiar family anecdotes swirling through Ho’s genealogical journey of survival.
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Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing
$14.95A collection of essays, interviews, rants, manifestos, notes and poems. Thirty-one prairie contributors, including David Arnason, Dennis Cooley, Dorothy Livesay, Robert Kroetsch, Patrick Friesen, and Margaret Laurence.
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Tracery
$16.95The poems in Tracery enact a lyric condensation. Many of them were written in transit: on the bus, on a bicycle, on foot, in the endless to and fro of work life. Their lyric brevity allowed composition directly in the brain, or quick jottings in a pocket notebook, primarily governed by the music of reason – “the ear’s judgement” (Joachim du Bellay), the “natural music” of poetry (Eustache Deschamps), “music at the heart of thinking” (Fred Wah). A major feature of this work is its incorporation and reworking – a translation – of other works of western literature and philosophy across the span of its brief, localized history. These are poems that barge into the arena of classic and modernist literary works with little regard for what is generally regarded as genius, with contempt for the ever-present misogyny and gender segregation of our collective past, with an ever-present critique, but also with a constantly renewable sense of wonder and humility. Written in a time of plagues, through dreams and daily life, these are poems to be enjoyed by anyone who observes events occurring in time, and then wonders at them.
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Traces of the Past
$18.95To document the movement and development of Montreal’s Jewish community from the 1880s until 1945, much like a detective, Sara Ferdman Tauben has pored over historic city maps and directories, sepia coloured photos, brittle newspaper articles and long forgotten anniversary publications to track the locations of Montreal’s early synagogues. Her quest results in a fascinating story that describes and defines the social, religious, and economic aspects of a distinct group of people through the architectural traces of its culture.
The decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth-century marked the era of mass migration of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Fleeing poverty and persecution, some came to Montreal. They left places with names like Minsk, Pinsk, Morosh, Galicia, and Dinovitz, to settle on Montreal streets with names like St. Urbain, St. Dominique and St. Laurent. To retain familiar traditions and familial connections, they established small congregations which recalled the homes they left behind. The Pinsker Shul, Anshei Morosh, Anshei Ukraina, and Anshei Ozeroff were not only places of worship but also places where friends and family from the same country, area or town could meet, exchange concerns, lend support to each other and resolve to help those left behind.
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Trachea and Other Stories
$22.95A novel in linked episodes, told in unaffected direct prose, about the life of an Indian man called Sharad, who becomes a Canadian–of sorts. The story begins in childhood with the suicide of Sharad’s father, who killed himself by cutting his throat. Sharad, brought up by his grandmother, grows up to become a nonconforming open-minded journalist involved in Bombay’s union and communal (Hindu-Muslim) politics. He marries an Indo-Canadian woman, Gunjun, from Toronto whom he meets via a photo and emails. The story of his struggles with jobs, marriage, identity, and weather comes alive through the vivid experiences of this uncomfortable uncompromising new Canadian.
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Tracing the Lines
$24.95Passionate critic, principled citizen, attentive reader and editor, and energizing teacher – Roy Miki is all these and more, a poet whose writing articulates a moving body of work. The two main areas of his passionate research and writing – social critique and poetics – inform each other in these essays, poems, and artwork compiled to mark a milestone in the life of an important public intellectual.
Contributors from across North America take Miki’s literary and artistic achievements as a starting point for analytical and creative reflections on key artistic, social, and political movements of the second half of the 20th century. Essays on poetics by Daphne Marlatt and George Bowering combine with original poems by Fred Wah and Michael Barnholden, among others, to explore topics ranging from voice, to love, to translation. Mona Oikawa, Dave Gaertner, Phinder Dulai, and Cindy Mochizuki write or create artwork on social justice, placing Miki’s redress work in relation to the politics and art of other historical reparations. Ashok Mathur, Ayaka Yoshimizu, Mark Nakada, David Fujino, and Hiromi Goto present various views of biotext. Jerry Zaslove, Susan Crean, Alessandra Capperdoni, and Smaro Kamboureli discuss the public intellectual’s relationship to institutions. The collection ends with an interview with Miki on interrelations between his photographic and poetic practices.
Miki’s history reflects that of the West Coast’s literary world. Not only did he found the influential literary journal West Coast Line, but he has researched and written works on poets Roy Kiyooka, George Bowering, and bp Nichol. Miki taught many of the poets and academics now working and writing on the West Coast.
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Tracing the Paths
$29.95bpNichol’s The Martyrology is one of the most outrageous, challenging, intriguing and accomplished long poems written in Canada. No other poem of its length has raised the major concerns of our time with such urgency and brilliance. Initially recognized by only a few, this luminous continuing work has attracted more and more readers with the appearance of each successive volume—Book 6 the most recent, with more books in process.
Tracing the Paths gathers contributions by a wide spectrum of readers who approach The Martyrology from both diverse and complementary critical paths. Interleaving the collection are comments by bpNichol, and the collection ends with a rich sampling of the next three books of this amazing unfolding work. There is also an introduction by editor Roy Miki, a bibliography of The Martyrology, reproductions of some manuscripts and text by bpNichol, and a chronology of personal and compositional events relevant to The Martyrology.
Tracing the Paths brings together the poet bpNichol and his readers in a collaborate form that is rare—if not unique—in Canadian criticism.
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Track and Trace
$17.95The poems in Zachariah Wells’s second collection range from childhood to dimly foreseen events in the future; they idle on all three of Canada’s coasts, travel the open road, take walks in the city and pause on the banks of country streams and ponds.
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Tracking Doctor Lonecloud
$19.95Tracking Dr. Lonecloud: Showman to Legend Keeper, by Ruth Whitehead, Nova Scotia Museum ethnologist, is a book that includes the memoir of Jerry Lonecloud, a Mi’kmaw hunter, healer, and showman. Co-published by Goose Lane Editions and the Nova Scotia Museum, the book offers to readers, for the first time, the earliest known Mi’kmaw memoir.
Jerry Lonecloud was born Germain Laksi, on 4 July 1852 in Belfast, Maine, to Mi’kmaw parents from Nova Scotia. As a youth, he lived in Vermont. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, he set out on a two-year adventure to bring his two brothers and one sister back to Nova Scotia. Trained in the use of herbal medicine by his parents, Laski fell easily into the role of Doctor Lonecloud in the American medicine shows of the 1880s, including Healey and Bigelow’s Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and his own company, the Kiowa Medicine Show, for which he made the medicines. During the rest of his remarkable life, he sold tonics in South America, prospected for gold, and guided sportsmen into the woods of Maritime Canada as they searched for moose and caribou. Hunter, healer, and showman, Lonecloud valued, studied, preserved, and passed on many of the traditional ways, stories, and natural medicines of his people.
“During Doctor Lonecloud’s travels, he gained a great amount of personal knowledge of different cultures, and in return he shared his vast knowledge of the Mi’kmaw people,” notes Donald Julien, executive Director of the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, in the book’s preface. A researcher himself, Julien has found Lonecloud’s name on hundreds of government documents in the provincial and national archives. “The story of his many trips from childhood, to when he left this world to join our ancestors, is very intriguing,” said Julien. After Lonecloud met Harry Piers, curator of the Provincial Museum of Nova Scotia, in 1910, the two developed a friendship that continued until Lonecloud’s death in 1930. Lonecloud’s great knowledge of natural and social history is reflected in the specimens and artifacts he brought to the museum, and in Piers’s meticulous notes on the information Lonecloud provided about the items.
Near the end of his life, Lonecloud told journalist Clara Dennis his own story and a wealth of Mi’kmaw tales, oral histories, jokes and social customs, many previously undocumented. Unpublished until now, this treasure of information, recorded between 1923 and 1929, forms the basis of this book.
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Tracking the Caribou Queen
$24.95In this challenging memoir about her formative years in Yellowknife in the ’60s and ’70s, author Margaret Macpherson lays bare her own white privilege, her multitude of unexamined microaggressions, and how her childhood was shaped by the colonialism and systemic racism that continues today. Macpherson’s father, first a principal and later a federal government administrator, oversaw education in the NWT, including the high school Margaret attended with its attached hostel: a residential facility mostly housing Indigenous children.
Ringing with damning and painful truths, this bittersweet telling invites white readers to examine their own personal histories in order to begin to right relations with the Indigenous Peoples on whose land they live. Tracking the Caribou Queen is beautifully crafted to a purpose: poetic language and narrative threads dissect the trope that persisted through her girlhood, that of the Caribou Queen, a woman who seemed to embody extreme and contradictory stereotypes of Indigeneity. Here, Macpherson is not striving for a tidy ideal of “reconciliation”; what she is working towards is much messier, more complex and ambivalent and, ultimately, more equitable.
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Tracks
$18.95Tracks is a compilation of personal travel essays that range across three continents, from Italy, where Genni Gunn was born and spent her early years, to Canada and Mexico, and through Asia, where she has travelled many times, both reconnecting with her sister and witnessing the emergence of new political realities in Myanmar. While these are journeys into the new and unknown, they also trigger the inner journey to the realm of memory. These pieces dig deep into personal territory, exploring the family ties of an unusually peripatetic family.
In the 1950s, Gunn’s parents travelled within Italy, settling wherever Gunn’s father’s work took him. Their two young daughters were sent to live with relatives, Genni in southern Italy, her sister Ileana in northern Italy. The family was eventually reunited in Canada. Gunn’s father was a mysterious presence — much later she learned he was working with British Intelligence, but during her childhood all she knew was that he would disappear as suddenly as he had appeared. Indelibly marked by their unusual childhood, the sisters became wanderers themselves. While in some ways, their world shrank with the departure of their parents, in other ways, their imaginations were opened to new possibilities. Gunn explores some of those possibilities in this collection. An inveterate traveller, she questions the impulse behind the need to stay in motion, to always be the “other” in the world, while always seeking the home that never was.
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Traditions
$6.95Traditions is a collection of poems that combine humour and sensitivity from a feminist perspective.
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traffick
$10.95traffick is an intelligent exploration of the long poem in which the pieces struggle with the order and disorder of language, body, and place amongst other things.”Budde has managed to transport to us an explosive text of acrobatic and infinitely intriguing poems.”–Matrix