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Showing 8785–8800 of 9211 results
Watermelon Kindness
$16.95Angels are aliens in spaceships. Angels descend
and eagles soar. I am not an eagle. If I were an angel I would descend
and give you of the bread of happiness
the salt of anger
& the message you already know better than I know:
the moon & the lakes & the hills
are forever.— from “North of 60”
The much-anticipated Watermelon Kindness, David Donnell’s first new collection in six years, comes from a part of the country that’s somewhere between Archie Bunker and Dale Peck — a contentious, but genial place.
With more range than any other contemporary poet, Donnell ponders questions of art, history, and psychology while reveling in the sensory and all that makes us real. Whether exploring the modus operandi of other writers or paralleling the trajectory of a satellite with everyday occurrences like lost money, badly ended love affairs, or political disappointment, Watermelon Kindness is the Roman padda, a tough individual loaf approximately the size of your hand. Always concerned with what’s most nourishing — why we’re as crazy as we are crazy — it’s forty percent crust, because crust is almost always the best of it.
Watershed: Reflections on Water
$19.95Alberta icon Grant MacEwan draws from his broad knowledge as an agriculturalist and his vast life experience to tell us "what every Canadian should know about water." These reflections are his love letters to water.
Wave Archive
$18.00Is it possible to archive the invisible symptoms of an illness? Is the archive emotional?
Emmalea Russo’s Wave Archive moves between essay and poetry while also pondering the mind-body connection and the unreliability of thought patterns and histories. Here, Russo invokes her own experiences with seizures, photographs and art-making, archival and indexical processes, brain waves, and the very personal need to document and store while simultaneously questioning the reliability of memory and language. Drawing upon the history of epilepsy in both ancient and modern brain treatments, Wave Archive disrupts and restores the archive over and over again, exploring the very edges of consciousness.
Wax Boats
$17.95In Sarah Robert’s debut collection Wax Boats, a rural island community comes to life in action-packed, evocative tales. Cougar ladies fight the BC wilderness and the inevitable extinction of their peaceful island lives. An expectant mother turns to Native traditions to guide her through a safe delivery. A Boy Scout troupe rescues their own leader, and learns to welcome someone “from away.” Wax Boats introduces thought-provoking characters caught between the encroaching modern, industrial world and the hard truths of lives lived at the edge of everything.
Way to Go
$19.95ONE OF CBC BOOKS’ BEST BOOKS OF 2023
A jubilant, irreverent, generous collection by a poet facing terminal illness.
Following his New York Times Best of the Year Dark Woods, Richard Sanger’s fourth and final book is a clear-eyed and big-hearted inventory of the passions of a life well lived. Understated, tender, archly funny and achingly generous, Way to Go is a joyful catalog of Sanger’s loves and a last gift from an irrepressibly jubilant poet.
Way Up
$19.95In the thirteen stories that comprise Way Up, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s canvas stretches from downtown Toronto to isolated farms, from the Canadian Shield to Nova Scotia and Europe, and even into outer space. In “The Last Magic Forest,” she turns her Gothic imagination loose in the bush of Northern Ontario, where tree planters have developed a unique culture. In this wasteland of clear-cutting and scarifying, the concept of “nature” overturns everything readers (and tree planters) expect. When Kuitenbrouwer takes a Canadian tree planter to Belgium in “What Had Become of Us,” only the outer topography changes. In the superficially more cultivated European forest, the value and meaning of human life depends on the inner topography the forester brings with her from the Ontario bush. In other stories, Kuitenbrouwer’s characters engage in a continual play with perspective, in a perpetual balancing act.
In an emotional spectrum ranging from corrosive grief to murderous recklessness, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s characters make — or fail to make — the constant adjustments necessary to stay fully human. By intention or accident, each character steps into a more comprehensible life or crosses into seductive darkness.
Wayside Sang
$16.95Wayside Sang concerns entwined migrations of Black-other diaspora coming to terms with fossil-fuel psyches in times of trauma and movement. This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath Great Lake rivers between nation states. Nicholson reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it criss-crossed these borders in a study that engages the automobile object, its industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyond the Great Lakes region.
Engaging a range of discursive fields to form the metrics of this project, she is interested in the intersection of various artistic practices and how being in relation to them can lend dimension to page and text-based efforts. Consider Charles Campbell’s Transporter project, begun initially as a visual investigation of the phenomenon of forced migration, or Camille Turner’s various “sonic walks” which present narratives that explore the complexities of Black life in Canada amid a “landscape of forgetting” Black history, and Khari McClelland’s embrace of music as a “transportation device” uncovering the experiences of fugitive Blacks crossing into Canada and a breadth of practice concerning borders and movement.
This book was once in the fields and frequented bars. It rolls out of factories onto roads travelling north across the border and returning again to some understanding of home. There are passengers and possessions – travelling musicians – memories of the Caribbean – brothers determined by border crossings – daughters reassembled.
We All Will Be Received
$21.95**CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER**
**NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS WINNER, SUSPENSE**
**NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR BOOK AWARDS FICTION LONGLIST**
***2020 RELIT AWARDS: LONG SHORTLIST***
In 1977, a young woman swipes a duffel bag of drug money and flees her bad-news boyfriend, hitching a ride with a long-haul trucker who points out satellites and enthuses about the future of space cargo. Building a life disconnected from her past, she assumes a new identity as Dawn Taylor, but thirty years later, running a roadside motel on a remote highway, Dawn will host a group of disparate individuals—all desperate to rewrite their own stories.
Brody seeks escape from those intent on repeating the narrative of his childhood trauma. Cheryl, whose career as a filmmaker is being dismantled on social media, rushes to rescue her daughter from a vicious cycle. And Spencer, an ex-con with easy access to his criminal past, chases an elusive redemption after seeing a picture of Dawn on a tourism website.
In We All Will Be Received, Leslie Vryenhoek offers a range of unforgettable characters—all hoping to reconstruct a truth that’s been shattered by perspective—and asks whether anyone can find peace or atonement in a contemporary world where technology makes the past ever present.
we are no longer the smart kids in class
$18.00From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, we are no longer the smart kids in class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. A fantasia of academic disillusionment and deflating youth, this collection contemplates moustaches, mountains, and oceans from Halifax to Victoria, always wondering how poetry matters to the heaving, melting, masturbating world it dramatizes.
We Are Not in Pakistan
$22.95A Quill & Quire Book of the Year
Ten years after her stunning debut, Shauna Singh Baldwin returns to Goose Lane with an outstanding new collection of ten stories. Migrating from Central America to the American South, from Metro Toronto to the Ukraine, this book features an unforgettable cast of characters. In the title story, 16-year-old Megan hates her Pakistani grandmother — until Grandma disappears. In the enchanting magical realism of “Naina,” an Indo-Canadian woman is pregnant with a baby girl who refuses to be born. “The View from the Mountain” introduces Wilson Gonzales, who makes friends with his new American boss, the aptly named Ted Grand. But following 9/11, Ted’s suspicions cloud his judgment and threaten his friendship with Wilson.
Each containing an entire world, these stories are marked by indelible images and unforgettable turns of phrase — hallmarks of Baldwin’s fictional world.
We are One
$14.95An anthology of Canadian poets marking the 2020 Pandemic.
We Are Still Here
$17.95Part mystery, part dystopian prophesy, We Are Still Here probes the implosion of the vagrant goals and economic aimlessness in one man and his resulting quest for purpose. Through a blending of mythical forces and mythological archetypes that idealize the Innu tales of cultural heroes, and shape-shifters, We Are Still Here acts as traditional account of the life events of a self-proclaimed Innu oracle, and how his gathered tribe emerge as the future of civilization by returning to a world in which humans and animals are not yet differentiated.
Highly entertaining and deceptively simple, Beuhler’s tale works for a wide reading audience.“An exciting new voice on the scene, Chris Beuhler’s enormous imaginative scope, his vigorous prose, and the high tension he creates will have everyone reading this book.” – Sharon Butala
We Don’t Listen to Them
$18.95In an inviting and challenging series of fictions, Sean Johnston’s We Don’t Listen to Them will leave readers puzzling while they smile at the acrobatics of his words and techniques. Some of Johnston’s stories border on “flash fiction” where incidents rather than an actual narrative drive the story. In the open piece “How Blue” the boy Ronnie is caught in the vortex of his father who drinks and a mother who condones, and a church representative who reforms. There is no plot, just Ronnie eating his purple ice cream and thinking his way through the maze. Several stories, particularly “Whose Origins Escaped Him” and “We Don’t Celebrate That” feature meta-fiction that explores writing about writing. In the former elaborate footnotes delineate the characters and their actions, explaining why the story is unfolding the way it is and why the writer has chosen to do this. In the later story “We Don’t Celebrate That”, the narrator, a writer, explains how rules can be absurdly imposed on writers in a futile attempt to govern the writing process. The story, which might have been about someone looking intently into their dying mother’s eyes and finding confusion there isn’t about that because section 18 of the rules says ‘All stories must say what they are not’. Such paradox is at work in many of the fictions in this collection, but so too are the small epiphanies of the characters who evolve within the work.
At various junctures in the collection Johnston employs devices that adjust his writing to be focused with the lens of meta-fiction. Shifts in narrative, jumps in time, intrusions into the narrative tension are all common here.But so too is pathos as seen in the family dilemma of a recovering alcoholic in the story “We All Considered This”. And we do find compassion in the son-in-law who holds sympathy and kindness for his father-in-law afflicted with Alzheimer’s in “You Didn’t Have to Tell Him”, and share the weighted sadness of the husband dressing his dead wife for the funeral in “He Hasn’t Been to the Bank in Weeks”. While the world will turn upside down in Johnston’s stories, and the logic and reality will be violated, and a bank teller will hand a patron his bank robber note, it is fiction that also ebbs and flows with human struggle, that is recognizable and relatable and, despite the challenges and uncertainties placed in the reader’s path, there is always a way to see more clearly than think we do.
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We Follow the River
$20.00We Follow the River tells the story of one family’s escape from military violence in Myanmar, their exiled existence in Thailand, and their immigration to Canada with only a pile of beat up suitcases on a luggage cart. It is about growing up as a foreigner in a foreign land, sifting through family history and grief, and alighting across cultures and continents to find a home.
Onjana Yawnghwe’s third poetry book reveals an expertise in language—at times joyful, disobedient, wild, and other times condensed and restrained. A work of over twenty years, these poems are written and rewritten through the retroactive prism of experience, polished and honed, eroded and erased. Sweeping in scope, intimate and honest, these poems tell of the quiet moments, the unruly moments of rage and sorrow, the rough distillation of self, both hated and loved. These poems reside behind the secret, dark door of the self.
We Meant Well
$24.95Longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize September 2023 selection for Great Group Reads by the Women’s National Book Association“Unsparing and compassionate … A novel of harrowing eloquence, We Meant Well explores compelling cultural contrasts and the ambiguity of charitable outreach.” — Foreword ReviewsA propulsive debut that grapples with timely questions about what it means to be charitable, who deserves what, and who gets the power to decideIt’s the middle of the night in Los Angeles when Maya, a married mother of one, receives the phone call. Her colleague Marc has been accused of assaulting a local girl in Likanni, where they operate a charitable orphanage. Can she get on the next flight?When Maya arrives, protesters surround the compound. The accuser is Lele, her former protégé and the chief’s daughter. There are no witnesses, no proof of any crime.What happened that night? And what will happen to the orphanage if this becomes a scandal? Caught between Marc and Lele, the charity and the villagers, her marriage and new temptations, and between worlds, Maya lives the secret contradictions of the aid worker: there to serve the most deprived, but ultimately there to govern.As Maya feels the pleasures, freedoms, and humanity of life in Likanni, she recognizes that her American life is inextricably woven into this violent reality — and that dishonesty in one place affects the realities in another.
We Oughta Know
$24.95A lively collection of essays that re-examines the extraordinary legacies of the four Canadian women who dominated ’90s music and changed the industry foreverFully revised and updated, with a foreword by Vivek Shraya In this of-the-moment essay collection, celebrated music journalist Andrea Warner explores the ways in which Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and Sarah McLachlan became legit global superstars and revolutionized ’90s music. In an era when male-fronted musical acts were given magazine covers, Grammys and Junos, and serious critical consideration, these four women were reduced, mocked, and disparaged by the media and became pop culture jokes even as their recordings were demolishing sales records. The world is now reconsidering the treatment and reputations of key women in ’90s entertainment, and We Oughta Know is a crucial part of that conversation.With empathy, humor, and reflections on her own teenaged perceptions of Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah, Warner offers us a new perspective on the music and legacies of the four Canadian women who dominated the ’90s airwaves and influenced an entire generation of current-day popstars with their voices, fashion, and advocacy.