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Douglas Lochhead is one of Canada’s finest poets. In celebration of his eightieth birthday, Goose Lane Editions is releasing Weathers: Poems New and Selected, a collection of the best of Lochhead’s work from the last fifteen years.
Douglas Lochhead’s poetic imagination receives its greatest stimulus from what his senses tell him about nature and other people, and his poetry overflows with energy. Sharp observation of detail anchors his passionate sense of place; subtle irony and masterful form barely contain his uncompromising honesty and strong emotions; and his command of the poet’s craft guides his attacks on the boundaries of meaning. The contrast he achieves between tightly controlled form and constantly moving, dynamic imagery yields the clean, precise poetry that his readers have valued so highly over his more than 50-year career.
Lochhead began his career in the 1940s, publishing his poems in literary journals. His first book, The Heart is on Fire was published in 1959, and in the next two decades he published eight more books of poetry. In 1980, his landmark collection High Marsh Road was nominated for a Governor General’s Award. In 1986, Goose Lane Editions published Tiger in the Skull: New and Selected Poems, 1959-1986, Since that time, Douglas Lochhead has published four major collections: Upper Cape Poems, a testament to his fascination with the Tantramar Marsh; Homage to Henry Alline, a tribute to an 18th-century evangelist; Breakfast at Mel’s, superbly crafted poems about the magic of place, and the rewards of observation; and Cape Enragé, poems written on the wild shore of the Bay of Fundy.
In the award-winning art book Dykelands, his austere nature poems accompany Thaddeus Holownia’s large-format photographs. He has also published All Things Do Continue, Yes, Yes, Yes!, and Black Festival, a beautiful memorial to his wife.
For Weathers, Douglas Lochhead has collaborated with editor David Creelman, who teaches Atlantic literature at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John. Together, they have gathered the strongest works from Lochhead’s books, new poems published in literary journals, and previously unpublished poems to create the quintessential collection of Lochhead’s writing.
Weaving Water is a novel about otters, healing the human heart, and finding hope for an imperilled Earth.Ecologist Beth Meyer has lost hope for the future of the Earth. Still she yearns to do something that matters. Just days after she ventures into the Newfoundland wilderness to study river otters, she meets her contrary neighbour, Mattie MacKenzie, who has lived there for eighty years. Living in a world filled with secrets and magic, Mattie confounds Beth’s scientific understanding at every turn. Ungrounded, Beth finds herself pulled inexorably toward an affair with Mattie’s nephew, Dan.Beth soon discovers that there is far more to the world than meets the Western scientific eye. There is mystery – unknowing. Hope, both for the Earth and for herself, lives in the heart of the mystery that is wilderness.
An otherworldly uncanniness haunts the margins of Darren Bifford’s debut collection, Wedding in Fire Country. Bifford is exceptionally adept at capturing the beauty of the mundane, and his poetry offers an insightful meditation on the meaning of the individual journey within larger political and geographical spheres. However, these familiar scenes are shot through with darker moments of raw violence and fear, as wolves wander the landscape of young adulthood and disaster taps at the windows of domestic spaces.
Bifford makes use of folkloric motifs and the juxtaposition of wilderness and urban environments to emphasize radical gaps in human understanding. Throughout the collection, the unknowable is embodied not in monstrous creatures, but in common experiences such as nostalgia, illness and accidents. Many of the poems are related in a voice whose serenity belies its sinister undertones–in one poem, the narrator’s tone hardly registers a change when a father-son bonding experience suddenly takes a gruesome turn. Touching moments of intimacy can be found throughout this collection, but menace continues to lurk in the shadows.
After barely surviving the events of The Killer Trail, Vancouver psychiatric social worker Chris Ryder once again finds himself at the centre of a high-profile murder case: Marvin Goodwin, a young man who falls on the extreme end of the autism spectrum, is found covered with blood at the murder scene of a local ice cream truck driver. When Chris is called in to learn what he can about Marvin, he finds that the weight of blood might just be too much for him to bear.
Complicating matters are Chris’ strained relationship with his father; the vicious actions of his half-brother, Ray; the blinding spotlight of the media; and the aftereffects of trauma. In The Weight of Blood, D.B. Carew has given us a protagonist who is trying to hold everything together while staunching blood that both spills and connects.
Poor Russell Dean, golden boy of American advertising. His meticulously crafted career has brought him wealth, fame, an idyllic lifestyle and a beautiful wife. But now his wife is divorcing him, he’s surrounded by fools and Russell is in a tailspin. A golf vacation to a remote Ontario resort town is exactly what he needs to skate through a rare rough patch. Or not. Mysterious natural forces far beyond his control and the eclectic characters he meets — including three skilled, powerful women and a mirthful Ojibwe fishing guide — have decidedly different plans. Welcome to the Canadian wilderness, Mr. Dean. Welcome to Kamini: Danger, Suspense, Mysticism, Romance and Live Bait.
Explore the unseen Maple Leaf Gardens
Generations have come to marvel and celebrate spectacles of all kinds at Maple Leaf Gardens. With its soaring roof and massive walls, this iconic building tells a story with an unlikely beginning and an ending yet to be written. Built against all odds, in the grip of the Great Depression, the Gardens went on to host 2,533 hockey games, with the Toronto Maple Leafs’ final regular season record 1,215 wins, 768 losses, and 346 ties. When it closed in 1999, it was the last Original Six arena still standing and remains in use for hockey today as Ryerson University’s Mattamy Athletic Centre.
In Welcome to Maple Leaf Gardens, Graig Abel and Lance Hornby have composed a rare, stunning, and historically invaluable tribute to what many would consider the Mecca of Canadian sport. Abel’s years as the Maple Leafs’ photographer make him the perfect guide for sports fans, music lovers, and star-gazers. Readers will experience the building’s many innovative features from the rafters to the clock, from the rinkside gold seats right up to the greys, where the “real fans” sat. Alongside Abel’s humorous first-hand stories about Harold Ballard, Doug Gilmour, and the celebrities who frequented the Gardens, Hornby gives a press box perspective on covering the Leafs at the end of the Gardens’ eventful era and the building’s place in history.
Welcome To Mina’s explores Vancouver and the many people who live in it through the lens of a fictional diner: Mina’s. The book features heartwarming stories of life, love, and food, all of which connects the stories characters when they enter Mina’s. Some contributors have brought their own experiences to the book and others were inspired about moments throughout the history of Vancouver. This book features ethnic diversity and represents all walks of life including individuals old and young, LGBTQ and people with disabilities throughout the history of the city we all love.
“WELCOME TO THE CYPHER is a delight to read—a story that will move every part of you to a wild and wonderful beat.” —Jael Richardson, Author and Executive Director, The Festival of Literary Diversity
“WELCOME TO THE CYPHER is a beautiful, rhythmic exploration of the joy of language and self-expression. Our whole family loved how the bright illustrations and the bold words pulled us through this gorgeous book …We’re HUGE fans!” —Bestselling authors, Alice Kuipers (the Polly Diamond series) & Yann Martel (Life of Pi)
Words burn bright in this joyful celebration of rap, creativity, and self-expression.
“Welcome to the cypher!
Now huddle up nice and snug.
You feel that circle around you?
Well, that’s a hip hop hug!”
Starting with beatboxes and fingersnaps, an exuberant narrator introduces kids in his community to the powerful possibilities of rap, from turning “a simple phrase/into imagery that soars” to proclaiming, “this is a voice that represents me!” As Khodi Dill’s rhymes heat up, the diverse crew of kids—illustrated in Awuradwoa Afful’s bold, energetic style—gain self-confidence and a sense of freedom in this wonderful picture book debut that is perfect for reading aloud.
A.G. Pasquella’s Welcome to the Weird America brings together three of his brilliant, fabulist novellas, each of which is filled with strange language and extraordinary surprises. In Why Not a Spider Monkey Jesus?, written like a comic-book adventure without the images, a talking chimpanzee becomes a televangelist. In NewTown, the author’s love letter to science fiction, a teenage boy named Sammy joins a motley band of rebels intent on overthrowing the bungling admiral of a huge spaceship. And in The This & the That, Pasquella takes us back to the old weird America, an America of hucksters and hobos, cartoons and carnivals.
From questions about money and God to environmental collapse, to the intersection of humanity and technology, A.G. Pasquella tackles complex subjects with beautifully surreal prose and a deep delight in the tradition of weird fiction. These mesmerizing, upending stories will have readers setting off on a fascinating journey down an unknown road with no destination, or end, in sight.
The poems included in this book explore many key contemporary issues, such as the relationship between the sexes; violence against girls and women; sexuality and gender identity; the relationship between human beings, animals and the environment; religion and spirituality; mental health and psychiatry; work, meaning, and exploitation; poverty and homelessness; multiculturalism; the value of children; and social community. The poet is also a professional philosopher, with a Ph.D. in philosophy, and so the book is informed by a lot of theoretical reading. However, while the insights of theoretical reading can often require much laborious study and be difficult to grasp and understand, this book is not itself theoretical but, rather, is highly accessible, able to be understood by a wide ranging readership. The writing is by turns innovative, playful, humorous, and visual, and engages readers in a number of ways.
When a series of murders threatens the lives of an entire community in Vancouver, RCMP Corporal Paul Blakemore and Inspector Coswell team up once again to solve the case. What begins as an array of hate crimes suddenly culminates into a conspiracy against an American politician, and the lines between Canada and the United States are blurred as suspicions rise from both sides. To solve this case, both detectives must look beyond the powers of one culprit and instead focus on the ventures of an entire underground organization, all while protecting members of their own city. An intense thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end, West End Murders is a great bedside read that threatens to keep you up well into the night.
Emotionally battered and bruised, 29-year-old Australian immigrant Benny is looking for escape, not redemption. Escape from herself and the dismal failures of her life: her first solo art exhibition is panned by critics and her husband left her for an Andy Warhol look-alike. Isolated from her family, her career as an abstract artist in ruins, she comes to Canada and finds solace working eighteen hours a day as a graphic designer in a disreputable agency. Numbing her pain with hard work, she self-medicates with prescription meds, and becomes involved in a series of increasingly dubious relationships with ill-suited unreliable men who lead her into danger. Cutting off all ties with normalized daily routines, Benny leaves her job and sets off on a road trip adventure across Canada, hoping she will discover who she wants to be and where she wants to be it. During the bus trip she discovers junk food, cigarettes, hash and drinks a lot of alcohol. She confuses sexual attraction with love in a series of relationships with loser bad boys and continues to put herself in destructive, potentially dangerous situations. Hardcore, she travels for the most part by Greyhound bus, sinking deeper into the underbelly of a world that offers her the anonymity she seeks. Funny, aggressive, fearless and vulnerable, Benny is a road-warrior with a backpack of opiates, a map and a guileless sense of naiveté. In seventy-two days, she travels nearly ten thousand miles overland and more by flight and train; she’s a determined modern-day pioneer. This coming-of-age novel is narrated with wry humour and filled with a cast of engaging characters. A tale of sexual adventure and feminist learning, Benny looks for escape but emerges a heroine instead; with mistakes, epiphanies and friendships helping forge her a home and a sense of identity in the true North.
Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize, Poetry, 2025
West of West Indian constructs the Queer Caribbean experience as simultaneously individual and collective, embracing the language that continues to unsettle queer life. The collection is, at once, a summons and a love letter to familiar figures like the Bullerman, the Chichiman, the Funny man, and the Anty man. It collects a distinctly queer Vincentian Canadian account of love and autonomy, and while it represents a written journey into queer pain, it is also an exhibition of pleasure flowing through the bodies and minds of its many subjects.
Roadkill stuffed and presented as art, an OB/GYN appointment gone horribly wrong, and government spies with a weakness for salmon bagels and Timmy Ho’s.Tender, satirical, and occasionally absurd, Barb Howard’s new story collection Western Taxidermy is a perfect introduction to one of Western Canada’s most high-spirited literary voices.In these sixteen stories, Howard effortlessly balances wry social commentary and prairie gothic, pairing humans and animals in clever and unexpected ways.