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Taking its inspiration from the Melville’s famous line “If man will strike, strike through the mask!”, Based on Actual Events punches through the surface of visible things, grabbing wild at the drifting actual. Calling himself a “a realist in fabulist clothing,” Robert Moore gives us a book-length sequence of sleek, fiercely comic, colloquial poems whose aphoristic storytelling is pegged to a desire for sublimity. His project is to find new frames of reference for our estrangement from the world. With each burst of invention and stylistic high-spiritedness (“So we reverse engineered the awesome and all we got / was this lousy poesy”), Based on Actual Events adds up to be Moore’s best book yet.
When naïve small-town boy Dillon meets the sophisticated urban Jack in a gay bar, it’s love at first sight, and not just for a one-night stand either! While these star-crossed lovers manage to bring their initially dubious if not downright disowning families together in celebration of their marriage, their unblemished love certainly hasn’t changed the world—quite the contrary. When Jack becomes the victim of a gay-bashing, Dillon sets out on an indiscriminate rampage of revenge. Unfortunately, the straight men he takes on are neither particularly homophobic, nor are they exactly itching for a fight and the scene quickly turns ugly, teetering on the verge of a slaughter of the innocent until the police intervene. Realizing too late that two wrongs don’t make a right, the lovers, wrapped in each other’s arms, die in a hail of bullets.
Arriving in heaven, much to their contrite surprise, the creator fits the souls of these two Romeos with a set of wings and sends them on a mission of redemption. Condemned to wander the earth and tell their cautionary tale forever to whomever will listen, their angelic personae TBAG and FEMINEM have had no trouble enthralling wildly enthusiast audiences all over North America with the rap opera rhymes of this tragic tale ever since.
While the goal of BASH’d is first and foremost to tell an engaging gay love story, it also flips the music industry’s gangsta stereotype of rap music on its head and returns it to its political roots—in this case to explore the dangers of the kind of attitudes that continue to condone and even encourage sexual discrimination of all kinds in our society.
Not since Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner has a narrative poem inspired such empathy in the hearts and minds of its audience.
Written mainly during the poet’s travels through India, Basmati Brown represents a spiritual and social journey through Punjabi cultural roots while retaining a clear connection to a home in British Columbia. Phinder Dulai’s poems have the ability to seduce with liquid words, caressing the reader with Punjabi rhythm and speech pattern in harmony with English voice. Basmati Brown is beautifully illustrated with evocative black-and-white photographs from both India and Canada. Dulai is a poet to watch, receiving high praise from talented Canadian writers such as Michael Turner and George Bowering. With just his second book of poetry, Dulai is already carving a name for himself in the Canadian literary scene.
Shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award
The innocence and clarity of Teri Vlassopoulos’s narrative voice reveals new and unexpected layers. The characters in these stories look for signs and omens as they attempt to understand events in their lives by framing them in abstract superstitions. The stories in Bats and Swallows are sharp, accurate, told with balance and skill.
“Vlassopoulos has found a way to carry over the wide-eyed curiosity and innate goodness of childhood into the mysterious, often sad, often tragic world of adulthood.”—Montreal Review of Books
Is faith only for the devout? Can faith be shared across religious boundaries? These are the questions that Paul Mason explores in this hilarious, wise, and utterly fictional account of a pilgrmage from Peterborough, Ontario to St. John’s Church in Lakefield, one town over.
As the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 approaches, a new chapter in the history of the war is being opened for the first time. Although naval battles raged on the Great Lakes, combat between privateers and small government vessels boiled in the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine. Three small warships — the Provincial sloop Brunswicker, His Majesty’s schooner Bream, and His Majesty’s brig of war Boxer — played a vital role in defending the eastern waters of British North America in this crucial war.
The crews of these hardy ships fought both the Americans and the elements — winter winds, summer fog, and the fierce tidal currents of the Bay of Fundy — enduring the all-too-real threats of shipwreck and possible capture and imprisonment. In peacetime, these patrol craft enforced maritime law. In wartime, they engaged in a guerre de course, attacking the enemy’s commercial shipping while protecting their own. Now, for the first time, Joshua Smith tells the full story of the battle for the bay.
Battle for the Bay is volume 17 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
The book is an utaniki, a poetic travel journal comprised of haiku, senryu, tanka, kyoka, zappai and various Japanese imagist sequences. It records a journey undertaken by the author and his family in a Volkswagen, c 1980, from northeastern Nigeria down to Lagos in the southwest and up the west coast of West Africa through Benin and Togo. With characteristic wit it exposes the neocolonial realities of so-called third world cultures: the ingenuity of their peoples, their wicked humour and resourcefulness. It’s a celebration of life in West Africa before the violence of Boko Haram and the abductions of young girls from Maiduguri, a city Richard Stevenson lived in for two years as a WUSC recruit.
The poems in this collection, representing work from the decade 1980-1990, range from evocations of common objects, a sea shell or a twisted nail, to explorations of an inner world of memory and imagination. Throughout the collection, there is a tension between things in their unique coherence and the imagination compelled to assimilate them: our seeing is never pure, is never seeing and only seeing.
“A remarkable and magical place enriched and enlivened by Kevin’s tenderness, sensitivity, and skill.” — Deborah Carr, author of Sanctuary: The Story of Naturalist Mary Majka.
Every year, thousands of visitors from around the world descend the staircase at Hopewell Rocks to walk on the ocean floor. Many of those visitors have been greeted by author and photographer Kevin Snair, who spent years working as an Interpretive Guide for the Hopewell Rocks Park. Bay of Fundy’s Hopewell Rocks combines Snair’s luminous descriptions of tidal action and geology with his stunning photography to capture the breathtaking experience of New Brunswick’s famous natural wonder.
Now revised and updated from the original 2016 edition and full of intriguing tidbits on the human and natural history of the Rocks, Bay of Fundy’s Hopewell Rocks offers an intimate, behind-the-scenes tour of this striking and fascinating place.
A “come from away” exploring love, loneliness, and adventure in remote Newfoundland
Part memoir, part nature writing, part love story, Bay of Hope is an occasionally comical, often adversarial, and always emotional story about the five years ecologist David Ward lived in an isolated Newfoundland community; of how he ended up there, worked, survived the elements, and coped with loneliness and a lack of intimacy. But this book is also a story about David’s 78 McCallum, Newfoundland, neighbors, the unforgiving mountain and wilderness culture they call home, and why their government wishes they were dead.
Creative nonfiction written in the tradition of Farley Mowat’s Bay of Spirits, Ward’s memoir is also evocative of Michael Crummey’s poignant novel Sweetland and Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A book about how great adventure tales do not always have to include dramatic, never-attempted, death-defying feats, Bay of Hope shows us that a person can travel a million miles over the treacherous terrain within their hearts, as long as they’re courageous enough to make such an arduous trek.
This poetry collection guides you through a sensational journey of love. The poems and images ignite your imagination, connect you to your current, past and future feelings, and touch that special spark inside. Throughout the book we linger in pain and strife trying to find a remedy for our troubled souls. In the realm of love, the power of words is far better for conveying exactly what we are feeling, whether we want to seduce, plead, flatter or convince, proclaim the depth of our devotion, or even reveal a broken heart. We become bitter as we harden our hearts, lose trust, feel betrayed and blame everyone around us for the emptiness that engulfs us.
A veteran music journalist explores rock-n-roll’s bayou roots in “a jolting 18-track joy ride [that] unlocks secrets and back-stories worth savoring” — The Wall Street Journal
The bayou of the American south — stretching from Houston, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama — is a world all its own, with a rich cultural heritage that has had an outsized influence on musicians across the globe. In this unique study of marsh music, Dave Thompson goes beyond the storied stomping grounds of New Orleans to unearth secret legends and vivid mythology.
In Bayou Underground, the people who have called the bayou home — such as Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, a one-armed Cajun backwoodsman, and a gator hunter named Amos Moses — are revealed through their own words, their lives and music, and interviews with residents from the region. Including interviews with legendary musicians like Jerry Reed and Bo Didley, Bayou Underground is part travelogue, part social history, and part lament for a way of life that has now all but disappeared.
There are things one cannot ever hope to understand. Does existence precede essence even if essence was available? In a collage of disparate images, the BE poems spin together individual and collective states of feelings to examine the fragments of the human condition in little existences.
In his first book since the Griffin-shortlisted Why Are You So Sad?, David W. McFadden offers up a gross of sonnets that display his trademark wit, mischief, curiosity, and quirky wisdom. A tour de force of compression, these brief poems Ñ as full and satisfying as his longer narrative works Ñ explore politics, religion, love, and poetry itself, with cameo appearances by Charles Bukowski, Jesus Christ, George Bowering, and Junichiro Tanizaki. Be Calm, Honey is at once deeply humanistic, poignant, and funny as hell, plainspoken, philosophical, and outrageous. Now into his fifth decade of writing, McFadden shows us what it is to live a life devoted to poetry.
Drawing on the author’s seven years of caring for his mother through Alzheimer’s, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver is what its title promises: four dispatches to an anonymous long-term caregiver. In brief passages that cast fresh light on what it means to live with dementia, Barnes shares trials, insights, solace—and, ultimately, inspiration.
Novelist and editor Wayne Tefs delivers a thrilling novel based on a real-life experience in Be Wolf: A True Account of the Survival of Reinhold Kaletsch. Reinhold Kaletsch was a German doctor and inventor with a passion for the Canadian Shield. Whenever possible, he escaped to his farm in northern Manitoba, relishing its severe beauty. Kaletsch had a taste for adventure, fulfilling his creed: a life without risks is one not worth living.