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Showing 8945–8960 of 9005 results
Year Zero
$11.95Year Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along songlines as though following passages of Koto music. In Brian Henderson’s poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed by awareness of the paradoxes at the heart of language, that language wants you for itself, and that what is named, falls. Whether focusing on the dying of a parent or fellow poet, or on the coming-to-be of a child, this poetry is alive with the truth that “The dead burn through us/ the not yet born.”
“What a wonderful book this is! Henderson tells the old story how dear ones die, and new lives come to be. In a world that’s dense, opaque, yet lit with random hints of something being uttered. The result is a marvel of passionate, glancing eloquence. I wanted it never to end.” –Dennis Lee
Years, Months, and Days
$18.95A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A transfiguration of Mennonite hymns into heartbreaking lyric poems, Years, Months, and Days is a moving “meditation on the possibility of translation.” Bridging secular spirituality and holy reverence with the commonalities of life, death, love, and hope, Jernigan explores the connection between hymn and poem, recalling the spare beauty of Marilynne Robinson’s novels or the poems of Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst. The sparse and tender phrasing of Years, Months, and Days is “an offering of words to music,” made in the spirit of a shared love—for life, for a particular landscape and its rhythms—that animates poem and prayer alike.
Yellow Crane
$20.00Inviting, human, capacious poems that grapple with ideas while also lightly grieving our capacity for ruin.
Yellow Crane, Susan Gillis’s fourth collection of poetry, is a book of many views, many voices. A long look at the changing landscape of a Montreal neighbourhood becomes at once a lament and a love poem. A sequence of poems inspired by Japanese tanka take on the cultural weather, core-drilling into the contradictions and uncertainties of the everyday. Writers, artists, thinkers, cooks, and others congregate in a hammock on the edge of a hayfield to compare notes on what we value. A bear turns up on a path near a quarry. The poems of Yellow Crane study, with a lover’s tender yet critical eye, the world we occupy and the way we occupy it: art, industry, environments both built and natural; the simultaneous flux and agelessness of our daily habits; the long human story of appropriation of wilderness; the fragility, resilience, and questionable worth of what we make, especially under political, economic, and social pressures; concern about our changing times; grief over what we leave behind. This is a book that argues with itself, then rests. At once precise and loose, wise and nimble, it will make you both feel and think–and care about the world along with it. We know the tree stands for promise
and for the desire, which comes much later, for atonement.
We stand at the west-facing window
and let the buildings opposite turn gold, then back to brick.
(from “Morning Light”)/
Yellow Watch
$22.95Nominated, Journey Prize, 2018: “Yellow Watch”
Long-listed, The Fiddlehead’s Fiction Contest, 2017: “Yellow Watch”
Runner-up, UofT Magazine Writing Contest, 2015: “A Pilgrimage to Atalaia”
First Prize Winner, Toronto Star Short Story Contest, 2015: “A Dragonfly Dashed by My Face”
First Prize Winner, The Malahat Review Open Season Short-Fiction Writing Contest, 2013: “The Butterfly First”This gripping collection takes us into the lives of Portuguese immigrants as they arrive in Toronto. Beginning in tiny Amendoeiro across the Tagus from Lisbon, it describes lives of abject poverty under the fascist thumb of Antonio Salazar. The men are often out of work from the local cork factory, and the women collect scraps to eat, while the dreaded secret police remain ever watchful for hints of unrest. Men disappear. It is a life of abuse, cruelty, and superstition, observed by the girl Milita, who calmly takes her beatings from her mother but misses nothing. These Portuguese stories are easily reminiscent of early Saramago.
Yellowknife Journal, The
$22.95Finding a fur trader?s journal is unusual. Finding a trader?s journal in French is even rarer. Finding a journal in French and written on birchbark is unprecedented. The Yellowknife Journal was kept by Jean Steinbruck, a soldier of German descent who was likely sent to the colonies by a prince as part payment of a debt. Steinbruck accompa nied Alexander McKenzie to the Arctic ocean before working as a fur trader for the North West Company in the Great Slave Lake area. As required by the Company, he kept a journal of his daily trafficking with the natives around his post. In the hard winter of 1802-03, he ran out of paper and was forced to use the birchbark sheets used for patching canoes to keep his daily entries. Historians and collectors have heard of traders resorting to birchbark sheets when they had no paper at their post, but as it was customary for traders to keep a rough journal and then rewrite a fair copy to send in to the company, no other examples of these birchbark journals have survived. In private hands for almost two hundred years, the journal has surfaced thanks to Henry de Lotbiniere Harwood’s passion for Canadiana and his own family’s history. A descendant of the Seigneurs of Vaudreuil and Rigaud, de Lotbiniere Harwood uncovered, preserved and passed on the journal to his children. This unique Canadian artifact has been published as a full-colour facsimile, with accompanying transcription and English translation and a lively and accessible introduction by Harry Duckworth, a noted expert in this field.
Yes, and Back Again
$19.95Historian Tanis and high school teacher Neil have just purchased their dream home on Saskatoon’s west side: a fixer-upper with plenty of character and an abundance of history to uncover. But as Tanis moves deeper towards uncovering the secrets of the Tanner family who originally inhabited their home – and the cause of the mysterious stains on the attic floor – Neil is pulled into a drama of his own, as two aboriginal teenagers from his school have gone missing and he is being looked to as a suspect. Taking its title from the Old English nursery rhyme “How Many Miles to Babylon?”, Yes, and Back Again examines the personal journeys required to bridge the distances between individuals, cultures, and generations in an atmosphere marked by class and racial divisions.
Yes, Miss Thompson
$19.95When plain, outspoken Yorkshire schoolgirl Marjory Thompson immigrates with her rambunctious family to Canada in 1904, her parents are convinced that fortune awaits in the flat farmland of Manitoba. Before long, the impatient Marjory realizes her parents have got it all wrong: nothing but hard work, loneliness, and boredom lie before them. Desperate to escape, Marjory takes one rural teaching post after another, scrimping and saving, until she can afford to attend university. After graduation, she is employed as a high school principal, a rare feat for a woman in the 1930s. What comes next, at the dawn of the feminist age, is not deserved success but a single act of terrible judgement that will haunt Marjory the rest of her life. With insight and imagination, Amy Boyes brings her great-grandmother’s past alive in this tale of immigration, struggle, and the long reach of history.
Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon
$19.95Nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Translation
Yesterday, on my way back from the museum: my head is full of images of storms. A boundless sea of paintings and photographs. Other storms I build like a backdrop, with sombre and anonymous characters, impossible to identify. I remain thus all evening, pressed up against the existence of a storm without feeling threatened. Waiting. After a few moments I become, I am, the storm, the disruption, the precipitation, the agitation that puts reality in peril.
Carla Carlson is at the Hotel Clarendon in Quebec City trying to finish a novel. Nearby, a woman, preoccupied with sadness and infatuated with her boss, catalogues antiquities at the Museum of Civilization. Every night, the two women meet at the hotel bar and talk – about childhood and parents and landscapes, about time and art, about Descartes and Francis Bacon and writing.
When Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon appeared in French (as Hier), the media called it the pinnacle of Brossard’s remarkable forty-year literary career. From its intersection of four women emerges a kind of art installation, a lively read in which life and death and the vertigo of ruins tangle themselves together to say something about history and desire and art.
‘Hier is a book in which the love of language, authorial anxiety and the generosity of a writer who has dedicated herself to the craft of writing are truly revealed.’
– Le Devoir
‘An explorer of language, Brossard has, for many years, pursued a demanding and unarguably original oeuvre. Hier, her latest book, is a kind of sum or synthesis of her research and her meditations.’
– Lettres Québécoises
Yesterday’s People
$22.95Yesterday’s People
YICHUD (Seclusion)
$16.95Rachel and Chaim are Orthodox Jews living in Toronto. They have requested an arranged marriage and today is their wedding day. The Yichud Room is the place where the bride and groom go to be alone immediately following the wedding ceremony. In the case of Rachel and Chaim, who have only had a handful of chaperoned dates, this is the first time they have ever been alone together. In another part of the synagogue, tensions rise between the groom’s older brothers, Ephraim and Menachem, rival Torah scholars who haven’t seen each other in four years. Meanwhile, the bride’s parents, Mordechai and Malka, are secretly planning to divorce after the wedding. YICHUD (Seclusion) directly confronts the tensions that exist in the Orthodox Jewish world between tradition and modernity, powerfully dramatizing issues of love, marriage, respect, sex, honour, and duty.
You Are Among Monsters
$19.95We call it a transfer? It?s important to use the terms, to distance yourself. It?s a dead guy in the back of a van, really, but the words can be something else. Dead bodies, Rum-runners, Murdered mothers. Small-town Alberta is home to Ian, a transfer agent who removes dead bodies all day and who has forgotten how to talk to the living; Becky, a failed academic looking to invent a violent history to escape her mundane present; and Athene, a young woman who witnessed her mother?s murder and now seeks answers from the man who took her mother?s body away. In You Are Among Monsters, the dead have stories left to tell. But who gets to do the telling?
You Are Here
$14.95You are about to meet Alison, who searches her life for meaning in nthis remarkable and powerful play. In a series of luminous moments and encounters, we’re drawn into Alison’s world: love that fades, hopes that die, and enduring friendship that offers the promise of redemption. In You Are Here, MacIvor shows us, and our emotional reality is in this moment, now. Carol Bolt once wrote that Daniel MacIvor’s theatre is “Öa world of poetry, ceremony and mystery.” You AreHere is a daring, intimate and profound theatrical experience.
You Are Here: Selected Stories
$26.95Gathering the best twenty stories from Cynthia Flood’s career, these spare, stylistically inventive stories explore subjects ranging from the domestic to the political.
In this collection, Flood navigates a wide range of subject matter with a writing style which gradually becomes more intense, tighter, and sometimes experimental with each story. Most themes are familiar—love, hate, children, the natural world, parents, failure, despair, anger, regret. Other stories are more unusual, dealing with topics such as far-left political activity. Containing what may be some of Flood’s most poignant work, You Are Here is a sharp and engaging exploration of the world today.
You Are Not Needed Now
$20.00You Are Not Needed Now is a brilliant new collection of stories from Annette Lapointe, author of the Giller-nominated novel Stolen.
Often set within the small towns of the Canadian prairies, the stories in You Are Not Needed Now dissect and examine the illusion of appearances, the myth of normalcy, and the allure of artifice. Lapointe presents characters who are extraordinarily real. They are often strange, vulgar, or messy: collecting blood-stained cotton pads and hairs from shower drains, slicing through skin to get more urgent medical treatment for testosterone withdrawal, storing the heart of a dead infant in a glass jar, kneeling on the dirty wet floors of a bathroom stall to perform oral sex.
Despite the diversity, strangeness, and complexity of her characters, Lapointe illustrates a remarkable understanding of each one. She knows them so intimately, and gives her reader the gift of knowing them, too. Lapointe is adept at looking closely, and exposes her characters’ faults and vulnerabilities, humiliations and vanities, in illuminating and surprising ways. Trapped in this inescapable place-life-her characters linger somewhere between apathy and obsession, compassion and disregard, conflict and avoidance.
This is a bold collection of stories, rich with nuance, originality, and depth.
You Break It You Buy It
$20.00You Break It, You Buy It features poems about disconnection, misconnections: the loss of friendships and identity, our voice, our purpose. At its core, it is a collection of elegies railing against and dealing with toxic relationships, from fair-weather friends, controlling mothers to narcissists. These poems invite the reader into personal experiences, public observations and the price we pay, positive and negative for our interactions with the media, our global and local conflicts, environmental challenges, the pandemic, the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. She writes about the dark underside of our lives with a sense of danger, humour and of hope for reconnection in the future with our community and our world.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
$19.95A “straight-dope, tell-all account” of touring with two of the world’s greatest bands of the 60s and 70s — A “fast-moving narrative of rock-n-roll excess.” (Publishers Weekly)
Sam draws intimate portraits of other stars of the psychedelic circus that was the music industry in the sixties and seventies, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Band, the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, and Eric Clapton
In this all-access memoir of the psychedelic era, Sam Cutler recounts his life as a tour manager for the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead — whom he calls the yin and yang of bands. After working with the Rolling Stones at their historic Hyde Park concert in 1969, Sam managed their American tour later that year, when he famously dubbed them “The Greatest Rock Band in the World.” And he was caught in the middle as their triumph took a tragic turn during a free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California, where a man in the crowd was killed by the Hell’s Angels.
After that, Sam took up with the fun-loving Grateful Dead, managing their tours and finances, and taking part in their endless hijinks on the road. With intimate portraits of other stars of the time — including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Band, the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, and Eric Clapton — this memoir is a treasure trove of insights and anecdotes that bring some of rock’s greatest legends to life.