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All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 8961–8976 of 9311 results
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what’s left
$16.95what’s left, a book in six related sections, presents us with cues and clues to the poet’s compositional strategies. The first section, “hazelnut,” measures time as the unfolding life of space. It alludes to mclennan’s long-term genealogy project, in which he discovers traces of the Sumerian flood, Etruscans, Icelanders, and Robert the Bruce hidden in “Indian Lands,” waiting to be discovered like “gilded coffins in Egypt, undisturbed, as yet,” along with other “‘ancient’ remains, now ‘decades-old,’” of our more recent, cash-crop culture. This hopeful search for a unified thread of narrative continuity in our shared physical landscape is undermined by the road-poems of the book’s second section, “interim report,” where the poet finds himself “somewhere between love and madness,” only to discover in the third section that the pursuit of a collective historical voice might well be merely a search for a little white li(n)e.
Section four, “cooley’s key,” shifts the identity/narrative search from the “other” to the “self,” with an ironic platonic toss of the active body in favour of its passive intentions: “‘he says in the old days, eh, all / they cared abt was sex & grades, eh, but now / all they care abt is grades … where / has the ambition gone.” Section five, “paisley,” dead-ends in an artfully constructed fractal barrage of global nostalgia: a series of endlessly over- and under-stated images of idealized neighbourhoods where lawns are cut with mullets and relationships are cut into periodic tables by intrusive punctuation. Finally in section six, we find “what’s left: coda,” a return to the particulars of the poet’s “territory”: not a “mighty oak from a tiny acorn grown,” but a hazelnut thicket in which a multiplicity of voices is heard.
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What’s The Score
$19.95The often outrageous and always wise follow-up to 2008’s Governor General’s AwardÐnominated Be Calm, Honey shows David W. McFadden at his most inquisitive and provocative. Here you’ll find ninety-nine poems full of surprises by a Canadian long-distance poet in his sixth decade of writing, a writer who never rests on his laurels or allows himself to become complacent. This is a book full of mystics and Golden Age movie stars, friends of McFadden and long-dead philosophers, and their tales are all told in the poet’s deceptively plainspoken voice.
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What’s Past Is Prologue
$34.95From Arthur Ellis Award–winning Grand Master of Crime Writers comes the 21st installment in the Joanne Kilbourn series
When Libby Hogarth, the go-to lawyer for the rich or famous who have committed heinous crimes, comes to Regina to deliver the prestigious Mellohawk Lecture, she is met with a torrent of hostility and misinformation. Libby Hogarth had successfully defended Jared Delio, a wildly popular national radio host, against charges of sexual abuse brought against him by three Regina women. Her no-holds-barred cross-examination of the women stirred up a rage that still smolders.
Zack and Joanne Shreve’s commitment to protect Libby goes beyond the fact that in defending Delio, Libby had simply applied the principles at the root of the justice system. Zack and Libby share a history. They were the last two students to article with Fred C. Harney, a brilliant alcoholic lawyer who changed both their lives. Sawyer MacLeish, Libby’s associate, was like a much-loved third son to Joanne when he was growing up, and she fears that Sawyer will suffer collateral damage from any attack on Libby.
Joanne’s fears are not groundless, and when the inevitable happens, Joanne, Zack, and their extended family must pick up the pieces.
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What’s the Matter with Mary Jane?
$19.95A wise-cracking, grammar-obsessed, pansexual amateur sleuth is thrust into the world of the uber-rich when her enigmatic, now-famous childhood friend breezes back into her life begging for help with a dangerous stalker
Our nameless postmodern amateur sleuth is still recovering from her first dangerous foray into detective work when her old friend Priscilla Jane Gill breezes back into her life and begs for help. Pris, now a famous travel writer, fears she’s being stalked again after a nearly fatal attack by a deranged fan a year earlier. In Pris’s dizzying world of wealth and privilege, nameless meets dreamy but sinister tech billionaire Nathan and his equally unnerving sidekick Chiles. Pris’s stalker is murdered outside her book launch, and the shadow of obsession continues to stalk Pris. With no one she can totally trust, nameless knows she’s not going to like the answer — but she delves into her old friend’s past, seeking the mastermind behind Pris’s troubles before it’s too late. Bunnywit does his level best to warn them, but no one else speaks Cat, so background peril transforms into foreground betrayal and murder.
In the second installation of the Epitome Apartments Mystery Series, our heroine walks a dangerous path in a world where money is no object and the stakes are higher, and more personal, than ever.
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Whatever
$11.95Sixteen-year-old Darrah is in trouble. She lost her temper and, as a result, Mrs. Johnson, was hurt. Now her parents want her to go to something called a “Restorative Justice” circle that the RCMP suggested. Darrah has to face her parents, Mrs. Johnson, a policewoman, and a “facilitator” who all sit in a circle and decide on Darrah’s “sanctions.” Sanctions aren’t punishments, the facilitator tells her. At first Darrah doesn’t believe this-helping Mrs. Johnson two afternoons a week feels like punishment. But then Darrah realizes that she likes helping the older woman, especially when Mrs. Johnson teaches Darrah how to cook and bake (her recipes are included in the book). It turns out, however, that Mrs. Johnson is hiding a secret. . .
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Whazzat?
$20.00Whazzat? explores how poetry invites us to look at things differently, with a sense of surprise, a whazzat. It looks at paradoxes we meet in life, and ways of resolving them through shifts of perspective. Poems cluster in four sections around paradoxes in different parts of our lives. Can we square the sheer unpredictability of events – especially with climate change – with our recurring need for certainty? Can we revitalize downtown cores without losing a sense of our past? In our personal lives, can we see unavoidable paradoxes as “gifts” that heighten our sense of wonder, rather than threatening to divide us in two? Is there a “now” we can live in, or do we inevitably live in our pasts and imagined futures? A number of poems have been previously published in literary magazines and anthologies across Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.A. This collection draws them together.
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Wheaton, The
$19.95A year after the early death of his wife, John Davies comes hesitantly out of retirement to take a job at The Wheaton, a senior’s residence. Having resisted ‘getting involved’ for his entire life, John is immediately out of his comfort zone. The Wheaton is a boundary-free environment, and he is immersed in the kinds of sticky matters he usually does his best to avoid. Surrounded by mortality and the ghosts of regret haunting many of the residents, John begins to do the unthinkable: relate to his fellow creatures and reconsider his past. After a life of being a selfish husband and a distracted absentee father, is it too late to try to make amends?
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Wheel and Come Again
$17.95The beat and language of reggae arose from the Jamaican countryside and the sidewalks of Kingston, but they’re basic for the poets represented in Wheel and Come Again. This remains true even though the poets’ personal worlds range from the street to the university and from the tropics to Toronto, New York, and London.
Wheel and Come Again features works by 28 poets of Caribbean origin; some remain in the islands, and others have migrated to North America and Britain. The book includes works by Canadian poets such as Rachel Manley, Afua Cooper, Lillian Allen, Olive Senior, and Clifton Joseph; UK poets including Linton Kwesi Johnson and Jean “Binta” Breeze; US writers Rohan B. Preston, Fred d’Aguiar, and others; and Island poets such as Anthony MacNeill and Lorna Goodison.
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Whelmed
$18.95What might a word lose – or gain – without its prefix?
Each prose poem in Whelmed features a word that has been unhinged from its prefix, allowing new meanings – radically unfamiliar, yet uncannily intimate – to emerge from these prefixless word deposits. Part prose-poem sequence and part encyclopedia of unpredictably irregular terms, Whelmed is at times deranging,almost disturbing, sometimes detached, and always joyfully rupting.
‘Addictionary of words lopped off from their prefixial syllables, this lightful pendium mises hours of giggles and a joyful sire to copy ad finitum! So much pleasure! So much verbal legerdemain. So spiring! Can’t stop/won’t stop reading, jotting, sharing. Constraint at its most unconstrained.’
– Maria Damon
‘With Whelmed, theWoman in the Shoe (who has too much to do) and the stoned, fixed priestesses of Apollo invoke the order of an alphabet of prefixes. Enjoy the maze – take with you two string balls, one of truth and one of belief. Her mastery of language makes poetry free.’
– Maxine Gadd
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When Africa Calls Uhuru
$20.00When Africa Calls Uhuru is a dramatic poem in search of what it means to be human. Henry Beissel takes the reader to the Rift Valley in Kenya where it is believed the evolution of Homo sapiens largely took place. The narrative unfolds in a dialogue between nature, science and history, three voices that evoke the fauna and flora of Africa and conjure up the history of its colonization. Ultimately, the poem celebrates today’s liberation of the ‘dark’ continent, arguing that since all humanity was born there, all people are brothers and sisters, whatever the colour of their skin. “Dance, my beloved / Africa,” the poet rejoices, “you are free / to choose freedom now!”
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When Big Bears Invade
$19.99Manitoba artist Nyco Rudolph and Alberta writer Alexander Finbow join creative forces to reveal the myth behind how the benevolent bears came to rule over us all. An illustrated children’s book for everyone, featuring beautiful Godzilla and King Kong-inspired paintings of giant bears attacking major Canadian cities and landmarks. Includes Grizzly Bear Colossuses attacking the CN Tower, Spirit Bears surfing the Tsunami into Vancouver, a huge Bearnado ripping into Winnipeg, giant bear cubs playing jump rope with the Mountain Gateway pipeline, Polar Bear Behemoths dropping a glacier onto the oil sands, and the Giant Bears delivering a very Canadian wall to keep the Americans out. At least that’s what Granny says really happened.
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When Days Are Long
$24.95When Amy Wilson accepted the job of field nurse for the Indigenous Peoples in the Yukon and Northern British Columbia in 1949, she was told that the north was a fine country for men and dogs but that it killed women and horses. Undaunted, Wilson travelled the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse (Mile 916) to Mile Zero. She served Indigenous Peoples in tents, shacks and on the trapline, travelling by dog team, car, plane, snowshoe, horseback and boat. She was the first to respond when a half-frozen man came stumbling into a ham radio operator’s shack with a story of epidemic and starvation at Halfway River. With five doses of antitoxin pinned inside her sweater to keep them warm, she made her way through forty-below temperatures to the camp where Indigenous Peoples were still living in summer tents. Four people had died of the “choking sickness” before Wilson’s arrival, but she brought immediate help, and shortly thereafter supplies began to arrive by sleigh and by air. The details of the diphtheria epidemic are both tragic and dramatic and just one of many such incidents in the busy life of the “Indian Nurse,” as she was called.
Wilson’s territory spanned 518,000 square kilometres. She was responsible for the health of 3,000 Indigenous Peoples, but Wilson was more than just a health care provider: over time, she became an advocate, partner and friend for the community with whom she shared mutual respect, music, medicine, tea from tobacco tins and, most of all, with whom she shared her heart.
Originally published as No Man Stands Alone in 1965 by Gray’s Publishing LTD., this new edition, When Days Are Long: Nurse in the North, includes an introduction by Wilson’s grandniece, Laurel Deedrick-Mayne, which brings crucial insights to this important figure in BC’s history.
A percentage of proceeds from When Days Are Long will be donated to the Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association’s Jean Goodwill Scholarship.
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When Earth Leaps Up
$18.00“…one of Canada’s major poets. The audacity — the courage — of her imagination teaches us, gives us our better selves.” — Tim Lilburn
This posthumous collection will be a delightful surprise for readers who thought they had heard the last of Anne Szumigalski’s nimble, sideslipping, otherworldly voice. Szumigalski’s poetic universe is as beguiling and unpredictable as dreams and myth, and like them, her universe can be enchanting, visually lush, and suddenly dangerous.
Untitled (“glory to the queen…”)
glory to the queen whoever she is
wherever she finds herself as she moves
up and down round and round
all the spaces that are hersonce she was a young thing and jumped
easily over any fence any line
now she’s an old woman thick and earthyby tomorrow she hopes to leap
out of this skin and into a new one
a skin like petals like leavesThe poems deal with ultimate questions. What is time? What is memory? Is it invented or real? Is death a kind of dream? Is life? Is God a man, a woman, or a Sacred Reptile? The imaginative leaps in When Earth Leaps Up are as easy as looking up at the prairie sky, as simple as turning your head to the side to catch a glimpse of an idea as it skips past you in the form of an interesting stranger, a passing cloud, the face of a loved one, long dead.
Szumigalski immigrated to Canada from England in 1951, and lived in Saskatoon from 1956 until her death in 1999. The author of 15 books, she received the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1995 for Voice, a collaboration with the visual artist Marie Elyse St. George.
Mark Abley is the editor or author of 10 books, including the internationally acclaimed Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Abley is the literary executor for Anne Szumigalski.
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When Fenelon Falls
$21.95A spaceship hurtles towards the moon, hippies gather at Woodstock, Charles Manson leads a cult into murder and a Kennedy drives off a Chappaquiddick dock: it’s the summer of 1969. And as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the March family’s cottage, she spends her days memorizing Top 40 lists, avoiding her adoptive cousins, catching frogs and plottingto save Yogi, the bullied, buttertart-eating bear caged at the top of March Road. In her diary, reworking the scant facts of her adoption, Jordan visions and revisions a hundred different scenarios for her conception on that night in 1954 when Hurricane Hazel tore Toronto to shreds, imagining her conception at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital or the CNE horse palace, and such parents as JFK, Louisa May Alcott, Perry Mason and the Queen of England.
But when bear-baiting cousin Derwood finds the diary and learns everything that the family will not face, the target of his torture shifts from Yogi the Bear to his disabled and haunted adopted cousin. As caged as Yogi, Jordan is drawn to desperate measures.
With its soundtrack of sixties pop songs, swamp creatures, motor boats and the rapid-fire punning of the family’s Marchspeak, When Fenelon Falls will take you to a time and place that was never as idyllic as it seemed, where not belonging turns the Summer of Love into a summer of loss.
‘The meta-fictional aspect of the novel provides a generous extra layer of storytelling that is both funny and wise. The writing is strong and complex and the subject matter, unique, important and emotionally moving.’
– Lisa Moore, author of February
‘The story is full of humour, surprises and a refreshingly unsentimental depiction of family relations. A boldand challenging undercurrent of darkness drives the plot forward … Palmer is a talented writer with an original voice and a marvellous ear for the nuance (and fun) of language.’
– Quill and Quire
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When is a Man
$19.95Paul Rasmussen is a young ethnographer and academic recovering from prostate cancer. Broken, he retreats to the remote forests and towns of the Immitoin Valley. As an outsider, he discovers how difficult it is to know a place, let alone become a part of it. Then, a drowned man and a series of encounters with the locals force him to confront the valley’s troubled past and his own uncertain future. As Paul turns his attention to the families displaced forty years earlier by the flooding of the valley to create a hydroelectric dam, his desire to reinvent himself runs up against the bitter emotions and mysterious connections that linger in the community in the aftermath of the flood.
An original debut novel that is meditative, raw, and exuberant in tone, Aaron Shepard’s When is a Man offers a fresh perspective on landscape and masculinity.
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When it Rains
$15.95When it Rains is the story of four people, two marriages, and one increasingly improbable series of events. As misfortune mounts, communication fractures, relationships crumble, behaviour becomes absurd. People sing, get naked, give up, lose control, have sex with strangers. Some kind of God intervenes. Or observes. Or something. Or nothing. When it Rains is by turns blackly funny social satire, heartbreaking drama, existentialist graphic novel, and post-modern Job story.