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In this collection of poems, Inge Israel works through Samuel Beckett’s letters, his biographies and his actual plays and novels to probe the imagination that created his artistic works. Arguably the pre-eminent avant-garde and most influential writer of the 20th century and a legend in his own time, Beckett presents many glaring paradoxes.
Winner:
2016 Foreword Reviews INDIES, Silver, War & Military (Adult Fiction)
Captain Jim McFarlane, a Canadian infantry officer, is coming apart at the seams. It’s September 1944, in Italy, and the allied armies are closing in on the retreating Axis powers. Exhausted and lost, Jim tries to command his combat company under fire, while waiting desperately for letters from his wife Marianne. Joining the army not out of some admirable patriotic sentiments but rather because of his own failings and restlessness, he finds himself fighting in a war that is far from glorious. In this story of love and war, Murphy brilliantly captures our ambiguous relationship to war.
It’s 1965. Twenty-two-year-old Linda Wise despairs of escaping her overprotective parents and her hometown, where far too many know she was sexually assaulted as a teenager. Deliverance arrives in the form of marriage to the charismatic, twenty-six-year-old Ronald Brunson, a newly ordained Methodist minister who ignites her passion for social justice. Ron tells her war and racial discrimination are symptoms of the “moral rot” destroying the country, conjuring up something dark and rancid in her mind, thrilling in its wickedness. He sweeps her away from Stony River, New Jersey, to serve with him at a church in a speck-on-the-map prairie town in Minnesota. What lies ahead for her over the next seven years is the subject of Tricia Dower’s penetrating study of a marriage and a woman’s evolving sense of self as she confronts the trauma that keeps her from her future, unfettered self. Becoming Lin evokes the turbulent era of Freedom Riders for civil rights, Vietnam war resistance, the US government’s war against the resisters, sisterhood and the push for equal rights for women, new-age metaphysics, motivational psychology and the unravelling of the traditional marriage contract – an era that resonates in today’s persistent racism and sexism, perpetual war and wide-reaching government surveillance.
Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice explores how Indigenous visual art and culture operate within and from a structural framework that is unique within the cultural milieu. Through a selection of contributions by Indigenous curators, artists, and scholars brings together perspectives that define curatorial practices, and at the same time postulates Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination within the three countries. These compelling essays begin to unearth the connections and historical moments that draw Indigenous curatorial practices together and the differences that set them apart.
With contributions from Nigel Borell, Freja Carmichael, Karl Chitham, Nici Cumpston, Léuli Eshr?ghi, Reuben Friend, Jarita Greyeyes, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Dr. Heather Igloliorte, Jaimie Isaac, Carly Lane, Cathy Mattes, Kimberley Moulton, Lisa Myers, Dr. Julie Nagam, Dr. Jolene Rickard, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Josh Tengan, and Daina Warren.
Nikki van Schyndel is not your typical grizzled survivalist. She is a contemporary, urban young woman who threw off modern comforts to spend nineteen months in a remote rainforest with her housecat and a virtual stranger. Set in the Broughton Archipelago, a maze of isolated islands near northern Vancouver Island, Becoming Wild is a story of survival in the pristine wilderness of BC. Sometimes predator and sometimes prey, twenty-nine-year-old Nikki and her companion Micah fend off the harsh weather, hungry wildlife, threat of starvation and the endless perils of this rugged Raincoast. To survive, Nikki must rely on her knowledge of BC’s coastal flora and fauna, and the ancient techniques of hunting and gathering. In this remote world she learns to skin bears, make clothes from cedar bark and take great joy in gobbling a fish tail whole. Told in a voice that is both familiar and vulnerable, Becoming Wild explores our innate longings to connect with nature and revert to a pure, Eden-like state.
Winner of the 2016 Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award
In this collection Jeanette Lynes’ follows in the tradition of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. In Bedlam Cowslip, she turns her attention to the life and work of John Clare, the great Victorian poet of the countryside, one of England’s greatest working-class bards. In these poems, the Romantic world of Clare, strewn with wild flowers and dizzy with birdsong, is visited by a new, postmodern voice, and the conversation that ensues across a dozen decades is profound and dazzling.
Painstakingly researched and deftly crafted, the poems share Clare’s loves, ambitions, rages and failures. With lines that echo the sharpness of Dorothy Livesay and the richness of Roo Borson, Lynes writes of madness, scarce paper and of the intense attention Clare brought to his world. In this book Lynes has created an uplifting poetic biography on a bright poetic star that has been rising for over a century.
Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie’s been shed bore, her first trade poetry collection, follows years of a small voice gaining in strength, and in volume, through so much subtle activity and quiet disconnect that by the time she was noticed, she was already everywhere, and already a confident voice. In a poetry built on the strength of play, Pirie’s writing moves at the speed of sound, slipping up against silence.
Incredibly Strange Wrestling was the bastard offspring of post-punk garage rock and masked Mexican lucha libre. Fielding a cast of crazed characters with names like El Homo Loco, Macho Sasquatcho and El Pollo Diablo, the show lived up to its name. Christians fought lions, Ku Klux Klowns squared off against Hasidic Jews and Bigfoots and bears mauled hapless hippies in some of the most surreal grappling bouts ever staged. And if that wasn’t enough, cult bands such as NOFX, The Dickies and The Donnas provided the raucous rock and roll in between the highflying mayhem.
ISW emerged from the back alleys and seedy clubs of San Francisco’s South of Market scene to headline the historic Fillmore and barnstorm North America on the Van’s Warped Tour. At the height of its popularity, Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong and Metallica’s James Hetfield could be seen tossing tortillas (which the promoters supplied) at ringside with the rest of the hell heads, boozehounds and tattooed party girls that made up ISW’s rabid following.
Bob Calhoun broke into ISW as an untrained grappler and rose through the ranks to become one of the creative forces behind the subversive carnival. In his new memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal, Calhoun delves into the ISW’s organized insanity with all of the dark humor that it deserves. It’s a story of urban misfits risking their necks for local celebrity in one of America’s most famous cities all told against the backdrop of the dot com boom and bust and an increasingly corporate entertainment industry.
Beer, Blood and Cornmeal takes the highest tier of the music industry and sends it on a collision course with the lowest rung of the professional wrestling ladder. The threat of real violence is always lurking at the fringes of the fake fights as shows end in riots and wrestlers disturbingly become their squared circle alter egos.
A collection of words and imagery from diverse voices grounded in the land that explore community in relation to time. Filmmaker/writer, Darlene Naponse, curates a gathering of expression about time that has passed, time that is now and time that comes.
For thousands of years, the broad expanse between Sumas and Vedder Mountains east of Vancouver lay under water, forming the bed of Sumas Lake. As recently as a century ago, the lake’s shores stood four miles across and six miles long. During yearly high water, the lake spilled onto the surrounding prairies; during high flood years, it reached from Chilliwack into Washington State. Then, through the 1920s, a network of dykes, canals, dams and pumphouses was erected and the lake drained–“reclaimed” in the words of projects supporters. A new landscape was created, a seemingly ‘natural’ prairie carved up into productive farmland.
Today, few people are aware that Sumas Lake ever existed. The only reminder is a plaque erected on the old lakeshore, at a rest-stop along the Trans-Canada Highway just east of Whatcom Road, on the historic trail blazed to BC’s gold fields. Yet for millenniums, Sumas Lake was a dynamic, integral part of the region’s natural and human landscape.
In his new book, Before We Lost the Lake, Chad Reimer sets out to truly reclaim Sumas Lake, to restore it to its proper place in the history of the Fraser Valley, BC and the Northwest Coast. Drawing on extensive primary material, Reimer reconstructs the life history of Sumas Lake from the glacial age through the lake’s demise and after. Before We Lost the Lake examines the lake’s natural history and ecology, its occupation and use by the Sema:th and other First Nations, its colonization by White immigrants, the environmental changes brought about by introduced plants and animals, and the campaign to drain it. Drainage proponents had their way and gradually the promised benefits were realized. But these benefits came at a heavy cost to the environment and for the Sema:th, whose traditional way of life was irretrievably lost.
It’s okay if you don’t believe in the afterlife. The people who live there don’t believe in you, either.
What if you went to heaven and no one there believed in Earth? This is the question at the heart of Beforelife, a satirical novel that follows the post-mortem adventures of widower Ian Brown, a man who dies on the book’s first page and finds himself in an afterlife where no one else believes in “pre-incarnation.” The other residents of the afterlife have mysteriously forgotten their pre-mortem lives and think that anyone who remembers a mortal life is suffering from a mental disorder called the “Beforelife Delusion.”
None of that really matters to Ian. All he wants to do is reunite with Penelope, his wife. Scouring the afterlife for any sign of her, Ian accidentally winds up on a quest to prove that the beforelife is real. This puts him squarely into the crosshairs of some of history’s greatest heroes and villains, all of whom seem unhealthily obsessed with erasing Ian’s memories and preventing him from reminding anyone of their pre-mortem lives. Only by staying a step ahead of his enemies can Ian hope to keep his much-needed marbles, find Penelope, and restore the public’s memories of the beforelife.
Never forget /
to connect the dots /
This book is an attempt to connect a couple.
In Begin by Telling, experimental pop sensation Meg Remy (U.S. Girls) spins a web out from her body to myriad corners of American hyper-culture. Through illustrated lyric essays depicting visceral memories from early childhood to present day, Remy paints a stark portrait of a spectacle-driven country.
As though channel surfing, we catch glimpses of Desert Storm, the Oklahoma City Bombing, random street violence, the petrochemical industry, small town Deadheads, a toilet with uterus lining in it, the county STD clinic, and missionaries at the front door. Each is shared through language of the body; the sensation of experiencing many of the defining events and moments of a country.
Immersive and utterly compelling, the threads in Begin by Telling nimbly interweave with probing quotes and statistics, demonstrating the importance of personal storytelling, radical empathy, and the necessity of reflecting on society and one’s self within that construct.