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The Witching Hours is an anthology of comics about magic- al women written, illustrated and edited by women and non-binary persons. It explores the range of what a witch can be and celebrates powerful and magical women. The book features 11 stories ranging from fantasy to horror to slice of life; including a history of the medieval witch trials, a folk story from the Philippines, and even a recipe for herb strawberry bread.
In the Point St. Charles of the author’s childhood people move for one of two reasons: their apartment is on fire, or the rent is due. Starting in 1968, eight-year-old Kathy Dobson shares her early years growing up in Point St. Charles, an industrial slum in Montreal (now in the process of gentrification). She offers a glimpse into the culture of extreme poverty, giving an insider’s view into a neighbourhood then described as the “toughest in Canada.”
When student social workers and medical students from McGill University invade the Point, Kathy and her five sisters witness their mother transform from a defeated welfare recipient to an angry and confrontational community organizer who joins in the fight against a city that has turned a blind eye on some of its most vulnerable citizens. When her mother wins the right for Kathy and her two older sisters to attend schools in one of Montreal’s richest neighbourhoods,Kathy is thrown into a foreign world with a completely different set of rules, leading to disastrous results.
Born in 1889, Gertrude Harding spent a boistrous childhood on a Welsford, New Brunswick, farm. She travelled to Hawaii to live with her sister, and, when her sister moved to London in 1912, Harding went with her. One day, from the top of a London bus, she saw a parade of women carrying large white posters. Attended by a policeman, they walked in single file on the street close to the curb as passersby stared and shouted rude remarks. It was a poster-parade of Militant Suffragettes demanding votes for women; after more than two decades of mild action, the Suffragettes were on the warpath.
Gertrude Harding couldn’t wait to join them. After a short initiation, Harding and a comrade-in-arms hit conservative Englishmen in a very tender spot: they smashed up the orchid house at Kew Gardens. Then, to counter government violence, Harding organized a cadre of women who learned jujitsu and wore Indian clubs on their belts. This bodyguard had two jobs: to deter the policemen who tried to haul Suffragettes off to prison, and to arrange escapes for Suffragettes on the run. When the politicians changed tactics and the bodyguard’s work decreased, Harding served as a private secretary to Christabel Pankhurst, the movement’s strategist. Then, as World War I intensified, Harding became the publisher of the Suffragette newspaper, again staying one jump ahead of the police. During the War, Harding found her second career: she became a social worker among women labourers in a munitions plant. Afterwards, she did social work in industrial New Jersey.
When she retired, she gardened and sold jam, and she also wrote her memoirs, which she illustrated with sketches and snapshots. Finally, old and ill, she returned to Rothesay, New Brunswick, where she died in 1977.
With Bated Breath asks questions about memory—how and why it plays such a prominent role in our lives: how time affects it, how it fractures, how we often reinvent it depending on the situation—and why it is that certain things stay with us with a blistering clarity, while the shadows of other people and events simply slip away, only to reveal themselves again later in our lives when we least expect them.
This is the provocative tale of Willy, a troubled but charismatic gay kid who flees Cape Breton Island for Montreal with hopes of forgetting a newly broken heart by starting a new life in the big city. There, hopelessly awkward and naïve, caught up in the cynical and brutalizing cash-economy of the city’s red light district, he retreats ever further into a world of fantasy and anonymity, and soon goes missing without a trace. Willy, in one way or another, has had a profound effect on the lives of the people he has touched. As rumours fly, secrets explode and reality blurs with fantasy, he is both remembered and reinvented by each of the play’s characters in their own way.
Though Willy’s self-appointed, newfound and worldly wise mentor had cautioned him, “There’s nothing safe. We’re never safe. If you ever thought you were, you were in denial,” it’s too late for this dreamer who ignored the best advice he ever got from those who cared for him: “You just don’t find a soul mate—you have to invent them. Cuz love at first sight sure don’t last.” What lasts at the end of the day is memory—the necessary tale we tell ourselves to both make sense of our past and to give ourselves hope for a future without having to lose those we have loved.
With English Subtitles is Carmine Starnino at his most inventive. The poems in this collection are exceptionally focused, musical and inviting. Household objects, Italian relatives, Yukon landscapes, worst-case scenarios and relationships are pushed onto the page with new-found urgency and delight. Here for the first time, Starnino has set aside the restraint of his earlier work in favour of a bold swagger and forthright musicality.
Starnino’s fascination with old objects is translated into poems that combine history and close scrutiny with lively personification and corresponding sound. These poems capture the true energy and anima of supposedly inanimate items. The aged suitcase exudes an air of hurry and persistence, “still champing to be off.” The iron gives a “suspirating hush as it catches its breath.” For each of these items, Starnino locates a pulse and charts the specifics of its breathing. Coupled with this energy is a focus on the process of decay and the beauty contained therein. Junkyard, charity auction, failed relationship and autumn all center on the varied and tenuous aesthetic of rust.
The poems in this collection are sensual, abundant and rushing. Starnino builds towers of sound and rhythm, introducing all the whim and decadence of bygone days to modern pragmatics and speech. His inventive use of language and personable interruptions draw readers inside an understanding of the world that is both grounded and imaginative. The result is a watertight and satisfying collection: poetry that proves resoundingly that art and life depend on one another for inspiration.
This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with cover flaps. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Octavian and printed on Rolland Zephyr Laid paper. The cover is hand-printed letterpress.
Winner of the 2004 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2006 F.G. Bressani Literary Prize.
In an ambitious, yet intimate novel set in Taos, New Mexico, and Hamilton, Ontario, Sally Cooper explores unexpected motherhood, creativity, race, love and faith. With My Back to the World tells the stories of three women: Rudie, who is editing a documentary in Hamilton in 2010; historical artist Agnes Martin, who decides in 1974 after seven years’ exile in New Mexico to begin painting again; and Ellen, a black woman burying her husband in 1870 on an Ontario homestead. Each of these women is waiting for the arrival of an unexpected child and their interconnected stories explore how society’s, and our own, ideas of what it means to be a woman, a mother and an artist change over time. Evocative and introspective, With My Back to the World tells the complicated stories of how different women find faith in themselves in extraordinary circumstances.
The sequel to With Unshakeable Persistence. McLachlan takes us into the next decade, relating with vivid, sometimes shocking detail, the experiences of prairie teachers during and after the second world war.
A compilation of individual stories based on the author’s interviews and correspondence with several depression era teachers.
Two very different couples meet after a critical mistake at a fertility clinic: a fertilized egg has been implanted into the wrong woman. Over the course of an awkward and absurd evening, they fight to determine the uncertain future of their IVF child. The situation forces each of them to reassess their relationships, the depths of their desire to parent, and their hopes for the future.
A lovely linguistic tension runs through this first collection of poems by Kathleen Wall, a desire to close the grieving space between words and feeling: the taut ache of separation, the mute solace of animals and gardens, a daughter’s silent discoveries. These are gentle, serious poems which draw on all the senses to discover how the world is made, how love and sorrow form the final record of experience.
without cease the earth faintly trembles
Centred on the everyday, and crafted without preamble or pretension, the poems in Without Ceremony are a literary pastiche— a thematic mosaic not unlike tracks on an album. Amidst a timeless cast of characters from Lucretius and Eva Hesse to Joan Mitchell and St. Augustine, Carr illuminates what it means to truly know something and questions how certain knowledge becomes valued over others. Without Ceremony spotlights the gendered division of ideas and the inherent strength of language to harm and oppress, as well as elevate. Within these pages, passing encounters become rare spectacles, and the ordinary, without ambitions of grandeur or ceremony, is celebrated, making Carr’s new collection a clarifying elixir for our time.
“Football’s massive popularity is undeniable, as are the many reasons players and fans are drawn to the game. But what is also undeniable is the game’s brutality and the troubling aspects of football culture at all levels. To whatever extent the reader shares Irv Muchnick’s perspective and conclusions, the evidence and arguments he presents deserve thoughtful attention.” — Bob Costas, Emmy Award–winning sportscaster “Muchnick’s jeremiad digs deeper than ever into the greed and hypocrisy of high school and college football, and the trail of broken bodies left in their wake. His information on the perils of conditioning is essential reading and might save your kid’s life.” — Robert Lipsyte, author of The Contender and SportsWorldFootball’s concussion crisis is well known, with our Hall of Fame heroes behaving erratically and dying young. But did you know that kid players across the continent die every year before a single ball is snapped — just from extreme conditioning drills directed by all-powerful coaches? And then, when the unimaginable happens, the football world simply buries the evidence, pays off victims’ families, and moves on …Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads presents the shocking stories of young men struck down by exertional heatstroke and other, often unacknowledged, causes. Taking the conversation about football and public health to a new level with investigations of the sport’s underreported worst tragedies and cover-ups it makes the case that no matter how much we enjoy America’s most popular sport at elite levels it belongs out of our public schools and off our public fields.
What is Indigenous erotica? It’s about the loving, sexual, ‘dirty,’ outrageous, and ribald intimacies of humanity and sexuality that we all crave. It shows us as we are: people who love each other, who fall in love and out of love, who have lovers, who make love, have sex, break hearts, get our own hearts broken, who have beautiful bodies. It’s about all of the crazy, poignant, obscene, absurd things we do just to taste, touch, enjoy, and enter another. An international collection of stories and poetry by: Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Maria Campbell, Chrystos, Patricia Grace, Basil Johnston, Randy Lundy, Daniel David Moses, Gregory Scofield, Richard Van Camp… and many more! Without Reservation. Go ahead, sneak a peek…
In Witness Back at Me, Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday. Chan’s poetry is suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, approximating the kaleidoscopic effect of interior thought.
Witness Back at Me draws on the childhood loss of Chan’s mother to breast cancer, as a survival mechanism towards an aesthetics of accepted disembodiment, always haunted by a search for nurturing and surrender to some greater being. The poems in this book intertwine polyvocally, building into a liminal biographical metanarrative: the whole point of existence, the author believes, is to luxuriate in the greater being of not-knowing. To accept the historical underpinnings, the brokenness of the world, inside and outside the self, but be in constant communication of both worlds, towards understanding and healing, is the one true meaningful quest.