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A Bee Garden
$18.00At the heart of this luminous collection, Pilling’s fifth, is a searing sequence of poems tracing a family’s grief at the suicide of a girl on the threshhold of womanhood: daughter, sister, niece, about-to-be-aunt. Yet in these, as in all of the poems, what comes through is a passionate affirmation of life, of beauty in the world, of human dignity and human compassion. Pilling’s voice is warm, forgiving, and inclusive; her world becomes, briefly, ours.
A Beggar’s Loom
$14.95In the poems of A Beggar’s Loom, Matt Santateresa reaches deeply into place and time to bring us stories from the past: General Wolfe scaling the ramparts of Quebec City gives way to Baudelaire writing to his mulatto lover, Jeanne Duvall. One hundred years later, Shoemaker and Levy, both astronomers, remark upon the sky with telescopes, as lovers look into the heavens imagining a string of comets heading toward Jupiter. The past becomes present in these poems, and the present is enlivened with the knowledge of eternal verities. In his second book of poetry, Matt Santateresa has artfully woven the disparate elements of A Beggar’s Loom into a work of astonishing richness and depth.
A Bend in the Breeze
When eleven-year-old Pascale Chardon finds herself on a lifeboat drifting toward an uncharted island with no memory of how she got there, all she wants is to get back to her family. The islanders, however, have a different objective.For many decades, the islanders have been anticipating the arrival of someone foretold only as the Long Awaited. The Long Awaited is said to have knowledge of the island’s future and will tell the islanders of their fate seventeen days after their arrival.At first Pascale is sure she’s not the Long Awaited, but when strange things begin to happen, she finds it impossible to be certain of anything. Could she be the Long Awaited after all? A Bend in the Breeze, award-winning author Valerie Sherrard’s 30th novel, is a delightful tale about the importance of love and compassion.
When Pascale Chardon finds herself on a lifeboat drifting toward an uncharted island with no memory of how she got there, all she wants is to get back to her family. The islanders, however, have a different objective.
For many decades, the islanders have waited for someone foretold only as the Long Awaited. The Long Awaited is said to have knowledge of the islanders? fate. At first Pascale is sure she?s not the Long Awaited, but when strange happenings occur, she finds it impossible to be certain of anything. Could she be the Long Awaited after all?
A Bite of the Apple
$24.95A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book for 2020
Carmen is vigorously polishing one of our three telephones. I am just twenty-five, Canadian, new to Britain and in awe of this formidable woman but as there are only two of us in the office I feel emboldened to ask: “Why did you start Virago?” She looks up and without missing a beat, replies “To change the world, darling. That’s why.”
I know I am in the right place.
Following the chronology of the press where she has worked nearly since its founding, Lennie Goodings tells the story of the group of visionary publishers and writers who have made Virago one of the most important and influential publishers in the English-speaking world. Like the books she has edited and published—by writers ranging from Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood to Sarah Waters and Naomi Wolf—Goodings’s contribution to the genre breaks new ground as well, telling a story of women in the world of work, offering much needed balance to the male-dominated genre of publishing memoirs, and chronicling a critical aspect of the history of feminism: how women began to assume control over the production of their own books.
Part memoir, part literary history, and part reflection on more than forty years of feminist publishing, A Bite of the Apple is a story of idealism and pragmatism, solidarity and individual ambition, of challenges met and the battles not yet won—and, above all, a steadfast celebration of the making and reading of books.
A Blueprint For Survival
$21.95A Blueprint for Survival begins in wildfire season, charting a long-distance relationship against the increasing urgency of climate change in the boreal, then shifts to a long sequence, “Seeds,” which thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. Each seed functions as blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to our current existential threat, each showing a different way of being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, “the beautiful cell.”
A Bomb in the Heart
$16.95A call late at night has Wahab springing into action. Despite a blinding snowstorm, an irritating bus driver, and a spinning wheel of worries, Wahab travels to his dying mother’s hospital room. A journey of two kinds, A Bomb in the Heart is about a young man’s relationship to his mother, the pain of loss, and about understanding the voice deep within.
A Book of Great Worth
$18.95Set largely among the Jewish community of inter-war New York City, this is a beautifully-told collection of scenes from Morgenstern’s life. The tricky ground of writing the advice column for a provincial Yiddish daily; successes during, and hard times after, the Depression; a position at the top of his craft as a labour specialist in the New York City Yiddish press – these and many more form a portrait of “a fundamentally decent man in morally perplexing situations”.
“I’ve been working on a series of stories about the character I call “my father” – loosely based on my own father – for about 30 years…I wondered if I could use the character in other situations. [One] story had begun with a spark of truth – a story my father had told many times about a foolish man he’d once known – and the spirit of my father.
“All the stories in the series walk that precarious tightrope between memoir and fiction…”I worked hard, with the stories’ structure and a sort of old-fashioned expository style, to make them feel like memoir – like truth.”
A Book of Riddlu
$20.00These “riddlu” are a lighthearted but heartfelt attempt to combine two poetic forms that demand extreme concision and that value the suggestive power of metaphor: the riddle and the haiku. … Both have different strengths – the quick thinking of the riddle (a lifesaver for Bilbo Baggins), the serious looking of the haiku. My “riddlu” tries to lighten the haiku’s seriousness while lending some of its intuitive weight to the riddle, producing little triads of lines that glance across metaphorical waters like skipped stones.
A Bouquet Brought Back from Space
$18.00In a secularized society, what kind of faith in our collective powers and imaginations can be patch-worked together, and what might be the role of angels? Through multiple locales, languages and spiritualities, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space both subverts and sublimates traditions of religious poetry, love poetry, and song. Playful in form and formed full of play, this fourth book of poetry by Kevin Spenst explores loss, love and faith through the palindrome, Madlib, Fibonacci, found poem, prose poem, sonnet and various strains of free verse. Spenst meditates on mental health, poetic friendships and influences, and the possibility of there being an angel assigned to the Mennonites at the beginning of their global journey. These poems sing, cry, and soothe.
A Boy’s Life of Napoleon
$2.99Alden Nowlan’s “A Boy’s Life of Napoleon” is a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan’s first novel, The Wanton Troopers, written in 1960 but published posthumously in 1988. Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions’s 60th anniversary, it is also available as part of the six@sixty collection.
A Brief and Endless Sea
$20.00Born out of waiting out the lockdown during the early days of the pandemic, Barbara Pelman’s A Brief and Endless Sea explores a life in retrospect, beginning with a high school typing class and ending with the Angel Purah, cutting the ties that bind a soul to a body. Many of the poems in this collection are rooted in Jewish tradition: the prophet Isaiah’s words of comfort; the rabbinical story of the Lost Princess, that angel and her counterpart, the Angel Duma. Pelman takes us to difficult places—the dissolution of a marriage, caring for a parent with dementia. But she doesn’t leave us there, waiting. Using the power of words to map a route out, A Brief and Endless Sea pulls us toward life in all of its vibrant details—the simple beauty of a small garden of tomatoes and roses, the pleasures of teaching poetry, long walks with a grandson, and encounters with spirituality. For Pelman, there is comfort in the making of a poem and in the “smallest life you can love.” Like the glosa form she turns to often, something small transforms into something larger, expansive. In A Brief and Endless Sea, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and waiting in itself presents fertile ground for hope and possibility.
A Brief History of Oversharing
$19.95Musings from a “one-man flash mob” (Toronto Star)
Comedian Shawn Hitchins explores his irreverent nature in this debut collection of essays. Hitchins doesn’t shy away from his failures or celebrate his mild successes — he sacrifices them for an audience’s amusement. He roasts his younger self, the effeminate ginger-haired kid with a competitive streak. The ups and downs of being a sperm donor to a lesbian couple. Then the fiery redhead professes his love for actress Shelley Long, declares his hatred of musical theatre, and recounts a summer spent in Provincetown working as a drag queen.
Nothing is sacred. His first major break-up, how his mother plotted the murder of the family cat, his difficult relationship with his father, becoming an unintentional spokesperson for all redheads, and many more.
Blunt, awkward, emotional, ribald, this anthology of humiliation culminates in a greater understanding of love, work, and family. Like the final scene in a Murder She Wrote episode, A Brief History of Oversharing promises everyone the A-ha! moment Oprah tells us to experience. Paired with bourbon, Scottish wool, and Humpty Dumpty Party Mix, this journey is best read through a lens of schadenfreude.
A Brief History of the Short-Lived
$18.95In his third poetry collection, A Brief History of the Short-Lived, Chris Hutchinson brings the full force of his linguistic dexterity to bear on the elusive subject of literature itself.
With his restless intellectual curiosity tempered by a dash of witty self-deprecation, Hutchinson deftly manoeuvres through hallowed halls of academia with humour and grace.
Three stylistically distinct sections,”Imago,””A Brief History of the Short-Lived,” and “Serialist” are interwoven throughout the collection, showcasing the range of Hutchinson’s poetic ability. The “Brief History” poems explode from the page in densely allusive bursts of energy, clusters of images fired off at a rapid pace: “He is wearing a green felt / Fedora with an ostrich plume which bursts into flame the moment I drop / A three-sided coin into his outstretched flipper.” By contrast, the “Imago” and “Serialist” sections are quieter and more meditative, though no less inventive or rich in imagery: “Rhetoric is big business / as byzantine networks / replace its circle of friends.”
By turns gleefully irreverent, thoughtful and too clever for its own good, A Brief History of the Short-Lived defies description–it must be read to be believed.
A Brief Relief from Hunger
$20.00A brief relief from hunger is a poetry collection about the yearnings of a young man – cocaine, human connection, fast food – and the ravenous world in which he lives. In Vancouver, the speaker binges Big Macs post-rehab while others consume fentanyl-tainted drugs. Growling bodies are everywhere, including on Facebook where people post cruel comments about drug users in the face of British Columbia’s toxic drug supply crisis. At the heart of the collection are poems that respond to these comments from the perspective of the speaker, now sober but still hungry, whose friends are dying from the contaminated drug supply. The speaker knows at least one reliable source of contentment: Grandma’s kitchen, where, at his lowest points, he finds cabbage rolls, acceptance, and a tenderness he wishes to absorb into his masculinity.
A Brief View from the Coastal Suite
$21.95Includes Author-Curated Discussion Questions!
The reunited Lund siblings, separated as children by Social Services, find that family, whether held together by blood or by choice, can be both a curse and a blessing, an obstacle and a point of connection.
Set in Vancouver during the economically turbulent year of 2008, A Brief View from the Coastal Suite explores the Lunds’ differing values in respect to relationships, money, and environment – all markers for a materialistic society that is becoming increasingly inhospitable. Cleo struggles to find time for her challenging job as an architectural designer and for the demands of her family; Mandalay, an artist and single parent, tries to raise her twin sons uncontaminated by the materialistic values of their lawyer father; and Cliff attempts to run a landscape company with his spoiled younger brother, Ben, and to accommodate the ever-increasing demands of his Estonian mail-order bride.
Karen Hofmann’s brilliant sequel to her novel What is Going to Happen Next skillfully explores societal attitudes and the instability of personal and public lives in a world that values money above all else.
A Bright and Steady Flame
$22.95In 1974, after escaping an abusive marriage, Luanne Armstrong struggled with poverty and caring for four small children. During this time, the author and Sam Moore began their friendship; they were both young single parents in crisis, and needed to change their lives. They supported each other through the child-rearing years, careers and environmental, peace and feminist work. Their friendship endured and strengthened during the colourful, sometimes strange, but also community-altering movements that rocked the seventies and eighties throughout BC: back-to-the-landers, draft dodgers, hippies, drugs and political movements for peace, feminism and equality.
Now in their later years, they are again both facing an identity crisis, and, again, they do so together, their long friendship a source of immense strength and comfort. This book delves into the hardships of aging, grief and pain, and how friendships can sustain all of us.
A Bright and Steady Flame gives insight into how deep and powerful a friendship can be. Armstrong’s new book speaks to our compelling human need and ability to build long-lasting community. This is a love story that celebrates, for all people, the solace that true friendship can provide.