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Congress 2024 Booklist
All Books in this Collection
Showing 61–67 of 67 results
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Thick Skin
$24.00Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister In The Brotherhood, is a deep dive into the secret language and hidden culture of one of the most esoteric heavy construction trades: Boilermaking.
For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women – in the Boilermakers Union. Distilled from a vast cache of journals, notes, and keen observations, Thick Skin follows Peach from the West Coast shipyards and pulp mills of British Columbia, through the Alberta tar sands and the Ontario rust belt, to the colossal power generating stations of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. At times edging up to the surreal, Thick Skin is a collection of strange stories carefully told, in tenderness and ferocity, for anyone who has spent time in a trade, or is curious about the unseen world of industrial construction. -
Tumblehome
$22.95On a warm August evening, Brenda Missen, a 37-year-old single, unattached writer, pitches her tent beside a lake in Canada’s 7,600 square-kilometre [3,000 square-mile] Algonquin Provincial Park. She is on a four-night “reconnaissance mission,” an hour’s paddle from the parking lot, to find out if she has the capability-and nerve-to one day take a real canoe trip in the park interior by herself. Paddling and portaging from her campsite by day and surviving imaginary bear attacks by night, she decides she’s ready. Then a ranger arrives to check her permit, and an inexplicable, powerful intuition tells her this is the person she’s meant to marry. Going solo may not be necessary after all.
But the fairy tale unravels. In the wake of a broken engagement to her One True Paddling Partner, Brenda ventures into the near wilderness on a series of solo canoe trips that blow all her perceptions of romance, relationships, God, and her own self (gently) out of the water. In our high-tech, urban age, when so many people are disconnected from the natural world, Tumblehome-part spiritual memoir, part travel adventure, and great part ode to the Earth-is a timely and important exploration of where our real roots lie.
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Water Confidential
$24.95In Water Confidential, Susan Blacklin (formerly Sue Peterson) revisits the important work of her late ex-husband, Dr. Hans Peterson. Beginning in 1996, Peterson, growing frustrated with his work in government funded research in Saskatchewan, brought attention to the desperate need for equal access to safe drinking water after a health inspector encouraged him to visit the Yellow Quill First Nation. In response to the issue, he developed biological technology for effective water treatment, still in use today.
Peterson and Blacklin joined forces with scientists from around the world to establish the registered national charity, the Safe Drinking Water Foundation. The SDWF developed accredited education programs for schools across Canada, while also educating the general public and Water Treatment Operators from Indigenous communities. Advocacy became a high priority when they discovered a variety of challenges to their mission, including questionable government practices that were blocking the reality of safe drinking water in First Nations communities. As committed activists, it became their life’s work to ensure that access to Peterson’s technology was available to all rural and First Nations communities.
Thirty years later, the majority of First Nations communities in Canada continue to face atrocious health issues as a result of unsafe drinking water. Blacklin, now retired, shares her deep concerns at the indifference, corruption, and lack of due diligence from all levels of government in response to the safe water movement. She echoes the work of the SDWF stating that Canada needs to implement federal drinking water regulations, and that a responsible government should use rather than abuse science when accurately determining Boil Water Advisories and addressing the deplorable state of access to potable water.
In this passionate and timely memoir, Blacklin shares her experiences with fundraising, activism and lobbying work. She reveals the complexities of negotiating between cultures, communities and the provincial and federal government. Blacklin emphasizes that ensuring safe drinking water to each and every First Nations community should be the top priority toward reconciliation with Indigenous people of Canada.
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We Follow the River
$20.00We Follow the River tells the story of one family’s escape from military violence in Myanmar, their exiled existence in Thailand, and their immigration to Canada with only a pile of beat up suitcases on a luggage cart. It is about growing up as a foreigner in a foreign land, sifting through family history and grief, and alighting across cultures and continents to find a home.
Onjana Yawnghwe’s third poetry book reveals an expertise in language—at times joyful, disobedient, wild, and other times condensed and restrained. A work of over twenty years, these poems are written and rewritten through the retroactive prism of experience, polished and honed, eroded and erased. Sweeping in scope, intimate and honest, these poems tell of the quiet moments, the unruly moments of rage and sorrow, the rough distillation of self, both hated and loved. These poems reside behind the secret, dark door of the self.
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We, the Others
$22.95Ungrateful, opportunistic, moochers, dangerous, incompatible with our values and our way of life?
Every immigrant demographic has heard these descriptors at some point in their migration history. We, the Others takes a contemporary look at the xenophobia, ethno-nationalism, and fear of the other that leads to discrimination and the belief that immigration is a polluting force.Rooted in the author’s personal family history as the second-generation daughter of Greek immigrants, and from her research as a journalist and columnist covering identity politics and social issues in Quebec and Canada for the past 20 years, Drimonis courageously tackles this country’s history and practices, divisive legislation like Bill 21, and various nationalist movements that have influenced policy. We, the Others is a poignant look at inter-generational struggles, conflicting loyalties and heartfelt questions of belonging.
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Wet Dream
$22.95Winner 2023 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry
Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart.
“Erin Robinsong’s Wet Dream is an erotic epistemology of humors, the vital fluids linking bodies to cosmos. What does liquidity know?” — Lisa Robertson
“Wet Dream is brain lube for an insurgent language — creaturely poems that remake your body and relation to the world. I want to smear them all over.” — Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
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Who Has Seen the Wind
$44.95