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A collection of letter and prayer poems in which an Indigenous speaker engages with non-Indigenous famous Canadians.
D.A. Lockhart’s stunning and subversive fourth collection gives us the words, thoughts, and experiences of an Anishinaabe guy from Central Ontario and the manner in which he interacts with central aspects and icons of settler Canadian culture. Riffing off Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, the work utilizes contemporary Indigenous poetics to carve out space for often ignored voices in dominant Canadian discourse (and in particular for a response to this dominance through the cultural background of an Indigenous person living on land that has been fundamentally changed by settler culture).
The letter poems comprise a large portion of this collection and are each addressed to specific key public figures–from Sarah Polley to Pierre Berton, k.d. lang to Robertson Davies, Don Cherry to Emily Carr. The second portion of the pieces are prayer poems, which tenderly illustrate hybrid notions of faith that have developed in contemporary Indigenous societies in response to modern and historical realities of life in Canada. Together, these poems act as a lyric whole to push back against the dominant view of Canadian political and pop-culture history and offer a view of a decolonized nation.
Because free double-doubles…
tease us like bureaucratic promises
of medical coverage and housing
not given to black mold and torn-
off siding. Oh Lord, let us sing anew,
in this pre-dawn light, a chorus
that shall not repeat Please Play Again. (from “Roll Up the Rim Prayer”)
The Peak: a university student newspaper with a hard-hitting mix of inflammatory editorials, hastily thrown-together comics and reviews, and a news section run the only way self-taught journalists know how—sloppily.
Alex and Tracy are two of The Peak‘s editors, staring down graduation and struggling to keep the paper relevant to an increasingly indifferent student body. But trouble looms large when a big-money free daily comes to the west-coast campus, threatening to swallow what remains of their readership whole.
It’ll take the scoop of a lifetime to save their beloved campus rag. An exposé about the mysterious filmed-on-campus viral video? Some good old-fashioned libel? Or what about that fallen Hollywood star, the one who’s just announced he’s returning to Simon Fraser University to finish his degree?
With savage wit, intoxicating energy, and a fine-tuned ear for the absurd, Michael Hingston drags the campus novel, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
***IPPY: INDEPENDENT VOICE AWARD – WINNER***
***LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2021***
***APMA BEST ATLANTIC PUBLISHED BOOK AWARD: WINNER***
***STEPHEN LEACOCK MEADAL FOR HUMOUR: SHORTLIST***
***THOMAS RADDALL ATLANTIC FICTION AWARD: SHORTLIST***
***MARGARET AND JOHN SAVAGE FIRST BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION: SHORTLIST***
***FOREWORD INDIES HUMOUR AWARD: SILVER***
***THE GLOBE AND MAIL SUMMER’S HOTTEST READS***
***2021 RELIT AWARD: LONG SHORTLIST***
In late 2008, as the world’s economy crumbles and Barack Obama ascends to the White House, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario – not to be confused with Milton, Ontario – leaves his parents’ basement in Middle-of-Nowhere, Saskatchewan, and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the Euro-lite electric sexuality of Montreal; to bask in the endless twenty-something Millennial adolescence of the Plateau; to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan and find his messiah – Leonard Cohen. Hilariously ironic and irreverent, in Dirty Birds, Morgan Murray generates a quest novel for the twenty-first century—a coming-of-age, rom-com, crime-farce thriller—where a hero’s greatest foe is his own crippling mediocrity as he seeks purpose in art, money, power, crime, and sleeping in all day.
“Kalteis is a sharp observer who delivers history with a wallop and brings the past back to bloody life.” — Emily Schultz, author of Sleeping with Friends and The Blondes
“Kalteis’s punchy, hard-boiled prose vividly captures the brutality behind the glitz of the Jazz Age.” — firstCLUE
For readers of Elmore Leonard comes a riveting, fast-paced ride through 1920s Prohibition-era Chicago, the epicenter of crime, corruption, and commerce
Trouble has a way of following Huckabee Waller like a shadow. Involved in the death of a gangster in his hometown of New Orleans, Huckabee hops a northbound freight and heads for the promise of Chicago. Tough times force him to make his way bare-knuckle fighting and running booze, and before long he finds himself entangled in the escalating tension between notorious rival gangs and the city’s deadly taxis wars. Caught up in vice and violence, Huckabee lands in the crosshairs of Al Capone.
The smart thing to do would be to get out of Chicago — fast — that is if the life he wants to leave behind doesn’t kill him first.
Translated from French by Howard Scott
Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes is a poetry collection of great sensitivity. Above all it is a cry from the heart, as if empathy and poetry were dazzled by the eruption of a volcano. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine reveals herself as a poet and Innu woman. She loves. She weeps. She shouts… to come into the world, again. The book is first of all a journey deep inside the self, with joy and love, taking the body on a path to expectation and ecstasy, a quest sustained by incisive, inventive writing, which can leap from impressions of nature to references to a Dali painting. The energy of the images and the power of this luminous, concise language amaze us.
In genre-bending fiction, Keith Cadieux’s collection of dark short stories set against the backdrop of terrifying events and using a narrative “frame/scenario”, this collection pushes various boundaries within the literary form and challenges artistic norms. These propulsive, linked stories by one of Manitoba’s most exciting emerging short-story writers are gripping and taut, elevating short stories and genre fiction together.
Curiosity about his father’s homeland sends American photographer Min Lin to Burma to immerse himself in its culture and build his portfolio. But it’s 1988 and pro-democracy activists are trying to overthrow the military regime. Min gets caught up in the movement after falling in love with one of its leaders. When she’s arrested, Min flees to the jungle and, joining the rebels, comes face-to-face on the battlefield with a Burmese army captain who looks exactly like him. After an explosion kills his double, Min awakes in a hospital misidentified as a hero of the regime, causing him to pose as the dead soldier for his own survival.
Escaping in 1990, he returns to Los Angeles, where he builds a new life based on his acceptance of his homosexuality while adjusting to the shock of discovering his father’s secret history in Burma. Decades later, a new wave of religious persecution and ethno-nationalism in the country now known as Myanmar compels him to return. Still haunted by the events of ’88, and knowing his ex-girlfriend is to be released from prison, Min must come to terms with his actions while seeking the truth about the double he met on a battlefield a lifetime ago.
A compelling personal memoir and a scathing indictment of bureaucratic indifference and agenda-driven government policies.
In his thirty years in the Canadian prison system, Robert Clark rose from student volunteer to deputy warden. He worked with some of Canada’s most dangerous and notorious prisoners, including Paul Bernardo and Tyrone Conn. He dealt with escapes, lockdowns, prisoner murders, prisoner suicides, and a riot. But he also arranged ice-hockey games in a maximum-security institution, sat in a darkened gym watching movies with three hundred inmates, took parolees sightseeing, and consoled victims of violent crimes. He has managed cellblocks, been a parole officer, and investigated staff corruption.
Clark takes readers down inside a range of prisons, from the minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution to the Kingston Regional Treatment Centre for mentally ill prisoners and the notorious (and now closed) maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary. In Down Inside, he challenges head-on the popular belief that a “tough-on-crime” approach makes prisons and communities safer, arguing instead for humane treatment and rehabilitation. Wading into the controversy about long-term solitary confinement, Clark draws from his own experience managing solitary-confinement units to continue the discussion begun by the headline-making Ashley Smith case and to join the chorus of voices calling for an end to the abuse of solitary confinement in Canadian prisons.
Winner of the 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry * 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist * 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award Shortlist * 2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist * 2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal Jury Selection * 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize Shortlist
An expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family.
Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it’s-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, D.M. Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can’t quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself, Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness.
More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one’s own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.
Talent can be discovered in the most unexpected of places! With a little inspiration and a magical cape, Drew learns to embrace his creativity with confidence and pride.
The school talent show is just around the corner, and every kid has signed up to perform—except Drew. Drew thinks he doesn’t have any talents worth sharing. He loves butterflies, his Grandma, and playing pretend—but those aren’t talents, right? Talents are juggling, singing, or magic tricks! He is discouraged until his Grandma brings him to meet a drag queen named Saturn, who gives Drew the confidence to fully embrace his true self and declare his talent proudly. With Saturn’s advice and magical cape, can Drew give an unforgettable performance at the school talent show?
Finalist for the 2024 Quebec Writers Federation Fiction Award
Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren’t your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a remarkably original, literary page-turner that explores such pressing questions of our time.
A depressed writer visits a war zone. He knows it’s a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there. Amid the fighting, he stumbles into a small strip of land that’s being reimagined as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. As he learns about the principles of the collective, he moves between a fragile sense of self and the ethical considerations of writing about what he experiences but cannot truly fathom. Meanwhile, women in his life—from this reimagined society and elsewhere—underscore truths hidden in plain sight.
In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.
Nora flees her small town after the sudden death of her lawyer husband. In Toronto, an ad lures her to rent a cheap apartment, where the landlord Henry lives in the next unit. Initially helpful to Nora, his charm hides a desire to manipulate women, leaving Nora vulnerable to his predations. The propulsive plot reveals that Nora hides secrets of her own – secrets that may save or undo her. This terrifying and essential debut novel brings forth a confident new literary voice to the trade.
Dying to be Thin is a witty and inspirational look behind locked doors into the secret life of a young teenager battling with the eating disorder bulimia. Written from the authors own personal experience, the play unfolds to tell the poignant story of Amanda, as she sets out to have her “Last Ever in Her Whole Life Binge.”
When Erika Drake, of the Westmount Drakes, met and fell in love with Marc Reiser, a Jew from northern Ontario, their respective worlds were turned upside down. Set against the backdrop of the first three years of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven captured the hearts and minds of its generation and helped to shape the more diverse and inclusive culture we have today.
Published in 1944, this classic novel was very timely; it spoke of the prejudices of its time, when Gentiles and Jews did not mix in society. Earth and High Heaven was the most successful novel of its time, winning many awards and prizes, including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1945 (an award founded to reward books that exposed racism or explored the richness of human diversity). It was translated into eighteen languages and the film rights were purchased by Samuel Goldwyn for a remarkable $100,000. Earth and High Heaven was the first Canadian novel to top the New York Times bestseller list for the better part of a year.
When Erika Drake, of the Westmount Drakes, met and fell in love with Marc Reiser, a Jew from northern Ontario, their respective worlds were turned upside down. Set against the backdrop of the first three years of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven captured the hearts and minds of its generation and helped to shape the more diverse and inclusive culture we have today.Shortlisted Raymond Souster Award
Interviewed on CBC Books
CBC Best Poetry Book 2024
Relentlessly inventive poetry that proclaims a diasporic, queer, and disabled self-hood.
In Jane Shi’s echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one’s chosen family, love and justice.
“Shi extends her poetics in all directions with silky skill. Language flourishes in the realm of a poet like this.”
– T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice and Obits.