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Eager for some peace and quiet, the main character of this tale in verse moves to the woods and builds a little cabin getaway. She?s found the perfect retreat?or so she thinks until she meets her neighbours: an array of loud and lively creatures who crunch and crack and hoot their way into her life. Young listeners will delight in the animals? playful antics and learn a bit about life in the wild.
As Janet Torge arrives, stumbles and finally lands solidly on the upper reaches of life, she explores how other senior citizens are grappling wIth this predicament—and adds her own comic voice with such gems as “My Love of Sitting,” “The Belly Fat Trap,” and “This Ain’t No Time for Puffed Sleeves.” The stories she tells in I Can’t Believe I’m Old will not help you live longer, nor will they promise you either health or happiness. What they will do is show you that this last phase of life can be full of surprises—and allow you to crack a smile or two along the way.
Fifty poems to dance (awkwardly) between queer and anxious spaces.
Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a current. Recorded on deliberately shaky media, this collection offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From Scruff dates to mix tapes, Jes Battis cruises (and crashes) through wild feelings and minor catastrophes. Dipping readers into a world of missed connections, social disasters and life as a queer party that constantly surprises, Battis uses a light touch and neurodiverse prosody as they chronicle middle-grade queerness and a kind of meandering surreality. From difficult desires, panic attacks and environmental sensitivities, Battis weaves nineties metaphors with current discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights in Canada as they ruminate between past and present like a cat refusing to settle. I Hate Parties guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives—to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code.
i heard a crow before i was born.
i heard tsó:ka’we before i was born.
i heard a crow before i was born opens with a dream-memory that transforms into a stark, poetic reflection on the generational trauma faced by many Indigenous families. Jules Delorme was born to resentful and abusive parents, in a world in which he never felt he belonged. Yet, buoyed by the love shown to him by his tóta (grandmother) and his many animal protectors, Delorme gained the strength to reckon with his brutal childhood and create this transformative and evocative memoir.
Across chapters that tell of his troubled relationships, Delorme unwraps the pain at the centre of his own story: the residential schools and the aftershocks that continue to reverberate.
In this stunning testament to the power of storytelling — to help us grieve and help us survive — Delorme tells the story of his spirit walk as he embraces the contradictions of his identity. As he writes, “i heard a crow before i was born is a man looking back, and dreaming back, and seeing that life, in whatever form it takes, however harsh it might seem, is beautiful.”
The first novel from award-winning poet Ben Ladouceur, I Remember Lights depicts a time when the world promised everything to everyone, however irresponsibly.
In summer 1967, love is all you need…but some forms of love are criminal. As the spectacular Expo 67 celebrations take shape, a young man new to Montreal learns about gay life from cruising partners, one-night stands, live-in lovers, and friends. Once Expo begins, he finds romance with a charismatic visitor, but their time is limited. When the fireworks wither into smoke, so do their options.
A decade later, during the notorious 1977 police raid on a gay bar called Truxx, he comes to understand even more about the bitter choice, so often made by men like him, between happiness and safety.
I Remember Lights is a vital reminder of forgotten history and a visceral exploration of the details of queer life: tribulation and joy, exile and solidarity, cruelty and fortitude.
What do we stand to lose in a world without ice?
A decade ago, novelist and short story writer Jean McNeil spent a year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world’s most enigmatic continent — Antarctica. Access to the Antarctic remains largely reserved for scientists, and it is the only piece of earth that is nobody’s country. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil’s years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels to Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent.
In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science, and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice. In entering this world, McNeil unexpectedly finds herself confronting her own upbringing in the Maritimes, the lifelong effects of growing up in a cold place, and how the climates of childhood frame our emotional thermodynamics for life. Ice Diaries is a haunting story of the relationship between beauty and terror, loss and abandonment, transformation and triumph.
In If Clara, nobody stands on firm ground. Daisy, a writer confined to her home, her leg in a cast from hip to ankle, receives a parcel containing the manuscript of a novel about a Syrian refugee and is asked to pose as its writer. Julia, the curator at the Kleinzahler Gallery, has no idea that her sister, Clara, has written a novel. However, she does know that Clara suffers from a debilitating mental illness, is unpredictable, and lapses easily into hostility. Maurice’s life is changed by an art installation involving a pair of binoculars welded to the wall through which visitors are invited to observe passersby outside. An ultralight aircraft’s collision with a quiet lawn brings them all together. If Clara explores the emotional weight of friendship, the complexity of family, and people inextricably entwined.
If We Caught Fire brings two families together for a wedding in St. John’s, an event that sets off a summer of fireworks in the lives of the people around them.
Edie’s calm and contained life is knocked awry when her mother decides to marry a man she met online after just a few months of dating. The groom’s son, Harlow, is a joyful adventurer who shows up for the wedding and quickly recruits Edie as his sidekick.
Harlow runs toward risk and adventure with arms wide open, unconcerned about what other people expect from him. Edie plans every step carefully and keeps her dreams small and attainable, even when others encourage her to want more. Over a few months, they develop a connection that defies definition, a situation that leaves Edie queasy with fear and tingly with possibility.
Edie and Harlow (and the rest of their new unwieldy family) do an elaborate dance, trying to discover just what they are to one another. When Edie thinks she’s figured him out, Harlow reveals a depth and darkness she didn’t see coming. By Labour Day, they’ve created connections, tested boundaries, and found they’ve come together and apart in unexpected ways.
If We Were Birds is a shocking, uncompromising examination of the horrors of war, giving voice to a woman long ago forced into silence, and placing a spotlight on millions of female victims who have been silenced through violence. A deeply affecting and thought-provoking re-imagining of Ovid’s masterpiece “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela,” Erin Shields’s award-winning play is an unflinching commentary on contemporary war and its aftermath delivered through the lens of Greek tragedy.
Immigrant Blues, an extension and deepening of the famous poems of the siege of Sarajevo translated in Simic’s Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford, 1997), explores the personal and the public devastations of war, especially its effects on the emotions, thoughts and memories of exiled survivors. Simic’s genius is to present this disturbing reality in terms so vigorous and humane that pain is mixed with the solace and pleasure of great art.
Open the doors, the guests are coming
some of them burned by the sun, some of them pale
but every one with suitcases made of human skin.
If you look carefully at the handles, fragile as birds’ spines,
you will find your own fingerprints, your mother’s tears,
your grandpa’s sweat.
The rain just started. The world is grey.
from “Open the Door”
“The brilliance of these poems lies in their detail, their lack of rhetoric, and their passion.” — Helen Dunmore, reviewing Sprinting from the Graveyard in The Observer
“Goran Simic has written with tact and restraint in daunting and provocative conditions. The fact that his terrifying testimony seems more whispered than screamed is part of its power.” — Denis O’Driscoll, on Sprinting from the Graveyard in The Times Literary Supplement
Longlisted Pat Lowther Award
A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so-called care under carceral capitalism.
Borrowing and disrupting the forms of patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents, Jody Chan’s impact statement traces a history of psychiatric institutions within a settler colonial state. These poems bring the reader into the present moment of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, capitalism and “money models of madness,” and “wellness” checks. Forming a ghost chorus, they sing an impact statement on migration and intergenerational trauma, gentrification, and police neglect of racialized violence against queer communities in Toronto–and how the “wrong” kinds of desire, be it across class, race, or gender lines, or towards other worlds, are often punished or disappeared. And yet, these poems also make space for what can take root, despite the impacts–care teams, collective grief rituals, dinners around a table with too many friends to fit. impact statement imagines, and re-imagines, and re-imagines again, a queer, disabled, abolitionist revolution towards our communal flourishing.
“This book is filled with important information and excellent insights. … You should buy it … please don’t illegally download it.” — John Degen, The British Columbia Review
Copyright is one of the cornerstones of western civilization; it is as relevant today, if not more so, than it was when the first formal copyright laws were enacted in the eighteenth century.
With the rise of the Digital Age, new challenges have been brought to the frontlines of the copyright battle. Online piracy, extensive unauthorized use of copyrighted works by educational institutions, and artificial intelligence are testing the ability of copyright laws to protect creators and their intellectual property.
Canada’s copyright laws are out of step with other western democracies and are overdue for updating. They need to be resilient and adaptive to the digital age to promote the production of new work and ideas.
Twelve-year-old Molly was riding her new bicycle on a deserted road when a man in a truck pulled up next to her, saying he was lost. He asked if she could get in and help him back to the highway, and said he could bring her back to her bike after. Molly declined, out of interest for her own safety. The next things Molly remembers are dirt, branches, trees, pain, and darkness.
Molly is now a spirit.
Mustering up some courage, she pieces together her short life for herself and her family while she reassembles her bicycle—the same one that was found thrown into the trees on the side of the road. Juxtaposed with flashes of news, sounds, and videos, Molly’s chilling tale becomes more and more vivid, challenging humanity not to forget her presence and importance.
In an intimate, loving approach to the tragic subject of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the acclaimed author of Dreary and Izzy shines a light on the haunting tale of a preteen’s last moments.
When Landon and Joy meet they feel an instant connection and quickly become inseparable. One day shortly after they’ve met, they take a trip to view The Hart Farm, an idyllic property located in a remote area. It’s perfect, with room for Landon to set up his carpentry shop and Joy to have an art studio. The real estate agent feels complete disclosure of the property’s tragic and potentially violent past is necessary but Landon and Joy decide ignorance is bliss and ask to not be told the details. They’re in love and smitten with the farm and decide on the spot to buy it.
As they spend their days creating art, reading, cooking for each other, listening to music, and making love, they can barely believe their good fortune. However, when the heat of summer–as well as their initial infatuation–begins to wane, Landon and Joy realize how little they know about each other or the house they now call home. They begin to feel a mounting sense of danger and uncertainty about what they used to delight in–the mysterious and tragic history of The Hart Farm, the wolves that prowl in the dark of night, and the near stranger they share a bed with.
In the Country in the Dark is a thrilling psychological exploration of the secrets we keep and why, the obsessions we live with, the love we all need, the family we sometimes find–and the lengths we might go to keep it.
Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history. Attuned to scientific racism, systemic medical failures, and climate change, Em Dial’s poems incisively carve out space for interrogation. Their place-finding and place-making is often surprising, centring care and desire, where Dial’s speaker “calls for someone to call me what I am and for that someone to be a lover, bare on silk sheets, inside walls of confidential lilac.” In the Key of Decay doesn’t just hum along, it sings.
Poems that show us a world in which precedent for gender transition is everywhere if you know how to look.
“I delete my history / badly,” writes Estlin McPhee in this searing, witty, lyrical, and elegiac debut collection of poems about intersections of trans identity, magic, myth, family, and religion. The line refers at once to a young person’s browser data that reveals an interest in gender transition; an adult’s efforts to reconcile complicated relationships; a culture’s campaign to erase queerness and transness from the historical record; and a religion’s attempt to pretend that its own particular brand of miraculous transformation is distinct from the kind found in folktales or real life. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.