Search results for ""Coach House Books""

Nothing slips by Brecken Hancock's deft ear as she seductively plumbs the depths of the evolution of bathing, doppelgangers, the Kraken, and the minutiae of family with all its tragic misgivings. The poems in Broom Broom pervert the rational, safe parts of the world to extoll and absorb the sweep of human history. What I mean to say is, the evidence is always there. From where we stand, we confuse lampposts for ghosts. Brecken Hancock's poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in several journals, including Event and Fiddlehead. She is reviews editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. Broom Broom won the 2015 Language Trillium Book Award for Poetry (English Language), which comes with a $10,000 cash prize. The Jury's citation for Broom Broom read: "Personal history and private pain are made public, historical, mythological, science fictional, and monumental in this eerie, resonant debut. Hancock's poems astonish with their breadth of reference, their dense soundscapes, their terrifying wisdom, and their centrifugal emotional force."

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Dan Farrell's second volume of poetry is an examination of a discourse that everyone knows about but few people have examined in detail: the response of people to Rorschach inkblot patterns. By turns profound and hilarious, this book is an insightful statement about the relentless drive to make meaning out of nothing. The online version features a dynamic inkblot, designed by Brian Kim Stefans, to test your own poetic/psychological state of being.

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Winnie-the-Pooh meets The Blair Witch Project in this very grown-up tale of a camping trip gone horribly awry. Twelve six-year-olds and their three adult chaperones head into the woods on a camping trip. None of them make it out alive. The Laws of the Skies tells the harrowing story of those days in the woods, of illness and accidents, and a murderous child. Part fairy tale, part horror film, this macabre fable takes us through the minds of all the members of this doomed party, murderers and murdered alike.

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White Lotus meets Shaun of the Dead in this absurdist take on the wellness retreat.Our narrator and his accidental companion, K. Sohail, inadvertently find themselves on an island wellness retreat impersonating a couple, the Dhaliwals, who have probably been killed in a helicopter crash. After being welcomed by Jerome the robot, the new Dhaliwals eagerly partake of the all-you-stomach buffet, the motivational speechifyings on Trunity by the berobed Brad Beard, and some erotic counselling by Professor Sayer. But things quickly take an ominous turn when an excursion to a nearby deserted village reveals a guillotine and a haunted chapel. And then one of the retreaters is murdered and the real Dhaliwals show up. Accusations, counter-accusations, and counter-counter-accusations are made, until the whole retreat is caught up in a bizarre trial. 

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOKS OF 2021CBC BOOKS THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2021A fresh take on the romance novel from the Giller Prize–winning author of Fifteen DogsFrom their first meeting, it was clear that Gwen and Tancred were meant to be together. But, as we know, the course of true love never did run smooth.Gwen’s mother, intuiting that her daughter is in love, gives her a magic ring that has been passed down through endless generations of mothers and daughters. This ring grants its wearer the opportunity to change three things about her beloved. Like all blessings, this may also be a curse.Ring turns the literary romance upside down and shakes out its pockets. It’s a playful meditation on the past, on magic, on race, on honour, on faith, and, yes, on love.Following on the heels of Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, The Hidden Keys, and Days by Moonlight, Ring completes Alexis’s Quincunx, a group of five genre-bending, philosophically sophisticated, and utterly delightful novels.

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The lives of three families intersect in the hallways of an apartment block in a Montreal neighborhood. Mélissa, Roxane, and Kevin have never had it easy. As their parents face their own struggles – with addiction, unemployment, and abuse – they must learn to fend for themselves. Though their lives converge at school, on the street, at the corner store, or when they can hear each other through their apartments’ thin walls, they each feel deeply alone. Neighbourhood Watch tells their coming-of-age stories with a cinematic ease, moving between despair and the unalterable hope of childhood. With her characteristic poetic flair and generosity, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, author of the acclaimed Suzanne, has painted, in brief strokes, an unforgettable and moving portrait of a fictional apartment block in Montreal. This translation of her 2010 debut novel is presented with an afterword interview with a woman who, as a child, was the inspiration behind the character of Roxane. ‘This is prose to lose yourself in. Never complicated, it’s gentle like a love song, comforting and enveloping like a black-and-white film, full of tones and textures. These sentences can destroy us. Not for their simplicity, but for the powerful beauty within the simplicity.’ —Peter McCambridge, ‘Best Translated Book Award: Why This Book Should Win,’ on Suzanne

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Camus’s Meursault and Thelma and Louise meet up under the blazing sun. Vexed by the ‘unremarkable star’ that ‘presses’ Camus’s Meursault to commit murder, Because the Sun considers the blazing sun as a material symbol of ambient violence – violence absorbed like heat and fired at the nearest victim. Likewise, as a friendship between women confronts gendered aggression in Thelma and Louise, the sun becomes the repository of pain, the high noon that pushes us through desert after desert. Because the Sun’s pastiche of voices embodies both stylistic and formal relentlessness by teasing out tonalities that blend and merge into each other, generating a blinding effect, like looking into the sun. “Breathless and death defying, the poems in Because the Sun are high-wire work. They sway above us in a blazing light of Burgoyne’s making. It is so rare that a book of poems is both a tuning fork for our minds as well as a balm for our bodies. But that is exactly what happens page after page in this blazing book.” —Michael Dickman, author of Days & Days “This beautiful work wraps Camus’s The Stranger in a poetics concerning erasure/+ hope. Out of the titular Sun’s burning punctum burst telling shards of what is erased by Camus’s remarkable construction of whiteness in-the-masculine: the dead ‘Arab,’ the female body’s interminable violations – but also its warming, even blinding capacity for consequential pleasures.” —Gail Scott, author of Heroine “Sarah Burgoyne begins with the sun and ends with flowers. In between is a complicated exploration of what it means to exist within a tradition that is Camus, Rimbaud, Blake. Taking her cue from Sara Ahmed, she notices how hard it is to challenge this tradition and yet that it matters to do it anyway.” —Juliana Spahr, author of That Winter the Wolf Came

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From martyr to insult, how “Uncle Tom” has influenced two centuries of racial politics. Jackie Robinson, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Christopher Darden have all been accused of being an Uncle Tom during their careers. How, why, and with what consequences for our society did Uncle Tom morph first into a servile old man and then to a racial epithet hurled at African American men deemed, by other Black people, to have betrayed their race? Uncle Tom, the eponymous figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a loyal Christian who died a martyr’s death. But soon after the best-selling novel appeared, theatre troupes across North America and Europe transformed Stowe’s story into minstrel shows featuring white men in blackface. In Uncle, Cheryl Thompson traces Tom’s journey from literary character to racial trope. She explores how Uncle Tom came to be and exposes the relentless reworking of Uncle Tom into a nostalgic, racial metaphor with the power to shape how we see Black men, a distortion visible in everything from Uncle Ben and Rastus The Cream of Wheat chef to Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Bill Cosby. In Donald Trump’s post-truth America, where nostalgia is used as a political tool to rewrite history, Uncle makes the case for why understanding the production of racial stereotypes matters more than ever before.

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Now You See Her nominated for three Dora Mavor Moore Awards; Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Costume Design & Outstanding Sound Design/Composition. Now You See Her named one of Toronto’s Top Ten Plays of 2018 by the Toronto Star. Six diverse women’s voices merge into one devastating (and funny) portrait of modern feminism. They are the invisible, the vanishing, and the disappeared. In an insurrectionary outburst of original music, words, and movement, the six characters in Now You See Her explore some of the diverse ways women fade from sight in our culture. They sing, dance, and thrust themselves into the elements as they travel through the seasons of their lives. Their voices are defiant. Their question is simple: why and how do we allow our power to disappear without a fight? Now You See Her follows Quote Unquote Collective’s acclaimed international hit Mouthpiece.

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What started as a small sequence of poems about the Starbucks logo grew to monstrous proportions after the poet fell under a siren spell herself. All Day I Dream About Sirens is both an ancient reverie and a screen-induced stupor as these poems reckon with the enduring cultural fascination with siren and mermaid narratives as they span geographies, economies, and generations, chronicling and reconfiguring the male-centered epic and women’s bodies and subjectivities.

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Now that we've sold ourselves to ourselves, shuffling letters and sounds around to hide the pain, how do we represent the uncanny valley in which we've set up shop? In Cursed Objects, Jason Christie recoils in horror at the thoroughness of his self, then begins to write toward a new understanding brokered between all the things that define him and who he thinks he should be and interrogates how we reduce people to words, especially online, turning them into objects.

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A bookend to All My Friends Are Superheroes -- a charming novel about falling out of love

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An archaeological dig uncovers the secret history of Toronto’s long-forgotten first immigrant neighbourhood. In early 2015, a team of archaeologists began digging test trenches on a non-descript parking lot next to Toronto City Hall -- a site designated to become a major new court house. What they discovered was the rich buried history of an enclave that was part of The Ward -- that dense, poor, but vibrant 'arrival city' that took shape between the 1840s and the 1950s. Home to waves of immigrants and refugees -- Irish, African-Americans, Italians, eastern European Jews, and Chinese -- The Ward was stigmatized for decades by Toronto's politicians and residents, and eventually razed to make way for New City Hall. The archaeologists who excavated the lot, led by co-editor Holly Martelle, discovered almost half a million artifacts -- a spectacular collection of household items, tools, toys, shoes, musical instruments, bottles, industrial objects, food scraps, luxury items, and even a pre-contact Indigenous projectile point. Martelle's team also unearthed the foundations of a nineteenth-century Black church, a Russian synagogue, early-twentieth-century factories, cisterns, privies, wooden drains, and even row houses built by formerly enslaved African Americans. Following on the heels of the immensely popular The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto's First Immigrant Neighbourhood, which told the stories of some of the people who lived there, The Ward Uncovered digs up the tales of things, using these well-preserved artifacts to tell a different set of stories about life in this long-forgotten and much-maligned neighbourhood.

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"When I first saw Norah and Amy's breathtaking performance I was speechless. Mouthpiece touches on every part of the female experience from birth to death using dance, music, and wicked humour with just a bathtub for scenery. The result is a new kind of feminist language which ignites pure, intravenous emotion. It's impossible to describe and truly unforgettable." —Jodie Foster Interweaving a cappella harmony, dissonance, text and physicality, two performers express the inner conflict that exists within a modern woman's head: the push and the pull, the past and the present, the progress and the regression.

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No Place To Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, it is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways — momentous and mockable — public bathrooms just don't work. Like, for the homeless, who, faced with no place to go sometimes literally take to the streets. (Ever heard of a municipal poop map?) For people with invisible disabilities, such as Crohn's disease, who stay home rather than risk soiling themselves on public transit routes. For girls who quit sports teams because they don't want to run to the edge of the pitch to pee. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen have protested bathroom bills that will stomp on the rights of trans people. And where was Hillary Clinton after she arrived back to the stage late after the first commercial break of the live-televised Democratic leadership debate in December 2015? Stuck in a queue for the women's bathroom.Peel back the layers on public bathrooms and it's clear many more people want for good access than have it. Public bathroom access is about cities, society, design, movement, and equity. The real question is: Why are public toilets so crappy?

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When Jim Hawkins finds the map to a legendary treasure, he embarks on a perilous voyage to claim it. His journey leads him to uncover a pirate mutiny, a chance meeting with a marooned misfit, and, ultimately, to the discovery of what kind of person he wants to be.Nicolas Billon's plays have been produced in Stratford, and across Canada, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. His first play, The Elephant Song, was made into a feature film.

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"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

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WINNER OF THE 2016 CANADIAN JEWISH LITERARY AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIRSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 TORONTO BOOK AWARDSThe problem of consciousness may just be a semantic one. The brain absorbs a sea of sensory input, the tiniest fraction of which reaches the shore of our awareness. We pay attention to what is most novel, most necessary at the time. At its most reductive, the word consciousness refers to the synchronized firing of neurons across multiple areas of the brain, the mental experience of attending.But should consciousness be summed up simply by its subconscious mechanism? I would prefer a more imaginative answer.After his father undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on the complicated texture of consciousness. During the long months that follow, Akler confronts the unknowable nature of another person’s life, as well as the struggles within his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth’s Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between memoir and meditation, and is at once elegiac, spare and profoundly intimate.

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While researching why Freud failed to win a Nobel Prize at the Nobel Archives in Sweden, a psychiatrist makes an unusual discovery. Among the piles of papers in the 'Crackpot' file are letters addressed to the executor of Alfred Nobel's will, written by several notable Nobel laureates — including Rudyard Kipling and Marie Curie — each offering an explanation of why and how Stonehenge was constructed. Diligent research uncovers that Alfred Nobel added a secret codicil to his will, a prize for the Nobel laureate who solves the mystery of Stonehenge. Weaving together a wealth of primary sources — photos, letters, wills — The Stonehenge Letters tells the tale of a fascinating secret competition. Praise for The Stonehenge Letters: 'This little novel is a delight from its first word to its last. The Stonehenge Letters is by turns thoughtful, whimsical, haunting and laugh-out-loud funny. Reading this book was like skating over the smoothest ice; I was blissfully unaware of the transition from history to fiction and back again' — Annabel Lyon, author of The Sweet Girl 'In his alarmingly smart and dangerously absorbing Freud-tinged romance/detective story, Harry Karlinsky deploys explosions, earthworms, radioactive particles and a passel of Nobel laureates to reinvent history in the golden age of invention.' — Zsuzsi Gartner, author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

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Finalist for the 2014 Archibald Lampman Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry! Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices into a stitched song propelled toward the next century. Haunted by "time's frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas," David O'Meara sifts culture, art, war, rebellion, and technology, offering defiance amid decay, while singing with the conflicting impulses of reflection and dissent. David O'Meara has authored three poetry collections and a play. He's been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Prize, the Trillium Book Award, a National Magazine Award, four Rideau Awards, and he won the Archibald Lampman Award twice. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

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"Will was pretty much the perfect role model." -- Beth Ditto, The Gossip In the spring of 2010, Toronto lost one of its most important queer civic heroes when local artist, DJ, activist, impresario, promoter, party-thrower, cafe operator, community-builder and lover Will Munro died of brain cancer at the unfathomably young age of 35. Famed for his subversive, irreverent visual art, which co-opted rock 'n' roll imagery and raunchy gay iconography, and his legendary Vazaleen dance parties, which singlehandedly reinvented Toronto's queer nightlife culture, Will did more to revolutionize both his community and his city in a decade than most folks do in a lifetime. Weaving together a collage of stories from and about the people who knew and loved him, Army of Lovers is both a biography of Will Munro and a document of a galvanizing period in the history of Toronto, a moment when the city's various subcultures -- the queer community, the art scene, the independent music universe, the grassroots activist enclaves -- came of age and collided with one another. Selected by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) for the 2014 Over the Rainbow Project book list

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"No other writer of our time and place was so diverse, attempted so much, and never lost sight of his intent."--Michael Ondaatje a book of variations collects three difficult-to-find bpNichol texts--love, zygal, and art facts--which exemplify Nichol's signature eclecticism, a wondrous amalgam of fiction, concrete verse, comics, translations, and collage--this collection of ephemeral work may prove his most lasting contribution to contemporary literature. bpNichol (1944--1988) was one of Canada's most adventurous, entertaining, and enigmatic poets. He is best known for his nine-book poem The Martyrology and his work on the TV show Fraggle Rock. Stephen Voyce is an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa.

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Winner of the 2013 Governor General's Award for Drama "Iceland is a beautifully structured and extremely powerful play that haunts the mind. Billon is an original and exciting voice."--Atom Egoyan Nicolas Billon's acclaimed trilogy of plays tackles, with wit and dark humor, the banking crisis, the whale hunt, and a real estate deal gone horribly awry. Told through interwoven monologues, the plays in Fault Lines are a surprising hybrid of Wallace Shawn and Neil Labute. Nicolas Billon's plays and translations have been produced at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Soulpepper Theatre, and the Canadian Stage.

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"After reading Mr. Faulkner's incredible book, something happened. I began to feel bad for the person I was before reading his poems. The poet writes: 'I've placed dynamite around your heart and a bit / in your teeth. How bored you must have been / before you met me.' And he's right. It was so goddamn boring before we met him."--Matthew Dickman Need Machine clamors through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumor. Andrew Faulkner co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. This is his first book.

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"Whip-pan-smart, fleet and protean, David Seymour's poems seem to contain the speed of the age. I love their ranginess and ambition, the way they rove through a here-and-now teeming with there-and-then, their speakers' flights and turnings through the blizzard. This is a different world, and we live in it." --Paul Farley "For Display Purposes Only is fighting trim, and poem after poem is a knockout blow." -- National Post "We are met at the front door of this book by an energized curiosity and a humane amusement. Worlds only notionally, minimally there become fully dimensioned, clearly edged under Seymour's attention. David Seymour is a magician."--Tim Lilburn These poems pause for the spectacle--cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides--to describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls, and decoys that the notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, in which the act of living is like a movie we're not in. David Seymour's first collection, Inter Alia, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. He works in the film industry.

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Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012) Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013) 'Maidenhead is a mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild, and Michel Foucault. It's a thrilling, brilliant, and really hot place to be.' -- Sheila Heti, Globe and Mail On a mangy beach in Key West, sixteen-year-old Myra meets Elijah, a Tanzanian musician twice her age. Trapped on a Spring Break family vacation, Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive, violent woman with a strange power over him. When Myra and her splitting-up family return home, she falls in with a pot-smoking anarchist crowd. But when Gayl and Elijah follow her north, she walks willingly into their world, engaging in more and more abject sexual games. As Myra enters unfamiliar worlds of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl's self-consciousness.

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For over thirty years, Patrick Cummins has been wandering the streets of Toronto, taking mugshots of its houses, variety stores, garages, and ever-changing storefronts. Straightforward shots chronicle the same buildings over the years, or travel the length of a block, facade by facade. Other sections collect vintage Coke signs on variety stores or garage graffiti. Full Frontal T.O. features over three hundred gorgeous photos of Toronto's messy urbanism, with accompanying text by master urban explorer Shawn Micallef. Patrick Cummins has photographed Toronto's built environment since 1978 and has worked as an archivist in Toronto since 1986. Shawn Micallef is the author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and a senior editor at Spacing magazine.

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"A great novel that captures the loneliness and absurdity of the 1990s suburban experience. Dense and imaginative writing that often borders on the uncomfortable, but the edge of your seat is the best place to be."-Joel Plaskett It is the summer of 1999, and the Sweltham family is leading an ordinary suburban existence. Former childhood volleyball champ Parker crisscrosses the continent as a sales rep for DynaFlex Sporting Goods, while his wife, Trixie, serves as the managing editor of Record of Truth, an unsuccessful journal for genocide studies. Their son Owen has just returned from juvenile prison to the vast horrors of high school. Heath, Parker's brother, has vowed to cut down on the weed and fried chicken for a regimen of self-improvement, obeying his AbDestroyer routine and crafting a screenplay that will dismantle the universe. All appears normal. Yet in the summer's swelter, as Y2K anxiety grows, grim truths are revealed. Trixie is rocked by the discovery of an undiagnosable cerebral defect, rendering her toils at the journal trivial. Cataloging crunches and ignoring his Gulf War vet ex-girlfriend, Heath fights to reconcile confusions of the past with hopes for a meaningful future. Owen's religious fixations feed his Robitussin binges and fantasies of self-destruction. And while peddling his wares at the annual Empowerment Expo, Parker forges an uneasy friendship with Adam, an African political refugee harboring his own violent aspirations. Sprawling yet scalpel-sharp, Maintenance, like some twenty-first-century White Noise, takes the suburbs to a geography you won't quite recognize. Rob Benvie has recorded and performed with the rock bands Thrush Hermit, Camouflage Nights, and The Dears. He is the author of the novel Safety of War.

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It all started with a black rose and a rich young man. And a house with a creek running through it. And then there she was, Kip Flynn, standing beside her boyfriend's dead body and agreeing to take a large sum of money from the young man's father to keep quiet. As if she could have done anything else, being so scared and grief-stricken and maybe pregnant. But that's not the end of it. You see, there's some kind of connection between Kip and this rich developer's son that keeps them tight in one another's orbit. So when Kip awakens from her grief, intent on revenge, they find themselves pursuing one another with a ferocity they can barely understand, one that spirals outward, with subway accidents and arson and drainpipes and backhoe wars, to envelop roommates, two guilty fathers, a window-cleaner or two, landlords, family secrets, a Vietnamese gangster, a stand-up bass player and an activist tour guide. And concluding in the subterranean heart of Toronto itself, which, like Kip, is torn between vengefulness and growth. Sean Dixon is a novelist, playwright, and banjo player. He's the author of the novel The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal; two novels for young readers, The Feathered Cloak and The Winter Drey; and several plays, including those collected in AWOL: Three Plays for Theatre SKAM.

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With cameos by jackalopes, Glenn Gould, homemade spaceships, and Carl Linnaeus, these poems are remarkable for their technical agility and their restless inventiveness. There's an elegance here that matches Dodds' impulse to challenge the reader with fresh metaphor and astonishing phrasing; the formal ambitions of many of the poems in Crabwise to the Hounds are balanced by an inclination towards wordplay and a bright musicality. Humorous at times, yet always handled with consummate craft, these poems invoke historical figures like Hiram Bingham and Ho Chi Minh even as they traverse a poetic landscape that includes telephone-game-style translations, interpretive dance poems on historic paintings and carnivalesque jaunts into a natural world overrun with mules, Alsatians, lions, and motorcycle-sized-deer.

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'The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.' -- Man Ray What if there were movies made the same way as suits, custom fitted, each one tailored for one person? Not broadcast, but narrowcast? Not theatres around the world showing the same globalized pictures, but instead a local circumstance, a movie so particular, so peculiar, it could cure night blindness or vertigo? Welcome to the world of fringe movies, where artists have been busy putting queer shoulders to the wheels, or bending light to talk about First Nations rights (and making it funny at the same time), or demonstrating how a personality can be taken apart and put together again, all in the course of a ten-minute movie which might take years to make. Practical Dreamers takes us to this other side of the media plantation. In it, twenty-seven Canadian artists dish about how they get it done and why it matters. The conversations are personal, up close and jargon free, smart without smarting. The stellar cast includes smartbomb Steve Reinke; visionary Peter Mettler; Middle East specialist Jayce Salloum; queer Asian avatars Richard Fung, Midi Onodera, Ho Tam, and Wayne Yung; footage recyclers Aleesa Cohene and Jubal Brown; overhead projector king Daniel Barrow; First Nations vets Kent Monkman and Shelley Niro; international art presence Paulette Philips; and documentarian Donigan Cumming. These in-depth talks come lavishly illustrated in an oversized volume.

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When a mad dentist steals people's teeth, Miss Lamp comes to town. Miss Lamp, a young and savvy lawyer, is holed up in Room 32 of the Peachland Hotel, waiting for a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and reviewing the case of Delano, the teeth-stealing dentist everybody loves to hate. Meanwhile, the narrator takes us on a tour of Miss Lamp's memories, stories of her family, the adventures of those who knock on her door. There's Miss Lamp's mother, Abby, and her mean grandmother. There's the supremely lovable Paper Boy, abused by Delano and in love with a younger Miss Lamp. There's naive Room Service Boy, on the hunt for the perfect tomato soup to accompany Miss Lamp's grilled cheese; at the grocery store he meets the assertive Banana Tray Hair -- could it be love? These characters' stories weave together into a tangle - like moths to a light, they all kaleidoscope back to our Miss Lamp in her floral hotel room. She invites you in to smell the flowers, to walk in someone else's shoes, to eat a peach, to watch a magpie pick for gold.

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With Canada / US relations in the proverbial toilet (American Standard, of course), Stephen Cain's third book blenderizes 'pop' culture, politics and poetry to befuddle the border. From the Howl-like opening rant about the militarism of the US to the satirical 'History of Canada,' this collection interrogates nationalism and cultural identity on both sides of the 49th parallel and attempts to show that Auden was wrong: poetry can make things happen. American Standard/Canada Dry includes odes to video games, poems culled from Viagra junk mail and CNN reports on the war, ruminations on Canadian poets, travelogues, concrete poems, mistranslations of bird poems, and riffs on peculiar Canadianisms, including homophonic translations of Quebecois lyrics. Deftly oscillating between vitriolic verse and humour, the poems in American Standard/Canada Dry interrogate poetics, nationalism and Tim Hortons as thoroughly as a burly border avant-guard; they're your passport to the land of a new political poetry.

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Artist and writer Steve Reinke is best know for his video work, an acerbic oeuvre that spans over a decade and includes his most famous piece, The Hundred Videos, literally a hundred short videos in which he explores the myriad permutations of identity, sexuality and art. The titles of his videos -- In the Realm of Perpetual Embarrassment, Sad Disco Fantasia, How Photographs Are Stored in the Brain are some examples -- encapsulate the tenor of Reinke's work: deadpan, self-deprecating, personal and always funny. Composed of original and found footage (from home movies, training films, porn flicks), the videos are typically diaristic, often philosophical, even elegaic. The writing itself is extremely well-crafted, possessing a wit and intelligence that translated well to the page; what seems improvisatory on screen is in fact very polished and precise prose. Everybody Loves Nothing contains Reinke's scripts from 1996 to the present, accompanied by numerous illustrative stills. An extensive interview with filmmaker Mike Holboom provides a broad overview of Reinke's career, themes and ambitions. Introduction by Lisa Steele, artistic director of Vtape.

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David spends his days as an underworked copy writer for an ad agency and his nights lost in old war movies, fantasizing about his strange teenage cousin and revisiting his father's suicide. His dreary life is upended when he finds himself at the mysterious Chaos Farm, a lavish wilderness retreat populated by those seeking to right their lives' imbalances through New Age games and rites of necromancy. In a paranormal experiment gone awry, they inadvertently raise a mysterious bloodthirsty creature that may be a) the Devil, b) David's deceased father, c) George C. Scott as General George S. Patton in the movie Patton, or d) all, or any, of the aforementioned. Carnage ensues, leading David through a woozy landscape of churning highways, deserted shopping malls and small towns, lured backward through the chasms of memory and nostalgia by the monster's coaxing squeals and forward toward an uncertain, hallucinatory future. Here, Lolita meets Maldoror meets 50s pulp horror comics. Safety of War is a hellride of exploded symbolism and beery misadventures, murders and tragedies, laughs, puzzles and meditations on valour and sacrifice in a world short on true heroes.

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In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem's lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away. A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters weren't so easily distracted by the noir-ishly handsome chief inspector, the seductive female veterinarian and the dashing anthropology professor studying the Winter Garden's gorge. The Winter Gardeners spend a summer of sultry afternoons nursing Rob, languidly drinking cocktails and trying to picture Nude Descending Staircase in their supposedly Cubist garden. Soon, however, they find themselves in a court room, where their family's values are on trial in a case reminiscent of that of Oscar Wilde.

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'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet's instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet's quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.' -- Frank Davey

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The story of how Toronto became a music mecca. From Yonge Street to Yorkville to Queen West to College, the neighbourhoods that housed Toronto’s music scenes. Featuring Syrinx, Rough Trade, Martha and the Muffins, Fifth Column, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Rheostatics, Ghetto Concept, LAL, Broken Social Scene, and more! “Jonny Dovercourt, a tireless force in Toronto’s music scene, offers the widest-ranging view out there on how an Anglo-Saxon backwater terrified of people going to bars on Sundays transforms itself into a multicultural metropolis that raises up more than its share of beloved artists, from indie to hip-hop to the unclassifiable. His unique approach is to zoom in on the rooms where it’s happened – the live venues that come and too frequently go – as well as on the people who’ve devoted their lives and labours to collective creativity in a city that sometimes seems like it’d rather stick to banking. For locals, fans, and urban arts denizens anywhere, the essential Any Night of the Week is full of inspiration, discoveries, and cautionary tales.” —Carl Wilson, Slate music critic and author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of Billboard’s ‘100 Greatest Music Books of All Time’ “Toronto has long been one of North America’s great music cities, but hasn’t got the same credit as L.A., Memphis, Nashville, and others. This book will go a long way towards proving Toronto’s place in the music universe.” —Alan Cross, host, the Ongoing History of New Music “The sweaty, thunderous exhilaration of being in a packed club, in collective thrall to a killer band, extends across generations, platforms, and genre preferences. With this essential book, Jonny has created something that's not just a time capsule, but a time machine.” —Sarah Liss, author of Army of Lovers

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His body, like yours, would lie mute as a plum until a vigilant limb came to a decision. As you might have guessed I've come to one myself. Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today's cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know 'you' is you? What good is it to decorate a headstone? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year--old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers. 'Ladouceur writes with an awareness of queer history, documenting it faithfully, but with his own twist ...This is poetry motivated by an honest wit.' -- John Barton, Arc Poetry Magazine Ben Ladouceur is a writer originally from Ottawa, now based in Toronto. His work has been featured in Arc, The Malahat Review, PRISM international and The Walrus, and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. He was awarded the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2013.

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Moving through a human landscape that exists both in the past and present, the speaker/speakers in This is the Emergency Present attempt to unearth an understanding about love, romanticism, and connection. Using chemistry and physics, the early works of Pablo Neruda, and the abstract broken language around him, Vincent Pagé attempts to define something tangible about presence and absence. By asking “at what point in a transition/ does one thing become the other thing?” he challenges us to consider what it means to be here, and at what point are we finally there?

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Her acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in Jen Currin's new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark cunning wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new and more personal territory. In a style that regularly pushes life's barely hidden strangeness into the light, Currin's poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography -- only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds ...This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life.

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Busted is a book about governance, and a catalogue of possible relations. It explores a litany of genres concerned with allegiance and refusal, and inhabits the array of ways we do or don't jive with self, group and governing relations. It is a polemic, it is a collage that interrogates how language and linguistic discourses contribute to shaping the relationship between the subject and polity.

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Natalee Caple made quite a splash with her first two books, The Heart is its Own Reason, a short-story collection from Insomniac Press, and The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World, a novel from House of Anansi Press. With A More Tender Ocean Caple turns her hand to poetry, and the results are no less dazzling. The poems were written using a Surrealist technique called automatic writing -- a kind of poetic impressionism after speed-reading. The effect is a kind of dreamlike state -- everything isn't quite as it should be, as though it had all been seen through the facet of a diamond. The poems are lyrical, erotic, gentle, happy, sad and strangely beautiful. A More Tender Ocean is unusual but immensely moving and compelling, tender but not maudlin. 'What goes on seems ordinary,' writes Caple. Rest assured, it is not.

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A beautiful conjunction of the late Douglas Clark's minimalist poetry and photography, this book transforms the mundane detritus of our collective past into a series of contemporary illuminations. Articles of Faith are found, given, fought for, hoarded and cherished ... They are the marks we leave in passing.' – Douglas Clark

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Rocky meets Elmore Leonard meets Miranda July as Pillow Wilson, a past-his-prime boxer, trains for his last title shot. Shenanigans ensue. Boxer ‘Pillow Fist’ Pete Wilson should be preparing for his big comeback fight. But, having recently undergone an ethical awakening, the new vegan is busy trying to find humane new homes for his menagerie of exotic pets (including Jersey Joe the sloth and Rigoberto the shark). His roommate, Sherlock Holmes, who faked his own death by waterfall, is now Pillow’s in-house doping expert.Pillow just can’t get motivated to train, and he’s further distracted from his push-ups when both his car and Rigoberto mysteriously disappear. Luckily, Sherlock is a master of deduction. What follows is part underdog sports story, part work of neozoological surrealism, and part existential mystery novel.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 TASTE CANADA AWARD FOR CULINARY NARRATIVESFeatured on "The Sunday Magazine" on CBC RadioNearly every culture has a variation on the dumpling: histories, treatises, family legends, and recipes about the world’s favorite lump of carbs ​​​​If the world's cuisines share one common food, it might be the dumpling, a dish that can be found on every continent and in every culinary tradition, from Asia to Central Europe to Latin America. Originally from China, they evolved into ravioli, samosas, momos, gyozas, tamales, pierogies, matzo balls, wontons, empanadas, potato chops, and many more. In this unique anthology, food writers, journalists, culinary historians, and musicians share histories of their culture’s version of the dumpling, family dumpling lore, interesting encounters with these little delights, and even recipes to unwrap the magic of the world's favorite dish. With an introduction by Karon Liu. Illustrations by Meegan Lim.Contributors include: Michal Stein, Christina Gonzales, Kristen Arnett, David Buchbinder, André Alexis, Miles Morrisseau, Angela Misri, Perry King, Sylvia Putz, Mekhala Chaubal, Arlene Chan, Chantal Braganza, Naomi Duguid, Eric Geringas, Matthew Murtagh-Wu, Monika Warzecha, Bev Katz Rosenbaum, Tatum Taylor Chaubal, Domenica Marchetti, Julie Van Rosendaal, Amy Rosen, Cheryl Thompson, Jennifer Jordan, Marie Campbell, Navneet Alang

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