Search results for ""Guernica Editions,Canada""

A sometimes satirical reflection on hope in a time of hopelessness, the poems in I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought use stubborn humour to grapple with the anxiety of moving forward during late capitalism. While many of the poems are set in Newfoundland, the book also echoes the universal experience of loss, leaving, returns, and never being able to return. The first section of the manuscript, titled Some Disasters, introduces real and imagined catastrophes. The St. Lawrence tidal wave, the history of resettlement, and the Muskrat Falls debacle stand next to poems that live in an imagined future where the capelin refuse to roll and snow refuses to fall. The second section is titled I dreamed I was an afterthought. Here, the eclectic poems turn to a more personal perspective of place, my struggles with mental illness, and a feminist exploration of familial relationships. In Of No Returns, movement through time and space is tinged with the same lurking fear of irreversibility, a fear which

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Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is divided into 7 sections. The first 5 sections focalize particular geographical regions: Southern Ontario in "The Southern Ontario Gothic Tour," North York in "The Northern Edge of Everything," New York in "Cynic's Guidebook," New Brunswick in "Vanishing Beach," and Antarctica in "Signs in the Southern Hemisphere." Though each section tells a story of people moving through these places, the poems ultimately subvert the expected conventions of travel narrative, directing critical attention to the personae and roles of travellers and to the systems of power at work in each locale. This is a book deeply concerned with psychogeography, the ways that individuals and environments mutually shape one another. Psychgeography comes to the fore particularly in the final two sections of the book, "Animals in Strange Houses" and "Genius Loci." In "Animals in Strange Houses," animals, both human and not, must literally and figuratively reconstruct homes after being displaced by urbanization and ecological destruction. In the final section, "Genius Loci," poems function as both portraits and place studies and reveal the deep intimacy between examinations of persons and places.

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In experimental lit veteran Brian Dedora's third novel, prose fragments and narrative threads come in and out of focus as, on a winter's night, a reveller in an upscale Toronto restaurant begins the most dangerous of things: a journey into memory. Is he a narcissist or is he among the wounded? What is it to be gay in a small desert town and in the heart of a sprawling city? The Apple in the Orchard navigates the truths and half-truths of a traveller, a loner plunging through city streets and into the woods, a Canadian wrapped in the myths of the North and tangled in the snare-traps of the urban. As this layered, undulating novel explores class tensions, a family in disintegration, and how the effects of sexual abuse wind through generations, and while cameos by voyageurs, cowboys, Black Robe, and Grey Owl flicker to life and vanish again, the tragic story of the unnamed Her emerges in verbal snapshots.

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Lexi, sixty-three and recently widowed, is facing the inevitable vicissitudes of life. After passing through a phase of numb immobility, Lexi makes a half-hearted attempt to meet some older men, but the experiences are disappointing. Undaunted, Lexi begins to accept the idea of being alone. Then circumstances disrupt her quiet routine – in the form of two house guests. In the physics of relationships, Lexi observes that nature abhors a vacuum. But she wonders if she herself has manipulated her circumstances to fill that vacuum. Eventually, Lexi encourages both house guests to move on. Ironically, her unselfish kindness leaves her once again alone. Through some strange physics of attraction and repulsion, however, her ex-husband reappears. Is he a changed man … or just acting like one? In the end, Lexi learns how to come to terms with her solitude, to resist entropy, and to fill the "vacuum" in her own way.

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Dead Voices is a collection of stories that are both seriously realistic and comically whimsical. They have everything from superheroes who get sick on words, to the appearance of dead playwrights, to the visit of saints and sinners from the past, to a hot stove discussion on hockey and love. They?re about the modern mind-set and its technological marvels and the older attention to character and virtue.

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In What If Zen Gardens, Henry Beissel, often considered the master of the long poem, turns to the time-honoured tradition of the haiku to help bring to light what he calls "the world's hidden affairs." Included in the collection are a series of black-and-white illustrations by Arlette Francière, themselves polished gems that highlight, reflect and enhance the poems.

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Alina has red hair, green eyes and an extraordinary intelligence: at the age of two, she can already read and count. She loves to surgically dissect the world around her and listen to the stories that her grandfather Giuseppe tells her, as they wander through the alleys and rocky coastline of Polignano.Hers is an atypical childhood, always poised between genius and discomfort, skipped life stages and looming bullying. Because she is always the youngest one, the best one, the strongest and most fragile one at the same time. A fish out of water with intellectual and sensory "superpowers", with depression and anorexia always lurking. Until Nicola arrives to break her crystal ball.A love that is as strong as it is socially unacceptable and that will mark the beginning of her real life, of her forced growth, of her precocious blossoming into a strong woman, capable of loving and suffering. This is the story of Alina and of her way of being, living with Asperger's syndrome, in a crescendo of emotions "differently" felt between Polignano, Milan and Paris, to then return to the starting point: the twelfth room.

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The Great Gatsby is known for the glitz and glamour of Gilded Age plutocrats; in The Last Green Light, the working people of Fitzgerald's novel get to tell their own, beautifully textured tale. Meet Jon Laine, a Midwesterner who captains one of the rumrunning boats that are the source of Gatsby's great wealth; enter a colorful netherworld of diner cooks, dump scavengers, secretaries, deckhands and car mechanics caught in the increasingly deadly conflict between organized crime syndicates, amid the murderous passions of caste-busting love. From movie stars to dark freighters, Wobblies to Harlem nightclubs The Last Green Light, like a jazz improvisation, riffs on a great American novel, creating its own, unique world in the process.

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The dozen stories in this collection chronicle the life of Karl Pringle, a wannabe philosopher who had once been enrolled in the graduate Philosophy program at the University of Toronto where he imagined himself as an Ubermensch, a Superman derived from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. But he was summarily dismissed from the program after punching out his academic supervisor. Now Karl lives in a decrepit apartment above a butcher shop in Toronto's Kensington Market, is unemployed and very much rootless. The stories in The Philosopher Stories follow Karl as he moves from one strange episode to another, none of which end well. Although Karl likes to think of himself as an Ubermensch, in the bleakest moments following his many mishaps, he seems to know better, that perhaps he is only fooling himself with his grandiose dreams. That he is nothing more than one of life's rejects, an out-and-out failure. Nuanced and multilayered, funny and yet achingly sad, these stories depict a yo

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Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness is Danila Botha's third collection of short fiction. In these thirteen brilliant stories, she observes with her signature vulnerability and humour what it's like not to fit in. From a photographer teaching English in the Middle East (Sometimes I Like to Shoot Kids) to a chalk eating South African immigrant teen, who struggles to fit in (Nothing My Parents Taught me Turned Out to be True) to a neurodiverse travel agent who is tired of pretending to be like everyone else (Congratulations on Everything) to a woman who fakes a pregnancy (All Good Things Take Time) and an artist with a desperate need to communicate during the pandemic (There's Something I've Been Meaning To Say To You), these stories pulse with the empathy and originality Botha has become known for. As in her previous collection, the Trillium and Vine nominated For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I've Known, Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness will make you laugh, and cry

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Cities Within Us offers poems that are dense and deep with language that resonates at multiple levels and often startles with its juxtapositions and verbal explosions. From the intimately personal to the dramatically confessional, Peter Taylor's poems capture a purse seine of discordant voices, including a piece of type, a bee, an orang-outang, Franklin, the delusional and the abused in a universe that seems both unlimited and inevitable. Images and emotions move the reader from the disappearance of arctic explorers to the razing and rebirth of the Dresden Frauenkirche to the comic innocence of a child's visit to Mars in poems that explore the inner landscapes of imagination and reality, and the intimate capacity for joy and loss.

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The anthology, Rudy Wiebe: Essays on His Works, compiled and edited by Bianca Lakoseljac, examines Wiebe's works and his achievements as an author, editor, professor and mentor who helped shape successful authors and encouraged a passion for Canadian literature.Intriguingly, while Wiebe's writing has been labelled as "brilliant" and "magnificent", it has also been seen as "challenging" due in part to his propensity for a rather Faulknerian turn of phrase and his use of multifaceted storymaking approaches, such as intertextual and intratextual dynamics, and the sociopolitical views and religious beliefs they embody.Rudy Wiebe's literary work raises him to the status of a Canadian literary icon whose fiction and nonfiction are seen as major contributions to Canadian literature, and will continue to be enjoyed for generations to come.

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In this dark comedy taking place over twenty-four hours, a blizzard pummels Toronto as a beloved high school teacher coerces his teenage student to assist in his violent suicide forcing the student, his best friend, the friend's bulimic mom, and a down-low cop to outrun each other, the storm, and the ghosts haunting them. I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley is a breathtaking and hilarious novel about the lengths people will take to erase themselves in order to matter.

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Blow Up the Ashes, Volume 2 of American Mayhem, reveals the story of Pierre Doucet, a gambler and then a killer for the New Orleans mob during World War II who at one time admires from afar a yellow-haired girl.When decades later he travels to New York, he meets KJ again. They discover she was his "yellow-haired girl". KJ learns Pierre is a killer, but instead of drawing back in horror joins him. KJ and Buckles come together at the novels' end when Buckles wreaks revenge on Big Bill.

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In 1967, the Summer of Love, 17-year old 'Buckles' Sinclair runs from her privileged home in Scarsdale to hitchhike to San Francisco, but instead of Flower Power, Peace, and Love she finds herself plunged into the darkest heart of the American nightmare. Her abandoned mother, KJ, rebuilds her identity and life in the company of a "family" of homosexual men-she is Wendy to The Lost Boys of Manhattan.

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Frenetic, fervent and musical, Songs of My Surrenders is the follow up to di Saverio's highly acclaimed epic poem Crito Di Volta. Whether writing about romantic love, filial reverence, friendship, or brotherhood, Di Saverio insists on passionate and profound connection. A wind of dust blows my tears Into the daisies of the jetty where I wait For you continuously; is it true What they say, that you no longer love Me? I will wait here, still. I will not move.

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Bob Dylan has created a body of work unparalleled in popular music. As a songwriter and as a singer, Dylan expanded the boundaries for song. In this substantially revised and updated second edition of The Bob Dylan Albums, Anthony Varesi analyzes the massive Dylan canon through a detailed discussion of each of the artist's officially released albums. The book follows Dylan's career chronologically from 1962's Bob Dylan through to 2021's Bootleg Series release Springtime in New York. All of Dylan's studio albums, live albums, collections and archival releases are examined in the text and in the detailed, annotated, cross-referenced discography, as are Dylan's notable soundtrack contributions, side projects and benefit concert appearances.The Bob Dylan Albums, 2nd Edition also discusses Dylan's other writings, such as Chronicles and his Nobel Prize lecture, and reviews the films Dylan has appeared in or been the subject of. The book contains frank analyses of the more controversial aspects of Dylan's career, including songs Dylan wrote about George Jackson, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Joey Gallo and Lenny Bruce, the use of Dylan's music in advertisements, and Dylan's 2011 trip to China.The book looks at recurring themes in Dylan's songs, the influence of other artists on Dylan's music, and the ongoing relevance of Dylan's work. In the process, The Bob Dylan Albums, 2nd Edition unearths new meaning in both Dylan's most famous works and in his songs and albums that have received less attention..

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Abandoned as a child, Melanie Forsythe seeks stability and belonging after her mom's boyfriend is left to raise her. Despite her raw deal, Melanie grows up to have a head on her shoulders and a strong bond with her stepdad. But her dream of having a family of her own is shattered when she suffers tragedy and betrayal. Forced to confront the kind of dysfunction that robbed her of a conventional upbringing, Melanie must choose between giving up on her dream of having a family or embracing a different form of motherhood.

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The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard is a contemporary story of obsessive love, sexual transgression and tragic loss. Bachelor and professional accountant Joseph Blanchard has led a socially active though emotionally cautious life into his late thirties. When he discovers that his beautiful nineteen-year-old cousin Sophie, a talented concert pianist, is in love with him, he finds he is helpless to resist her youthful charms, and against his better judgment embarks upon a passionate affair. As a safeguard against causing pain to her parents, the two lovers conspire to keep their relationship secret. For a while they are happy. But Sophie's performing career compels her to spend time in the company of other musicians, many of them young men. Consumed by jealousy, Joseph allows rage to seize control, with tragic results. Grieving, he sets about to destroy all evidence of the affair. But when a family secret is exposed, it reveals the past in a new light. In the end, his health in decline and with nothing left but memories, he discloses his secret to a confidant.

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Howard O'Hagan was one of the first native-born westerners to make a mark on Canadian literature. The purpose of this collection of essays on the works of O'Hagan, edited by Sergiy Yakovenko, is not only to refresh scholarship on his best known work, Tay John, but also to break the vicious circle of ignoring O'Hagan's other works-his later novel The School-Marm Tree (1977) and his short stories and sketches, collected in Wilderness Men (1958) and The Woman Who Got on at Jasper Station and Other Stories (1963). This volume offers two original articles on The School-Marm Tree, by Ren?e Hulan and Carl Watts, and Albert Braz's profound study of O'Hagan's Wilderness Men. Among the other contributors: Joseph Pivato, D.M.R. Bentley, Kylee-Anne Hingston, Jack Robinson, Sergiy Yakovenko, and something from Howard O'Hagan himself.

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The two true life stories contained in Tenacity span decades-- and two worlds, Australia and Britain. Told through the painful words of mothers Julie Rose and Marilyn Cowell (as recorded by her daughters, Michelle and Sarah), this compelling read has no sugar coating as it takes you through Julie's and Marilyn's struggle to get their sons off drugs-- and the tragedies that ensue. These stories highlight the harrowing fact that addiction can happen to anyone and can strike even the best of families. Powerful and hard hitting, this must read serves as an information and education tool for both young people and parents, a lesson not to be ignored.

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Earth, 2212: The novel, third in the Against The Machine trilogy, yet free standing on its own, tells of a dystopian society in the midst of catastrophic climate change. Billions have died. The minority of people remaining inhabit the MEGs, former cities transformed by technology into huge protective domes; outside is the MASS living by subsistence. All seems well for those in the CORPORATE. It is not. With worsening climate, the MASS increasingly restive and their AI Silicons becoming sentient, those at the top have concocted a final solution: to leave Earth for Alpha Centauri, destroying the planet in their wake. Four protagonists, each from separate segments of this world, come together to attempt to prevent the plan. By the end they have managed to alter the human/machine interface, so changing human evolution.

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In October 2016 Peter Jickling left the Yukon to write in Toronto. His resulting poems document subjects ranging from subletting to subways ? illuminating quiet moments amidst noise. Sometimes sad, often funny, and always humane, Downtown Flirt is an outsider?s account of urban life.

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In math for couples, we re-visit the past to discover our place in the contemporary world. A long-dead father watches his daughter work on her Mac, a woman converses with a photo of her young self. Adele Graf leads us on a journey that is rich and hopeful, evoking powerful nostalgia even if we've never been to the places described. When these poems release us back to our current lives, we feel restored to savour the warmth in a "glad red hat" and the love that arrives "still summer lush."

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Jamison Everett, a shy and lonely man with few friends, is a retired high school English teacher. When his artist sister, Monna, who is suffering from Parkinson's Disease, calls and asks for his help, he reluctantly agrees to leave his apartment in Minneapolis and temporarily relocate to her remote Montana town. Perhaps, in caring for his sister, he will find the friendship he longs for. But Monna's fiercely independent husband, Ben, has a different game plan. Parkinson's has robbed Monna of her ability to paint, and if the doctors won't cure her, then by god he'll do it by sheer force of will. Jamison, summoning his courage, offers to help, and an alliance is born. Yet neither man can know how much their nascent friendship will ask of them. Only Monna senses what is coming.

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What you will find in Echoes of Growing up Italian are accounts of the immigrant experience as told through the eyes of women. The Italian diaspora is one of the most significant of the 20th century, with a far-reaching impact in the Americas, Australia and Northern Europe. The Italian immigration narrative is a universal one. The stories in this book of the Italian woman in North America and how she learned to survive as she lived with two cultures in her heart and home. This collection provides the reader with a candid glimpse into the lives of sixteen women from across North America: some were born and raised in Italy while some have only been there on holidays; some are mothers and grandmothers and some are single; some only know a few words of Italian, while others are fluent, but we all have a discerning perspective on what it means to live with two cultures.

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A 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.

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Skater Girl is a collection of intensely personal essays, an archaeology of the self. Robin Pacific sifts through the midden of consciousness to find shells, potsherds, a broken piece of mirror. Themes of art, spirituality and social justice run like a current through otherwise disconnected pieces and fragments, many as short as one paragraph. Further, ideas about aging, loss and mortality colour many of them. The book is about the formation of Robin Pacific's many selves, about creativity, spiritual seeking, and the dream of a more equal society.

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The Walled Garden is a unique collection of short essays addressing a wide variety of subjects. From an exploration of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Federico Fellini to an update on the linguistic theories of Ernest Fenollosa, from a look into the true nature of time and the present moment to a discussion of 'psychic birthplaces', from reflections on Paleolithic caves, poetry and art, The Walled Garden includes the wild, the tamed and the stunningly unusual.

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In Zanzibar, in 2008, George Elliott Clarke began to write his "Canticles," an epic poem treating the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Imperial and colonial conquest, and the resistance to all these evils. That is the subject of Canticles I (MMXVI) and (MMXVII). In Canticles II (MMXIX) and (MMXX), Clarke rewrites significant scriptures from an oral and "African" or "Africadian" perspective. Now, in Canticles III (MMXXII) and (MMXXIII), Clarke shifts focus—from world history and theology — to the specific history and bios associated with the creation of the African ("Africadian") Baptist Association of Nova Scotia. By so doing he concludes the most remarkable epic ever essayed in Canadian letters — an amalgam of Pound and Walcott — but entirely and inimitably his own.

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Seeker: A Sea Odyssey is the story of two people who meet in Mexico and fall in love. Rita is an American part-time English language teacher and freelance reporter for an English language tourist magazine struggling to raise two young boys on her own. Bernard is a French geologist under contract to the Mexican government to search for underground thermal springs. She dreams of finding Shangri-la after witnessing a bloody government crackdown from which she barely escapes. He dreams of having a yacht and sailing the world. Their dreams mesh, and they immigrate to Canada to earn the money to build their boat.

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This story follows three generations of a Vietnamese family as they struggle through major events of the 20th century. From the War of Independence against the French colonial power to the Vietnam War, the novel depicts a family's resilience in the face of tragedy, as told through the voice of a young girl attempting to understand family scandals within an historical context. At the novel's core is the death from AIDS in the early 1980s of the narrator's half French, half Vietnamese cousin Daniel, a beautiful rebel who is stricken down following a summer escapade in Provincetown. His family of three generations of physicians cannot bear to call the disease by its true name. Daniel dies alone in his Montreal hospital room.

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Like his three siblings, 32-year-old Alfredo Freddy Flowers Falconi has led two lives: the idyllic one before The Incident -- his mother's 1984 death -- and the complicated one afterward. He was just eight-years-old when his father abandoned the family, and nine when his oldest brother, Small Carm, covered up the circumstances of Rosa Falconi's demise to keep the family's honour intact. Twenty-three years later, that lie has become a black hole: hidden at the centre of all of their lives, it's supremely powerful force that, when uncovered by Freddy, threatens to tear them apart. Set against the backdrop of the Falconi family's shuttered tractor showroom on Toronto's pulsating and ethnically diverse Spadina Avenue, Falconi's Tractor explores the Italo-Canadian experience, Catholicism, family dynamics, the fall of a family business, infidelity, and mental health—all with a red Falconi tractor and a Ferrari sports car as bookends to the action.

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Revolt/Compassion gathers together six important works by Michael Springate: Historical Bliss, Dog and Crow, The Consolation of Philosophy, Freeport Texas, Kareena, and Kut: Shock and Awe. Written and produced over a twenty-five year period, they capture an expansive range of interests and influences, and reflect the artistic interdisciplinarity which has been a defining feature of his career.

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It is 1955, and the three Fayette sisters have lived their whole lives in the enchanting French Quarter of New Orleans. Though neglected by their parents, they share a close bond with one another--from afternoons in their small, shared bedroom, to trying to speak with ghosts beneath the sweeping trees in their garden. When the middle sister Constance disappears, the family believes she has run away, as she has done before; it is only the youngest--thirteen-year-old Bonavere (known as Bonnie)--who suspects there is more to it. Met only with grief from her family and resistance from the police, Bonnie embarks on a journey to bring her sister home, venturing through fabled Red Honey Swamp, and the city's vibrant and brutal history. Unravelling the layers of her sister's secret life, Bonnie discovers a pattern of girls found half-mad in the Louisiana swampland, and a connection to the wealthy, notorious Lasalle family. To rescue her sister, she must confront the realities of true violence, and the very nature of insanity.

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