Search results for ""Guernica Editions,Canada""

From the author of the international bestseller The Quincunx When his nation is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a man persuades his wife that they should give temporary shelter to a young girl who is at school with their daughter. He has no idea that the girl belongs to a community against whom the invader intends to commit genocide. Days stretch into weeks and then months while the enemy's pitiless hatred of the girl's community puts all of the family in danger. Nobody outside the family can be trusted with the dangerous secret and the threat from outside creates internal conflicts that put the family's unity at risk.

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Probing the question: "Are we ready to accept a human-ape hybrid in our midst?"What if humans were able to reproduce with other great apes? What would the hybrid offspring look like? Act like? Think like? And how would humans respond? Would such creatures be allowed to live among us? Or would they be put under a microscope in a zoo or research facility? Lucinda Gerson is an outspoken, free-spirited working-class single mother. Lively and unpredictable, she's the sort of person you might call "one of a kind." Her child Bonbon is quite literally one of a kind. When Lucinda spends the money she has inherited from an uncle on a trip to visit her anthropologist sister in the Congo, she comes back pregnant. Lucy and Bonbon is the story of mother and child, and of the controversy that swirls around them over the course of the child's first fourteen years. It is a story of freedom and captivity, of love and friendship, of borders and of border crossings, and of what it means to be a human animal.

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From old school dispensation to Zombie apocalypse: on change, loss and rapid transformations.The Narrow Cabinet is a book about change, loss and the struggle to understand what the hell is going on in a world experiencing such rapid transformations. The movement is from (a) an old dispensation of tough minded, rugged living and surviving troubled times through (b) a narcissistic sinkhole of complacency leading ultimately to (c) a zombie apocalypse. That is the general trajectory, but the work itself complicates the tropes. The old dispensation is by no means a paradise, nor is it dealt with nostalgically. The seeds of all the trouble are there from the start. But there is something admirable in the strength and fearless grit we find during that phase. In the sinkhole phase, the voice flits between depressive angst and lunatic outrage as oppressive forces exert ever more stubborn pressure. Here the speaker begins seeking the cause of the trouble that worsens until ultimately manifesting as zombie culture. With the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse, the terms of the illness become apparent.

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Fictional epic: three years in the life of Ray Archer.Archer portrays three years in the life of Ray Archer, a fictional Canadian actor/director dedicated to exploring performance styles with his diverse company. Following a Canada-wide tour of King Lear performed in mask, Archer takes his new epic history of Canada across the country and to Ireland, where a strange encounter changes his life in ways he could not imagine. Written in both modern and traditional poetic styles, Archer is Book Three of the epic trilogy On the River of Time, which examines three figures—one mythical (Odysseus), one historical (Edmund Spenser), and one fictional (Archer)—and the links between them across 3,000 years

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The Black Death epidemic spawned Boccaccio's Decameron; the bubonic plague brought us A Journal of the Plague Year. Many other great literary works have centered around storytelling at the time of a pandemic. Of people quarantined in their homes in 1722, Daniel Defoe wrote: "It was generally in such houses that we heard the most dismal shrieks and outcries of the poor people, terrified and even frighted to death by the sight of the condition of their dearest relations, and by the terror of being imprisoned as they were."In March of 2020, a new virus in the shape of a crown forced Montrealers and people worldwide to be locked in their homes in fear of contagion. Social distancing, self-isolation, and quarantine became the new buzzwords dominating everyday vocabulary.In April, once this new reality set in, the Quebec Writers' Federation asked its members, "What’s the story of your day?” It initiated a project, Chronicling the Days, inviting writers to detail a typical day in their life. The aim was to provide writers with a forum to put their creative thoughts to paper to try to make sense of the surreal situation and find some connection with other writers. “Every story valid,” the guidelines stated. One hundred writers responded to the challenge.True to its slogan of “No Borders, No Limits,” Guernica Editions is collaborating with the Quebec Writers’ Federation to publish these essays in an anthology in the spring of 2021. These 100 essays are interspersed by six longer ones, also on the topic of the pandemic, but written for the QWF Writes series. Most submissions are by professional authors, members of the QWF; for some, however, this anthology represents their first time in print.Chronicling the Days—Dispatches from a Pandemic provides an intimate panorama of the early days and experiences of the coronavirus. Constituting a rich mosaic of different styles, forms, and voices, this anthology provides a moving account of the everyday life of Quebec writers in isolation, digging deeply into their souls and reaching out to others.

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If small-town reporter Polly Stern has to cover one more manure runoff story, she's going to lose her already unmindful mind. Polly thought she'd end up as a serious photojournalist, traveling the world, meeting important people, and documenting significant environmental and social events. Life didn't turn out as expected. With her career at a standstill, her marriage over, her nest empty, her spiritual foundation precarious, and her family keeping a vital secret from her, Polly is desperate for answers. And change. She sets out on an unintended journey, stumbling upon story after story that for some reason—coincidence, fate?—all occurred in 1937. Polly's path leads her to: a troubled teen on a stone bridge high in the Green Mountains of Vermont, a political refugee on a kosher farm carved out of the Dominican Republic jungle, a tribal chief near a remote hut in uncharted Papua New Guinea, a volunteer soldier in a foggy olive grove in Spain, an artistic Italian savant in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and to a Tibetan boy and his snow-white mastiff as they begin their trek across the Himalayas. As the lines blur between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between present and past, Polly writes about these inspiring characters, and others, in nine short stories—all set in 1937—embedded throughout the novel. Her compelling international literary voyage reveals clues that allow Polly to uncover the truth about her own history, opening a new path for understanding, forgiveness, and love.

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In Kissing a Tree Surgeon, worlds traverse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in New Jersey. Southern women get kidnapped by North Koreans. A Dutch girl solicits money on OKCupid. A young woman meets Golda Meir on an Upper East Side bus in New York City. A character believes he's the biological son of Frank Sinatra. Zionist-Hasidic lesbians protest anti-Semitism at a women's Catholic college. A stalking moviegoer takes her dead grandmother to a Bertolucci film. A daughter meets her father's mistress at his grave. An employee is banned from calling her boss in the office. An adult woman visits the radio store in Lakewood, New Jersey, of the boy who didn't invite her to his bar mitzvah.

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Two unrelated, aspiring writers, born on the same day in the same year to parents with the same first names, grow up together and eventually gain national prominence as authors. As the years pass, the complex sexual identities of Miller Sark and Hal Pierce undermine their intense private relationship, inflicting damage that cannot be undone by the distinction of their fiction and poetry. Inspired by the lives and works of American literary giants Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane, This Cleaving and This Burning reveals the passion and purpose behind masks of public reputation and creative expression.

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This is a flip book with two novels: A Place In The Dark braids history, fiction and politics. It is set in Utica with substantial passages of painful, site-specific memories of the characters of both the Vietnam war and the American engagement in Iraq. These memories are carried by a Vietnamese immigrant woman living in Utica, who suffered in Saigon, an American Marine and Italian-American Utican who committed an atrocity during the siege of Khe Sanh, and an Iraqi who administered torture and worked as translator and interpreter in Baghdad on America's behalf. The central character is an ex-private investigator, of Utica, who is an Italian-American, beset by his long-standing guilt for his deferment from the draft during the Vietnam era and now suffering from serious heart disease. The Glamour of Evil deals with how, some males, especially literary/intellectual types, are drawn to violent men in organized crime. How they secretly desire intimacy with such people whom they find charismatic, powerful and uniquely free inside a world where the freedom of the individual is in much doubt. The novel features a legendary American Mafioso--who loved modern fiction and French existentialism--Crazy Joey Gallo and his dark world. This is combined with a whodunit involving Eliot Conte's daughter, a crisis that a connected man of literary flair promises to resolve for Conte--for an unusual price.

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The past infuses the present in the poems gathered in this collection. Painting a transformative Southeast wind helps restore a culture to a decimated people. Everyday events trigger a yearning for love from those already departed. A goldfish experiences poetry for the first time, again. An arduous trek through the Peruvian mountains leads to a stone that stops the sun. By turns ironic, comic, imagistic, experimental, these poems ask what?s next, and how we get there.

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Dervish at the Crossroads isn't a music guide so much as an autobiographical exploration of the experience of music from 2000 to 2020, with commentary on what makes the experience of music during these two decades radically different from all that came before. As the title of the book implies, due to the unique conditions of our time we can no longer think of ourselves as points on a series of evolutions; we're now much more present to all of music, from the beginning of written and recorded music, all of which turns around us like spokes on a wheel. This grants us a unique vantage point from which to appreciate music in itself. The book alternates text with a comics and infographics detailing the history of the author's discoveries as a music journalist during this time, along with personal experiences and ruminations and interviews.

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Dori's narrative is a heart-touching and zany blend of actual events in the life of a young Boxer. With edgy charm, she takes us on a romp through her world in such a way we can't help but reconsider our lives. Through her we get a dog's-eye view on human exploitation of animals. This unique approach is hauntingly effective.

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This rich volume begins with a very good-humoured memoir, "Alice Munro: Not Bad Short Story Writer"; by Munro's renowned Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, followed by powerful autobiographical pieces by fiction writer Jack Hodgins, playwright Judith Thompson, poet John B. Lee, poet-playwright-teacher James Reaney, and local historian Reg Thompson. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Country, including a previously unpublished interview with Munro by J.R. (Tim) Struthers and a superb essay by George Elliott Clarke on Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, take a cultural or historical or personal approach, while also providing judicious readings of the subtle literary dimensions of key Munro works.

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Elizabeth Macaluso's first volume of poetry, The Lighthouse, engages with the Italian American experience; it also explores gender, sexuality, and what it means to be a woman from Long Island. Macaluso captures the experiences of ethnic American women in this lyrical collection. She meditates on history, memory, war, and faith, all subjects germane to contemporary American and global cultures.

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Winner of the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in PoetryThey were shot, transported, deported. They were hanged, or they hanged themselves. They starved, or their hearts suddenly failed, or drugs or cancer consumed them. Others lived into their nineties, one even to 103. Nicola Vulpe's Insult to the Brain transports us from the gas-seeped muck of the Somme, to a tiny apartment in Buenos Aires, to an undisclosed prison yard in Iran, and a hundred times and places in between, to join some of the last century's finest poets in their final moments: horrific, tragic, ordinary, silly, absurd. Whether it is with the minimalist Gare de Rouen, 1916, dedicated to Émile Verhaeren, who was accidently dropped under a train by an adoring crowd, the lament The Poet Descends, Willing the Stairs, for Forough Farrokhzad, who swerved her car into a wall to avoid a school bus, or the openly political Death and His Kin, for Tal Almallouhi, who disappeared into a Syrian prison and may or may not be dead, Vulpe writes unblinkingly with clarity, kindness--even humour-- of our common fate, and brings us closer to the fragile core of our humanity.

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The adventure of discovering, then diving into the world of that esoteric and fascinating French "literary club", the Oulipo -- and the perils of trying to reconfigure the world's most famous monologue while abiding by their fiendishly challenging rules.

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In Rivers Applaud Forever, Raymond Filip, the craftsman and musician, showcases his spoken-word texts that perform on a silent page, as well as his say then play recitals on stage. This collection features free verse and end rhymes; satire and nature studies; a concrete poem and a proem; a linked sequence of narratives, and a long bird call to the uncaptured. Filip's peace process comes to terms with his birth and disfigurement in a displaced persons camp after World War II; the unspeakable abuses of growing up with domestic violence and a broken home in the riverside slums of Montréal; his adventures as part of the resistance movement that led to Lithuanian independence; the ups and downs of a mixed marriage to a Filipina; his battle with cancer; the journey of faith and global identity; and the joys of defying his age through his first love: sports.

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This story – part memoir, part historical fiction – spans a period of one hundred years, from 1914 to 2014, with the main emphasis being on the years of the two World Wars. It concentrates on the lives of real people –the author's parents, the author, a young pilot from New Jersey in WW1, and others – as well as some fictional characters, who all lived through one or both of the wars and were profoundly affected personally by them. Arise the Dead I focuses on World War I where the author's dad took part in the Battle of Loos (September 1915) and where he was wounded.

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A Japanese detective agency in Midwest America; a sex triangle with the vampish Angela at its apex, and love-sick Pohl and lust-warped Burnett at the receiving ends; a Fat Man devouring a huge luncheon amidst the splendors of his garden; and has-been vixen Violet seeking justice and revenge. Just some of the elements of No. 22 Pleasure City, a novel that ranges in flavor between Japanese manga, pulp fiction and tongue-in-cheek pornography. The novel is a story of betrayal, obsession, rejection, friendship, and--ultimately--redemption.

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In Fate's Instruments, picking up the story from where Paul's brother Jay left it in No Safeguards, Paul, an aspiring writer, marries Carlos, with whom he lived in Guatemala, and brings him to Montreal. Things go wrong from the beginning, and they break up. Then fate, in the form of a brain tumour, strikes Paul. He receives support from Jay, Lionel (himself a brain tumour survivor), friends, and the enigmatic Professor Bram. But it is Paul's exploration of his Vincentian childhood and new-found love that restores his equilibrium.

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Taking place during World War II, Somewhere in the Stars is the story of three young men from San Francisco -- Nick Spataro, his cousin Paolo, and friend Nathan Fein -- and their adventures as members of an American tank battalion chasing the Germans up the Italian peninsula, while Nick's Sicilian dad is interned as an "enemy alien" back in the USA. Despite encountering prejudice both at home and during their tank training, the three show uncanny skill in outmaneuvering and destroying German tanks, until their own tank is blown up. Tragic events both on and off the battlefield, bravery, guilt in the loss of friends, romance, trauma, feelings of regret, daring rescues and eventual re-union with loved ones make for a powerful and explosive mix.

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In 1941, 12-year-old Rivka Rosenfeld lives in the Warsaw Ghetto with her grandfather and two sisters in a synagogue because housing is scarce. When German soldiers slash her grandfather's beard, Rivka is compelled to write in between the pages of a library book by Hans Christian Andersen. Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, founder of the Underground Archive--a compilation of Warsaw Ghetto experiences, asks her to contribute her stories to the archives and Rivka agrees, imagining her words rising up from the ground on wings of their own.

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The unsolved murder of Fred Morelli, in Utica, New York, in 1947, comes to the fore more than 60 years later when 15-year-old Angel, hacker extraordinaire, has his guitar smashed by Victor Bocca, one of the original suspects in the murder. Angel hacks files that may point not only to Bocca's involvement but also that of the mob. From there, mayhem breaks loose as assassins descend on Utica to silence Angel. In the midst of it is Angel's adoptive father, Eliot Conte, who, along with his close friend Police Chief Antonio Robinson, must try to unravel the mystery of what is going on before more killings take place, including that of Angel himself.

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This book of essays examines the fictional work of Nino Ricci from a variety of critical perspectives. These perspectives include ideas about literature, culture, identity, politics, and society in terms of Canada and the modern world. Each contributor examines a specific novel or several novels, focusing on the prevailing themes and literary elements used by Nino Ricci to construct his work of fiction. This critical study allows the reader to enhance one's understanding of Nino Ricci's particular style and vision. It also provides an understanding of Nino Ricci's valuable contribution to contemporary Canadian fiction and world literature. The contributors in this book are: William Anselmi, Howard A. Doughty, Brian L. Flack, Lise Hogan, Marino Tuzi, and Jim Zucchero.

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Blood of My Blood eaves together the history, sociology and psychology of first, second, and third-generation Italian Americans. Its data is presented with scholarly precision; yet the author's personalized style, which he peppers with autobiographical tidbits, makes it immensely readable. Unlike most books written by academics, this one compels the reader to feel as well as to know.

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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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The year is 1950. A brutal racist attack drives Alfie Bagliato's family from their small town to New York City, where, at sixteen, Alfie dreams of escaping his Italian American enclave through a career in music and a romance with his distant cousin, Adeline. Soon enough, disappointment and frustration lead Alfie to join the military, to follow Adeline to San Francisco, and then to become a New York City cop, whose clash with protestors during the 1968 Columbia University student uprising nearly kills him, forcing him to confront his inherited bigotry and fear, as he wrestles with his lingering love for Adeline and need to find a new life.

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Once Our Lives is the true story of four generations of Chinese women and how their lives were threatened by powerful and cruel ancient traditions, historic upheavals, and a man whose fate – cursed by an ancient superstition – dramatically altered their destinies. The book takes the reader on an exotic journey filled with luxurious banquets, lost jewels, babies sold in opium dens, kidnappings by pirates, and a desperate flight from death in the desert – seen through the eyes of a man for whom the truth would spell disaster and a lonely, beautiful girl with three identities.

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This flip book features two separate novellas: In Sickness and In Health: Lily's most cherished goal in life has always been to be normal, so as an adult she has painstakingly constructed a normal life for herself, with family, friends, and career. But her need to keep hidden her invisible disability, due to its stigma and her shame, now threatens to destroy everything she has worked so hard for. Yom Kippur in a Gym: Five isolated strangers in a synagogue on Yom Kippur a day of intense reflection and soul-searching are each struggling with a major personal crisis, when unexpectedly they are thrown together by an emergency that, in one hour, changes all their lives forever.

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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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Enter the cross-cultural tale of gusto and enchantment, adaptation and loss, preserving the old ways of making a life. Presented in six acts with intermissions and curtain calls, it is a new form of literature presented in interactive libretto form. Read it silently, read it out loud, or step upon the imaginary stage of all life to commandeer the operatic recitative called sing/speak. Il Vagabondo is a love story-an opera rusticana of the people, by the people, for the people. It is all true.

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Almost daily scientists are sounding dire warnings about the effects of climate change. Our young will bear an unprecedented burden. They are eager to discover what can be done, as time slips away. But few of them – or us – are aware that global warming is but one facet of a looming planetary catastrophe. Most of the natural and social systems humans depend on for survival are also in various stages of collapse. Each failure will impact the other systems, including climate, in a series of feedback loops that can unleash a virtual tsunami of destruction, and do so far sooner than climate scientists, looking only at their own discipline, predict. The corona virus pandemic has shown how unprepared we are. Multiply its effects times 10, times 50, to get an idea of what's coming. We have entered what scientists term a "critical state," at the brink of an unstable precipice. The smallest push or pull, from any direction, could suddenly topple us. Despite the global scale of the emergency, its root causes are predominantly human and surprisingly simple. With courage to act, we can slow the devastating cascade and, perhaps, even reverse some of the worst impacts.

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The Tenderness and the Wood traverses cities, continents, and centuries searching for elusive swallows, symbolic of angels. It is a search for pre-religious purity in lyricism, resisting any sort of paraphrase or story that might later lead to easy codification. The result is an existential and agnostic gospel wherein redemption emerges as the transformative beauty of language itself

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This book is a collaborative work of Ted Goodden?s ceramic sculptures and Cornelia Hoogland?s poems. Specifically, they are responding through image and text to the 64 hexagrams contained in the ancient book of wisdom, the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Cosmic Bowling's calm weather lands in the midst of twitter storms in which everybody wants to start a conversation. Here's a conversation -- facilitated through visual art and poetry -- that's been going on for three millennia, one that asks the perennial question: How should we live now?

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Götterdämmerung is Len Gasparini's fifteenth book of poetry since the early 1970s. What distinguishes this collection from his earlier work is the long title poem: a tour de force that covers new ground in the genre of ecopoetics by launching an acerbic yet lyrical assault on the Anthropocene. Other poems explore such diverse themes as memory, art, and botany. Also included are three literary essays that evince the importance of language and imagination.

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When 26-year old Crito Di Volta is released after 10 years of psychiatric institutionalization, he develops and launches Mortarismo—a new socio-political, psycho-spiritual, artistic movement— with the aim of deinstitutionalizing, and eventually reconnecting with, all of humanity. Called a work of genius and a poem that exceeds Allen Ginsberg's Howl in both authenticity and intensity, di Saverio’s epic Crito Di Volta is a strong pronouncement on civil rights, religion and art; and a daring revolt against the platitudes of contemporary Western society.

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#1 Best Canadian Gay Fiction on GoodreadsWhen a long-lost sister shows up as a trans man named Luke, a series of precipitous events throws the lives of boyfriends Daniel and David into turmoil. While David attends an extravagant family reunion in Sicily, Daniel's ex Marcus plans the world-premiere of his one-man show. The couple's vertiginous exploration of sex, intimacy and love comes to a head when a shocking revelation tests their commitment and future together.

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A woman has her cat euthanized, a decision that causes her to become aware of her ability to kill. She writes, hand haunted by history, and returns to the forgotten memory of the time when her ancestors were animals. By writing, she tries to understand the psyche and its obvious manifestations of cruelty, which she sees every day in the media: rapes, murders, bombings of civilians, indifference towards the powerless, humans and animals that are made to suffer without remorse. This book is a cry provoked by existential questions: how to deal with the wickedness in the world, how to see one's own wickedness without sinking into despair. By writing, by openness to others, by compassion, she seems to be able to face life believing that, if she recognizes the presence of evil both in her and in the world, she will be able to respond by standing among the living.

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A g call to action and accountability. – Shelagh RogersNeedless to say, moments like now, when the hurdles to becoming a respected author are at their lowest. When the only hurdles to being published are the quality of your writing and your patience to deal with certain less and less important gatekeepers. Moments in history like this, must be acknowledged and celebrated. That's what this anthology is: It's a celebration. A moment to cry out, "Look how many of us have a voice! There are stories, and poetry in this country that are about people like me! I am not alone!"

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Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for PoetryThe poems in Swoon speak to the steady wending of a life's thematic drama: the falling / rising permutations across biographical phases. Indications are filtered through relationship, encounter, art, the natural world, and dream. Associations coalesce in a rhythmic clocking of feeling / thought. Randomness and accident may have a part to play, destiny and mystery, too; suggestion of a plot. There's storyline unfolding that resists a denouement.

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Shakespeare wrote at a unique historical turning point: the world was understood through poetry -- rather than through the science of observing it. In Shakespeare Beyond Science: When Poetry Was the World, Sky Gilbert's radical new research locates Shakespeare as a disciple of the Greek rhetorician Hermogenes, and a student of the Neo-Platonist Johannes Sturm. No, not just another 'interpretation' of the meaning of Shakespeare's work. Instead, a radical approach to Shakespeare as magician and rhetorician, as a post-structuralist, more concerned with form than content, and confident of the dangerous magical power of words not only to persuade but to construct our consciousness.

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How do you write about an artist who refused to be contained? Widely published and celebrated, Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was an influential Canadian artist and writer who gifted an extensive body of work that unfolded in nearly every dimension of media. Throughout his life, he continued to redefine his context for articulation. His early success and recognition as a painter and poet expanded to include a practice in photography, sculpture, film, performance and music improvisation. But his compulsion for articulation also manifested as a resistance towards resolution and an embracing of its provisionality.

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At war against Napoleon near bankrupt English mill-masters experiment with a new factory system acquiring machines to replace men. A young worker leads the Luddites attacking mills and smashing machines. With increased assaults and even murder North England feels the grip of terrorism. Government agents attempt to suppress the rebellion. In 1812 there are more British troops in North England than fighting Napoleon in Europe. Against the Machine relates the story of the diverse characters caught in this conflict. It unveils the rank exploitation which marked the Industrial Revolution. Timely, intense and reflective of another, technological revolution: our own.

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To fill gaping holes in their lives, the protagonists in The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness embark on bizarre quests that ultimately lead them astray. Whether a child savant who sings the lyrics to hundreds of songs (and never talks), a woman who has to decide whether to turn in her arsonist brother, a failed writer whose fictional character suddenly comes to life, an unhappy insurance examiner who discovers a fallen angel and decides to cash in on his find, or a successful, middle-class man who pines for the poet he once was, nothing is sacred in this collection of stories. Myth and imagination hold equal weight, authenticity and fable go hand-in-hand, and the lines between reality and illusion blur. Characters find themselves trapped, or at least, incapable of restoring their humanity. It may be sobering to observe such forays into darkness but underlying their failures is a tacit suggestion that perhaps they could have won out with more imagination, more strength, or simply with some encouragement. And some do; amidst the carnage of those who fail and disappear emerge some who acquire new strength to reconnect with the world.

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