Search results for ""anvil press publishers inc""

As Canada's punk poet laureate, Art Bergmann has been tearing up stages, and terrifying the music industry, for half a century. Often referred to as "Canada's Lou Reed," Art's story is one of rock and roll's great tales untold. Until now. From his days helping to lay the foundation of the Vancouver punk scene with The K-Tels, to his acclaimed solo work in the '80s and '90s, and a late career resurgence that has culminated with being named to the Order of Canada, The Longest Suicide chronicles every unlikely twist and turn Art's life has taken. Working with veteran music journalist Jason Schneider, Art lays it all out in his own inimitable way, with dozens of people who took part adding their own voices to corroborate (and sometimes dispute) the often-incredible chain of events. With cameos by John Cale, Bob Rock, The Clash, Bob Geldof and many others, The Longest Suicide is both a triumphant story of personal survival, as well as a unique glimpse inside the rise of alternative rock. Above all, it is a tribute to Canada's most unheralded singer-songwriter, whose greatness is only now being widely recognized. From the Introduction: "The story of Art Bergmann's career is perceived by many to be a succession of failures, but the story of Art's life? If Art doesn't have the best story, it is always the most magical." - Michael Turner, author of Hard Core Logo

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What if Billy the Kid not only didn't die, but was saved by a woman? History tells us that the short and violent life of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, ended at the hand of Pat Garrett on the moonless night of July 14, 1881. But I Am Billy the Kid tells a different story, straight from Billy himself. This revisionist history seen through the lens of a twenty-first century sensibility features the picaresque hero we thought we knew and the unexpected one that we don't; a fearless and determined young woman who is in no mood to be saved and would much prefer exacting her own revenge. Billy has been in an alcoholic haze since a failed attempt to escape notoriety by faking his own death. By 1915, his fame has only increased, and when word of a possible ruse leaks out, Billy finds himself once again on the run. He agrees to follow his elder brother Joseph north from New Mexico Territory, to possible sanctuary in Canada. Billy and Joseph encounter Turner Wing, a young woman with a fierce sense of self-determination and the skills with a gun to back it up, and her father, a man with a past and a burlap sack over his head due to a significant facial disfiguration. They are in desperate search of Turner's sister, who has been abducted by a pair of marauding thieves. Billy and Joseph know the truth about the girl's fate and, following their own code of honour, form an uneasy alliance with the Wings to avenge her death.

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Through forty-two personal essays, Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing brings together insights from writers and publishers across Canada on the practices that fuel their work, and invites readers to join the conversation through a series of engaging writing prompts. The essays collected here include strategies for pre-writing, writing and revision, as well as thoughts on the writing life and the world of writing. Resonance is for any writer of fiction, non-fiction or poetry who has ever wanted a helping hand, a quick chat or a word of encouragement along the lonely road from blank page to published work. Resonance seeks to build community and extend the practice of creativity to writers everywhere. Contributors include: Jen Sookfong Lee, Aislinn Hunter, Betsy Warland, Wayde Compton, Caroline Adderson, Kayla Czaga, JJ Lee, Carleigh Baker and Jónína Kirton.

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Part travelogue, part autofiction, part record of living under Western regimes that torture, kidnap, and murder its own citizens and those who wish to cross its borders, White Lie is a collection of super-short fictions. Written to be read in a book, but written on a phone, about that technology, about how our stories today blend into factual-seeming fictions and lying propaganda. Repressed memories of living in repressive societies. Like Tierra Whack's album of one-minute rap songs or Stan Douglas' Monodramas. Shorter than a stand-up comic's joke and longer than a criminal tyrannical president's tweet. A museum room full of paintings you zoom thru in thirty seconds or Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould. New fakes for attention spans that ... what was I saying? Something something the age of distraction. You get me. Clint Burnham's White Lie is a series of quick bursts - hilarious, tragic, and thoughtful in turn. You won't forget these paragraph-length stories because you will read them again and again.

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Geoff Inverarity writes poems for people who don't like poetry (and those who do). In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents, hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself. But it's not all shattered dreams and sad-luck stories here, there is hope and optimism too - in the future, in the Now, and in the heat and power of the coming generations. And there are poems of memory, poems for grandfathers and aging aunts, children and lost loves. Inverarity also probes the the multitude of possibilities "in this fallen world of compromises," gently reminding us that "we're stockpiling for the short term / the long term we don't know. / No matter how much you prepare / there's always something new looming / like the Unexploded Grief Bomb." It is a world where we struggle to give back the past, to finally get to the point "where the past does not exist" and "where all history is now." The penultimate entry is "Mars Variations," a wonderfully extended suite of complementary poems, a time-traveling fractal narrative: a sci-fi horror movie for the ears, referencing works as disparate as Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Wordsworth's "Prelude," and horror films like Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man along with nods towards the various iterations of Godzilla; and of course the classic 1962 "Mars Attacks" Topp's Bubble Gum cards - which form a framing device. The sequence explores the relationship between time, fiction, and facts; between public history and private experience. The book concludes with a short Epilogue, assuring us that "one day, all the broken things will be mended."

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There is something of the elemental in Outlasting the Weather, Patrick Friesen's Selected and New poems 1994-2020. Over time, the elements shape new worlds. Wind carves a stone bowl, the earth receives our dead. The poems are archaeological digs through layers of a life lived without the certainty of belief. Covering twenty-six years and selected from eight previous volumes, the poems in this collection reject wisdom; rather, they are infused with the kind of knowledge that comes from having weathered many seasons yet still remaining open to wonder. Perhaps, writes Friesen of his late father, you are in that grave where we laid you but I am child enough to think the sky. And for a moment we all look up, transported, filled with the endless possibilities offered by a poet for whom poetry is a way of thinking. The volume wraps up with, "New Work," twenty-seven new poems that display the poet's vast and prodigious talents.

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Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. The acclaimed author of the memoir, In the Slender Margin, turns her focus back to poetry in this amazing and condensed work of prose poetry. The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor's hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists. PRAISE FOR EVE JOSEPH'S PREVIOUS WORK: "To Joseph, it makes as much sense for the dead to appear as spirits glowing in midair as for them to be inert and terminated." (The New York Times) "Poet and essayist Joseph (The Startled Heart) serves up luminous, poetic prose in this thoughtful look at dying, grief, burial, and how animals react to loss, among many related topics." (The Publishers Weekly) "In the Slender Margin is intended as an exploration rather than a balm or solace, though it will no doubt be those things for some people. Its resonance comes, rather, from its intelligent open-endedness, its unflinching, simultaneous embrace of death's reality and persistent mystery." (Globe and Mail) "I was haunted by the gentling towards innerness and by the way the poem slowly opens up to the world at large. White Camellias' is a geography of the moment before the moment passes." (Barry Dempster) "The Startled Heart is a memorable collection that tugs on death's sleeve, sometimes with the innocence of a child, sometimes with the ache of the unforgiving." (Georgia Straight)

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Melissa Bull's debut short story collection The Knockoff Eclipse and Other Stories hums with the immediacy of distant and future worlds. Firmly rooted in the streets of Montreal and its many neighbourhoods and subcultures, Bull zooms in on the female experience while playing with societal expectation and literary convention. Spattered with bits of French, many of the stories pull back the covers on the intersection between French and English Canada. In the titular story "The Knockoff Eclipse," we're transported to a future world where women's clothing quite literally advertises their supposed wants and desires. Wanda and Henry meet in an old divebar turned trendy futurist café. "I used to be a model. But I got tired of people looking at me," she tells Henry. The theme of looking or being looked at runs through the entire collection, female bodies and the women who inhabit them must constantly contend with the masculine gaze, which is often internalized in such a way that it seems inescapable. The Knockoff Eclipse is dark like Duras, flippant comme Sagan, with elements of the surreal running through. These stories are modern feminist fables for the reader who is decidedly uninterested in upholding the moral of the story as it's been traditionally told.

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Everything is just a little more difficult for poor thirty-something Margaret Rudge. Adjusting to single life after her no-good husband Tommy leaves her for a shrink, Margaret manages to snag a job slinging coffee on the street. "Everyone hooks up waiting for their latte," her sometimes-fabulous friend Cindy advises. And maybe it's good advice because it's while working at Frank's coffee cart that she meets a handsome young dancer and is drawn into the exhilarating and slightly unhinged world of a NYC modern dance company. Margaret is stuck in a jack-in-the-box, and author Mark Wagstaff expertly mans the crank, turning the lever over and over, letting eerie circus music slowly fill your head. Will she find what she's looking for? Is it hiding in the strangely lit aisles of her downstairs grocery store? Maybe it's avoiding her calls, holed up with a new girlfriend, the cognitive psychology graduate, in a condo in Phoenix. Or maybe, just maybe, it's coffee-stained and unexpectedly expected. In Attack of the Lonely Hearts, each character is broken in their own forlorn way. A master of the dark and witty one-liner, Wagstaff manages to spin a hilarious and off-kilter story about what can happen when lonely hearts discover they're attached to even lonelier bodies.

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Selected and with an Introduction by Stuart Ross Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn't exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest. Bad Engine brings together mostly revised versions of about one hundred poems selected from Dennis's published work, along with several dozen new poems. This volume, introduced and edited by Dennis's long-time friend, the poet and editor Stuart Ross, marks a milestone in the career of a homegrown, no-bullshit, tells-it-likes-he-sees-it populist bard. Here the reader will find a rollicking tale of drinking with racists, poignant prayers for quiet nights with lovers, raw narratives of childhood abuse, defiant anthems of a body broken by sports injuries, a mindful meditation about a stoned dragonfly, and the not-quite resigned laughter of a man smashing away at a keyboard for four decades and becoming neither rich nor famous. Bad Engine is Michael Dennis being human.

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Heroines Revisited is a large format follow-up volume to the original Heroines: Photographs by Lincoln Clarkes that was released by Anvil in 2002. This new edition features over 150 portraits accompanied by three new critical essays that contextualize the five-year photo project and the controversial body of work. The Heroines Project is an epic photo documentary of the addicted women that were living and working in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in the late '90s and early 2000s. University of Western Ontario professor Kelly Wood writing in Philosophy of Photography states, "Heroines forced viewers and respondents to take sides in an uneasy ethical dialogue that does not acknowledge the series' uncanny ability to perform against viewers' expectations of certain visual categories and discusses how these expectations might preclude photography's ability to enact or incite political change." Essays by Kelly Wood, Paul Ugor, and Melora Koepke; Interview with the artist by Theresa Norris.

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The Shining by Stanley Kubrick - that strange story in which a writer and his wife and young son with ESP stay in a mysterious hotel in low season - has been fascinating viewers since its release in 1980. Simon Roy first saw the film when he was 10 and was mesmerized by a particular line: "How'd you like some ice cream, Doc?" He has since seen the movie at least 42 times, because "it encompasses the tragic symptoms of a deep-seated defect that has haunted [it] for generations." The painstaking bond he has knitted with this story of evil has enabled him to absorb the disquieting traits of its "macabre lineage" and fully reveal its power over him. This is an unusual and astonishing book. In this truly remarkable debut, Simon Roy has produced a highly original, unsettling, and fascinating account. This essay will appeal not only to Kubrick fans but also to readers who are attuned to life's hardships and mindful of the strength needed to overcome them. Praise for Kubrick Red: "Such is the off-centre, episodic nature of this book that it's hard to find parallels elsewhere in literature." (Vancouver Sun)

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As If is a collection of stories that, as its title suggests, points at an indubitable truth: all literature is speculative. Goulden's, however, extends past the boundaries of conventional fiction into areas traditionally occupied by fantasy and magic realism. These stories rail against the industrial and digital mechanisms of our age and, in the great fabulist tradition, call upon its characters to take action, to reach beyond the repetitive anxiety of being a cog in the wheel of mechanical environmental destruction. Sound too ethereal and abstract? It isn't. These stories are grounded in the physical reality of Vancouver and the Prairies of Canada, and they are grounded in the people who live there, whose successes and failures are kick-started by abrupt changes in their physical world. How the characters react to those challenges initiates a multitude of potential results. As if. Some say that writing is a tool to tell ourselves stories about who and why we think we are. The characters in As If encounter physical laws that challenge conventional mindsets, and they create reality models whose assumptions don't always play out in expected ways. They are then compelled to revise their understanding of themselves and their world. Forced evolution? Maybe. These stories invite the reader to look down the highway, see what might be coming, and see what they might be able to do. Praise for As If: "From the little lies in 'Joy' to sud- den loss in 'As If,' to Mr. Jimmy in 'The Painted Hand,' Goulden looks at all the ways one's world can collapse. Each story works to steal the floor out from under its protagonist, with little or no warning, giving the overall impression that there's no such thing as sure footing in this world." (BC Bookworld)

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Rowan Friesen has made a career of drug dealing and small-time thievery. He lives a loners life on the outer reaches of Saskatoon, selling cystal meth to highschoolers and hawking his pilfered loot on the net. Shiftless and seemingly friendless, he is, at first glance, an unlikely and unlikable protagonist. But as Stolen unfolds, we learn the details of Rowans life: his well-meaning but self-absorbed mother, his mentally ill father, and a high school friendship both lustful and incendiary. Praise for Stolen: Lapointe constructs the familiar world, the one inside each of us, in the lives of strangers. Its what fiction does best. The Globe & Mail It moves with the force of whats right and true and must not be elided. Giller Prize Jury Giller Prize Nominee Winner, Saskatchewan Book Awards Best First Book (City of Saskatoon Book Award) Globe & Mail Top 5 First Fiction

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Glossolalia is an unflinching exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, and sexuality as told in a series of poetic monologues spoken by the thirty-four polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Marita Dachsels second full-length collection, the self-avowed agnostic feminist uses mid-nineteenth century Mormon America as a microcosm for the universal emotions of love, jealousy, loneliness, pride, despair, and passion. Glossolalia is anextraordinary, often funny, and deeply human examination of what it means to be a wife and a woman through the lens of religion and history.

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In Greek mythology the muses preside over the arts and inspire writers and artists to produce works of genius. In 'Frenzy', Catherine Owen pays homage to the muses in a six-part compilation of muse-quests, some the author's, some those of others. In "Flood-Ghazals," she takes the leaping form of the Persian ghazal and makes it fluid, out of entirely, loosened from its couplet bounds and set free as an unravelled block of threads. "Cobalt Moments" are paeans to a place and its temporalinhabitants-a punk-metal bar in Vancouver and some of its crazy denizens, an attempt to capture the rhythms of this hypnotizing zone of intense music and liminal people. "Opposite Angel's" is a satirical fable of the muse-seeker. How the artist, perhaps unwittingly, ends up placing their muses, especially when they are human, alive, and of the desired gender, on a pedestal. "One Week in Her Life" covers eight random days, in which the poet rambles through the urban world, facing various incongruities, griefs, absurdities, while reveling in little glimpses of peace. "agitate" is a long poem about a photographer's sojourn along a Vancouver Island beach on a trek to chronicle sea surfaces. Environmental, gendered, and artistic critique collide in her mental and physical reality as she dreams of emerging from the frenzy to establish one pure moment of beauty in the world. "Catherine Owen is a neo-romantic bard whose idiosyncratic poetry is barbed with aspects of Tough Love wed to the groom of nihilism. This poet wears a black mood for a wedding dress as she casts invective against bourgeois normalcy. Mistress of neologism and its conflicted ally-ambiguity?-this musifier is unabashedly shameless in making herself "lovesick". A poet taster's head spins, which may not be a bad thing. In an era of political correctness and its self-righteous terrorisms, Owen's muse skateboards over society's niceties as her love junkie heart leaps like an adolescent butterfly. Revel in the nuancesof light and darkness doing a tango in the ineffable quest for the muse's many forms." - Joe Rosenblatt (poet, artist, editor, and recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award) "Catherine Owen is an extraordinarily gifted poet. It's not just the sheer sonic pleasure of her language or the largesse of her endlessly inventive imagery but that she is unsettled and unsettling, deeply disobedient and yet almost selfless in her surrender to form. These poems, and especially the Flood-Ghazals, take you down and then drag you up again, gasping for air." -Robert Priest (poet, songwriter, playwright, winner of the Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Award)

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'Suburban Pornography' is contemporary literature, which documents Canadian urban life in a raw and naked manner. The prose is stripped-minimalist, direct, urgent, unflinching. The stories revolve around ordinary characters and problems-people stuck in bad relationships or jobs. Some yearn for something just beyond their grasp, something authentic to knock them out of their malaise. Their frailties and obsessions are front and centre. They are garbage men, bus drivers, waitresses, soupkitchen clients, and neighbourhood perverts-tired and busy, too weary to contemplate-from social conditions that sanction only mere existence in redemption's agony and fleeting glory. " 'Suburban Pornography' surpasses a generic understanding of a tell-it-like-it-is literary form, born from American 20th century fiction, and delivers a unique Canadian voice offering a universal reflection of troubled humanity." - Discorder "What makes 'Suburban Pornography' so memorable is the brutally honestsnapshots of the inner-city ill-privileged and sad-sack suburbanites who fuck, suck, bleed, bruise, cruise and search for love among the loveless." - Xpress

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'Body Breakdowns' is a collection of true tales about brushes with mortality and the medical establishment. Some are serious, some are funny; all are about illnesses, both minor and major. The pieces are all related to aging and are told in strong, engaging, and authentic voices. They are about people suddenly discovering they're vulnerable and the different ways they come to terms with that, as well as how they deal with the health professionals whose job it is to provide care for ourbodies. They are also about how people who have physically suffered learn to find words for and, thus, shape the new world they find themselves in. These stories remind us that everything can change in a moment. And that we're all in these aging bodies together. Janis Harper, the Vancouver-based teacher and actor who edited this beautiful little book of personal, intimate stories, some nearly gemlike in their clarity, believes she might have felt less afraid, less isolated, if others who'd hadexperiences similar to hers had shared some of her fears." - The Gazette

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'Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit' is a singularly Canadian novel featuring crime, culture, and sports. Written in the vein of John Kennedy Toole ( 'Confederacy of Dunces') and JP Donleavy, 'Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit' is set in Vancouver during an early 80s Grey Cup weekend. Tourists and sports aficionados have descended on the city in record droves. There are, however, a few folks who have other interests and plans. Three small-time career crooks are planning a heist on one of the city's exclusive hotels. Enter Harry Pazik Jr., a good ole boy from Calgary, who is inadvertently swept up in the mayhem of the crooks' boondoggle. Meanwhile, across town at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, rehearsals of 'La Traviata' are in full swing. The 300-pound stage manager has toppled to the orchestra pit, crushing the tuba player, while Jorgen Thrapp, assistant to the Lighting Director, is busy behind the scenes with his dealings in drugs and numbers running for a crooked printer intent on making a killing on the big game. Everyone gets more than they bargained for in this slapstick Grey Cup-meets- 'Goodfellas' romp. "Only connect' was E.M. Forster's advice to writers, and Osborne connects like a mad electrician in a power plant." -The Vancouver Sun "Smart dialogue, fast action, and a mix of liquor and drugs fuel this clever tale." -North Shore News

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'Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer' is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he's sold thousands of his books in the streets, published and edited magazines, trained insurgents in his Poetry Boot Camps, and started Canada's first Small Press Book Fair. Where the media focusses only on the glamorous literary lives of its few superstars, Ross gives us a glimpse into How Writers Really Live. In 'Confessions', he declares himself the King of Poetry, explores his floundering Jewish identity, wanders into the best bookstore in Canada, offers a crash course in avoiding writing, pisses off his publishers, runs a renegade Canada booth at the International Book Fair in Managua, and begs egomaniacal young writers to stop bugging the hell out of him. Many of these essays are culled from Ross's bimonthly "Hunkamooga" column in 'Word: Toronto's Literary Calendar'. Others are written specifically for this collection. " 'Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer' is a wonderful book - funny, outrageous, and acute. I'll even say it's the best short-essay collection aout writing life that I've read in ages." - Canadian Literature

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'Lonesome Monsters' is a collection of prose and poetry from Vancouver writer Bud Osborn. Mr. Osborn's writing is as much chronicle, confession, testimony, as it is poetry-an unwavering account of inner-city struggle and the tenacity of the human spirit. "Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn's 'Lonesome Monsters' successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life." - Geist Magazine

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Originally published in 2014, In the Slender Margin was enthusiastically received and applauded for its respectful sensitivity in dealing with a subject that is still, to many, an avoidable topic of conversation: death and dying. Using her 20+ years' experience working as a palliative care counsellor in a hospice as a springboard for exploration, Joseph probes our collective knowledge of that final life experience that we all must face. Intimately personal and wise, this award-winning poet gives us a deep and profound musing, a "wise and lyrical meditation" on the slender margin, that mysterious slip of geography between life and death. From the Preface: "First published in 2014, In the Slender Margin was/still is, a meditation of sorts on death and dying. It did not prescribe then, nor does it now, ways to move through grief in order to find closure. I wrote the book as a way of understanding what I had seen in my years as a hospice counsellor. In the process of writing and thinking about death from many different angles, I found the brother I had lost many years ago and, fifty years after his death, was able finally to mourn and hold him close. COVID-19 has initiated many discussions about mortality. It is my hope that this book can add, in whatever way, to those conversations." Praise for In the Slender Margin: "In the Slender Margin is intended as an exploration rather than a balm or solace, though it will no doubt be those things for some people. Its resonance comes, rather, from its intelligent open-endedness, its unflinching, simultaneous embrace of death's reality and persistent mystery." (Globe and Mail) "A literate, free-association meditation on the final fact of life." ( Kirkus Reviews ) "Intricate and beautiful . . . Provides an intimate language for grief and makes death a site of wonder as much as pain. . . . In her careful prose, her encounters with the dead, dying and mourning take on a kind of grace." ( National Post )

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The award-winning author of Afflictions & Departures turns her kaleidoscopic lens on England in the 1970s in Queasy, a series of linked memoirs. While still grieving her father's death and the end of her first romantic relationship, Madeline Sonik moved with her mother from Windsor, Ontario to the seaside village of Ilfracombe in North Devon, England. As a teen at war with herself, nothing could have prepared her for the incredible cultural differences that she would encounter, nor the social and political tumult that was England at the time - trade union strikes, mass unemployment, IRA violence, and crippling taxes. Waiting tables and working as a chambermaid at local hotels, she talked politics among friends and work mates, with hot cups of tea throughout the day and pints of lager in the evening. Margaret Thatcher - the "Iron Lady" - loomed large as opposition leader and was fast gaining popularity, even amongst segments of the working class. The country seemed poised on the cusp of change and a new direction. It was in this unlikely crucible of hope and despair, of promise and discord where the author found the sustenance to fuel her development as a person and as a writer.

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Infused with the spirit of Charles Bukowski, these down to earth poems by Downtown Eastside warrior poet, Henry Doyle, take readers on a hard-scrabble journey, starting from Doyle's early years as a runaway from foster homes, an incarcerated youth, a boxer, and a homeless wage-earner living in shelters and on the streets of Ottawa and Toronto, to his eventual arrival in Vancouver to work in the construction labour pools before landing work as a custodian and maintenance man. Doyle's potent combination of gritty realism, weary wisdom and wry humour make No Shelter an unforgettable collection.

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From the street, New Westminster's Hollywood Hospital didn't look like much - just a rambling white mansion, mostly obscured behind the holly trees from which it took its name. But, between 1957 and 1968, it was the site of more than 6000 supervised acid trips, as part of the burgeoning (and controversial) field of psychedelic psychiatry. Under the care of Medical Director J Ross MacLean, and ex-spy/researcher Al "Captain Trips" Hubbard, it became a mecca for alcoholics, anxiety patients, and unhappy couples (as well as celebrities like Andy Williams), its unorthodox methods boasting a success rate of nearly 80%. But the same media attention that brought the hospital to prominence also assured its downfall, as prohibition forces drove their work underground for more than 50 years. Written by 49.2 regular Jesse Donaldson and academic historian Erika Dyck, The Acid Room takes readers into the hospital's inner sanctum, charting its meteoric rise and fall as it opened up brave new worlds in medicine, and put Canada at the forefront of a movement that is only now being fully explored.

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The book-length prose poem The Headless Man takes up Georges Bataille's subversive image of the acéphale and turns him into an outsider "everyman" to explore the paradoxes of identity, the body, and desire. This oddly fractured tale centres the monster, both human and inhuman, recognizable yet strange, in a labyrinth of experience. The Headless Man awakens in a place that, although based on our own world, is unfamiliar to him. Moving through this strange landscape, he must make sense of it through his actions, striving to determine whether there is a place for him in a world not made in his image, or whether he must imagine something different in order to be. Having no head, he cannot speak, see, or hear in the usual ways, so he must learn to do these things using other parts of his body-which leads him to a fuller sense of himself. In this gothic, picaresque narrative, laced with horror and humour, Montreal surrealist Peter Dubé addresses his concern with queer challenges to identity and sexual boundaries, exploring questions about insider and outsider, what constitutes the "normal," and what is relegated to the realm of the "monstrous."

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Winner of the 41st International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest Alan is unsure if he is dead or dreaming, he only knows that he is stuck in a loop. He finds himself being forced to walk along a straight path through an unending pine forest where any deviation from the path causes him to black out and begin again. Dipping in and out of an endless purgatorial walk, Alan relives key moments in his life where he missed the opportunity to learn, escape, and change: The death of his mother, an abusive relationship with his father, and the opportunity to connect with his only real friend, a neighbour he never speaks to named Edgar. The Loop chronicles the life of an alcoholic who is unable to escape his past to explore the ways in which abuse can shape someone into their abuser and the ways trauma can transfer from one generation to the next. How much of who we are is who we are? How much of it is someone else? What if this has all happened before?

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And This Is the Cure follows Allison Winter, public radio pop-culture journalist and former riot grrrrrl as she regains custody of her adolescent daughter, Hanna, following the murder of her ex-husband. She is unprepared to deal with either the demands of parenting or the fury of her ex-husband's religiously conservative, grieving family, so she pulls up roots and moves Hanna from Winnipeg to Toronto. Allison's sweet-natured partner, Eden, struggles to take on the day-to-day parenting while Allison resumes her career and avoids the chaos building at home. Despite all efforts, tensions swell and Hanna's rage over her disrupted life eventually erupts in episodes of violence. Allison's past histories - as a frontwoman for a riot grrrrrl band and her earlier history as a runaway from a conservative Christian family - return to haunt her present life. Her former bandmates want to reunite for a tour of Japan, and her sister demands help in caring for their difficult and aging mother. Allison decides it would be best for them all to return to Winnipeg, but this only sparks a whole new chapter of familial conflict, and precipitates a disastrous event that forces Allison to confront her estranged relationship with her mother and come to terms with her own troubled past. And This Is the Cure is a novel about the weight of unresolved baggage - its pain and trauma - and working through the process of healing and moving on.

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At the heart of Mysterious Dreams of the Dead is the spiritual search for a father who died in a plane crash north of Lake Superior when his son was fifteen. Mike Shintani decides in his early thirties to address the curious circumstances surrounding his father's death; the senior Shintani's body was never found, and wolves circled the crash site as if guarding the area. The impetus for Mike's search for truth is a diary he found in the basement of his home. It was obviously his father's, but it was written in Japanese. Mike never knew his father could write Japanese. He himself could neither read nor write the language. He was fortunate enough to enlist the help of Naoko Ito, a Japanese grad student at the University of Toronto. It turned out, the book was a dream diary, filled with poetry, descriptions of the surreal, and the story of a love affair with a woman named Chiemi. Chiemi is at the centre of the elder Shintani's dreams, and Naoko, after some time, seemingly disappears into thin air. Both appear as ghosts in dreams. Another great mystery of Mike's life is the behaviour of one of his best friends, Boku Sugiura, who decides one day to rob a bank, in the name of his grandfather and redress for Japanese Canadians. The two strains of the novel come together in Moose Jaw. Mike discovers the truth about his father's life and Boku's uncle (Daniel Sugiura from the Three Pleasures), a protestor in the Moose Jaw stand-off. Through elements of the Japanese ghost story (kwaidan), magic realism, and Buddhist myth, secrets are revealed and explored. The Mysterious Dreams of the Dead is an imaginative examination of the effect of the exile, internment, and dispersal on the third-generation of Japanese Canadians (the Sansei).

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BC Bestseller! Even before it was a city, Vancouver was a property speculator's wet dream. "There are more speculators about New Westminster and Victoria than there were in Winnipeg during the boom," CPR Chief WC Van Horne warned a friend in 1884, "and they are a much sharper lot. Nearly every person is more or less interested and you will have to be on your guard against all of them." Ever since Europeans first laid claim to the Squamish Nation territory in the 1870s, the real estate industry has held the region in its grip. Its influence has been grotesquely pervasive at every level of civic life, determining landmarks like Stanley Park and City Hall, as well as street names, neighbourhoods, even the name "Vancouver" itself. Land of Destiny aims to explore that influence, starting in 1862, with the first sale of land in the West End, and continuing up until the housing crisis of today. It will explore the backroom dealings, the skulduggery and nepotism, the racism and the obscene profits, while at the same time revealing that the same forces which made Vancouver what it is, speculation and global capital, are the same ones that shape it today, showing that more than anything else, the history of real estate and the history of Vancouver are one and the same. And it's been dirty as hell. About the Series: Land of Destiny is the first title in Anvil's new series "49.2: Tales from the Off Beat," an ongoing series dedicated to celebrating the eccentric and unusual parts of city history. From Jesse Donaldson, author of the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award finalist book This Day In Vancouver, and a host of other local historians, the series will be an in-depth examination of the weird, the wonderful, and the terrible, injecting fresh details into well-worn local lore, or digging deep into the obscure people, places, and happenings of the last 130 years. From psychedelic hospitals to town fools, from communist organizers to real estate scumbags, 49.2 will take pains to break down the myths surrounding the City of Glass.

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Raymond Souster Award nominee. Finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima. This long-poem memoir tracks the author's experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself. Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, Trauma Head disturbs and disorders language and syntax to reconcile appearance with experience. Advance Praise for Trauma Head: "Elee Kraljii Gardiner's Trauma Head is a quicksilvered mirror-a startling and exquisite sequence of poems. The unspeakable' reflected is intensely fierce and sublimely sensual. Difficult, devastating, and meticulously crafted, this work is a rewarding chronicle of persistence through the trauma of recovery and return. Speech and soma are disrupted, shattered, unsheathed and reshaped-and they shimmer with Kraljii Gardiner's luminous strength and control." - Sandra Ridley, author of Silvija (2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist)

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2017 Foreword INDIES Finalist (Historical, Adult Fiction). 1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The RCMP are rounding up "suspicious" young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC's interior are only months away. Daniel Sugiura, a young reporter for the New Canadian, the only Japanese-Canadian newspaper allowed to keep publishing during the war, narrates The Three Pleasures. The story is told through three main characters in the Japanese community: Watanabe Etsuo, Morii Etsuji and Etsu Kaga, the Three Pleasures. Etsu in Japanese means "pleasure"; the term is well-suited to these three. Morii Etsuji, the Black Dragon boss, controls the kind of pleasure men pay for: gambling, drink and prostitution the pleasures of the flesh. Watanabe Etsuo, Secretary of the Steveston Fishermen's Association, makes a deal with the devil to save his loved ones. In the end, he suffers for it and never regains the pleasures of family. And there is Etsu Kaga, a Ganbariya of the Yamato Damashii Group, a real Emperor worshipper. His obsession becomes destructive to himself and all involved with him. He enjoys the pleasure of patriotism until that patriotism becomes a curse. The Three Pleasures is an intimate and passionate novel concerning an unsightly and painful period in Canada's history. "Terry Watada's literary tour de force, The Three Pleasures, lifts the Japanese Canadian internment experience beyond passive victimization by giving life to a host of historical figures heroes, villians and tragic characters in a fascinating yet little-known resistance movement within the camps. An absolute page-turner and worthy read." (jim wong-chu)

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A finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, Ignite is a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. Born into a strict Mennonite family, Abe Spenst's mental illness spanned three decades in and out of mental institutions where he underwent electric shock treatment and coma-induced insulin therapy. Merging memory and medical records, Kevin Spenst recreates his father's life through a cuckoo's nest of styles that both stand as witness and waltz to the interplay between memory, emotion and all our forms of becoming. Praise for Ignite: "... with a fearless layering of voice, Ignite is upfront and unswerving. A novel-esque torrent tracing a troubling history of illness, part confrontation and part chronicle, this collection is daring with its dark narrative. Here is a willingness for, and enviable strength in, extending poetic range. Ignite heals and ascends. There are books that need to be written and this is one of them. This is a collection which gives more and more with every read." (Sandra Ridley, judge, Alfred G. Bailey prize) "An outstanding follow-up to Spenst's excellent first collection. (Winnipeg Free Press)" A selection of poems from Ignite won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry.

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Montaigne Medal Finalist (Eric Hoffer Awards) The stories in Cretacea and Other Stories from the Badlands mostly take place in hot weather, where dust and sweat envelop everyone and everything. A teenage boy spends a summer with his hard-livin', hard-drinkin', messed up uncle and has to fight for a position in his new, temporary "family." A recent widower gets swept up in the world of the local swingers' scene. A band of misfits struggles to survive at a makeshift commune. An eccentric woman with OCD has a strange fetish that involves the prescription delivery boy. For no particular reason, a fossil-collecting, poetry-reading loner decides to turn sniper and shoot up the town - selecting only non-human targets. Asphyxia games with a sexy transvestite go seriously awry. A distraught man enlists his friendly neighbour in a nighttime river search for his lost daughter. Bored and desperate couples in a trailer park find unique ways to work out their kinks. The plans of a primed-for-action threesome are suddenly derailed when a badly beaten dog is spotted tied up to a parking meter. Fossils and prehistoric sleeping creatures, cattle, rivers, dusty highway gas stations, truck stop diners, guys in small towns with dead-end jobs and unfulfilled dreams, the smell of sage and the sound of cicadas in the air, and redemption is nowhere to be found ... This is not the Alberta world of oil and hockey and wheat, but of people at night, living alternate lives, wearing clothes that usually remain hidden in the depths of closets. When they emerge from these closets wearing these clothes, these shopkeepers, lawyers, and students do things to themselves and each other that it would take Freud to explicate. Everywhere in the valley lies the fear of loneliness, the obsession with desire, and the human fixation with the unknown. Praise for Cretacea & Other Stories from the Badlands: "[I]n Martin West's impressive debut short story collection ... readers will encounter echoes of Flannery O'Connor and Barry Hannah."(Foreword Magazine) "the 11 tales in Martin West's debut collection ... often surprise with strange, startling images." (Alberta Views)

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Nathaniel G. Moore follows up his 2014 ReLit Award win for Savage with a diverse collection of short fiction, his first, Jettison, featuring stories which dangle somewhere between horror and romance. "Jaws" explores a father's desire to over-share the erotic origins of his children's "Aunt" Louise; "Blade Runner" uncovers the darkest and most hilarious aspects of dating by delineating the psych ward politics surrounding a male mental patient with five girlfriends who takes apart his bed when they visit; in "A Higher Power," readers are introduced to a brave woman in recovery who shares a story about a time when all she could think about was Prime Minister Paul Martin and would do anything to crash charity dance-a-thons he might be attending; in "Son of Zodiac," Moore captures the ache of a life-spanning meltdown in the painfully polite confessions of a man who believes his father was the Zodiac Killer. Be grateful as you witness a portrait of vulgar torment when a young woman is given an English professor action figure for Christmas ("Professor Buggles"). Each of these stories is an all-inclusive getaway to hilarity and emotional atonement. Jettison is an all-you-can-eat buffet of literary invention: you'll be so glad you got an invite. Praise for Jettison: "wickedly fun to read" (Winnipeg Free Press)

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Most civic histories celebrate progress, industry, order, and vision. This isn't one of those. Vancouver Confidential is a collaboration of artists and writers who plumb the shadows of civic memory looking for the stories that don't fit into mainstream narratives. We honour the chorus line behind the star performer, the mug in the mugshot, the victim in the murder, the teens in the gang, and the "slum" in the path of the bulldozer. By focusing on the stories of the common people rather than community leaders and headliners, Vancouver Confidential shines a light on the lives of Vancouverites that have for so long been ignored. This new collection takes a fresh look at the raw urban culture of a port city in the mid-twentieth century. These were years when Hastings and Main was still a dynamic commercial hub, when streetcars thrummed through the city streets, and when "theatre" meant vaudeville and burlesque. Street gambling and illegal boozecans peppered the map, brothels and bootleggers served loggers and shoreworkers, and politicians were almost always larger than life. This collection of essays and art illuminates aspects of a city that was too busy getting into trouble to worry about whether it was "world class." The collection includes essays from Tom Carter, Aaron Chapman, Jesse Donaldson, James Johnston, Lani Russwurm, Eve Lazarus, Diane Purvey, Catherine Rose, Rosanne Sia, Jason Vanderhill, Stevie Wilson, Jim Wong-Chu, Will Woods, Terry Watada, and John Belshaw.

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In prose thats as sharp as broken glass and shot through with poetry, Teresa McWhirter unlocks the extraordinary subculture of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties. Most startling of all are the portraits of young womentough, independent party girls who are strong enough to say no to love and smart enough to know why. McWhirter unearths a community of adult-kids seldom chronicled Realistic dialogueheavily peppered with slang, swearing and esoteric pop-culture referencescontributes to the novels overall believability. The humour and wordplay alone mark McWhirter as a writer to watch. Quill and Quire Some Girls Do is a sharp, poetic glimpse into the yearning but hopelessly unfocused lives of a group of marginal urbanites surprisingly, McWhirter makes them touching rather than alienating. Elle Canada

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In this debut collection of personal essays, Silcott looks at the tangle of midlife, the long look back, the shorter look forward, and the moments right now that shimmer and rustle around her: marriage, menopause, fear, desire, loss, and that guy on the bus, the woman on the street, wandering bears, marauding llamas, light and laundry rooms. This isnt a how to guide to middle age and its not a collection of memories either for one thing, the author cant remember that much foranother, shes more interested in the places where the raw bones of the personal intersect with the wider world. Where a moment or gesture suddenly feels emblematic or prophetic or final, and why is that? Why do some moments shimmer, while others fade into a quickly growing morass of "I cant remember?"

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'A Dark Boat', a new collection of poetry by Patrick Friesen, is heavily influenced by 'cante jondo' (Spanish "deep song", or flamenco) and 'fado' (Portuguese songs of longing). Friesen approaches music as a method of weaving his poems with both Spanish and Portuguese aspects of longing, imagistic leaps, and darkness. The poems in 'A Dark Boat' try to shake hands with darkness; the kind of darkness that is rich and necessary for a full human life, the darkness of soil into which seeds drop and grow, the darkness of the grave into which the body is lowered. They explore the kind of loneliness and yearning that is contained in the Portuguese word 'saudad:' a longing for something in the past that can never be found because time has shifted everything away from what it was. Although musically aware and inspired, Friesen's poems do not delve too deeply into the metaphorical; rather, they thrive on an allusive and suggestive level that makes room for jarring non sequiturs andvibrant images. These elusive and emotional poems say much, while telling as little as possible. "...His (Friesen's) sensitivity as an artist affects all his work in a profound and beautiful way. ...Friesen writes about a world that is "quiet" but teeming with emotion; this world is alive and "writhing" with lust, obsession, inspiration, suffering, and yearning. ...There is a musicality to Friesen's writing, a lyricism indicative of what the Spanish term "Deep Song", a more somber stream of flamenco music. There are constant references to fado music, pianos, horns and Tom Waits, as Friesen probes the universality of music. ...The poems are not frivolous but neither are they suppressive or overwrought by the darkness. Instead, the themes are the undiluted musings of an adult, contemplative, full of yearning and with an awareness of death. Friesen is preoccupied with dancing, the motion of feet and legs. In his poems everything from walking and drunken stumbles, as well as the movementof dance, is associated with lust, struggle and resistance. This becomes the perfect backdrop for historically rich poems about Lorca. ..." - Vancouver Weekly "...If you've never heard fado music, you should. It is an intense, raw, emotional music which Patrick compared to the Delta blues, another passion of his. Or you could just read this book, which is imbued with his reminiscences of his trip and the music of fado. ...lines that punch you in the gut, leaving you breathless. ..." - PrairieFire

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'Vancouver Noir' looks at the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, an era in which there was intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions. These are visions of the city, both of what it was and what some of its citizens hoped it would either become, or, conversely, cease to be. The photographs-most of which look like stills from period movies featuring detectives with chiselled features, tough women, and bullet-ridden cars-speak to the styles of the Noir era and tell us something special about the ways in which a city is made and unmade. The authors argue that Noir-era values and perspectives are to be found in the photographic record of the city in this era, specifically in police and newspaper pictures. these photographs document changing values by emphasizing behaviours and sites that were increasingly viewed as deviant by the community's elite. They chart an age of rising moral panics. Public violence, smuggling rings, police corruption, crime waves, the sex trade, and the glamourization of sex in burlesques along and nearby Granville Street's neon alley belonged to an array of public concerns about which the media and political campaigns were repeatedly launched. "Purvey and Belshaw's 'Vancouver Noir' resurrects, in eminently readable black and white, the stories, characters, landmarks, images, lexicon and lore of one of this city's truly colourful eras." - James C. Johnstone, Historian "...If the thirties was a time of idealism, thepost-war world was one of cynicism. The insistence on social conformity and order provided a stark contrast to a seething underworld-if sometimes only in peoples' imagination. Contradictions abound. As suburban living reflected decency and family values, public concern was expressed about juvenile delinquency. Public (and even private) discussion of sex was generally taboo but the sex trade prospered in brothels and neon signs along Granville Street lit up dens of burlesque, booze and gambling.Ladies and escorts began entering the regulated beer parlours in Vancouver through separate doors in 1927. Thirsty working men crowded these establishments after a hard day's work and it was unseemly for a very long time, for women to mix freely among them. By 1954 cocktail bars were established so middle-class men and women could meet in an acceptable environment. Glamour arrived to the city in the form of supper clubs, emerging in the late 1930s and including big-name American acts like HarryBelafonte, Tony Bennett, Mitzi Gaynor, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. Still segregation, not integration was the cultural norm as visible minorities lived in separate neighborhoods such as Hogan's Alley and Chinatown, sin' was confined to a square mile, and police attempted to the activities of drug pedlars and addicts. Attacking the poor and disenfranchised was common. Stanley Park rancheries, float houses under the Burrard Street bridge and other residential blights' to the city cameunder regular attack by civic authorities... 'Vancouver Noir' succeeds in exposing what lies beneath, delivering readers a fascinating glimpse of another side of the city."- British Columbia History

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In a style reminiscent of Raymond Carver, the stories contained in 'Animal' depict people on the brink of major life change. They stand at crossroads they are often oblivious to; they suck thick air in rooms filled with palpable tension. Leggat's characters often seem captured in a cinematic slo-mo, teetering on the edge of something unknown, heroically resisting the ever-present pull of Fate. It matters little whether the characters take action or refuse to act; life acts for them. The reader is left to wonder: when does "meaning" cease to have meaning? Like travelling a mountain highway at night, what's just around the next bend is never known. The stories in 'Animal' never fail to deliver potent surprises. "I'm tempted to say it's a slim, distilled masterpiece." Michael Bryson, Underground Book Club "These quickly unfolding stories are elliptically drawn, tense with action and dark humour. Leggat is a shape-shifting writer" The Globe and Mail "This immensely rewarding collection is worth picking up" eye weekly Finalist for the Trillium Book Award

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'I Cut My Finger' is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed 'Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected' (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures. "Many of his narrative poems can best be called surreal. With their fancifully imaginative stories and wonderfully absurdist takes on the world, it's as if you're watching bizarre cartoons on YouTube." - Prairie Fire "A damn-fine book in every sense of the word." - TaddleCreek

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Had Charles Bukowski and Mary Karr birthed a literary bastard-child, it could have been Rodney DeCroo. From the banks of the Allegheny River to the west coast of Canada comes a fighter and survivor that has chosen poetry and song as his weapons of defence. These poems show you what happens to the traumatized children of drunken, negligent and equally traumatized parents. Children and teens living in powder keg homes whose "safe place" is a hiding spot behind the furnace, the streets, abandoned houses, and condemned factories. These pages are stained by people that have done horrible things and had horrible things done to them: neglected Vietnam vets, out of work coal miners, desperate and violent men with nothing but rage for a world that used them up like canisters of propane. Fishing for Leviathan is not a work about the privileged and entitled, but the trapped wage-earners and broken labourers that make the world of the privileged possible. And it is all anointed with liberal quantities of booze and drugs which, of course, make the situations worse; but they also make the days and nights bearable. These are poems from a writer who has crawled through a mile of broken glass and come out the other side more or less intact. Sobriety, meetings, counselling, therapy, and good friends are the balm and glue that put the broken back together again. Advance praise for Fishing for Leviathan "Rodney DeCroo's work reveals again and again that he's as true a poet as any writing today. Like all poets who can lay claim to authenticity, he's a troubled marriage of heaven and hell, and in this collection he has brought forth fierce, finely honed poems that are at once brutal and uniquely beautiful. Fishing for Leviathan is a piercing imaginative document and a clear, redemptive revelation of what it is to be alive." - Russell Thornton, author of Answer to Blue

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This Here Paradise begins with an epigraph from the work of Welsh poet, Menna Elfyn: "your language a hymn/ lost in the multitude,/ requiem for a world/ that's forgetting how to be". As if in response to this "forgetting," Wharton's poems move from the personal to cross a panorama of hopeful attentiveness. Clear images combine with a distinctive sense of rhythm and music to shape a collection both straight-ahead readable and carefully thoughtful, serious and playful. There is a recognition that paradise includes both highs and lows. The presumptive duality of these two conditions suggests a tension that resolves through the book's five sections, as Wharton opens a suitcase of birds and watches them soar over a landscape alive with radiant, open waters.

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Just Like a Real Person is a story about broken cars and broken people. A story of intoxication, sobriety, and potent memories of a woman in a yellow sundress. But, it's also a story about love that asks what it means to finally feel, after years of feeling nothing but numb. The story begins with a crash, and throughout the story, we bear witness to many more - both literal and metaphorical - as cars wrap around lamp posts and jump medians, and as the humans inside them are unknotted from smouldering metal and the entanglements of their choices. "He" is a nameless, indiscriminate addict. A fuck-up without a driver's license, who has caused forty-two car crashes in eight years, and makes his living by picking through the shattered belongings and lives he leaves behind. "She" is Lola, and Lola is unsure where she's going, just that it's far from there. Disorienting as an acid trip, the story winds through the aftermath, watching as he collides with recovery, women, and his own imperfect recollections while searching for the elusive girl in the yellow sundress.

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From the author of 19 Knives and My White Planet comes a brilliant suite of stories built around music and travel. Whether it's a band coming apart at the ruins of Pompeii, or tours through Napoli's "volcanic dust and volcanic drugs and jackal-headed bedlam and mountains of stinking trash"; or a nostalgic stroll past the homeless in Victoria's inner harbour while "gentle Tunisian techno" rides the breeze, where the addicted populate park benches, as weighted as Shakespearean characters ... "lit rock and tiny chalice hidden under his shirt, get it all, draw every wisp of the wreath and heavy is the head that wears the crown, that lights the lighter." Or it's Steppenwolf or The Youngbloods drifting from a car radio as "an ambulance siren and lights fly our street ... a flashing mime show of grief's rocket." Or, perhaps they're in Iceland, or Denmark, "somewhere seriously lunar and attractive" spending wheelbarrows of cash the record execs didn't give them. Or it's the Viper Room, Sunset Boulevard, a bar in Butte, Montana, or Johnny Cash in Tijuana. The five stories that comprise Czech Techno are replete with the sizzle and jump we have come to expect in a Mark Jarman story - "those shadowbox anthems of lost icy street corners and vanished republics" are on grand display, his herky-jerky emblematic style in full roar. And the quest for love, the matters of the heart, is ever-present, weaving through these stories like a knife blade through sand.

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Montaigne Medal Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards Against Death is an anthology of creative non-fiction exploring the psychological shifts that occur when we prematurely or unexpectedly confront death. Against Death is a natural outgrowth of the editor's experience of surviving a vertebral artery dissection and stroke and the subsequent writing of a long poem memoir about the event. To be "against" something can mean two different things at the same time. "Against" can mean pressed up close to something, yet it can also signify refusal. These texts deal with the affects of this proximity, taking into account any meaning of the word. Rather than showcase only extreme survival stories or difficult biological situations, the pieces in Against Death consider the ways we make sense of death on a personal level and how we integrate that thinking as we continue forward. Against Death articulates the personal experiences of each author's "near-deathness," utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what "magical thinking" proposes. These pieces are incisive and articulate, avoiding the usual platitudes, feel-good bromides, and pep talks associated with near-death encounters. The writing moves past the sob story and confronts the tough circumstance of facing death with truth and compassion, no matter how ugly or (in)convenient. Contributors include: angela rawlings, Joe Average, Aislinn Hunter, Jennifer van Evra, Maureen Medved, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Bruce Meyer and many others.

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"Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response. The blade melts ice via friction and pressure. I drifted away from skating but the language is imprinted in me, too, a tracing, a line extending beyond the margins." (from Serpentine Loop) These are engaging and poignant poems about life on and off the ice.

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