Search results for ""Coach House Books""

CBC BOOKS - CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023Peter Greenaway meets Angela Carter: a Gothic tale of secrets and revenge When the curtain rises on Malmaison, it reveals a once-enchanting estate, quietly falling into darkness and ruin, and at the heart of it, a father, one of a long line of fathers who have flourished at the expense of those around them. The silence seems peaceful, but lurking under it is a deep malevolence, scores of ugly and violent secrets kept by cast-off mistresses and abandoned daughters. Ever-greedy, the father brings in Aliénor, a woman who promises to make the lands give even more of themselves; the plants will flourish, the animals will multiply, each feast will be more sumptuous than the last. The father thinks the stage is set to satisfy his every desire, but Aliénor will bring a new script, one in which the hunters are hunted and a new reign will begin.

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LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURETHE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023A novel about Berlin: a city for artists and libertines, a perfect place to find love and madness. When he tired of Toronto’s insular scene, art critic Martin Heather fled to Berlin, where he tried to sleep his way through the entire population of gay men. And then he met Alexandar, who began to tutor Martin in increasingly violent sex – and in love. Pervatory is a series of journal entries about Martin and Alexandar’s relationship. But interjections from the present, where Martin has been institutionalized, suggest that the hints we get of his increasing instability and obsession with the idea that his apartment is haunted by an evil spirit may have led to something dire … RM Vaughan was an astute art critic, a dazzling poet, and an important queer activist. His untimely death in October 2020 was a tremendous loss to the queer and literary communities. This novel is what he left for us."Pervatory is RM Vaughan's perverse Valentine to Berlin. It is sexy, funny, often elegant, and a fitting elegiac punctuation mark to his incredible body of work. Given the way he left us, it is as devastating as it is exhilarating." – journalist and Lambda Award–winning author Matthew Hays"RM Vaughan was a promiscuous pansy, a louche moralist, a lonely heart, but most importantly, he was a writer, an irritating, idiosyncratic, incisive writer. This country, with its mawkish, mediocre literary culture, didn't know what to do with him. Pervatory is his final affront." – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot"Brilliant, funny, propulsive." – Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

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HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARD NOMINEE From basketball hoops to cricket bats, the role community sports play in our cities and how crucial they are to diversity and inclusion. “The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.” For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It’s a story that plays out in sport after sport – team and individual, youth and adult, men's and women's. While the dazzle of pro athletes may command our attention, grassroots sports build the bridges that link city-dwellers together in ways that go well beyond the physical benefits. The pandemic and heightened awareness of racial exclusion reminded us of the importance of these pastimes and the public spaces where we play. In this closely reported exploration of the role of community sports in diverse cities, Toronto journalist Perry King makes an impassioned case for re-imagining neighbourhoods whose residents can be active, healthy, and connected. "I couldn’t stop reading Perry King’s Rebound. An evocative essay about the transformative and uniting power of local sports in a city with residents from every country in the world, the book is well researched, entertaining, and informative. It spoke to my own experiences as a young athlete fitting into a new city when I first came to Toronto – and to the importance our city government must place on local recreation and sports if our city is to help all residents reach their potential. A fantastic contribution to understanding Toronto – and to the power of local recreation in any major city." —David Miller, former mayor of Toronto

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Libraries are magical places. But what if they’re even more magical than we know? In Cyrille Martinez’s library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who reads what and why. He’s tired of people reading bestsellers, so he places himself on the desks of those who might appreciate him. Meet the Old Historian who mysteriously vanished from the stacks. Meet the Blue Librarian, the Mauve Librarian, the Yellow Librarian, and spend a day with the Red Librarian trying to banish coffee cups and laptops. Then one day there are no empty desks anywhere in the Great Library. A great horde of student workers has descended, and they will scan every single book in the library: the much-borrowed, the neglected, the popular, the obscure. What will happen to the library then? Will it still be necessary? The Dark Library is a theoretical fiction, a meditation on what libraries mean in our digital world. Has the act of reading changed? What is a reader? A book? Martinez, a librarian himself, has written a love letter to the urban forest of the dark, wild library, where ideas and stories roam free.

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In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. A new, revised edition of a seminal work of edgy, experimental feminism. With a foreword by Eileen Myles.

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"This is a wonderful new edition of the Poetic Edda. It captures the language, vitality, and rhythms of the original."-Jesse Byock, PhD, UCLA Gods, giants, the undead, dwarves, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, and a giant wolf are just some of the stars in these Norse tales. Committed to vellum in Iceland around 1270, The Poetic Edda has compelled the likes of Richard Wagner, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jorges Luis Borges, and W.H. Auden. Jeramy Dodds transmits the Old Icelandic text into English without chipping the patina of the original. Jeramy Dodds's Crabwise to the Hounds was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award for poetry.

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Winner of the 2011 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry! In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work 'so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin's trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.

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Shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General's Award for Poetry! This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice. Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi. Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky. Echoing the pastoral and elegiac modes of the Romantic poets, whose reverence for nature never prevented them from addressing it with all the ideas and sensibilities their times allowed, Sina Queyras's stunning collection explores the infrastructures and means of modern mobility. Addressing the human project not so much as something imposed on nature but as an increasingly disturbing activity within it, Expressway exposes the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. 'Cleanse the doors of perception,' Blake urged, and with that in mind, Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we've allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome - each decision can make or unmake us.

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This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. There are essays -- many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries -- on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you'll ever read.

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What is the best way to tell a story? In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bok, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson. Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter. Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative. Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Gluck, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

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Quill pen, linotype, computer: does how you write affect what you write? In with wax, derek beaulieu spurns the sentence and woos the phrase, the image and the language of printing, weaving fragments together to address the question of how publishing and printing affect writing. The result is a series of poems -- marvellous hybrids of visual, Language and lyrical poetry -- that are sure to impress.

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The surrealist antics of Gary Barwin will run the predictability of your universe through a particle accelerator. Watch as your right eyebrow turns into you as a child. Watch Jeff connect the mower to the Internet to cut other people's lawns. Hear the sploosh as Barwin drops some extra syllables in Basho's frog pond. Funny, smart and as unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, Raising Eyebrows is divided into four mind-boggling sections - dirty dogs, my life in the salad spinner, ukiah poems: frogments from the frag pond, and bassoon throng blues. Raising Eyebrows will make you do just that.

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Louise Bak's second book, Tulpa (in Buddhist mysticism, a magical entity created by intensely concentrated thought), continues her challenging exploration of a broad range of themes and uses of the global lexicon. Combining a visual artist's flair for colour with a performance artist's transgressive interventions, Bak is a unique voice in post-colonial Canadian writing.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 COLE FOUNDATION PRIZE FOR TRANSLATIONA nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Up is a meditation on the makeup that colours, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be. The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter. “The most radical book of 2020 talks about makeup. Radical in the intransigence with which Daphne B hunts down the parts of her imagination that capitalism has phagocytized. Radical also in its rejection of false binaries (the authentic and the fake, the futile and the essential) through the lens of which such a subject is generally considered. With the help of a heady combination of pop cultural criticism and autobiography, a poet scrutinizes her contradictions. They are also ours.” —Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir “[Made-Up] is a delight. I read it in one go. And when, out of necessity, I had to put it down, it was with regret and with the feeling that I was giving up what could save me from a catastrophe.” —Laurence Pelletier, Lettres Québécoises, five stars "Made-Up is a radiant, shimmering blend of memoir and cultural criticism that uses beauty culture as an entry point to interrogating the ugly contradictions of late capitalism. In short, urgent chapters laced with humor and wide-ranging references, Daphné B. plumbs the depths of a rich topic that’s typically dismissed as shallow. I imagine her writing it in eye pencil, using makeup to tell the story of her life, as so many women do." —Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points "A companion through the thicket of late stage capitalism, a lucid and poetic mirror for anyone whose image exists on a screen." —Rachel Kauder Nalebuff "Made-Up is anything but—committed to the grit of our current realities, Daphné B directs her piercing eye on capitalism in an intimate portrayal of what it means to love, and how to paint ourselves in the process. Alex Manley has gifted English audiences with a nuanced translation of a critical feminist text, exploring love and make-up as a transformative social tool." —Sruti Islam

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Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry! To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years. The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic -- how the mind contains both -- and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person? Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.

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W. B. Yeats meets Gregg Araki at a gay bar. The Tower is a "translation" of W. B. Yeats's The Tower—an homage and reinvention of the poet’s greatest work. Whereas Yeats’s book contended with his mortality as an aging spiritualist Irish Senator, this version contends with a new mortality: ours. The poems in this collection crystallize the transition from Legault’s late twenties to his early thirties, situated in North America during a time of political upheaval. It takes each of Yeats’s poems as a starting point and queers them. It translates Yeats’s modernist urge, on the other side of a long century. In her review of The Tower, Virginia Woolf says Yeats has “never written more exactly and more passionately.” One might imagine she’d conclude the same here. You can’t fault these poems for lacking passion. Yeats used to talk to ghosts. His wife would let ghosts talk through her. They would talk to Yeats, and he would write down what they say. Another way you could put it is that Yeats talked to his wife. Ghosts are much closer than you think. They like to live in books. So Legault spent some time talking to Yeats’s ghost. Or, Yeats’s ghost talked to him. This is him talking back. "Through Legault, the opening of Yeats’ words in the title poem shift and turn from absurdity to one of anxieties around ageing" —rob mclennan's Blog "If you've never cared about poetry, you will after reading these modern-day renderings..." —Maria-Claire

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Mad Long Emotion wants to talk flora to fauna like you. It talks by dancing, as bumblebees do. In its dances, loosestrife shoos humans away, green carnations flirt with handsome men beyond the shade, and “dogbanes though dead bloom.” Meanwhile, in better-discerned motion, numerous species both spiny and spineless prove invasive, from Great Lake lampreys to hydraulic triceratopses. But they’re just looking for better homes. The book concludes with a long poem about distance, desire and the difficulty of combining the two. Lend this book your eyes and nose; mouth its contents to your house plants. The poetry of Mad Long Emotion wants to live forever, and you can make that happen with your face.

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The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author's body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our "petroculture" has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personalities. Structured like the hormones some of these synthetic chemicals mimic in our bodies, this sequence of poems links the author's biographical details (diet, lifestyle, geography) with historical details (spills, poisonings, military applications) to show how permeable our bodies are to the environment. As Dickinson becomes obsessed with limiting the rampant contamination of his own biochemistry, he turns this chemical-microbial autobiography into an anxious plea for us to consider what we're doing to our world -- and to our own bodies.

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"Charming, funny, and often elegant. This is a formidable collection." —Ben FamaWith an alternating sense of wonder and detachment, Jay Ritchie's first full-length collection of poetry grapples with death, disappointment, love, alienation, and emails—the large and small subjects of daily life. His unflagging sense of humor and aphoristic delivery create a work that is personable yet elevated, witty, and honest.Jay Ritchie was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario and lives in Montreal, Quebec. Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie is his full-length collection.

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Curry is a dish that doesn't quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn't properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.Naben Ruthnum won the Journey Prize for his short fiction, has been a National Post books columnist, and has written books and cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley's first novel will appear in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.

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A fifteenth-century portrait painter, grieving the untimely death of his unrequited love, takes refuge at the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel, an island off the coast of France. He haunts the halls until the monks assign him the task of copying manuscripts – though he is illiterate. His work heals him and grows the monastery's library into a beautiful city of books, all under the shadow of the invention of the printing press. Dominique Fortier is an editor and translator living in Montreal. She is the author of five books, including On the Proper Use of Stars and Wonder. Rhonda Mullins is an award-winning translator and writer living in Montreal, Quebec.

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The word "magyarazni" (pronounced MUG-yar-az-knee) means "to explain" in Hungarian, but translates literally as "make it Hungarian." This faux-Hungarian language primer, written in direct address, invites readers to experience what it's like to be "made Hungarian" by growing up with a parent who immigrated to North America as a refugee. In forty-five folk-art visual poems each paired with a written poem, Hajnoczky reveals the beauty and tension of first-generation cultural identity. 'Because translation between cultures is always fraught - and yet somehow translate we must - Magyarazni explores language and cultural identity in the permeable space fomenting between family and society, word and image initiating us into a new alphabet of lived meaning. In reading we wonder along with Magyarazni's wandering "you," we care and get entangled in the "brambles of your cursive," we too are "made Hungarian."' - Oana Avasilichioaei 'Familiar but out of reach, Magyarazni reforms the language of home on the tip of your tongue, a language of knotted cursive and bubbled syntax; folksong and stovetop. Each letter blossoms as a hand-drawn flower and a sputtering drone of spits and pith. Magyarazni punctuates every I with a poppy seed, every C with the splinter-ed foil of a solemn treat. Mournful and personal, Magyarazni calls out for the language of family.' - Derek Beaulieu

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Literary crime novel populated by French Surrealist authors of the twenties; characters include imagined versions of André Breton, Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Guillaume Apollinaire (changed to be an old woman), Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon (changed to be a young woman with cool hair), Jacques Prevert and Michel Simon. Pillow is a twist on the anti-hero that looms so large in the cultural imagination right now (Tao Lin's novels, True Detective, The Knick). In fact, he's an anti-anti-hero: a sweet, pleasant person with an original mind who nonetheless engages in sketchy and immoral behaviour. Written in the weirdo-whimsical vein of, say, Miranda July or Sheila Heti, moreso than the tough men despairing things in short sentences vein of, say, Dennis Lehane, which is what you usually get in literary crimeland. With echoes of an Elmore Leonard thriller: funny, and driven by colorful characters. Boxing subculture is well-connected and generally hungry for reasonably intelligent writing. Author's sister is Claire Battershill, author of Circus (McClelland & Stewart, 2014) winner of the CBC Literary Award for Short Fiction.

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An old man in a military uniform is dumped at the police station-he won't speak English but has a lawyer's card in his pocket. A seemingly innocuous encounter gets stranger and stranger as we gradually realize no one is who they seem and the Balkan wars' traumas continue to play out. The "It Kid" of Canadian theater, award-winning playwright Nicolas Billon, returns with a devastating parable. Nicolas Billon's plays and translations have been produced at the Stratford Festival, Soulpepper Theatre, and Canadian Stage. Fault Lines won the Governor General's Award, and his first play, The Elephant Song, is being developed into a film starring Catherine Keener.

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"As New York, capital of the twentieth century, recedes from memory, it becomes more like Paris; we flock to it to pay tribute to the great things that once happened there. New York is now a miasma of apocryphal myths feasting on its own corpse. On these pages, Martinez spins hazy rumor and wilting gossip into blistering contemporary fiction, holding up Warhol's mirror to the myth of Warhol himself. The result is a delicious celebration of simulacra where, like New York New York itself, nothing is true, but everything is permitted."-Kenneth Goldsmith John is a poet. Only John almost never writes poems, because he is also unemployed. He lives with four friends, and they squat in a loft in New York New York, a fantastical city that resembles the Big Apple, but also any other city where artists live. They throw fabulous parties and practice group sodomy. That is, until John meets Andy. Andy is an artist. Well, he is if you define art as something that people don't want but the artist wants to give them anyway. A gallery owner with Tourette syndrome "discovers" his work and Andy is on his way to being famous. John, on the other hand, is hard at work at being unemployed, drinking all night and sleeping all day-which leaves him very little time for writing poems. Andy, watching him sleep, has an intriguing idea for a piece of art that he thinks will allow John to get paid for what he does best. Using the story of Andy Warhol and John Giorno and their film Sleep as a starting point, The Sleepworker reads like a Warhol film on fast-forward. Cyrille Martinez is a poet and novelist living in Paris. This is his English debut. Joseph Patrick Stancil has studied French and translation at UNC-Chapel Hill and New York University. He currently lives in New York, New York.

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Winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2015 Toronto Book Awards Winner of the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize "[Alexis] devises an inventive romp through the nature of humanity in this beautiful, entertaining read … A clever exploration of our essence, communication, and how our societies are organized." – Kirkus Reviews "This might be the best set-up of the spring." – The Globe & Mail "André Alexis has established himself as one of our preeminent voices." – Toronto Star — I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence. — I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence. And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet-erinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks. André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks. André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf and, most recently, Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 book of 2014.

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How can we carve private spaces from discarded publics? DOWN takes junk language -- with cameos by Frank O'Hara, Frank Ocean, Aaliyah and the Temptations -- and distresses it, building sonically dense poems that are caught between the poignancy and flatness of their source texts. Disorientation and defamiliarization yank fresh feeling from banal sentiments in this playful collection. 'I've believed in Dowling's poems for a long time with you. Or maybe you're just now catching up to how the genius is working her machine on our minds? Gravity of letter in the word measured and dispensed with inimitable grace. The words are familiar, yes, but we get them again from this magnificent poet who is not going to let us just trample the smallest of them. I have tremendous respect for any poet who strives to be even half as great as Sarah Dowling.' -- CAConrad 'After all of the previous avant-garde's perpetual rediscoveries of Gertrude Stein's formal innovations, Dowling reminds us that her best poetry was, above all, sexy. Where Dowling surpasses is in her recognition of the phatic, the emphatic, the obsessive understanding of the cultural syntax of infatuation. Everything in DOWN is palpably cloudy in its thick description: I am starstruck.' -- Craig Dworkin Sarah Dowling is the author of Security Posture and Birds & Bees. Sarah's poetry was included in the anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. She teaches at the University of Washington Bothell and is international editor at Jacket2.

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What do your Eggs Benedict say about your notions of class? Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outre food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting attitudes towards social status and leisure? In some ways, brunch and other forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions. For award-winning writer and urbanist Shawn Micallef, brunch is a way to look more closely at the nature of work itself and a catalyst for solidarity among the so-called creative class. Drawing on theories from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Florida, Micallef traces his own journey from the rust belt to a cosmopolitan city where the evolving middle class he joined was oblivious to its own instability and insularity. The Trouble with Brunch is a provocative analysis of foodie obsession and status anxiety, but it's also a call to reset our class consciousness. The real trouble with brunch isn't so much bad service and outsized portions of bacon, it's that brunch could be so much more.

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A 2015 ReLit finalist A 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist Shortlisted for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award 'It offers wit, precision of speech, weird connections, odd juxtapositions, jarring images, & a variety of moods in a swirl of sentences that refuse to stay still but argue with each other & with their readers. This School is well worth attending.'--Eclectic Ruckus "Her poetry is a subversion of the dominant paradigms in this country ...one ride that will leave you gripping both sides of the canoe."--Lambda Literary Review At times a call to action and at others an intimate conversation between friends, Jen Currin's sensual and surreal poems speak to the political upheavals and environmental catastrophes of our time. School is an instruction manual for igniting transformation through a collective effort of love and community. Jen Currin's books of poetry include Hagiography and The Inquisition Yours, which won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Award.

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"This is a book with brains and muscle, resonant and intense, and Matthew Heiti is a prodigious talent, the spooky bard of mullets and muffin-tops, grow-ops and stolen snakeskin boots on Highway 69." — Mark Anthony Jarman A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people. These eleven people – from the police officers who retrieve the body to the teenager who carries it away to the young woman planning to strike out for Toronto and Sudbury's local drug dealer – are all damaged in some way, and eventually, through the body itself, are brought together in a strange moment of violence.

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"White Piano holds an acute sense of what poetry is, its danger...Brossard knows well that 'life is only good for living' and that living is incarnated in the material of language, that sounds, those carriers of sense, can propel it in front of the world." - Le Devoir Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. Pronouns and persons, poetry and prose: White Piano, superbly translated from the French, narrates a constellation of questions and offers a "language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie." Nicole Brossard is one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.

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Praise for Strube's previous novels: "Smart, eccentric prose."--The New York Times "Strube's comic sense is like a perfectly mixed martini: exceedingly dry and potent."--The Toronto Star Milo doesn't quite have it together. His acting career has stalled. His girlfriend dumped him. His miserable father has vanished. And Pablo and Wallace--and then Wallace's mother--seem to have moved in to his house. The only person Milo likes is Robertson, the autistic eleven-year-old next door. So when Robertson gets bullied, Milo is finally spurred to action. Milo being Milo, though, even his best intentions go awry, and soon Robertson's dad is in the hospital, Milo's lost in the woods during an acting experiment and Gustaw, his dad, may have returned from the dead via reality TV. Cordelia Strube's most recent novel Lemon, her eighth, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Trillium Award.

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In the stories of Mad Hope, Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both unrecognizable and alarming. We think we know these people but discover we don't-they are more alive, more real, and more complex than we first imagined. A high school science teacher is forced to re-examine the role he played in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania after a student makes a shocking request. The uncertainty, anxiety, and anticipation of pregnancy are examined through an online chat group. Parenting is viewed from the perspective of a gay man caring for his friend and her adopted son. A tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents. Birrell uses precise, inventive language to capture the beautiful mess of being human-and more than lives up to her Journey Prize accolades. Her characters come to greet us, undo us, make us yearn, and make us smile. Heather Birrell is the author of the story collection I know you are but what am I? Her work has been honored with the prestigious Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative nonfiction.

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Robert Brand has given up on real women. Relationships just haven't ever worked out well for him. He has, however, found a (somewhat problematic) solution, a new feminine ideal: the 110-pound sex doll he ordered over the internet. Showing an uncanny access to the voice of the rejected, unimpressive, emotionally challenged modern male, Helen Guri's debut collection explores Robert's transition from lost and lonely to loved, if only by the increasingly acrobatic voices in his mind. Match's touching, whip-smart poems chart the limits of the mind/body relationship in decidedly virtual times. Does our hero's lovesick, wry, self-searching and often self-annihilating gaze signal some catastrophic aversion to depth or a feverish (if unsettling) reassertion of the romantic impulse? Can anything good really happen when the object of one's affection is, literally, an object? And if she looks like a human being, can you ever know for sure she isn't one? Equal parts love story, social parody and radiant display of lyrical gymnastics, Match announces the arrival of a daring, forthright and stubbornly original new talent.

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"Hughes is a very good writer, if 'good writing' has to do with precision, eloquence, beauty, and passionately held belief."—Times Literary Supplement Welcome to Crooked River, population 2,851 and falling. Eli has lived in Crooked River his whole life, ever since he was born in the dead of winter with the cord wrapped around his neck nearly thirty years ago, and he knows better than anyone about that shrinking number. His father, uncle, and grandmother have all died, he didn't know his mother, and his grandfather, Clarence, founder of the town and eccentric builder of hotels and a now-underwater castle, walked to the river one day and never returned. Eli's childhood best friend, George, went missing, too, when they were kids, around the time his dad started going a little bonkers, and George was never seen again. Eli's always been obsessed with Clarence and George's disappearances. Now, while the town half-heartedly celebrates its centennial and the river, long ago diverted to make way for a mine, reclaims its original path, Eye Lake is vanishing day by day. As new tensions in town rise and the lake's water level drops, Clarence's castle—and his many secrets—begin to surface. But when another young boy goes missing, Eli's past and present collide. Tristan Hughes is the author of three previous books: The Tower, Send My Cold Bones Home, and Revenant. He was the winner of the 2002 Rhys Davies Short Story Award. He lives in Wales.

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Longlisted for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize! Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award! Lemon has three mothers: a biological one she's never met, her adopted father's suicidal ex, and Drew, a school principal who hasn't left the house since she was stabbed by a student. She has one deadbeat dad, one young cancer-riddled protege, and two friends, the school tramp and a depressed poet. Figuring the numbers are against her, Lemon just can't be bothered trying to fit in. She spurns fashion, television, and even the mall. She reads Mary Wollstonecraft and gets pissed off that Jane Eyre is such a wimp. Meanwhile, the adults in her life are all mired in self-centredness, and the other kids are getting high, beating each other up in parks, and trying to outsex one another. High school is misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions, and inequities, and nothing guidance counsellor Blecher can say will convince Lemon otherwise. But making the choice to opt out of sex and violence and cancer and disappointment doesn't mean that these things don't find you. It will be up to Lemon if she can survive them with her usual cavalier aplomb.

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If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn't food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, food-security concerns, how chefs are trained: how a city nourishes itself might say more than anything else about what kind of city it is. With a cornucopia of essays on comestibles, The Edible City considers how one city eats. It includes dishes on peaches and poverty, on processing plants and public gardens, on rats and bees and bad restaurant service, on schnitzel and school lunches. There are incisive studies of food-safety policy, of feeding the poor, and of waste, and a happy tale about a hardy fig tree. Together they form a saucy picture of how Toronto -- and, by extension, every city -- sustains itself, from growing basil on balconies to four-star restaurants. Dig into The Edible City and get the whole story, from field to fork.

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Hoping to erase her unhappy old life, Hazel jumps in her beat-up old car and speeds away. When she pulls up to the Evening and Morning Star Trailer Park, where nothing turns into even more of nothing, she decides it just might be the new life she's looking for. At the centre of this new life is King, a motorcycle-riding, hard-drinking, guitar-playing kind of guy. Hazel loves him to death. He spends his days fixing cars, while Hazel spends hers working at the town's thrift shop. Evenings they spend with Spiney and Sissy, playing cards or drinking at Old Joe's. It's a clear kind of life, pure as water in the old quarry. As Hazel settles into the trailer park, she begins to settle into her new life too. She covers the trailer's yard with wildflowers. She makes new friends, like Egbert (Egg), who helps her create elaborate tableaux in the thrift-shop window. She may even learn how to cook. But when King's repeated brushes with the law bring him a spell in jail, things begin, slowly and surely, to unravel. Maybe Hazel hasn't outrun herself after all, maybe year-round Christmas lights and thrift-shop glamour can't outshine honesty, and maybe Hazel can't make her world perfect by willing it so. Fun and sad and true, King feels like a slumber party: just you and your best friend in sleeping bags whispering through the long night. And when you wake up in the morning, you'll blink, shake your head, and for a second, just a second, the world will seem like a more magical place.

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Carla Carlson is at the Hotel Clarendon in Quebec City trying to finish a novel. Nearby, a woman, preoccupied with sadness and infatuated with her boss, catalogues antiquities at the Museum of Civilization. Every night, the two women meet at the hotel bar and talk -- about childhood and parents and landscapes, about time and art, about Descartes and Francis Bacon and writing. When Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon appeared in French (as Hier), the media called it the pinnacle of Brossard's remarkable forty-year literary career. From its intersection of four women emerges a kind of art installation, a lively read in which life and death and the vertigo of ruins tangle themselves together to say something about history and desire and art.

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The Animal Sciences is like a science fair project. Take a group of friends -- the missing Robin, crazy Kookla, jealous Duffer, lost Autumn and Latvian Igor -- add baking soda and vinegar, and watch what happens. As the story rockets back and forth between the past and present, the consecutive anecdotes start to coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts, and we begin to see how the different atoms -- the characters -- of this particular molecule are interdependent. We come to suspect, too, that just as the laws of nature make that baking-soda volcano inevitable, so too do they rule human relationships, making volcanoes out of some chemical reactions and warmth out of others. Maybe, just maybe, human sciences aren't so different from the animal ones. What is it that makes us human? Could it be love?

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Adrift in history and myth, fairy tales and TV, the tedious and the marvellous, you'll find Dislocations in Crystal. These poems move through the world opened by Prince Henry the Navigator's epoch-shifting push to open a sea route around Africa to the Spice Isles. They pick their way through the detritus of the world bequeathed by his success, looking for a land as promised, not of the given but the taken. Crossing and re-crossing untold regions disguised as a New World, these carefully crafted poems, in the tradition of Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, scatter the seeds of the yet-to-be-thought, drawing readers onward towards a dream that lies past apocalypse.

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Charlotte the spider...Wilbur the pig...Fern and Avery...and Lurvy, the hired hand. They and all the other characters from the timeless children's classic that you remember so well are back, in author and small-press overlord Hal Niedzviecki's first novel, Lurvy: a farmer's almanac. A caveat: given the (ahem) rather significant changes in social morays since the first appearance of these jolly folk, happenings on the Arable farm are somewhat different than you might well remember them.

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How can we build more accessible cities? Living Disability brings together vibrant perspectives on disability justice and urban systems. A musician and snow removal expert, a queer curator, a public pool aficionado, and a journalist turned city councillor - these are just some of the disabled writers exploring disability justice, analyzing urban systems, and proposing more equitable approaches to city building in this anthology. Essays and interviews push the conversation about accessibility beyond policy papers and compliance checklists to show how disabled people are already creating more inclusive spaces in cities of all sizes.Living Disability is universal in scope but intimate and local in focus, grounded in personal struggles and celebrations. Decisions about public transit, affordable housing, and park design all disproportionately impact disabled communities; by sharing stories an

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