Search results for ""Coach House Books""

You've heard of The Big Sleep, right? Well, it's sixty years later and time for The Ubiquitous Big. This book, the second from Calgary poet Ian Samuels, explores the language of certain influential aspects of early to mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Yes, folks, you get Arcana, based on the cultural fascination with war drawn from a kaleidoscope of incidental sources and overheard conversations; Personality, a take on the fashion cycle accessed through an old cosmetology textbook; and The Ubiquitous Big, which takes on cinema and gender through a scrambled, augmented and mythologized series of quotes from classic film noir. The result is a playful and humorous book of poetry with a serious trigger finger. So shut up, get in the car, and sit back for a romp through some of the funniest language to pass through time and expose the myth of its own mythos.

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Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and "natural" spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire while they scan scenes as an outsider or camera eye to unsettle and fray familiar settings. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focus to worn detail, asking us to seek pattern and possibility in a hyper-paced present tense. These are little ominous films, documenting the minutiae around us that can be our undoing. Let their ribs stretch out -- there is no figure which is not also a ground in its arctic plane. Cutting rooms as luck would have it have academic sincerity. Sarah Pinder was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and lives in Toronto, Ontario. This is her first collection.

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CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 202349th SHELF EDITORS' PICK FOR JUNE 2023When a family is forced to return to the mother’s childhood home, she seeks meaning in her ancestral roots and the violent beauty of the natural world.Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are cramped together in a small century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones or internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds, a language of fireflies and clover. The five children explore nature and its treasures, while our narrator, Anaïs, turns to the eccentric neighbours and her own family history to find peace and meaning in the middle of her life.To the Forest is a field guide to a quieter life, a call to return to the places where we can reweave the threads of memory, where existence waltzes with death, where we can recapture what it means to be alive.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRYCBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023Backward and forward: a double book of mirrored poems about identity in all its forms.This is a book of slow hours, days, and years – how they can collapse into one another, how it can feel like we are living one day repeating itself. From within this collapse, the speaker seeks connection everywhere. They visit their father’s birthplace, Jogjakarta; they listen to a stranger’s phone call at the Motel 6 in Alberta; they linger in the so-called ethnic aisle of the grocery store. From all of these places the speaker is discouraged but tries to imagine a future joyously incomprehensible to the present.Slows: Twice is a collection of revisions and repetitions; every poem in one half of the book has an alternate version, or a mirror poem, in the other half. The poems are tied to themes of work and labour, consumption and waste, family and home, as shapers of identity and relationships. The act of revising and repeating – slowly – is meant to be a resistance to efficiency, a resistance to being an always-productive body under capitalism."The poems of Slows: Twice collect in resonance, contemplate the construction of selves, with modes of repetition, sequencing, and mirroring, the way language assembles an identity or points to itself as it points away. 'The clouds // disappear the sky sometimes; or they become it.' Storied and cubistic, palindromic and cleaved, Liem’s poems reveal relationships to time, noise, and duration, and the possibility of joy given painful pasts." – Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure"T. Liem is one of my favorite poets working in Canada. I welcomed this book into my life like sudden sunlight. Slows: Twice is a book about how urgently we need to read differently. I loved its mischievous relation to form and expectation as well as its burning intelligence. I once described T. as an inheritor of the tradition of language poetry, but what Slows: Twice proves is that T. is less an inheritor and more so an innovator, an inventor in their own right. I read it in one frenzied sitting." – Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus"It’s breathtaking to watch words drip from a page into a silver river cutting through a canyon of time. T. Liem sculpts poetry with steady, curious fingers, pushing against the filaments we think hold us together that have been quietly collecting cracks, from buried violence and whispered histories to the fragile connections tying us together. Obits. captured my heart; Slows: Twice now affirms it." – Teta, founder of diasporic Indonesian publication Buah zine"'For everything I was, I am now something else.' Revision of self and world are core to this innovative, unruly book that manages somehow to be at once formally wacky and emotionally clear. These poems seem to ask: if language is a box heavy with histories and inadequacies and which we nevertheless must carry, can language also carry us somewhere, elsewhere, strangely? Rarely have I encountered a book so at home in the unresolved, in the tension between a longing for declaration and a commitment to questions. T. Liem’s work conjures the figure of Janus: god of duality and gates, one face facing an end, the other looking through a new door, right in the eye of a dream." – Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency"T. Liem's Slows: Twice is a fascinating exercise in revision and remaking, each repetition of its text accomplishing the arduous task of stretching time and geopolitical fixity. 'asking and repeating/ we are made' declares Liem, and that utterance produces the book's essential maxim, 'language is change/ changed by prosody.' In between these cracks of time, language becomes a miracle suture for love and connection where the hard reality of one's circumstances may produce infinite ruptures. This is a book that peers into the fissure, holding these moments of fracture as still and clearly as possible--a future of proximates." – Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, the Swarm

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LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURE49th SHELF TOP 22 BOOKS OF 2022Is love real if the beloved isn’t? Girl, Interrupted meets Rebecca in this taut tale of love and madness When Tia meets Pacifique, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime love. They spend five wild days and nights together, and then Tia wakes up in an ambulance with a collarbone broken in a bike accident — and no trace of Pacifique. Unable to convince anyone that Pacifique exists, Tia winds up in a psychiatric ward, forced to face the possibility that this perfect lover may be a figment of her imagination. While there, Tia meets Andrew, a contemplative man with schizophrenia, who falls in love with Tia. He, too, tells her to forget Pacifique. Who to believe? The medical establishment and her fellow patients? Or her frail human memory? And if Pacifique truly is a figment, is life in the “real world” with Andrew enough?"In concise and vibrant prose, Sarah L. Taggart illuminates the dark corners of delusion (or is it delusion?) and a mental-health system that consigns people to endless limbo. Lucid and destabilizing, graceful and raw, this novel asks: is losing one’s sanity so different from falling in love?" – Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love Stories"Pacifique turns the psychological thriller on its head, allowing madness to be a meaningful lens through which to see the world instead of a cheap plot twist. Taggart has created a stunning, smart and revolutionary novel here - one that forces its readers to see clearly what so often remains hidden. This book means so much to me. One of the best I've read in years." – Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out On The Ground

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A buddy-cop dramedy starring a bottle of Advil and a headache that won’t quit Imagine you’re standing in a room, and someone on the other side of the door won’t stop knocking – ever. Welcome to Andrew Faulkner’s world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil. Through direct address, sideways glances, lyrical interludes and deep consideration of what it means to overcome a condition when living is a part of the condition itself, these poems observe the speaker’s world as it crowds around him, coming into sharper and specific focus, from the hard wisdom of saints on suffering and a slightly unhinged Caravaggio on the metaphysics of painting, through to the deep meaning of a hot dog and a thoroughly botched retelling of a Norm Macdonald joke. Throughout it all, Advil whirls around like an unruly tornado of a sidekick, snapping Polaroids and “searching for a cloud that resembles a plausible end-of-life scenario.” Think of this collection as a meditation on how to deal with pain and uncertainty when life itself is an uncertain, painful mess. These are poems that acknowledge the shakiness of the ground we stand on. The opening poem wonders: “If you stay with the shakiness through its conjugations? Who knows.” But don’t worry. Advil’s on the case and aims to find out."These wry poems cajole the reader into feverish attentiveness. Andrew Faulkner's Heady Bloom is that unusual collection of poems whose aim is generous and profound, but whose means are often comic and provocative, all jagged edges and elbows. Chaplinesque, perhaps, but Chaplin at an all-ages hardcore show, or having been to one and reflecting on it later, in tranquility." —Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City and Run the Red Lights"Among other issues, this book explores how the seizures, hallucinations, and excruciating pain caused by neurological conditions that are now treated clinically were once thought of as visions granted to and endured by saints. Faulkner does this in poems that are filled with seriousness but also humor, unlikely allusions, and exhilarating wordplay. A running conceit is the speaker’s ambivalent relationship—a kind of “bromance”—with Advil, modern medicine personified as his nemesis and doppelgänger, a taunting comedian but also a vital helpmate, a debased version of the saints’ archangelic protectors. Faulkner’s imagery and conceits surprise and delight. A strange and beautiful book. " —Geoffrey Nutter

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WINNER OF THE 2022 WRITERS' TRUST BALSILLIE PRIZE FOR PUBLIC POLICYSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 DONNER BOOK PRIZEWINNER OF THE PATTIS FAMILY FOUNDATION GLOBAL CITIES BOOK AWARDIs the ‘smart city’ the utopia we’ve been waiting for?The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year.But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities — one defined by utopian ideologies, architectural visions, and technological fantasies.Smart streetlights, water and air quality tracking, autonomous vehicles: with examples from all over the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, and Chicago, Dream States unpacks the world of smart city tech, but also situates this important shift in city-building into a broader story about why we still dream about perfect places. "John Lorinc’s incisive analysis in Dream States reminds us that the search for urban utopia is not new. Throughout the book, Lorinc underscores the fact that a gamut of urban innovations – from smart city megaprojects to e-government to pandemic preparedness tools – only provide promise when scrutinized together with the political, economic, social, and physical complexities of urban life." – Shauna Brail, University of Toronto"Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias takes us on a fascinating journey across world cities to show how technology has shaped them in the past and how smart city technology will reshape them in the future. This book is essential reading for policy makers, researchers, and practitioners interested in understanding the opportunities and challenges of smart city technology and what it means for city building." – Enid Slack, University of Toronto School of Cities"“Utopia may be the oldest grift in the city-building business, but Dream States shows that technology is a timeless tool for turning the most ordinary of urban dreams – clean air and water, safe streets, and decent homes – into reality. As digital dilettantes try to sell us on a software overhaul, John Lorinc provides us an indispensable and flawless guide to the must-haves and never-agains of the smart city.” – Anthony Townsend, Urbanist in Residence, Cornell Tech, author of Smart Cities

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Poems to read in the small hours before dawn, when the sirens start up again. Swivelmount’s concerns – the collapse of subject and world, eros and law, knowledge and bafflement – gain new urgency as Babstock fiercely reimagines and reassembles the remnants into a viable order. At the core of their kinetic imagery is a freefall into mourning, but also a faith in others: a Babstock poem is the voice next to you in the ER waiting room, becalmed, compassionate, darkly humorous. This is Babstock at his best. Past Praise: “This is a poetry that is so uncompromising in how it deals with traditions – of poetic forms, of dictions, of militaristic histories – that it becomes something magnificent: brittle and hard. It will change how you think.” —Juliana Spahr for On Malice “On Malice is a fascinating and elegiac rebuke to surveillance technologies and its discontents. Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet. His work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity.” —Peter Gizzi “The flavour of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge.” —Ange Mlinko for Methodist Hatchet “I felt as if I were reading poems written with a scalpel. Methodist Hatchet swaggers with confidence, intelligence, technique, humour, and that pinioning accuracy of observation we’ve come to expect from Babstock, surely one of the most versatile, switched-on, and linguistically savvy poets of our time.” —Simon Armitage “Methodist Hatchet is as precise as it is expansive, as complex as it is companionable. It refuses to look away from the unstable nature of self and world and word. That is why Babstock is one of the most exciting lyric poets writing today.” —Sina Queyras, The Globe and Mail for Methodist Hatchet

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Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs. Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches. Complete with Alfred’s drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf,” that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway? “A mash-up that is part fabulism, part faux biography, and part satire, Days by Moonlight conveys the experience of grief, managing to transform its inarticulable and symbolic weight into a finely wrought literary work.” —Quill and Quire

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bronchia think form a bombsight think periosteum singing particle falconry workpiece two lowcut hills seeking what stone is for body is herd alliterations Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language's viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative. 'A fierce, ladderlike cri de c/ur -- at times a cri de cur -- Night & Ox pulses with sawblade nocturnes that gnaw through the very rungs on which they're wrung. One part Jabberwocky-talkie, one part fatherhood ode, the poem seeks a threshold, where the "mondayescent" gives way to ardour, splendour, even love. Scott is a cosmoglot of the throat's ravine, and this is his manic, pandemonic article of faith.' -- Andrew Zawacki Praise for Blert: 'Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft. Blert is a strange and gorgeous work of linguistic materialism.' -- Dennis Lee

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There were plans for an official welcome. It was to take place the following Sunday. But those who came to the rectory on Father Pennant's second day were the ones who could not resist seeing him sooner. Here was the man to whom they would confess the darkest things. It was important to feel him out. Mrs Young, for instance, after she had seen him eat a piece of her macaroni pie, quietly asked what he thought of adultery. Andre Alexis brings a modern sensibility and a new liveliness to an age-old genre, the pastoral. For his very first parish, Father Christopher Pennant is sent to the sleepy town of Barrow. With more sheep than people, it's very bucolic--too much Barrow Brew on Barrow Day is the rowdiest it gets. Bu things aren't so idyllic for Liz Denny, whose fiance doesn't want to decide between Liz and his more worldly mistress Jane, and for Father Pennant himself, who greets some miracles of nature--mayors walking on water, talking sheep--with a profound crisis of faith. 'It's been clear since his debut novel, Childhood, that Alexis is one of our most distinctive and exacting prose stylists, and at its highest pitch, as in the breathtaking final paragraph, these are sentences that attain the level of the best music.' - Montreal Gazette Praise for Andre Alexis's previous books: "Astonishing ...an irresistible, one-of-a-kind work."--Quill & Quire "Alexis [has an] astute understanding of the madly shimmering, beautifully weaving patterns created by what we have agreed to call memory."--Ottawa Citizen Andre 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 books include Asylum and Ingrid and the Wolf.

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Why, it's a whale of a book! Here comes Moby Jane - again! Originally published in 1987 and long out of print, Moby Jane contains ten years' worth of Gilbert, poem by poem, that literally spill out over its edges - the book begins on the front cover and ends on the back! Eli Mandel calls Gilbert 'an extraordinary, intelligent experimentalist,' and Coach House has just gotten wind that this classic tome has been chosen for National Poetry Month 2004 as one of the ten all-time must-read books of Canadian poetry.

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A double-lunged bong hit of mid-Eighties post-punk college rock, Gertrude Stein, art films, and the comedic legacy of Laurel and Hardy (including such great standup teams as HD and Ezra Pound, Jesus and Judas, and Steve McCaffery and bpNichol). Jeff Derksen says: 'If reading is sixty-nining, then dyslexicon satisfies at both ends. Stephen Cain disentangles everyday life into its constituent emotional, intellectual, sexual and cultural parts -- people, the city, books, music - only to recombine them into a new set of relations ...It's a sexy m-f of a book. Put it on your turntables.'

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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDTHE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023All talk, no action: The Mezzanine meets Ducks, Newburyport in this meandering and captivating debut It’s a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel’s letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres. These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird."From the first page to the last I felt wholly captivated by Falling Hour and Hugh’s sensitive and far-ranging digressions. Morrison has captured the magic of Sebald and made it entirely his own, a curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a “fake” country. " – André Babyn, author of Evie of the Deepthorn"Falling Hour is a profound incantatory exhalation – a quiet triumph; to read it is to engage in a smart, humane and at times very funny conversation that you will never want to end." – Simon Okotie, author of After Absalon“A stellar debut novel by a stellar new talent. Falling Hour is written in a prose style that enlivens every page.” – Mauro Javier Cárdenas, author of Aphasia: A Novel"In Falling Hour, an immensity is condensed into a single day, a single park, a single empty frame. To themes of loss and dispossession that recall in scope and sensitivity the work of Teju Cole and W.G. Sebald, Morrison brings the attentive eye of a poet and a truly impish sense of the absurd." – Jen Craig, author of Panthers and the Museum of Fire"Falling Hour deserves mention as a notable debut along the estuary of modern fiction." – D. W. White, Atticus Books, Phoenix, AZ

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"Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy...Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt...She wields language expertly, even beautifully."--The New York Times What if the cinema of the present were a Mobius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating color? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun "you"? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture, and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema? These and other questions are answered in the new collection from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley+Maxwell. A quorum of crows will be your witness. And if you discover you were bought? You note the smell of rain, bread, and exhaust mixed with tiredness. And if you yourself are incompatible with your view of the world? And what is the subject but a stitching? Once again you are the one who promotes artifice. At 2 am on Friday, you burn with a maudlin premonition. And rankings and rankings and badges and repetitions. Lisa Robertson's book Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010 and was longlisted for the 2011 Warwick Prize. Her other books include Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. She is the 2014 Bain Swiggett Professor at Princeton University.

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Published in 1994, Crystallography was a gem of a book, an instant hit that was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. It has been unavailable for an ice age, and Coach House Books is proud to bring it back. 'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' The book exists in the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals - looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bok himself says, 'a word is a bit of crystal in formation,' suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form. Lucid, sparkling, a diamond of a book: Crystallography is a crystal-clear approach to the science of poetry from the author of Eunoia.

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST 100 BOOKS OF 2023CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN NONFICTION OF 2023Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father's life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time. Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report."Martha Baillie’s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue, her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient tale” of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie’s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love." – Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women"This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn’t put it down." – Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness""Exquisite." – Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife"I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.” – Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker"This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author’s identity by way of her mother’s death, her sister’s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human." – Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

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Jonathan Ball’s fourth poetry book, the first in seven years, swirls chaos and confession together. At the book’s heart is a question: Why create art? A series of poetic sequences torment themselves over this question, offering few answers and taking fewer prisoners. Loose sonnets that consider the artistic creations of Leatherface, monster-killer from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, sit alongside Rilkean elegies for an iPhone. Surreal meditations on the collage work of Guy Maddin are followed by all of the lines from Melville’s Moby-Dick that mention “salt.” Politicians and painters jostle while absurdist humour crashes into stark admissions of vulnerability in the wake of having children. A startling diversity of styles and subjects feed into the maelstrom of The National Gallery, and its dark currents will draw you in to drown.

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Housing is increasingly unattainable in successful global cities, and Toronto is no exception -- in part because of zoning that protects “stable” residential neighborhoods with high property values. House Divided is a citizen’s guide for changing the way housing can work in big cities. Using Toronto as a case study, this anthology unpacks the affordability crisis and offers innovative ideas for creating housing for all ages and demographic groups. With charts, maps, data, and policy prescriptions, House Divided poses tough questions about the issue that will make or break the global city of the future.

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Longlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary AwardA woman must emerge from the virtual world she’s created to confront her flesh-and-blood past and family. Growing up with a menacing drunk for a father and a grief-stricken mother, a girl spends her 1980s childhood staring at the television to escape the tension, depression, and looming violence that fill her suburban home. After winning a modelling competition, she dedicates herself to becoming a placid image onto which anything can be projected, a blank slate with a blank stare. Earning enough in Paris to retire in her twenties, she buys a studio in Montreal and retreats from the world and its perceived threats, cultivating her existence as an image through her virtual reality avatar. But when her mother develops cancer and nears the end of her life, she is forced to leave her cocoon – surrounded by her posse of augmented reality superheroes – and interact with the world and her parents without the mask of her perfect, virtual self. Georges offers up an alienated childhood with shifting pop culture obsessions, a woman’s awakening to the role of the image in culture, and her eventual isolation in her apartment and the world online. It is a catalogue of the anxieties of an age, from nuclear war to terrorism, climate change to biological warfare. Set in the past and not-too-distant future of Montreal, The Imago Stage is an ominous tale of oppression, suppression, and disembodiment.

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In Vulgar Mechanics, K. B. Thors seeks to invent new strategies for survival through the two most basic tools available to the speaker: language and the body. The work begins in collapse, the poems acting as witness to the death of a mother. The speaker documents how, as her mother’s physical body disintegrates, hidden knowledge rises to the surface in the form of “seismic legacy data.” As dark secrets are released, the desire for justice demands improvisation. Moving from the fracked landscapes of the prairies to the steep verticality of New York, this is a collection concerned with hunger, anger, and the shifting fault-lines between play and pain. The poems celebrate the body as a vehicle of excavation and self-determination in a world in which there may be no such a thing as a safe word. Thors pushes against the boundaries of language – the material of sense, meaning – in order to claim a quantum vision of the self, one who transforms trauma into energy through its own multiplicity. The body becomes both ghost and machine, burning the past in its engine to make something beautiful and new, “a thunder egg / bucking the fire pit.”

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ONE OF BOOK RIOT'S "20 MUST-READ HORROR BOOKS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF"Simon and Marie can’t seem to have a baby. And so they flee the city for an idyllic village, where things will certainly be better. But the town is gloomy, even hostile -- things haven’t been the same since the factory closed down and a broadcast antenna was erected. Now there are no birds singing, and people have started disappearing.

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WINNER OF THE 2019 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARDIn Obits. a speaker tries and fails to write obituaries for those whose memorials are missing, those who are represented only as statistics. She considers victims of mass deaths, fictional characters, and her own aunt, asking what does it mean to be an 'I' mourning a 'you' when both have been othered? Centring vulnerability, the various answers to this question pass through trauma, depression, and the experience of being a mixed-race queer woman.

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Like the neutrino observatory of its title, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande seeks “glimpses of the obscure” to carve out meaning, alternately a resistance to rationalism and its champion. It aims to tear through abstraction with the concrete, either catastrophic -- road accidents, nuclear explosions, floods, extinction, eviction, suicide -- or quotidian, finding threads of love, empathy, and belief within the fray. These poems delight in aphorism, paradox, puns, and wit, each stanza a closure that moves tangentially to the next, each poem more bricolage than narrative, more shuffle than playlist. These are poems with no middle. These are poems of beginnings, and of ends.

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Modernist poet-painters Mina Loy and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven had many friends in common (including Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp), yet there is no record that the two ever met. Their non-relationship presents a curious "absent presence" in modernist history.Zelazo weaves lines of poetry by both women into an imaginary conversation, exploring the way their work has been suppressed, stitched, spliced, and edited by male editors and arbiters of taste.

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"The dense hermeticism in Eyre's vision generates a fascinating journey for the viewer, rewarded with a glimpse into a very complex psyche. A magnificent body of work." —Canadian Art Known for the theatricality of her self-portraits and the doubles that populate her images, disrupting the fixity of identity, Janieta Eyre is one of Canada's most original, provocative, and internationally recognized photographers. Spanning her seven major series (1993–2013), Incarnations is the first collection to make accessible a representative body of her work, including contributions by prominent Canadian writers and artists.

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A kind of cross between The Haunting of Hill House, Stoner and Alice in Wonderland. Mayr's novel The Widows was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region. Monoceros won the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, the 2012 Relit Award for Best Novel, and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

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Whatever the underlying motives—be they love, financial security, or mere masochism—the fact is that getting involved in a romantic partnership is emotionally, morally, and even politically fraught. In Hard To Do, Kelli Marìa Korducki turns a Marxist lens on the relatively short history of romantic love, tracing how the myth of economic equality between men and women has transformed the ways women conceive of domestic partnership. With perceptive, reported insights on the ways marriage and divorce are legislated, the rituals of twentieth-century courtship, and contemporary practices for calling it off, Korducki reveals that, for all women, choosing to end a relationship is a radical action with very limited cultural precedent.Kelli Marìa Korducki is a journalist and cultural critic. Her byline has appeared frequently in the Globe and Mail and National Post, as well as in the New Inquiry, NPR, the Walrus, Vice, and the Hairpin. She was nominated for a 2015 Canadian National Magazine Award for "Tiny Triumphs," a 10,000-word meditation on the humble hot dog for Little Brother Magazine. A former editor-in-chief of the popular daily news blog Torontoist, Korducki is based in Brooklyn and Toronto.

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From accomplished writer Ken Sparling comes a spare verse novel about a girl and a boy and the life they're writing together. But the girl wants a story and the boy wants a poem, and the furniture in the house is stuck in the middle. Meditative and magical, a book as complicated as the ways we love, This Poem Is a House is, in the end, about a girl's story sheltering a boy's poem, the way a house shelters the lives of the people who live in it. Ken Sparling has written six novels, including Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (Knopf, 1996), commissioned by Gordon Lish. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

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QUILL & QUIRE BEST OF 2016 QUILL & QUIRE BEST COVER OF 2016 We think of the modern woman as sexually liberated – if anything, we’re told we’re oversexed. Yet a striking number of women are dissatisfied with their sex lives. Over half of women report having a sexual complaint, whether that’s lack of desire or difficulty reaching orgasm. But this issue doesn’t get much press; the urge is to ignore or medicalize it (witness the quest for ‘pink Viagra’). If so many ordinary women suffer from sexual frustration, then perhaps the problem isn’t one that can be addressed by a pharmaceutical fix – or isn’t a problem. Maybe we need to get hot and bothered about a broader cultural cure: a reorienting of our current male-focused approach to sex and pleasure, and a rethinking of what’s ‘normal.’ Using a blend of reportage, interview and first-person reflection, journalist Sarah Barmak explores the cutting-edge science and grassroots cultural trends that are getting us closer to truth of women’s sexuality. Closer reveals how women are reshaping their sexuality today in wild, irrepressible ways: nude meetings, how-to apps, trans-friendly porn, therapeutic vulva massage, hour-long orgasms and public clit-rubbing demonstrations – and redefining female sexuality on its own terms. Sarah Barmak is a Toronto-based freelance journalist and author. Her writing has appeared in Maclean's, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Canadian Business, Marketing, and Reader's Digest.

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I'm ill-equipped for this. I sit by a fake fireplace that frames a real flame. I've been crossed by two crows today. 'Multi-vectored, Rogers's poems hum with life and tension, their speaker poised as mother, seer, reporter and daughter. They speak of loss and cold realities (misplaced charms of luck, a tour of an assisted-living facility, coins thrown into Niagara Falls). They also interweave dreams and visions: "O Lion, I am / an old handmaiden; I will not lay the pretty baby in the lap / of the imposter." Simple but evocative, at once strange and plain, Rogers's poems of address ricochet off the familiar "Dear Reader" or Dickinson's "Dear Master" ...Rogers's poems provide instructions for what to leave, what to take and what to fight. They act as selvage between the vast mother-ocean -- the mem of memory -- and the fabric we make of the uncertain in-between.' -- Hoa Nguyen, The Boston Review 'How can we live with the kind of pain that worsens each day? Dear Leader explains through bold endurance, enumerated blessings and the artistic imagination. By pasting stark truths over, or under, images of strange, compelling beauty, Rogers creates a collage, a simulation of the human heart under assault, bleeding but unbroken. Part Orpheus, part pop-heroine who can "paint the daytime black," all, an original act of aesthetic violence and pure, dauntless, love.' -- Lynn Crosbie 'In Dear Leader, Damian Rogers re-invents the same-old poetic lyric to offers us one-of-a-kind insights on childbirth and party bars, rolling blackouts and old rock standards. Here, what looks at first like familiar language always reveals itself to be a rare mineral. And that's the magic: this is a poetry that refuses to be staged or to succumb to cliche or mannerism, insisting on celebration and condemnation, caution and cosmic vibrations. "Say you're a poet," Rogers advises us, tongue-in-cheek, "Maybe you mean / Hi, I have a lot of feelings." Striking that balance between one-liners and mourning is no small feat.' --Trillium Award Jury Citation Praise for Paper Radio: 'Paper Radio jumped out at me and I can't say why, but that's what you want poetry to do, and I never want to say why. Because it's real and talking to me. Because it's bloody and horrifying beauty. It's the Clash and Buckminster Fuller, Auden and Bowie. -- Bob Holman Originally from the Detroit area, Damian Rogers now lives in Toronto where she works as the poetry editor of House of Anansi Press and as the creative director of Poetry in Voice. Her first book, Paper Radio, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

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When Halland is found murdered almost right outside his door, his widow, Bess, is of course the prime suspect. She isn't worried about that, though, but about the daughter she abandoned years ago. As the police investigate, the slightly cantankerous Bess instead follows a trail of her own regrets and misapprehensions. Atmospheric and haunted by the uncanny, The Murder of Halland is anything but your typical whodunnit. It won Denmark's most important literary prize, Den Danske Banks Litteraturpris, and its English translation was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Prize. Pia Juul has published five books of poetry, two short story collections and two novels. Martin Aitken is a translator living in rural Denmark.

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Ana and her son, Philippe, are grieving the loss of Philippe's father when Ana's hairstylist Kimi dies in an apparent suicide. Driven by a force she doesn't understand, Ana starts digging into Kimi's past in Guyana in 1978, which leads to nested tales of north and south, past and present, and to the Jonestown Massacre. A stunning translation of a masterpiece by one of Quebec's most important novelists. Elise Turcotte is a novelist and award-winning poet who has twice received the Prix Emile-Nelligan. Rhonda Mullins was a finalist for the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation and translated Jocelyne Saucier's And the Birds Rained Down.

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"Alphabetic dismantling, syntactic play, essaying words backwards and 4words (as she might say), Christakos manifests forensic clarity and telegraphic fortitude in this unsettling work."--Rachel Blau DuPlessis Revelling in the value of social polyphony from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Multitudes looks at its contemporary theatres of Facebook and Twitter, post-riot police surveillance, protest culture and poetry itself. With wit, perceptiveness and her trademark linguistic sonar, Margaret Christakos keenly examines intimacies and banishments, as well as intergenerational grief, self-display and social hope.

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"Goldbach's touch is light and his narrative momentum is fierce."--The Globe and Mail Robert James, a private detective more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, gets a midnight call from a young woman whose older husband has been found with a knife in his chest. Murder, corruption, and betrayal ensue as he's drawn into the dark underworld of his client, but hapless Robert and his sidekick, a flower-delivery guy, can't stop drinking, smoking, and philosophizing long enough to keep up. Imagine The Big Sleep via Fernando Pessoa, with a side of Buster Keaton. John Goldbach is the author of Selected Blackouts, a collection of stories.

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Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. "Time's not the market, it's the bustle; / not the price but worth," he writes, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr. Matthew Tierney's narrators grapple with the gap between what's seen and what's experienced, their minds tuned to one (probably) inevitable truth: the more I understand, the more I understand I'm alone. If it were necessary to tell someone where I am, I'd say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles. I'd say I have loved. Matthew Tierney is the author of the Trillium Award--nominated The Hayflick Limit and Full Speed through the Morning Dark. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

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A finalist for the 36th annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award! Five siblings, all haunted by the death of a brother in their youth. One winter day, when another of them will be taken by cancer. Guddy is struggling to fly across the continent in a snowstorm to see her sister while she still can. Jerry, avoiding the phone, hits the highway, driving as fast as he can away from his back pain and his son. Bjarne, just back from six years on the streets, is watching Judge Judy, trying to quiet the voices in his head. Annie is cleaning her mother's trailer and ducking her questions. And then there's Therese, trying to forgive them all before it's too late. As all five are forced to react--or to choose to not react--to the news of Therese's impending death, their actions weave a nuanced portrait of a family, of the devastating reach of childhood grief. What if thinking is all we have at the end of the day? This transcendent first novel from award-winning poet Sina Queyras tells the story of childhood by recreating the mind at work grappling with it: noticing, reaching, loving, and flailing. Sina Queyras' last collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award, and she is the winner of the 2012 Friends of Literature Award. She is a blogger for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.

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Non-profits are big business. As the sector expands to embrace new issues, there is increased pressure for accountability, relevancy, and efficiency. Practitioners are expected to be experts in a variety of fields. In Five Good Ideas, forty professionals from successful non-profits large and small offer information, strategies for action, and management solutions that are easy to implement and will improve how organizations function. Alan Broadbent is the chair of Avana Capital, Tides Canada Foundation, and Maytree, and is the author of Urban Nation. Ratna Omidvar is the president of Maytree and is The Globe and Mail's 2010 Nation Builder of the Decade for Citizenship.

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Where does the fragile, robust self reside when 'personal' voice is sent out online into an ironic masquerade ball of alias identity and wanton proxy? What stirs us? Can there be anything authentic about feeling anything anymore? In What Stirs, Margaret Christakos looks at our primal appetite for attachment through the modern norms of codependency and co-existence, understanding that the postmodern digital era has created an atmosphere where the vulnerability and tenderness of the individual is both profanely exposed and brazenly reinvented in the arrival of virtual identity. Often playful but never trifling, Christakos's work layers the ecstatic possibilities of lyric poetry, the mundane and intimate extremes of motherhood, and her continued curiosity with experimental poetics in a thoughtful collection of sensual, language-focused, and wonderfully aural poems.

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A New York Times Notable Book of 2010 Longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize Verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias, 1995--2007. Collected by Elisa Sampedrin. Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past -- its ideas, its personages, its syntax -- to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language -- whiplike -- casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage. Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

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Haven is fiercely protective of her little brother, Chase, spiriting him away when their father's temper is about to flare yet again. She hides the bread away so he'll have something for lunch, and she teaches him to hide himself. But when that's no longer enough to keep him safe, she steals the car and takes them both away to their aunt, Mary, who tries her best to love and nurture them. They try to redeem their harrowing childhood in different ways: Haven, lost and damaged, goes to medical school and teacher's college, and marries young, hoping to find meaning through her daughter, April. Chase battles his demons through cathartic but doomed performance art. And, always, they try to keep one another afloat. Chase and Haven is a haunting story -- inventively told and deeply felt -- of suffering and love, made of thousands of small impressionist facets that refract the quiet spectrum of the beauty and the detritus of two entwined lives.

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Deliciously wicked satires about local and international celebrities, the poems in Portable Altamont evince an irrepressible grasp of the zeitgeist, its machinations and manipulations, its possibilities and puerility. Who other than artist and raconteur Brian Joseph Davis could have imagined Margaret Atwood as a human beatbox, Jessica Simpson applying for arts grants or the Swedish Chef reciting T. S. Eliot? Davis uses every literary form available to revel in and rearrange pop culture. Even the index turns into a short story about Luke Perry's descent into a shadowy underworld of Parisian intellectuals and terrorists. A word of warning: this book is a complete and utter fiction. Philip Roth is not David Lee Roth's brother. Reese Witherspoon is not a Communist cell leader, and Don Knotts has never been a New Age guru. The stuff about Nicole Richie, however, is absolutely true. Portable Altamont is that rare book that is both incendiary and compulsively readable. Get to it before the lawyers do!

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