Search results for ""Coach House Books""

The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade -- in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning. Nicole Brossard, one of the world's foremost literary innovators, is known for her experiments with language and her groundbreaking treatment of desire and gender. This dextrous translation by the award-winning poets and translators Erin Moure (Little Theatres) and Robert Majzels (Apikoros Sleuth) brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossard's remarkable syntax and sensuality.

Read more less

It's a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It's 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way. Miss Mary Barfoot runs a school for secretaries with her young lover, Miss Rhoda Nunn. But when the Misses Madden -- spinsters Virginia and Alice and beautiful young Monica -- arrive, along with the attractive Dr. Everard Barfoot, things can never be the same. Age of Arousal is a lavish, sexy, frenetic ensemble piece about the forbidden and gloriously liberated self -- genre-busting, rule-bending, and ambitiously original.

Read more less

Brian Lembeck -- 'Pulpy' -- takes life slow and steady. He likes his office job, and he likes his gentle, figurine-collecting boss, Al. He even likes the bitter receptionist, though he's the only one who does. He likes his wife, Midge, too, and their ice-dancing lessons. Midge works as a candle-party hostess -- she quit her office job when Al's dog ate her pet pigeon and Al promised Pulpy a promotion. But when Al retires and the tyrannical Dan takes over, the promotion vanishes. And then Dan's oversexed wife, Beatrice, takes a shine to Pulpy, and Dan starts to think Midge is one hot tamale. Soon, the receptionist is smitten with Pulpy, Midge can't get rid of Dan and Beatrice, and Pulpy's job is in jeopardy. For once, Pulpy just might have to take a stand.

Read more less

Glenn Gould captured the imagination of a worldwide audience, becoming an instant celebrity with his eccentric performance style and his definitive renderings of Bach. David Young has used Gould's early and late recordings of The Goldberg Variations as a structural template for the acclaimed Glenn, his dramatic exploration of the music, ideas, and remarkable life of this iconoclastic and celebrated pianist, arguably the most important artist Canada has ever produced.

Read more less

The debut collection of visceral short fiction from notorious Toronto writer, editor, indie commentator and small-press overlord Hal Niedzviecki, Smell It lances the boil of urban life and sticks its nose right up to what oozes out. 'One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of Canadian writers,' says Eric McCormack.

Read more less

'This is a record of our version of grassroots theatre. The idea was to take a group of actors out to a farming community and build a play of what we could see and learn. There is no story or "plot" as such ...Nevertheless, we hope that you can see many stories woven into the themes of this play and that out of it will emerge a picture of a complex and living community.' - Paul Thompson

Read more less

Overthinking simple actions leads to overwhelming poems about what one can lean on if promised help doesn’t helpI Will Get Up Off Of is a book about trying to leave a chair. How does anyone ever leave a chair? There are so many muscles involved - so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate. What is there to lean on when avenues promising help don’t help? I Will Get Up Off Of explores the role art plays in survival and the hope that underlies any creative impulse."The voice of these poems moves like a magical fish trapped in a small squ

Read more less

"The empire's missing links are found deep in this poet's ever-astonishing states of multiple consciousness-astutely attuned to the pressured, violent, mass conformities forced upon us-brilliantly formed into poems as ambitious and achieved as any written in the English language today."-Lawrence Joseph In these dramatic monologues, Walid Bitar delivers variations on the theme of power: in politics, in the subjugation and abuse of other cultures, and in our divided selves. Using satire, parody, koan, and riddle, Divide and Rule struggles with the mendacity of language and identity. They have no maps. Ours, I'll redraw. Isn't itself, their neck of the woods, needs a rest-something more than a nap, and less than death, though death wouldn't hurt. Walid Bitar's poetry collections include 2 Guys on Holy Land, Bastardi Puri, and The Empire's Missing Links. He was born in Beirut and lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Read more less

From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it. From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before. "If nostalgia was a disease in the Good Old Days, then David Berry's cogently argued, intelligent, and witty book should be prescribed reading for anyone wishing to understand what sometimes feels like a peculiarly virulent epidemic of our current times." —Travis Elborough "We're so lucky to have a writer as thoughtful, funny, smart, and cutting as David Berry. Nostalgia dictates so much of our world, and there isn't a better cataloger, critic, and guide through it than Berry." —Scaachi Koul

Read more less

Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates, and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender, and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Jenny Sampririsi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end. 'As invigorating and idiosyncratic a collection as this reviewer has encountered in some time. A must-read.' -- Seth Abramson, Huffington Post

Read more less

In two massive volumes, Steve McCaffery, Canada's most challenging, experimental and innovative poet/critic amasses the best of his previously published and ungathered work. From the early concrete and visual poems of Broken Mandala and Transitions to the Beast to the Ludwig Wittgenstein-inspired philosophical investigations of EVOBA, from the innovative novel Panopticon to the Governor General's Award-nominated Theory of Sediment and the recent The Cheat of Words, this comprehensive edition covers all phases of McCaffery's vast and heterogeneous poetic oeuvre. Many works that have previously only been available in small, privately circulated editions, such as Shifters and Every Way Oakly, are available in perfect-bound form here for the first time. Volume 2, following in the wake of the extraordinarily successful first volume, collects the best of McCaffery's ungathered work. Along with selections from his concrete and visual poetry, this book contains sound poem and performance scores, excerpts from early chapbooks, 'pataphysical essays and sections of the often-discussed but rarely seen text The Abstract Ruin. For new readers and long-time fans of McCaffery alike, Volume 2 of Seven Pages Missing is essential reading.

Read more less

Yet another book of poems from the ubiquitous poet, playwright, actor, director, visual artist and standardized patient (yes, standardized patient), Stan Rogal. This is the first of Rogal's books to feature samples of his collage work.

Read more less

Home is where the heart is, or, in the case of The Sink House, home is what the heart is. Sequestered on a sleepy street in a dry Calgary suburb, our heroine, the House, finds herself embroiled in a stalled love affair with an elusive and alluring Oxfordshire riverbank. In a series of self-contained poems both prosy and lyrical, we follow this curious and engaging affair, which mysteriously coincides with a slow and gradual flood. Everything succumbs to the persistent rise of water: the street becomes a creek bed, wallpaper comes away in the night, sandbags melt, kitchen utensils become silt. Here, the furniture floats, flowers become fish that feed in the garden on vegetables that explode with damp. Through it all, our lovers persist, salvaging soap boats and flushing toilets for amusement. Intelligent, enigmatic, sometimes humorous, and always enticing, The Sink House is a long, eccentric love poem that will immerse you in the flood of its own desire. 'If only the imagination were real. Story seems to think so. And so does Julia Williams. Here, image (hear the image) beautifully choreographs the story into a readable imagination that is a measure of syllabic and rhythmic particulars, a language, thankfully, balanced, open and with surprise. In other words, a poetry that makes seeming so.' -- Fred Wah

Read more less

Taking its title from lossless data compression algorithms, Lossless transmits through time and space those ‘stabs of self’ that intensify with loss of relationships, of faith, of childhood, of people. The qualities of light, colour, and movement in the book’s forty-eight sonnets conjure a sense of arrested time, of motes in the air, while chapters of Borgesian prose poems extract knowledge from information to reconstruct a subjectivity, a personality, and a life."Tierney tracks and backtracks in the realm of dispossession like a cross between a physicist and a magician from a future era. These poems are new forms for human heart and quiddity.” - Anne-Marie Turza, author of Fugue with Bedbug"In this wise, wonky, poignant avowal of error and losslessness, Matthew Tierney geotags his ''freefall of associative memory,'' where the past fl

Read more less

CBC BOOKS: 2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEW A queer writer travelling through India can''t escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present. "I am leaving for the winter - I have to get away from this small town and all its dangers - to write, read, think, all the most important things in the world but which are thought the least important, the most expendable." Thus begins the Indian winter of our narrator, a queer writer and translator much like the author, a winter that includes a meandering journey through India, trying to write about a long-ago lover whose death he has just learned of. While on this journey into memory, he flees his current faltering relationship in search of new friendships and intimacies. Inspired by Antonio Tabucchi''s Indian Nocturne, and by the writings of Anaïs Nin, Rachel Cusk, and Carole Maso, among others, Indian Winter finds

Read more less

What if poetry and prayer are the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion that hooks you to the thrashing, imperfect world?Good Want entertains the notion that perhaps virtue is a myth that’s outgrown its uses. Exploring the value and shame ascribed to our desires both silly and serious - artistic, superficial, spiritual, relational - these poems grapple with deeply rooted questions: How can there be a relationship between goodness and godliness, if god is a character with shifting allegiances and priorities? Is clarity worth the pain of redefining your experience of the world? Is privacy the same as secrecy the same as deceit? Each caveat becomes a prayer, ritual, invocation, dream, or confession, requiring a blind faith that feels increasingly more impossible to sustain. Good Want looks in

Read more less

Cowboy erotica meets Kathy Acker in this smart, raunchy look at a queer sexual awakeningSteacy Easton grew up Mormon, queer, and Autistic in the West. This book traces the people and spaces that made them who they are: the Mormon church, an Anglican boys’ boarding school where they were sent to be ‘reformed’ and where they were abused by a teacher, and then, later on, rodeos and bathhouses and mall bathrooms. The world Easton describes is one in which desire is complicated, where men – ‘daddies’ – can be loving and they can be abusive, and there isn’t always a clear distinction.Easton explores the essential texts of their sexuality, from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Neil LaBute, Kip Moore to Lorelei James, and delves into their own encounters as they came of age. These daddy lessons are blunt about the pleasures of disobedience, slippery and difficult, revelling in the funk of memory and desire."In dangerous times, Daddy Lessons dares to complicate the question of what children desire, including things that they probably shouldn’t, and that adults must not exploit or manipulate. Except they do. Steacy Easton's meditations follow how such desires and disasters secrete an aesthetic and a self, and how something vivacious can spring from that muck, something like this book itself, smutty and shining and garlanded in jonquils." – Carl Wilson, author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste"Steacy writes about the queer pleasure-seeking body in ways both fresh and eminently familiar." – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners"Daddy Lessons is a cocky and tender reclamation of childhood and teenage wanting." – Vivek Shraya, author of I’m Afraid of Men and People Change

Read more less

A reimagining of an instructional text on tumbling supports poems about the amateurishness of being human.Tumbling for Amateurs is a reimagining of James Tayloe Gwathmey’s 1910 book of the same name, published as part of Spalding’s Athletic Library. Bookended with “Propositions” on why tumbling is a skill that everyone should learn and “Extracts from Letters of Support,” each verso poem in this collection pairs with a recto illustration based on drawings from the source text. In the spirit of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, word and image work for each other, creating something more than just an instructional manual.Tumbling is, well, a metaphor for everything. And we all are, well, amateurs. Experimentation abounds in these poems and manipulated pictures. There are anaphoras, list sonnets, erasures, palimpsests and concrete poems, all working from tumbling’s limited vocabulary and central focus of acrobatics and gymnastics. In this experimentation of form and text is a search for the lyric, for an emotional connection when one isn’t always possible, in bodies, in movement, in desire. “We measure our lives by what our bodies can do.”"Matthew Gwathmey’s poems, springboarding from a genre of fitness manual popular in the early twentieth century, tumble us into the present through tests gamily set for body and mind. As ripped as his gymnast protagonists – evoked so fetchingly in the book’s illustrations – Gwathmey writes a poetry eschewing the lyrical in favour of a stripped-down, athletic language that gives shape to 'what must remain / nameless.' There’re so many ways to read ourselves into Tumbling for Amateurs. Go toe to toe with these poems and they’ll tone up your grip on what poetry is." – John Barton, author of Lost Family “We have no other way to touch each other. / Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other." Like the tumbling acts from which they spring, Gwathmey's poems are delightfully performative. They leap, loop, and reconfigure familiar forms into fresh and acrobatic new intimacies. Slyly queering his source text — an early 20th century tumbling manual for young men salvaged from the dusty closet of family history — Gwathmey transforms instruction into seduction as he conducts a tender and playful archeology of desire." – Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book"Gwathmey's poems go together like a troupe, somersaulting through the vocabulary of the way a body moves. They turn the still past into this moving present." – Paul Legault, author of The Tower

Read more less

CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023In his follow-up to SKY WRI TEI NGS, Nasser Hussain tackles the absurdity of the English languageThe term “Love Language” can be read at least three ways: as an imperative, as the signoff to a letter, and as a contemporary way of talking about relationship styles. None of these would be wrong in this book. Love Language loves language. These are poems that repeat and hypnotize as English becomes more absurd: from Apple's terms and conditions to other poet's love poems, from performance reports to pop songs, Hussain skillfully and joyfully toys with everyday texts to talk about love, to think about poems, to call out racism, to remind us that words can be fun. Allow these playful poems to woo you, to let you fall in love with language again."Think of 'time as a lantern,' suggests Nasser Hussain, in these inimitable poems that take play seriously and allow seriousness to enter the room disguised as incantation. These are poems that long to dismiss the lyric’s most recent pretty mask of polite propriety and instead take us to the lyric’s ancient roots. It started way back, the poet says, 'when a cave person made a grunt,' to speak the name of a thing. Indeed. This is the lyric’s ancient pact with the world: to spin playful language into seriousness of giving things their names—what are we without this speaking, this tune? Hussain knows this and writes beautiful poems—and I, for one, am grateful." – Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"Hussain's humour is never complacent; it is the opposite of a defence mechanism (we are encouraged to imagine such a thing) and wryly sidesteps the bad binary of conservative withdrawal as set against algorithm-envenomed hyperassertion. He puts into words a new masculinity maturer than we deserve, that acknowledges swerves of defiance to be inseparable from underswells of doubt." – Vidyan Ravinthiran, author of The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here

Read more less

Boy meets Girl, Boy marries Girl, and years later Boy mysteriously disappears in this Gordon Lish–style novel.The boy and the girl have been married for decades, mostly getting along as they go about their lives. But one day, like thousands of people around the world, the boy vanishes, and the girl is left to wait, wonder, and worry. Will he return? Who might she be if she moves on without him?This is a world where every morning the cat gets fed and the coffee gets made, but also one in which God sometimes lives in the garage – she likes to sleep on the freezer – and gigantic words can fall from the sky. Not Anywhere, Just Not cracks open the small dramas of our lives to show the dread and wonder inside all of us."Ken Sparling is a brilliant writer and this book, like all his books, is a beauty. Sparling chronicles the times I fear most—the moments of loneliness, of loss, of ennui—and somehow makes them seem worthwhile, even wondrous, and often flat-out funny. His work makes life look livable, which makes him a wizard to me." – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot"A gorgeous rendition of the domestic uncanny, Not Anywhere, Just Not is an ostensibly quiet book that slowly and carefully unnerves and unsettles you--both because of its precise swapping out of reality and because of just how familiar it so often seems. All of us, Sparling seems to say, are on the verge of vanishing at any moment." – Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

Read more less

CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023THE TORONTO STAR 'MUST READ, HANDS DOWN BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR'‘Cat Person’ meets Station Eleven in this apocalyptic depiction of toxic masculinity.An unnamed man is spending the evening with his ex-girlfriend. She’s obsessed with the 1956 John Wayne classic The Searchers, and she recounts the story as a way for them to talk about their histories, their families, maybe even their relationship. But as he gets more drunk and belligerent, she gets more and more uncomfortable with him being in her home.And then, two days later, a mysterious catastrophic event befalls Toronto, and our protagonist must trek across the city to find Melanie. His quest spirals into increasing violence, bloodshed, and hallucinations as he moves west through the confusion and chaos of the city.Using the tropes of both the Western and the disaster movie, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys looks at the violence of our contemporary masculinity, and its deep roots in shaping our culture. A suspenseful and thought-provoking evocation of our current moment."Ask the right questions and a conversation about the movies becomes a conversation about your life, family, past, and everything you value: Aaron Tucker’s novel, which starts chatty before turning deeply, unexpectedly inward, grasps the ceaseless, sometimes terrible relevance of violence and troubling art." – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time"In Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys, Aaron Tucker refuses the easy projections of masculinity from film history. Instead he gallops into the screen to sift out how drama collaborates with the bloodiest of truths. That this novel shifts from dialogical treatise into a thriller proves that Tucker is well on his way to stealing the weird fiction mantle away from Don DeLillo." – Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes and Little Threats"Sad, smart, innocent and wise. A relentless retelling of a movie and a life, full of hope, if there is any." – John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts

Read more less

2022 QUILL & QUIRE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARSHORTLISTED FOR THE 30TH ANNUAL HAMILTON LITERARY FICTION AWARDA bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And she’ll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan’s wish come true. But Ülle begins to remember her past and the outrageous steps her government took to combat a deadly pandemic of parasitic infections, which have brought her to this new country and to Regan’s house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both Ülle and herself alive. But the shadowy organization that brought them together wants to keep them both quiet – permanently. A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly comic dystopian tale that probes our anxieties around boundaries, whether territorial or bodily, and our fraught desire not to die alone."Gripping from the first page, Robert McGill’s A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a dark, speculative novel with echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale, set against the backdrop of a plague. Some of us would do anything to survive, down to flatpacking ourselves like IKEA furniture, while others would do anything to make our miserable lives end. This is timely, provocative, ethically challenging fiction that asks whether the drive to survive is stronger than the inevitability of death." –Ian Williams, author of Reproduction"Terrifying and tender, A Suitable Companion's sci-fi angle serves to frame a fascinating parable about the post-post-modern family. Unpredictable and completely original, this is a propulsive, rewarding, and thought-provoking read." –Michael Redhill, author of Bellevue Square​​“The guy knows what he’s doing, from missing children to silk parachutes, you are never lost and he will catch you.” – Zadie Smith, author of Swing Time“A storyteller who refuses to keep things straight, and for this produces freshly captivating effects.” – Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist“A writer of striking talent and originality.” – Daily Mail on The Mysteries“McGill is a talented writer, adept at expressing the nuanced, unspoken truths that beg the lies by which we live.” – Observer on The Mysteries

Read more less

Kazim Ali introduces five autofiction novellas by Kristjana Gunnars—available in the U.S. for the first time, in a single, handsome volume "Between the late eighties and late nineties, Kristjana Gunnars published five transgeneric novels comprised of a scintillating blend of fiction, autobiography, literary theory, and philosophy. Elusive and poetic… rigorous yet passionate...these books were treasured by a devoted readership and have been lauded by critics throughout the years since." – Kazim Ali, from the introduction From a childhood in Cold War Iceland to love affairs and deaths, these short works document a life of perpetual motion, told a discontinuous, subversive style to reflect the singular, feminist, nomadic life of the narrator. It is a life of thought, an ongoing engagement with writers from Proust to Kierkegaard to Kristeva, seeking and often finding a companionship in the writing of others. These five spellbinding narratives act as a bending bow, open to what life has to offer day by day and taking the gentler course, wherein nothing is forced and life’s big questions remain beautifully unanswered. The Prowler is a reminiscence of childhood spent in Iceland, seen from a distance with the Cold War as a backdrop, just before the hyper-modernization of the mid-sixties, when the air of the past was still discernible. When an orange was a delicacy against the darkness. This is Gunnars’ most lauded novella. Zero Hour is a contemplation and remembrance of the narrator’s father and his death. The narrative traces the course of the father’s illness and final moments, and confronts the reality and grief of absolute endings. The Substance of Forgetting is ultimately about happiness. Set in a lush valley in central B.C., the narrator begins to awaken to possibilities of love and transcendence. The Rose Garden is set in Germany and the narrator is on an academic exchange wherein all that happens are things that are not supposed to happen. Night Train to Nykøbing is a darker exploration of life’s (and love’s) unknowns and the dangers inherent in choices we make. The narrator is travelling between Vancouver and Oslo in a continuous back and forth that gives rise to a sense of the liminality of life itself."The intimacy, grace, and intelligence of these narratives is remarkable. The mystery and quietude honours the beauty of the everyday as it passes, while simultaneously gesturing to vast other worlds. Often I was taken by its openings and distances, and a marvellous, almost translucent quality that permeates the texts. Oddly, at times it felt as if I were inside a whispering many-chambered shell – resonant, enclosed, pearlescent – the pleasure afforded, enormous." – Carole Maso, author of Ghost Dance"From 1989 to 1998, the Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars published five novellas, each detailing specific moments in the writer’s life. Gathered here for the first time, they offer a significant new strand of thinking about the rise of autofiction and the history of innovative women’s writing in Canada. If you loved discovering Annie Ernaux, you’ll love discovering Kristjana Gunnars." – Sina Queyras, author of Lemon Hound

Read more less

CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN POETRY BOOKS OF 2022LONGLISTED FOR THE RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARDhwæt, another Beowulf translation? Not exactly… Welcome to Denmark’s Heorot Hall, where King Hrothgar invites to his banquet table everyone but Grendel, Saxon’s cradle-made monster. Dissing this ur-outsider initiates a predictable and monstrous backlash, a Mediæval fracas that only the eponymous Beowulf can quash. Sailing across the whaleroads, he arrives to “quell and queltch and quatch the Grendel beast.” Beowulf, that still-recognizable hero, embodies a “blank” function, a motive-driven yet motiveless megastar. He’s the young, fit, male, self-sacrificing protagonist-interloper who will fight any monster to protect his people. Or to defend strangers. Or to gain a reputation. Or because he just really wants to… In her rendering of Beowulf, Nicole Markotić offers a rollicking cover song of fantastical text. These pages will surprise readers as they introduce new ways to embrace, challenge, or click with Anglo-Saxon heroics. Writing original poems, Markotić de-stories the story of one man, who mostly does not play well with others, who fights monsters (and defeats their mothers, too), and who practically invents the poetic tradition of entitled bravery. Upending the tale with her fresh and enchanting style, Markotić gives a nod to previous translations, winks at canonical critics, bares historical biases, all while gifting transmogrifying pages that will whet your whimsy!"Nicole Markotić takes the original English-language epic and reprocesses it. That is, she rereads, rewrites, reimagines, rethinks, and retells it, all at the same time. The result is the story re-understood. The phrasing and incantation is Markotić’s own (and our era’s own), deployed with deliciously textured and diverse registers of language. Blake saw infinity in the palm of his hand. Markotić puts a millennium in yours." —Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour"Beowulf, with its unfathomable monsters and monster-slaying hero, its bro world of mead, boasting, weapons, and booty, remains a stubbornly relevant template for much of our contemporary scene. Nicole Markotić’s After Beowulf handles all this with dazzling sprezzatura. It is a pleasure to follow the narrating, condensing, commenting voice as it sashays through a range of verbal registers from high Olsonic to comic book pratfall, snark to scholarship. After Beowulf provides an up-to-date reading of Beowulf through the eyes of a feminist poet. And it continually suggests what things might be like after Beowulf." —Bob Perelman, author of Jack and Jill in Troy"The collision of ancient and colloquial language creates bursts of humour as my dude Beowulf makes his way into the banquet hall and beyond. Linger here to experience the aesthetics of poetry in action: vibrant and intensely moving, we feel the wrenching pain of Grendel’s mother. Markotić’s language is thick with meaning and light with humour: a creation of the most projective of verses." —Jacqueline Turner, author of Flourish

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE QWF MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONTHE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022From LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after they’d turned in an essay on Virginia Woolf. Queyras returns to that contentious first encounter with Virginia Woolf to recover the body and thinking of that time. Using Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone, this book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of one’s own at the centre of our idea of a literary life. How central is the room? And what happens once we get one? Do we inhabit our rooms? Or do the rooms contain us? Blending memoir, prose, tweets, poetry, and criticism, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind, and from a very private life of the mind to a public life of the page, and from a life of the page into a life in the Academy, the Internet, and on social media."With Virginia Woolf alongside them, Queyras journeys through rooms literal and figurative, complicating and deepening our understanding of what it means to create space for oneself as a writer. Their hard-won language challenges us to resist any glib associations of Woolf’s famous ‘room’ with an easy freedom. Inspiring and moving, Queyras’s memoir testifies to Woolf’s continuing generative power."—Mark Hussey, editor of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (2011) and author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (2021)"In this beautiful, perceptive book, Sina Queyras moves deftly between the words and wake of Virginia Woolf and their own formation as writer, lover, teacher, friend, and person. Rooms is expert in its depiction of personal and literary histories, and firmly aware of its moment of composition. Reading these pages, I was enticed by Queyras’s curiosity and openness, thrilled by the sharp edges of their anger. Tight prose, electric thinking, self-discovery – it’s all here, all abuzz. Rooms is alive." – Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book"It is impossible not to question the world as we thought we knew it by the end of this book. Sina Queyras painstakingly aims their extraordinary nerve and talent at Virginia Woolf’s idea of a room of one’s own: 'It’s a mistake to consider the room without all of its entanglements.' Taking Woolf’s cue, Queyras explores writing that is not world-building but something far more generous and transformative; as Woolf wrote, 'Literature is open to everybody.'" – CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

Read more less

The genius and artistry behind Superbrothers and the making of an indie video game, from inception to its highly anticipated launch. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was released in 2011 at the forefront of an exciting era of “indie games” – with the aesthetic of punk rock and the edge of modernist fiction, indie games pushed gaming into the realm of the avant-garde. Superbrothers (Craig D. Adams) was hailed as a visionary in the video game world. Now, his long-awaited follow-up, JETT: The Far Shore, has been released for Sony PlayStation and Epic Games Store. In the decade from inception to launch, Adams brought author Adam Hammond along for the ride, allowing unprecedented insight into the complicated genesis of Jett. The Far Shore offers a portrait of the enigmatic Adams and his team, the genius and artistry, the successes and setbacks, that went into building the world of JETT, in which you’re tasked with scouting a new home for a humanoid people after they’ve decimated their planet. To provide context, Hammond recounts the history of indie games and how their trajectory has followed that of independent art and literature. A riveting insider’s look at one of our most popular art forms.

Read more less

Away From Her meets Strangers on a Train in this follow-up to cult bestseller And the Birds Rained Down "A journey as geographical as it is interior... a bumpy route, but one punctuated by contemplative pleasures, by small, lost joys... Simultaneously introspective and captivating, [And Miles to Go Before I Sleep...] reconnects us to what is essential." —Les Libraires “Nostalgic and beautifully grotesque, this novel is delightfully baroque and, although short, so striking it simply will never leave you.” —The Coast, on And the Birds Rained Down "Cleaving closely to the award-winning Jocelyne Saucier novel on which it’s based, this eco-friendly, elegantly delivered tale about the sunset changes in the lives of a trio of graybeards living in the woods is engaging, thought-provoking and ultimately moving." –The Hollywood Reporter, on the film adaptation of And the Birds Rained Down After And The Birds Rained Down, a stunning meditation on aging and freedom (with more than 3,000 Goodreads ratings), Jocelyne Saucier is back with this unsettling story about a woman’s disappearance. Gladys might look old and frail, but she is determined to finish her life on her own terms. And so, one September morning, she leaves Swastika, her home of the past fifty years, and hops on the Northlander train, eager to put thousands of miles of northern Quebec between her and the improbably named village, and leaving behind her perennially tormented daughter, Lisana. Our mysterious narrator, who is documenting these disappearing northern trains, is on a quest to uncover the truth of Gladys’s voyage, tracking down fellow passengers and train employees to learn what happened to Gladys and her daughter, and why.

Read more less

WINNER OF THE HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARDRich and diverse narratives of Indigenous Toronto, past and present Beneath many major North American cities rests a deep foundation of Indigenous history that has been colonized, paved over, and, too often, silenced. Few of its current inhabitants know that Toronto has seen twelve thousand years of uninterrupted Indigenous presence and nationhood in this region, along with a vibrant culture and history that thrives to this day. With contributions by Indigenous Elders, scholars, journalists, artists, and historians, this unique anthology explores the poles of cultural continuity and settler colonialism that have come to define Toronto as a significant cultural hub and intersection that was also known as a Meeting Place long before European settlers arrived. "This book is a reflection of endurance and a helpful corrective to settler fantasies. It tells a more balanced account of our communities, then and now. It offers the space for us to reclaim our ancestors’ language and legacy, rewriting ourselves back into a landscape from which non Indigenous historians have worked hard to erase us. But we are there in the skyline and throughout the GTA, along the coast and in all directions." -- from the introduction by Hayden King

Read more less

A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest. In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action. Edited by Madhur Anand, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Dorner, Catherine Graham, Elena Johnson, Canisia Lubrin, Kim Mannix, Kathryn Mockler, June Pak, Sina Queyras, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Rasiqra Revulva, Yusuf Saadi, Sanchari Sur, and Jacqueline Valencia Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto.

Read more less

Emily Dickinson is as famous for being a recluse as she is for her poetry. In this stunning novel, we see her struggling to reconcile spirit and flesh, preferring letters and reflecting that the only way to have books and life is to live through one’s own writing. Dominique Fortier brings Dickinson vividly to life, as if reanimating a flower that had been pressed in a book, through her reflections on language and what it feels like to be home.

Read more less

Where were you when you first read Ariel? Who were you? What has changed in your life? In the lives of women? In My Ariel, Sina Queyras barges into one of the iconic texts of the twentieth century, with her own family baggage in tow, exploring and exploding the cultural norms, forms, and procedures that frame and contain the lives of women.When I am a bitch I feel in such good company.Nice girls never gave me anything but trouble,Eating the ground out from under me, then wavingAs I fall. Pity one has to die to see how liberatingBad can be. But what news had I of my own self?Words landed like razors, hours tinkled, suitors arrived.Listen, you'll think otherwise, but I tell you, betrayalIs your Get Out of Jail Free card. Take it,Don't look back. Of course you will. Look back.We always do, we who adore the muscleOf our cashmere cells, a cock that makesOur knees weak. Darlings, don't be sweet,Or serviceable. Don't accommodate,Write in blood or don't bother ...Sina Queyras was born in Manitoba and grew up on the road in western Canada. She has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Calgary. Most recently, she is the author of the poetry collection MxT, which received the QWF Award for poetry, the Pat Lowther Award, and the ReLit award for poetry. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford, and Concordia University in Montreal, where she currently lives.

Read more less

Night Became Years is poetry in the sauntering tradition of the flâneur. Stefanik loafers his way over sacred geography and explores his own mixed heritage through the lexicon of Elizabethan canting language. Comparing the terminology of fifteenth-­century English beggar vernacular with a contemporary Canadian inner­-city worldview, the poems in Night Became Years unfold as separate entities while at the same time forming a larger narrative on the possibilities of poetry today and the nature of mixed­-blood identity.

Read more less

Blurbs from Joan Retallack, Kevin Killian and CA Conrad A brash and brazen use of misread historical texts to highlight the violence of the treatment of North America's first people Zolf identifies as a LGBTQ writer

Read more less

In the early nineties, Beck sang 'I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me?' and changed everything. Suddenly, it wasn't so bad to be a nerd or an oddball; loser chic had begun. Ten years later, after all the computer nerds have had the last laugh, Jon Paul Fiorentino turns to Thorstein Veblen's seminal social science text from 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen's book introduced to our culture the terms 'conspicuous consumption' and 'nouveau riche'; it identified a new demographic, the leisure class, and demarcated its position in culture. The Theory of the Loser Class, then, is an art manifesto for the aesthetics and ethics of loser culture. If the Anthony Michael Hall character in The Breakfast Club wrote poems (and, deep down, you know that he did), they'd probably read a lot like The Theory of the Loser Class. Drawing on texts ranging from Thorstein Veblen's groundbreaking The Theory of the Leisure Class to Star Wars (the nerd Bible) for inspiration, this carefully crafted suite of poems documents the tribulations and insecurities of everyone's inner geek. Fiorentino maps the psychic territory of abjection across the shopworn spaces of suburban Winnipeg, where a landscape of aging strip malls, burned-out houses and living rooms littered with video-game consoles serves as a mirror to the inner states of urban ennui among the socially inept and the culturally vexed. By turns compassionate, funny and filled with selfloathing, The Theory of the Loser Class is never without the possibility of redemption; 'And if a loser falls,' says the narrator of 'Right in the Spine,' 'I feel it.' The Theory of the Loser Class is the perfect soundtrack for the alienated and the hopeless.

Read more less

In a Paper City write nothing down. So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, the author's two mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the letters characters n and b, and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences. Beneath this thin narrative runs an undercurrent of horror that decries the deliberate plunder of the City resulting from an absolute disregard for history's relationship to the body's fictions -- what n and b term 'art lost to numbers.'

Read more less

A Painted Elephant tells a tale of love -- unrequited, of course, like all the best stories. Our Juliet? A lonely Indian elephant, newly arrived at the Calgary Zoo from Holland, with a penchant for moonlight escapes. Her Romeo? The wooden Maytag Man statue on Calgary's 9th Street, with his sad eyes, his oaken thighs, his aloofness. This book, the first from Jill Hartman, is a tragi-comic narrative poem about pachyderm passion. Nina Simone, Pig Latin, German opera and a chorus of Canadian poets play in the background. Incense, speculaas cookies and cheap flowers scent the air. And goddesses, myrmidons and shipwrecks appear with some frequency. With fractured, playful language, the smart and funny Painted Elephant trumpets an important new voice in Canadian poetry.

Read more less

Although firmly rooted in the real, Lillian Necakov's evocations of 'movie magic' prove irresistible in these forty poems and five collages. Ranging across dozens of films -- from Wim Wender's Wings of Desire and Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law to Hitchcock's Rope and Hawks's To Have and Have Not --- Lillian Necakov's language, steeped in the comic of the banal, has absurdity for breakfast.

Read more less

Steve Venright, the true heir to the literary legacy of Henri Michau, Christopher Dewdney and Jorge Luis Borges, is the only surrealist ever to come from Sarnia, Ontario. Spiral Agitator, his fourth book, is a sumptuous assortment of prose poems and visual art from beyond the Turbulated Curtain.

Read more less

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDWINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEWINNER OF THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZEWINNER OF THE 2023 GEORGES BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTIONFINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTIONPUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRETHE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment. Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.” On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor. "Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter offers a richly detailed account of a particular occupation and time—train porter on a Canadian passenger train in 1929—and unforcedly allows it to illuminate the societal strictures imposed on black men at the time—and today. Baxter is a secretly-queer and sleep-deprived porter saving up for dental school, working a system that periodically assigns unexplained demerits, and once a certain threshold is reached, the porter loses his job. Thus, success is impossible, the best one can do is to fail slowly. As Baxter takes a cross-continental run, the boarding passengers have more secrets than an Agatha Christie cast, creating a powder keg on train tracks. The Sleeping Car Porter is an engaging and illuminating novel about the costs of work, service, and secrets." – Keith Mosman, Powell's Books "I thought The Sleeping Car Porter was fantastic! It strikes a balance between being about the struggles of being black and gay at that time while not being too heavy handed with it. I enjoyed his constant mental math on how many demerits he might receive for each infraction. The reader really gets a sense of the conflict that Baxter is going through. I really liked reading a book from the perspective of a porter." – Hunter Gillum, Beaverdale Books

Read more less

First published in 1975, The Cage was a graphic novel before there was a name for the genre. Considered an early masterpiece of the genre, the Canadian cult comic has been out of print for decades. The new edition includes an introduction by Canadian comics master and Lemony Snicket collaborator Seth (Palookaville; It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken). Cryptic and disturbing, like Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) illustrating a film by Ozu, The Cage spurns narrative for atmosphere, guiding us through a series of disarrayed rooms and desolate landscapes, tracking a stuttering and circling time and a sequence of objects: headphones, inky stains, bedsheets. It's not about where we're going but how -- if -- we get there.

Read more less

The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire. One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel. "Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future."—Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum "It’s brilliant, strange, and unlike anything I’ve read before."—Rebecca Hussey, BOOKRIOT

Read more less

Every major airport has a three-letter code from the International Air Transport Association. In perhaps history's greatest-ever feat of armchair travel, Nasser Hussain has written a collection of poetry entirely from those codes. In a dazzling aeronautic feat of constraint-based writing, SKY WRI TEI NGS explores the relationship between language and place in a global context. Watch as words jet-set across the map, leaving a poetic flight path. See letters take flight (and leave their baggage behind).

Read more less

Toronto is home to multiple and thriving queer communities that reflect the dynamism of a global city. Any Other Way is an eclectic and richly illustrated local history that reveals how these individuals and community networks have transformed Toronto from a place of churches and conservative mores into a city that has consistently led the way in queer activism, not just in Canada but internationally. From the earliest pioneers to the parades, pride and politics of the contemporary era, Any Other Way draws on a range of voices to explore how the residents of queer Toronto have shaped and reshaped one of the world’s most diverse cities. Any Other Way includes chapters on: Oscar Wilde’s trip to Toronto; early cruising areas and gay/lesbian bars; queer shared houses; a pioneering collective counter-archive project; bath house raids; LBGT-police conflicts; the Queen Street art/music/activist scene; and a profile of Jackie Shane, the trans R&B singer who performed in drag in both Toronto and Los Angeles, and gained international fame with her 1962 chart-topping single, `Any Other Way.’

Read more less

Juxtaposing the seemingly benign names of Europeans that permeate our geographies with the details of their so-called discoveries and conquests, Dead White Men turns ideas of exploration, discovery, finding and keeping back upon themselves. Engaging with exploration and scientific texts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries – texts wrapped up in the history and ongoing present of colonization – this collection builds a fascinating poetry of memory out of histories that are largely forgotten.‘A provocative and galvanizing read … Riveting and dazzling invention is visible on almost every page: fonts shift size, language cascades and cleaves, and images disrupt order. Dead White Men should be widely read and taught.’– Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning‘Dead White Men is not only a searing indictment of colonialism but also a painful reminder of the violence that underpins the logic of exploration. Each poem strikes at the heart of the issue: there are often unarticulated, unacknowledged Indigenous presences here that have been flattened over by the lies and mirages of empty landscapes. Dead White Men is a stinging and difficult journey, and one that continues to remind us that stolen land has always been the most pressing concern for Indigenous peoples and settlers. This is an absolutely essential book.’– Jordan Abel, author of InjunShane Rhodes is the author of five books of poetry, and has won awards including an Alberta Book Award and the National Magazine Gold Award for poetry. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Read more less

'Shot-Blue is that rarest species, a genuinely wise novel.' -- Rivka Galchen Rachel is a young single mother living with her son, Tristan, on a lake that borders the unchannelled north -- remote, nearly inhospitable. She does what she has to do to keep them alive. But soon, and unexpectedly, Tristan will have to live alone, his youth unprotected and rough. The wild, open place that is all he knows will be overrun by strangers -- strangers inhabiting the lodge that has replaced his home, strangers who make him fight, talk, and even love, when he doesn't want to. Ravenous and unrelenting, Shot-Blue is a book of first love and first loss.

Read more less

Mission Creep began as reworkings of the CIA's Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual. Attempts to torture the text itself-obeying literary constraints, employing audio editing tools, and displacing it with other voices, including Hannah Arendt's and Evel Knievel's-reveal convoluted narratives, transmissions that contemplate whether torture provides useful information. At once a fugue and an absurdist comedy, info-overload and pure tone, Mission Creep comes on with the fire of apocalyptic prophecy and melts on the tongue like the last snowflake of winter. Joshua Trotter lives in Montreal, Quebec. His first book, All This Could Be Yours, was one of the National Post's top ten poetry books of 2010.

Read more less