Search results for ""Coach House Books""

A lyrical wilderness of power, wealth, leisure and desire, the poems of Country Club freewheel across state lines with panache and flagrant feeling. In this bold debut from Andy McGuire, all passions -- even unpleasant ones -- stare down the barrel of a world in which freedom is the fifty-first state, and love is the eleventh province. The manatee wades out of the water and roars at the sightseers That one of them owes him a drink. From the beach below the boardwalk, cock-a-doodle-do! What about a Christmas bowlcut over by the mangrove manatees! Because in Florida there are Floridians And they are born Floridians at large. Every motion Can't stop its own ocean. The oceans' motions make mistakes. Some of the dying are unspeakable In their thinness, poorly disguised meat mannequins. The mosquitoes are so big They bleed you like a pig. Being eaten alive is an acquired taste. Andy McGuire's poems have appeared in Arc, CV2, Vallum, Riddle Fence and Hazlitt. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Read more less

It's a quirky sort of historical fiction set in the mid–19th century, during the Spanish-Peruvian/Chilean War. Told in the third person omniscient, it mostly follows an unambitious ship's recorder named Simón, who goes to Peru on what is called a scientific expedition, but is really an attempt (maybe) by Isabella II to reassert her power over her colonies. The language of the novel is extravagant; in contrast, Simón's records of the trip, and of the political machinations between Spain and Peru are the opposite. Throughout, the tone of the book is sometimes mocking, sometimes ironic, rarely the grandiose descriptions you get in a tale of war. It's a weird book — anything but your typical historical fiction, and unlike anything CH has ever published. Winner of the Prix des Collégiens (2014), whose jury is composed by 800 college students. Rhonda Mullins's translation of Jocelyne Saucier's And the Birds Rained Down was shortlisted for CBC Canada Reads (2015) and the Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation (2013).

Read more less

For forty years, RM Vaughan has been fighting, and failing, to get his forty winks each night. He's not alone, not by any stretch. More and more studies highlight the health risks of undersleeping, yet we have never been asked to do more, and for longer. And we can’t stop thinking that a lack of sleep is heroic: snoozing is a kind of laziness, after all. But why, when we know more about the value of sleep, are we obsessed with twenty--four--hour workdays and deliberate sleep deprivation? Working outward from his own experience, Vaughan explores this insomnia culture we’ve created, predicting a cultural collision — will we soon have to legislate rest, as France has done? — and wondering about the cause--and--effect model of our shorter attention spans. Does the fact that we are almost universally underslept change how our world works? We know it’s an issue with, say, pilots and truck drivers, but what about artists — does an insomnia culture change creativity? And what are the long-term cultural consequences of this increasing sacri?ce for the ever-elusive goal of ‘total productivity’? ‘RM Vaughan ... [is] easily amongst the top ?ve art critics working today. I’ve seen Vaughan turn phrases that have the forcefulness of Christian Viveros Faune, the plainspoken insight of Dave Hickey, and the lyricism of Peter Schjeldahl. Vaughan should never have to do anything but write. ’— Paddy Johnson, editorial director, Art F City New York RM Vaughan is a Canadian writer and video artist who lives in Berlin and Toronto. Vaughan is the author of nine books and a contributor to over 50 anthologies. His videos and filmed performances play in galleries and festivals around the world.

Read more less

Winner of the 2015 Quebec Writers' Federation's A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry If you tore off the tops of canola -- yellow canola flowers -- would you jump in a tub of canola margarine just to make the best of despair? Implored by concerned readers to be 'classy' and 'real' for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical note-books on all things 'poetic' and 'poetical.' Birds! Flowers! History! Sad leaders! The word 'aubade'! They're all here, in a serial, State Fair--bound collection of lyrics set in the working-class belvedere of Asbestos Heights. Among the refreshing lemon-lime sodas of the world and the rousing lyrics to 'Bootylicious,' Asbestos Heights amps up McGimpsey's trademark sideswiping of formal rhetoric and prosody with pop savoir faire to ?nd his boldest collection. Imagine Petrarch in a Tweet war about where to buy a good pair of dad jeans. Imagine Yeats but with a lot fewer swans. Imagine a poet who was told long ago that nothing good ever comes out of a place like Asbestos Heights. 'David McGimpsey is unfuckwithable, poetry-wise, and I'll stand on John Ashbery's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.' -- Michael Robbins David McGimpsey is the author of several books of poetry and short fiction. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the A.M. Klein Prize. He is also a musician, a fiction editor for Joyland, and his travel writing is a regular feature of enRoute magazine. He lives in Montreal, where he teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.

Read more less

It's 1606 and Europe is at war over God. At the behest of Rudolf II of Austria, Venice's four strongest men are charged with transporting a holy painting -- Albrecht Durer's The Brotherhood of the Rosary -- across the Alps to Prague. In the small Alpine village of Pusterwald, they are set upon by Protestant zealots; their escape is attributed to a miracle. The strongmen and their captain are summoned to an inquiry, led by the magistrate of Venice and the cardinal archbishop of Milan, to determine whether something divine did indeed occur. Each man's recounting adds a layer of colour to the canvas. Through this vividly painted mystery, inspired by true events, Sean Dixon challenges the role of faith at the dawn of the Age of Reason. Sean Dixon is a playwright, novelist, and actor. His plays are collected in AWOL: Three Plays for Theatre SKAM. Sean's novels are The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal and The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn.

Read more less

"Jeet Heer more thoroughly and widely understands comics history and the perplexing binomial life of the cartoonist better than anyone who's not one. As well-versed in literature as he is in comics, he always gets at the peculiar, poetical texture of his subject not only by what he writes, but how he writes it--clearly, mellifluously, and beautifully. Our humble discipline is singularly lucky to have him telling its story."--Chris Ware In a partnership spanning four decades, Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman have become the pre-eminent power couple of cutting-edge graphic art. Their landmark magazine Raw, which first published artists such as Ben Katchor, Chris Ware, and Charles Burns, brought an avant-garde sensibility to comics and, along with Spiegelman's legendary graphic novel Maus, completely revolutionized the form. As art editor of the New Yorker since 1993, Mouly has remade the face of that venerable magazine with covers that capture the political and social upheavals of the last two decades, such as the black-on-black cover after 9/11 and the infamous Barack Obama fist-bump cartoon. Based on exclusive interviews with Mouly, Spiegelman, and a pantheon of comics artists--including Dan Clowes, Barry Blitt, Anita Kunz, and Adrian Tomine--In Love with Art is both an intimate portrait of Mouly and a rare, behind-the-scenes look at some of today's most iconic images. Through the prism of an uncommonly successful relationship, the book tells the story of one of the most remarkable artistic transformations of our time. Jeet Heer's writing has appeared in the Guardian, Slate, Boston Globe, the American Prospect, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) Shortlisted for the Gerard Lampert Award (2013) Inspired largely by the poet's experiences as a young man working in the Saskatchewan oilfields, Mathew Henderson's The Lease explores masculinity and the roles morality, violence, and hard labor play in it. Equal parts character study, cultural documentary, and coming-of-age narrative, Henderson's poems make it clear that however we may try to stay apart from them, the stubborn and often unflattering realities of masculine culture persist, not just in isolated, dangerous environments like this, but in our very idea of what work is. No mark survives this place: you too will yield to unmemory. Give everything you are in three-day pieces. Watch the gypsy iron move, follow its commands. Tend the rusted steel like a shepherd. Shortlisted for the 2013 Gerald Lampert Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets Mathew Henderson lives in Toronto, Ontario, writes about the prairies, and teaches at Humber College. The Lease is his first collection of poetry.

Read more less

Anniversary edition will be lavishly illustrated Book is a perennial favourite at Coach House: it's in its 16th printing and has been sold into 15 different territories. It's even been purchased in bulk for a few wedding receptions! Pursuing foreword by Erin Morgenstern or Daniel Handler Bestseller in Canada, Sweden, Germany and England. Anniversary edition will have foreword by noted author (TBD)

Read more less

Winner of the 2013 CBC Overlookie Bookie Award for Most Underrated Canadian Book "These stories read like collaborations between Stephen King and TMZ with Borges and Nabokov on the edits. Each short story sounds with the thunder of a novel. Enthralling, dark, gut-busting stuff!"--Jeff Parker Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal desert of the soul, an admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three thousand-word sentence in defense of his passion, an aging porn star dons a dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of a lifetime, and Leonard Cohen shills for Subway: these mercurial and wildly varied stories explode the conventions of short fiction. Spencer Gordon is the co-editor of the online journal The Puritan and the micro-press Ferno House. Cosmo is his first book.

Read more less

A spaceship hurtles towards the moon, hippies gather at Woodstock, Charles Manson leads a cult into murder and a Kennedy drives off a Chappaquiddick dock: it's the summer of 1969. And as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the March family's cottage, she spends her days memorizing Top 40 lists, avoiding her adoptive cousins, catching frogs and plotting to save Yogi, the bullied, buttertart-eating bear caged at the top of March Road. In her diary, reworking the scant facts of her adoption, Jordan visions and revisions a hundred different scenarios for her conception on that night in 1954 when Hurricane Hazel tore Toronto to shreds, imagining her conception at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital or the CNE horse palace, and such parents as JFK, Louisa May Alcott, Perry Mason and the Queen of England. But when bear-baiting cousin Derwood finds the diary and learns everything that the family will not face, the target of his torture shifts from Yogi the Bear to his disabled and haunted adopted cousin. As caged as Yogi, Jordan is drawn to desperate measures. With its soundtrack of sixties pop songs, swamp creatures, motor boats and the rapid-fire punning of the family's Marchspeak, When Fenelon Falls will take you to a time and place that was never as idyllic as it seemed, where not belonging turns the Summer of Love into a summer of loss.

Read more less

The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!). Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008. This edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bök and an expanded afterword.

Read more less

The return of a former lover saps a retired librarian's faith in punctuation; a judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy; and the glories of market analysis prove as deceptive as human connection when Trevor Spates' visit to a stripper goes awry. Meanwhile, poor Tim Pine must face his coprophobia in a most public and lamentable office misadventure. Sentimental Exorcisms is a collection of tragicomic satire, latter-day-Victorian collisions of Nabokov and Proust. The men in these long short stories have grand designs and petty fears, or modest designs and grand fears. Desires, scapegoats, idylls, and obtrusive egos: the golden calves they can't quite bear to kill. With their ramparts crumbling around them, each mounts an exuberant defence in a vacuum of self-absorption.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the Manitoba Book Awards in the category of Most Promising Writer Talented newcomer Jonathan Ball's Clockfire is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce -- plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience, and the laws of physics are flagrantly violated. The poems in one sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks both 'clocks' and 'fire' and thus fails to offer its audiences immediate, violent engagement. They sometimes resemble the scores for Fluxus 'happenings,' but they replace the casual aesthetic and DIY simplicity of Fluxus art with something more akin to the brutality of Artaud's theatre of cruelty. Italo Calvino as rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft, Ball's 'plays' break free of the constraints of reality and artistic category to revel in their own dazzling, magnificent horror.

Read more less

Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Gail Scott, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf. These fifteen women are some of the best writers engaged in avant-garde literary production today, defining the contours of new movements and schools of writing in North America. By showcasing their work alongside extensive interviews, Prismatic Publics stages intimate encounters with these key figures as they work in and against Language, conceptual, post-conceptual, documentary, and investigative poetry traditions -- often across, between and at the interstices of genres. The writers in this anthology do not represent a single movement or tradition, although they all recognize language as inherently problematic and a perpetual subject of inquiry. Theirs is writing that demands a heightened level of attentiveness and attunement to what language can do on the page and in the social worlds of its making. Gathered in a single volume, these selections, some dating back to the early 1970s and others appearing in print for the first time, provide an opportunity to trace the diverse networks, influences, dialogues, dialectics, and interventions that continue make the work of Canada's innovative women writers a powerful force in avant-garde writing around the world.

Read more less

Biology is not Dree's thing. Equally heinous are English, social studies, her sister and mother, not to mention Edmonton in general. Toronto's upcoming Renegade Craft Fair is where she belongs. On her 15th birthday, she will get the special fund her father promised, and be on Westjet Flight 233 to Toronto. Instead, her dad has a fatal heart attack, and all she finds are clues leading to the ominous Alberta Psychiatric Hospital where her parents once worked. As Dree tries to unearth a mystery, and still pass science, she keeps searching for the money, and for a way to grieve her father.Told in a fresh, frank voice, "The Mitochondrial Curiosities of Marcels 1 to 19" is a wry, adventurous, unflinching look at the trials of teenage life. Instructions for renegade crafts are included.

Read more less

Dr. Thoughtless Actions, a young geneticist, awakes one morning to find a cardboard box secured to his head. Unable to wrench it off, he attempts suicide, not only failing but also, unbeknowst to himself, cloning himself, creating Dr. Wishful Thinking. The two losers fall in love, fall in science, and fail to make a baby. Their conversation, an intricately woven semantic circus, traverses boxedness, love, and the more ridiculous areas of metaphysical speculation. Through a series of rapid exchanges, verbal games, and musical numbers, they discover that all their thoughts come from God, all their words come from the devil, and their desire for love is a habit acquired from the cinema. Sound familiar? Don't be so hard on yourself. [boxhead]: a bedtime story for your brain.

Read more less

Middle-aged and short on prospects, Charles Wilson returns to Trempes, the village of his childhood, and discovers the body of his childhood friend, Paul Faber, hanging from a tree in the clearing where they played as boys. Thus begins Wilson's obsessive quest to exhume the secrets of his past and to understand the reasons for his friend's death. But memories shift, people change and things are never as they seem. Soon Wilson finds himself caught up in a delusory spiral that threatens his very existence. This is at once a neo-Gothic metaphysical thriller and a meticulous meditation on the unapologetic betrayal of memory and imagination. Wilson's story bubbles up from the faults between mystery and fairy tale, brimming with characters haunted and tortured by the past, where truth and deception are wound up in time like the gnarled branches of old, grizzled trees.

Read more less

While lunching one day in Paris, long-time friends and collaborators John Armstrong and Paul Collins drew up a list of 49 random words that would become the subjects of a series of photographs. Armstrong shot in their native Canada, and Collins in France, where he has been living these past 20 years. When the 98 images are paired - which photographer took each one is never identified - they explore the blurred edges of North American and European culture, of the familiar and the exotic, of shared and individual experiences. The pairs of photos are augmented by a series of textual responses - some in English, some in French - to the 49 words. The passages act more as complements to the photos than as captions, providing an anecdotal context for the photographers and their project. The photographs were exhibited at Toronto's Robert Birch Gallery and the Art Gallery of Sudbury, Ontario, in summer 2002, and in Caen, France, and Erfurt, Germany, in 2003.

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

Finalist for the Governor General's Award for Best Translation from French to English A translation of acclaimed writer Jocelyne Saucier's Les héritiers de la mine, originally published in French by Les Editions XYZ. Jocelyne Saucier's first novels, La vie comme une image and Jeanne sur les routes, were finalists for the Governor General’s Award. Her third novel, Il pleuvait des oiseaux, garnered her the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, making her the first Canadian to win the award. Rhonda Mullins has been nominated twice for the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation (most recently for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier's And the Birds Rained Down) -- you know what they say about third times and charms!

Read more less

Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards) If Lisa Robertson were to collide with David Lynch in a dark alley, the result would be a lot like The Politics of Knives. From shattered narratives to surrealistic fantasies, the poems in The Politics of Knives bridge the gap between the conventional and the experimental, combining the intellectual with the visceral. The complicity of language in violence, and the production of stories as both a defensive and offensive gesture, trouble the stability of these poetic sequences that dwell in the borderland between speaking and screaming. She made hyphens and made me use them. From her back she pulled brackets. Saying: "These in your throat and these around your neck." Jonathan Ball teaches English, film, and writing at two universities.

Read more less

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Poetry Melding the deeply personal and the culturally popular, Li'l Bastard is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committed liar. Written in part as an homage to John Berryman and Robert Lowell, this sequence of sixteen-line poems--"chubby sonnets"--explores the poet's obsessions (food, aging, baseball, beer, and Barnaby Jones) and map his midlife crisis on a wild flight through Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas, and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li'l Bastard will cement David McGimpsey's status as a beloved original. David McGimpsey is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, including Lardcake and Sitcom. He teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.

Read more less

Hide under your bed! Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret meets South Park in The Lillian Lectures, a collection of short poems and cheerfully nasty illustrations that will turn your universe on its head. Remember how strange you thought sex and God were when you were little? Six-year-old Melanie is weirder and naughtier than you ever were, and now she's passing her wealth of wacky wisdom on to her little sister, Lillian. Your mom would never let you play with them, but you sure would have wanted to; Melanie is the ultimate bad influence.

Read more less

Alexandra Leggat, the author of Moondogging and numerous book and music reviews, puts on the page the remarkable texts that she is renowned for performing at spoken word events all over Toronto.

Read more less

A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living?Kate Black grew up in West Edmonton Mall - a mall on steroids, notorious for its indoor waterpark, deadly roller coaster, and controversial dolphin shows. But everyone has a favourite mall, or a mall that is their own personal memory palace. It''s a place people love to hate and hate to love - a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend.Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming of age in North America''s largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread - and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope."Speaking as a child of PacSun and Hot Topic myself, Big Mall is like a madeleine dipped in Orange Julius. Like a m

Read more less

A contemporary dramatic take on a 4,000-year-old Sanskrit epic that is foundational to Indian culture. Why Not Theatre’s large-scale, once-in-a-generation retelling of Mahabharata brings together a cast of performers entirely from the South Asian diaspora, blending cultures and art forms in a spectacular production at the Shaw Festival and the Barbican Theatre in London. Over two parts (Karma and Dharma) and a communal meal (Khana), this translation and adaptation of Mahabharata spans generations and takes audiences into the hearts and minds of some of the most complex and enduring characters ever created. With warring families and devious revenge plots, Mahabharata tells the story of an ancient feud with philosophical and spiritual questions that are no less urgent today. In times of division, how do we find wholeness? Are we destined to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors? And how can we build a new world when we have nearly destroyed this one? Contains the full text of the play along with materials opening up the behind-the-scenes world of the production, including interviews with the creators, background and context about the source material, production photographs, a Mahabharata family tree, and glossary."Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes’s contemporary take on the Mahabharata is one of the most beautiful emotional journeys I have had the privilege to witness. It is inspiring, mind broadening, and speaks to all the senses. It even brings you back to the origins of theatre itself, when people would gather in the quarries around a bonfire to tell stories. With their tasteful use of technology, dance, and opera, the 4,000-year-old Sanskrit poem comes to life and feels more universal than ever. A captivating theatre experience, from the first flame to the last pixel." – Robert Lepage"In their stunning rendition of the great Indian epic Mahabharata, Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes brilliantly reverse the whole concept of what Bertolt Brecht famously advised theatre directors: to make the familiar, unfamiliar. Jain and Fernandes have turned the unfamiliar into the familiar. The 4,000-year-old saga most Indians grew up with is made accessible to a contemporary audience the world over. No mean feat. ‘The play, true to its source, crosses all boundaries of culture, class, and geography. Its timeless storytelling and evocative stage design is transformed into a saga for the world, with its fundamental emotions of human nature – power, hate, jealousy, greed, and lust. To be gob-smacked by this innovation would be an understatement. Immerse yourself in this take on the Mahabharata and travel with it in time into the past, present, and future of humanity." – Deepa Mehta

Read more less

CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves? Written after a brain tumour diagnosis, The King of Terrors is a treatise on living with illness and the way that language, relationships and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Johnstone's poems oscillate between the personal and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we're never quite sure what we are seeing, no matter how familiar."There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, ‘each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.’ These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone – despite a future only as certain ‘as the body // it inhabits’ – offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself." – Randall Mann, author of Deal: New and Selected Poems"The King of Terrors is a luminous meditation on the otherworld of illness and treatment, contemplating the mysteries of death and the frontiers of mind and body with sharp clarity and radical vulnerability. These mesmerizing, urgent poems admit us not only to waiting rooms and brain scans, but also to the intimate fears that accompany the estranging experience of being unwell, or, as the poet says, living 'between / age and agency.' Haunting, stark, and lyrical, The King of Terrors is charged, as all the best poetry is, with the shock of the mortal." – Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The Jaguar

Read more less

Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumes: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history. Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body — really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary – about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world’s creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators."Oh the pleasure of inhabiting the mind of an animal like Meghan Kemp-Gee! Her poetry is curious, restless, uneasy, and imaginative; it is also highly disciplined, unfolds in precisely measured lines. Watch for brilliant uses of repetition — the slipperiness of meaning, its ever-doubling character, is on full display, played out in deft linguistic twists. A deadpan delivery amplifies the oddity of what’s encountered: arsenic-drunk wildcats, chlorinated orchids, the 'one painful spot of blue' in a deer’s eye. I can’t say strongly enough how grateful I am to have read this collection; don’t miss it." – Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems

Read more less

What if we could love the planet as much as we love one another?"Warm, wise, and overflowing with generosity, this is a love story so epic it embraces all of creation. Yet another reminder of how blessed we are to be in the struggle with elders like David and Tara.” – Naomi Klein and Avi LewisWhat You Won’t Do for Love is an inspiring conversation about love and the environment. When artist Miriam Fernandes approached the legendary eco-pioneer David Suzuki to create a theatre piece about climate change, she expected to write about David’s perspective as a scientist. Instead, she discovered the boundless vision and efforts of Tara Cullis, a literature scholar, climate organizer, and David’s life partner. Miriam realized that David and Tara’s decades-long love for each other, and for family and friends, has only clarified and strengthened their resolve to fight for the planet.What You Won’t Do for Love transforms real-life conversations between David, Tara, Miriam, and her husband Sturla into a charmingly novel and poetic work. Over one idyllic day in British Columbia, Miriam and Sturla take in a lifetime of David and Tara’s adventures, inspiration, and love, and in turn reflect on their own relationships to each other and the planet. Revealing David Suzuki and Tara Cullis in an affable, conversational, and often comedic light, What You Won’t Do For Love asks if we can love our planet the same way we love one another.

Read more less

Typography meets poetry at a Pink Floyd laser-light show In Surface Tension, poetry is liquefied. Flowing away from meaning, letters and words gather and pool into puddles of poetry; street signs and logos reflected in the oily sheen of polluted gutters of rainwater. Like a funhouse mirror reflecting the language that surrounds us, the pages drip over the margins, suggesting that Madge was right, we are “soaking in it!” Surface Tension updates visual poetry for our post-pandemic age, asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to imagine letters as images instead of text, to find meaning in their beautiful shapes as Beaulieu stretches, torques, slides, blurs, and melts them into Dali-esque collages."The striking compositions you’ll find in Surface Tension are being presented sequentially in book form, yet that they wouldn’t be out of place hanging on the wall goes without saying. Beaulieu swerves Gomringer when writing that 'Readibility is the key: like a logo, a poem should be instantly recognizable...' yet, to this reader, these works merit sustained and enthusiastic viewing precisely because they teeter on the edge of legibility. The kinetic, glitchy quality of their 'alphabetic strangeness' keeps them unrecognizable as poems and, here, 'that is poetry as I need it,' to quote Cage. Think of them as anti-advertisings selling you nothing but bountiful manifestations of the irreducible plasticity of numbers, punctuation marks, and letter forms. No logos." – Mónica de la Torre, Madelon Leventhal Rand Endowed Chair in Literature, Brooklyn College; co-editor of Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979"With his distinctive visual palindromes and angled axes of symmetry, Derek Beaulieu has developed a signature mastery of Letraset, leveraging the twentieth-century technology as a vehicle for bring concrete poetry into the twenty-first century. With Surface Tension, Beaulieu takes the possibilities of that new idiom even further, unsettling the fixity his symmetries once reinforced and dislodging the set in Letraset as poems distort in fun-house-mirror swerves, sag as if under their own weight, pool and smear in the liquid logic of heated ink, or swoop and blur as if in motion. In the process, these poems make visible the filmic potential of the photocopier, the facture of abraded transfers from brittling stock, and the three-dimensional substrate of the page with its flexible bends in curving space. These are thus poems in part about their own modes of production. They are beautiful products of a self-aware and intelligent process." – Craig Dworkin, author of Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality"'When most of the language we consume is non-poetic, should poetry not attempt to poetically intervene within these spaces that are not traditionally poetic?' The answer to Derek Beaulieu’s question, put forward in his beautiful essay, is surely yes: the ten brilliantly adventurous visual poems in his Surface Tension make a startling case for his fascinating Letraset/photocopier inventions. Beaulieu’s compositions originate in a place of clean design and logical narrative; soon, as in a dream, they open up, ushering in what he calls 'a poetry of difference, chance, eruption.' Marcel Duchamp would have called it the poetry of the infrathin: watch 'Simple Symmetry' or 'Dendrochronology' open up and come alive in their minutely evolving new spaces. This is quite simply an enchanting book – a book producing new pleasures with each turn of the page." – Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, Stanford University

Read more less

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZEWays of Seeing meets Mary Ruefle in these visual-art-inflected poems Though they started from Sheryda Warrener’s impulse to see herself more clearly, the poems in Test Piece ended up becoming more expansive meditations on seeing and vision. They engage with the process and practice of art-making, and specifically with abstract minimalist works like those by Eva Hesse, Anne Truitt, Ruth Asawa, and Agnes Martin. Not-seeing/not-knowing is a motif, as is weave, grid, pattern, rhythm of interiors, domestic life. These poems are informed by collage, by the act of bringing images and lines together. With their echoes and reverberations (hand, mirror, body, clear, form, face), a greater complexity is revealed."In conversation with visual art, mirrors, and the traces of self we assemble through encounter, Sheryda Warrener’s Test Piece holds an expansive place to dwell with the phenomenological. Interacting with event and object, reflection and parataxis, the writing asks us to consider contingent spaces and the matter of matter and meaning making. The poems adhere as arrangement, as a consideration of relationality. 'What does she whimper in the dog’s ear? / How earthly we behave, believing we’re alone.'" – Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure"Sheryda Warrener's newest poetry collection unspools as a complex weave of repeated motifs, ritualistic gestures, and deeply embodied observations. I’m especially struck by the influence of twentieth-century women artists within the collection: meditations on Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, and Sherrie Levine’s works structure much of Test Piece. Palimpsests of photographed interiors, where living and writing collide lyrically and randomly, combine with floating textual cut-ups of variegating transparency. This concretizes, perhaps, how the poems bloom forth from experimental assemblage: 'her body holds/the long blue sentence of it…'" – Marina Roy, artist and author of Queuejumping

Read more less

Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry Awardink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion. Starting with ad copy that extols the iconic Pink Pearl eraser, Holbrook erases and erases, revealing more and more. Rubbing out different words from this decidedly non-literary, noncanonical source text, she was left with the promise of “100 essays” and set about to find them. Among her discoveries are queer love poems, art projects, political commentary, lunch, songs, and entire extended families. The absurdity of the constraint lends itself to plenty of fun and funny, while reminding us of truths assiduously erased by normative forces. ink earl’s variations are testament in micro to the act of poiesis as not so much a building as an intrepid series of effacements; we rub away at the walls of language we’ve lived within in order to release both what’s been written over, and what we want to say now.

Read more less

In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature? A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species – humans included – are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her. Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own. Fauna, Christiane Vadnais’s first work of fiction, won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and was named one of 2018’s best books by Radio-Canada.

Read more less

The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet. In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian. Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers. Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking. Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.

Read more less

A CBC BOOKS BEST NONFICTION OF 2020AN ENTROPY MAGAZINE BEST NONFICTION 2020/21A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK OF THE DAY (07/23/2022)Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference."Historically we have associated the disabled body image and disabled life with an unhappy ending” – Sue Carter, Toronto Star"Leduc persuasively illustrates the power of stories to affect reality in this painstakingly researched and provocative study that invites us to consider our favorite folktales from another angle." – Sara Shreve, Library Journal"She [Leduc] argues that template is how society continues to treat the disabled: rather than making the world accessible for everyone, the disabled are often asked to adapt to inaccessible environments." – Ryan Porter, Quill & Quire"Read this smart, tenacious book." – The Washington Post"A brilliant young critic named Amanda Leduc explores this pernicious power of language in her new book, Disfigured … Leduc follows the bread crumbs back into her original experience with fairy tales – and then explores their residual effects … Read this smart, tenacious book." – The Washington Post"Leduc investigates the intersection between disability and her beloved fairy tales, questioning the constructs of these stories and where her place is, as a disabled woman, among those narratives." – The Globe and Mail"It gave me goosebumps as I read, to see so many of my unexpressed, half-formed thoughts in print. My highlighter got a good workout." – BookRiot"Disfigured is not just an eye-opener when it comes to the Disney princess crew and the Marvel universe – this thin volume provides the tools to change how readers engage with other kinds of popular media, from horror films to fashion magazines to outdated sitcom jokes." – Quill & Quire“It’s an essential read for anyone who loves fairy tales.” – Buzzfeed Books"Leduc makes one thing clear and beautifully so – fairy tales are fundamentally fantastic, but that doesn’t mean that they are beyond reproach in their depiction of real issues and identities." – Shrapnel Magazine"As Leduc takes us through these fairy tales and the space they occupy in the narratives that we construct, she slowly unfolds a call-to-action: the claiming of space for disability in storytelling." – The Globe and Mail"A provocative beginning to a thoughtful and wide-ranging book, one which explores some of the most primal stories readers have encountered and prompts them to ponder the subtext situated there all along." – LitHub"a poignant and informative account of how the stories we tell shape our collective understanding of one another.” – BookMarks "What happens when we allow disabled writers to tell stories of disability within fairytales and in magical and supernatural settings? It is a reimagining of the fairytale canon we need. Leduc dares to dream of a world that most stories envision is unattainable." – Bitch Media

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RELIT 2022 NOVEL AWARDA joy ride set on a crash course with the past.Audrey Cole has always loved to drive. Anytime, anywhere, any car: a questionable rustbucket, a family sedan, the SUV she was paid to drive around the oil fields. From the second she learned to drive, she’s always found a way to hit the road.Years ago, when she abandoned her oil field job, she found herself chauffeuring around the Lever Men, a B-list band relegated to playing empty dive bars in far-flung towns. That’s how she found herself at the Crash Palace, an isolated lodge outside the big city where people pay to party in the wilderness.And now, one night, while her young daughter is asleep at home, Audrey is struck by that old urge and finds herself testing the doors of parked cars in her neighbourhood. Before she knows it, she’s headed north in the dead of winter to the now abandoned Crash Palace in a stolen car, unable to stop herself from confronting her pastThe Crash Palace is a funny, moving, and surprising novel by the author of the Amazon First Novel Award–nominated The Milk Chicken Bomb. Audrey is unlike any character you’ve met before, and you'll love being along for the ride.

Read more less

Dulge, rageous, couth, chalant-we think of prefixes as a few letters that change a word, but what if a word is lost without one? Each prose poem in Whelmed features a word that has been unhinged from its prefix, allowing new meanings-radically unfamiliar, yet uncannily intimate-to emerge from these prefixless word deposits. Part prose-poem sequence and part encyclopedia of unpredictably irregular terms, Whelmed is at times deranging, almost disturbing, sometimes detached, and ultimately joyfully disrupting. Nicole Markotic is a poet, novelist, and critic. She is currently a professor of creative writing, children's literature, and disability studies at the University of Windsor in Ontario.

Read more less

Recite your poem to your aunt. I threw myself to the ground. Where were you in the night? In a school among the pines. What was the meaning of the dream? Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices -- Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras -- in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time -- embodied here in Lisa Robertson's forceful cadences -- can tell. '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 'Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.'-- The Village Voice Lisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

Read more less

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Drama Penelope Douglas is an ex--forensic psychiatrist looking for a fresh start in a western boomtown grown three sizes too crazy. But then a television writer offs himself in her sleek bathroom and her oil-wife friend pronounces Penelope her baby's godmother. Will she be able to find heart in this wild and soulless landscape? Will she have to smudge her lipstick to "cowboy up"? Drama, a new play by the master of edgy dark humor, has all the answers. Karen Hines is the author of Hello ...Hello (A Romantic Satire) and The Pochsy Plays. A Second City alumna, Hines has appeared in numerous television and film productions and is the director of cult horror clowns Mump & Smoot.

Read more less

Winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry! A finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Lambda Literary Award! In her ambitious follow-up to Hagiography, acclaimed poet Jen Currin continues her unique exploration of the surrealist lyric, constructing a strong case that, in these frightening times, it may be the best poetic mode for capturing the complexities of lived experience. In tongues alternately vulnerable, defiant, resigned and hopeful, The Inquisition Yours speaks to the atrocities of our time -- war, environmental destruction, terrorism, cancer and the erosion of personal rights -- fashioning a tenuous bridge between the political and the personal. Trying to make sense of a world where even language is 'a danger,' Currin's poems reject the old storylines in favor of a vigilant awareness, and wonder what might happen if we 'change the feared penmanship' and embrace a narrative that empowers everyone.

Read more less

First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike. This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Melanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book -- Mauve, the horizon -- is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original. Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.

Read more less

Theatre doesn't have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O'Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isn't really a show; it's an interactive chitchat about memory, depression, and 9/11, a dazzling whirl of talking streetcars, pizza and schizophrenia. And it's hilarious. O'Donnell's artistic practice has evolved into 'something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission.' With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, O'Donnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity, abundance and power of the social sphere. Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic.

Read more less

If the expression 'Two steps forward, one step back' describes the conventional attitude toward hesitation and uncertainty, Disturbances of Progress takes those steps and turns them into a dance. In an intimate and intensely personal manner, Lise Downe's third major collection of poetry documents the sorts of interruptions that plague the lives of artists and writers. Yet the poems themselves emerge as testament to the triumph of the artistic process over circumstance. As the poet mulls over the uncertainty of her own life's trajectory, she deftly weaves together the imagery of searching and the vagaries of language into a whole cloth. Downe's writing uses the qualities of colloquial speech -- hesitation, interjection, digression and repetition -- to convey the experience of writing as an unforseen progression. Favouring intuitive progress over linear intention, these vivid, painterly poems reflect the dynamic between the known and the unknown.

Read more less

Notes on desire, reproduction, and grief, and how feminism doesn't support women struggling to have childrenIn pop culture as much as in policy advocacy, the feminist movement has historically left infertile women out in the cold. This book traverses the chilly landscape of miscarriage, and the particular grief that accompanies the longing to make a family. Framed by her own desire for a child, journalist Alexandra Kimball brilliantly reveals the pain and loneliness of infertility, especially as a lifelong feminist. Her experience of online infertility support groups -- where women gather in forums to discuss IVF, surrogacy, and isolation -- leaves her longing for a real life community of women working to break down the stigma of infertility. In the tradition of Eula Biss’s On Immunity and Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided, Kimball marries perceptive analysis with deep reportage -- her findings show the lie behind the prevailing, and at times paradoxical, cultural attitudes regarding women’s right to actively choose to have children. Braiding together feminist history, memoir, and reporting from the front lines of the battle for reproductive rights and technology, The Seed plants in readers the desire for a world where no woman is made to feel that her biology is her destiny.

Read more less

Contemporary Canadian poetry got you down? Well, we'd like to prescribe a little Hello Serotonin, the latest in mood-enhancing poetry anti-depressants. This new book of poems from Jon Paul Fiorentino operates within the constraints of what he terms 'synaptic syntax' - poetry that performs the very nature of neuronal activity from the point of view of a mood-enhanced Human Comedy, which, with a quick turn of phrase, or missing neurotransmitter, could become Human Tragedy. Filled with a witty, self-deprecating and often Andy Kaufmanesque sense of humour, Hello Serotonin is today's generation of pharmaceutical poetry, and will alter your perception of therapeutic poetics. Get your prescription filled today!

Read more less