Search results for ""Guernica Editions""

The Black Death epidemic spawned Boccaccio's Decameron; the bubonic plague brought us A Journal of the Plague Year. Many other great literary works have centered around storytelling at the time of a pandemic. Of people quarantined in their homes in 1722, Daniel Defoe wrote: "It was generally in such houses that we heard the most dismal shrieks and outcries of the poor people, terrified and even frighted to death by the sight of the condition of their dearest relations, and by the terror of being imprisoned as they were."In March of 2020, a new virus in the shape of a crown forced Montrealers and people worldwide to be locked in their homes in fear of contagion. Social distancing, self-isolation, and quarantine became the new buzzwords dominating everyday vocabulary.In April, once this new reality set in, the Quebec Writers' Federation asked its members, "What’s the story of your day?” It initiated a project, Chronicling the Days, inviting writers to detail a typical day in their life. The aim was to provide writers with a forum to put their creative thoughts to paper to try to make sense of the surreal situation and find some connection with other writers. “Every story valid,” the guidelines stated. One hundred writers responded to the challenge.True to its slogan of “No Borders, No Limits,” Guernica Editions is collaborating with the Quebec Writers’ Federation to publish these essays in an anthology in the spring of 2021. These 100 essays are interspersed by six longer ones, also on the topic of the pandemic, but written for the QWF Writes series. Most submissions are by professional authors, members of the QWF; for some, however, this anthology represents their first time in print.Chronicling the Days—Dispatches from a Pandemic provides an intimate panorama of the early days and experiences of the coronavirus. Constituting a rich mosaic of different styles, forms, and voices, this anthology provides a moving account of the everyday life of Quebec writers in isolation, digging deeply into their souls and reaching out to others.

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From the author of the international bestseller The Quincunx When his nation is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a man persuades his wife that they should give temporary shelter to a young girl who is at school with their daughter. He has no idea that the girl belongs to a community against whom the invader intends to commit genocide. Days stretch into weeks and then months while the enemy's pitiless hatred of the girl's community puts all of the family in danger. Nobody outside the family can be trusted with the dangerous secret and the threat from outside creates internal conflicts that put the family's unity at risk.

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Probing the question: "Are we ready to accept a human-ape hybrid in our midst?"What if humans were able to reproduce with other great apes? What would the hybrid offspring look like? Act like? Think like? And how would humans respond? Would such creatures be allowed to live among us? Or would they be put under a microscope in a zoo or research facility? Lucinda Gerson is an outspoken, free-spirited working-class single mother. Lively and unpredictable, she's the sort of person you might call "one of a kind." Her child Bonbon is quite literally one of a kind. When Lucinda spends the money she has inherited from an uncle on a trip to visit her anthropologist sister in the Congo, she comes back pregnant. Lucy and Bonbon is the story of mother and child, and of the controversy that swirls around them over the course of the child's first fourteen years. It is a story of freedom and captivity, of love and friendship, of borders and of border crossings, and of what it means to be a human animal.

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From old school dispensation to Zombie apocalypse: on change, loss and rapid transformations.The Narrow Cabinet is a book about change, loss and the struggle to understand what the hell is going on in a world experiencing such rapid transformations. The movement is from (a) an old dispensation of tough minded, rugged living and surviving troubled times through (b) a narcissistic sinkhole of complacency leading ultimately to (c) a zombie apocalypse. That is the general trajectory, but the work itself complicates the tropes. The old dispensation is by no means a paradise, nor is it dealt with nostalgically. The seeds of all the trouble are there from the start. But there is something admirable in the strength and fearless grit we find during that phase. In the sinkhole phase, the voice flits between depressive angst and lunatic outrage as oppressive forces exert ever more stubborn pressure. Here the speaker begins seeking the cause of the trouble that worsens until ultimately manifesting as zombie culture. With the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse, the terms of the illness become apparent.

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Fictional epic: three years in the life of Ray Archer.Archer portrays three years in the life of Ray Archer, a fictional Canadian actor/director dedicated to exploring performance styles with his diverse company. Following a Canada-wide tour of King Lear performed in mask, Archer takes his new epic history of Canada across the country and to Ireland, where a strange encounter changes his life in ways he could not imagine. Written in both modern and traditional poetic styles, Archer is Book Three of the epic trilogy On the River of Time, which examines three figures—one mythical (Odysseus), one historical (Edmund Spenser), and one fictional (Archer)—and the links between them across 3,000 years

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If small-town reporter Polly Stern has to cover one more manure runoff story, she's going to lose her already unmindful mind. Polly thought she'd end up as a serious photojournalist, traveling the world, meeting important people, and documenting significant environmental and social events. Life didn't turn out as expected. With her career at a standstill, her marriage over, her nest empty, her spiritual foundation precarious, and her family keeping a vital secret from her, Polly is desperate for answers. And change. She sets out on an unintended journey, stumbling upon story after story that for some reason—coincidence, fate?—all occurred in 1937. Polly's path leads her to: a troubled teen on a stone bridge high in the Green Mountains of Vermont, a political refugee on a kosher farm carved out of the Dominican Republic jungle, a tribal chief near a remote hut in uncharted Papua New Guinea, a volunteer soldier in a foggy olive grove in Spain, an artistic Italian savant in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and to a Tibetan boy and his snow-white mastiff as they begin their trek across the Himalayas. As the lines blur between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between present and past, Polly writes about these inspiring characters, and others, in nine short stories—all set in 1937—embedded throughout the novel. Her compelling international literary voyage reveals clues that allow Polly to uncover the truth about her own history, opening a new path for understanding, forgiveness, and love.

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In Kissing a Tree Surgeon, worlds traverse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in New Jersey. Southern women get kidnapped by North Koreans. A Dutch girl solicits money on OKCupid. A young woman meets Golda Meir on an Upper East Side bus in New York City. A character believes he's the biological son of Frank Sinatra. Zionist-Hasidic lesbians protest anti-Semitism at a women's Catholic college. A stalking moviegoer takes her dead grandmother to a Bertolucci film. A daughter meets her father's mistress at his grave. An employee is banned from calling her boss in the office. An adult woman visits the radio store in Lakewood, New Jersey, of the boy who didn't invite her to his bar mitzvah.

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Two unrelated, aspiring writers, born on the same day in the same year to parents with the same first names, grow up together and eventually gain national prominence as authors. As the years pass, the complex sexual identities of Miller Sark and Hal Pierce undermine their intense private relationship, inflicting damage that cannot be undone by the distinction of their fiction and poetry. Inspired by the lives and works of American literary giants Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane, This Cleaving and This Burning reveals the passion and purpose behind masks of public reputation and creative expression.

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This is a flip book with two novels: A Place In The Dark braids history, fiction and politics. It is set in Utica with substantial passages of painful, site-specific memories of the characters of both the Vietnam war and the American engagement in Iraq. These memories are carried by a Vietnamese immigrant woman living in Utica, who suffered in Saigon, an American Marine and Italian-American Utican who committed an atrocity during the siege of Khe Sanh, and an Iraqi who administered torture and worked as translator and interpreter in Baghdad on America's behalf. The central character is an ex-private investigator, of Utica, who is an Italian-American, beset by his long-standing guilt for his deferment from the draft during the Vietnam era and now suffering from serious heart disease. The Glamour of Evil deals with how, some males, especially literary/intellectual types, are drawn to violent men in organized crime. How they secretly desire intimacy with such people whom they find charismatic, powerful and uniquely free inside a world where the freedom of the individual is in much doubt. The novel features a legendary American Mafioso--who loved modern fiction and French existentialism--Crazy Joey Gallo and his dark world. This is combined with a whodunit involving Eliot Conte's daughter, a crisis that a connected man of literary flair promises to resolve for Conte--for an unusual price.

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The past infuses the present in the poems gathered in this collection. Painting a transformative Southeast wind helps restore a culture to a decimated people. Everyday events trigger a yearning for love from those already departed. A goldfish experiences poetry for the first time, again. An arduous trek through the Peruvian mountains leads to a stone that stops the sun. By turns ironic, comic, imagistic, experimental, these poems ask what?s next, and how we get there.

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Dervish at the Crossroads isn't a music guide so much as an autobiographical exploration of the experience of music from 2000 to 2020, with commentary on what makes the experience of music during these two decades radically different from all that came before. As the title of the book implies, due to the unique conditions of our time we can no longer think of ourselves as points on a series of evolutions; we're now much more present to all of music, from the beginning of written and recorded music, all of which turns around us like spokes on a wheel. This grants us a unique vantage point from which to appreciate music in itself. The book alternates text with a comics and infographics detailing the history of the author's discoveries as a music journalist during this time, along with personal experiences and ruminations and interviews.

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Dori's narrative is a heart-touching and zany blend of actual events in the life of a young Boxer. With edgy charm, she takes us on a romp through her world in such a way we can't help but reconsider our lives. Through her we get a dog's-eye view on human exploitation of animals. This unique approach is hauntingly effective.

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This rich volume begins with a very good-humoured memoir, "Alice Munro: Not Bad Short Story Writer"; by Munro's renowned Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, followed by powerful autobiographical pieces by fiction writer Jack Hodgins, playwright Judith Thompson, poet John B. Lee, poet-playwright-teacher James Reaney, and local historian Reg Thompson. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Country, including a previously unpublished interview with Munro by J.R. (Tim) Struthers and a superb essay by George Elliott Clarke on Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, take a cultural or historical or personal approach, while also providing judicious readings of the subtle literary dimensions of key Munro works.

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Elizabeth Macaluso's first volume of poetry, The Lighthouse, engages with the Italian American experience; it also explores gender, sexuality, and what it means to be a woman from Long Island. Macaluso captures the experiences of ethnic American women in this lyrical collection. She meditates on history, memory, war, and faith, all subjects germane to contemporary American and global cultures.

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Winner of the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in PoetryThey were shot, transported, deported. They were hanged, or they hanged themselves. They starved, or their hearts suddenly failed, or drugs or cancer consumed them. Others lived into their nineties, one even to 103. Nicola Vulpe's Insult to the Brain transports us from the gas-seeped muck of the Somme, to a tiny apartment in Buenos Aires, to an undisclosed prison yard in Iran, and a hundred times and places in between, to join some of the last century's finest poets in their final moments: horrific, tragic, ordinary, silly, absurd. Whether it is with the minimalist Gare de Rouen, 1916, dedicated to Émile Verhaeren, who was accidently dropped under a train by an adoring crowd, the lament The Poet Descends, Willing the Stairs, for Forough Farrokhzad, who swerved her car into a wall to avoid a school bus, or the openly political Death and His Kin, for Tal Almallouhi, who disappeared into a Syrian prison and may or may not be dead, Vulpe writes unblinkingly with clarity, kindness--even humour-- of our common fate, and brings us closer to the fragile core of our humanity.

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The adventure of discovering, then diving into the world of that esoteric and fascinating French "literary club", the Oulipo -- and the perils of trying to reconfigure the world's most famous monologue while abiding by their fiendishly challenging rules.

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In Rivers Applaud Forever, Raymond Filip, the craftsman and musician, showcases his spoken-word texts that perform on a silent page, as well as his say then play recitals on stage. This collection features free verse and end rhymes; satire and nature studies; a concrete poem and a proem; a linked sequence of narratives, and a long bird call to the uncaptured. Filip's peace process comes to terms with his birth and disfigurement in a displaced persons camp after World War II; the unspeakable abuses of growing up with domestic violence and a broken home in the riverside slums of Montréal; his adventures as part of the resistance movement that led to Lithuanian independence; the ups and downs of a mixed marriage to a Filipina; his battle with cancer; the journey of faith and global identity; and the joys of defying his age through his first love: sports.

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This story – part memoir, part historical fiction – spans a period of one hundred years, from 1914 to 2014, with the main emphasis being on the years of the two World Wars. It concentrates on the lives of real people –the author's parents, the author, a young pilot from New Jersey in WW1, and others – as well as some fictional characters, who all lived through one or both of the wars and were profoundly affected personally by them. Arise the Dead I focuses on World War I where the author's dad took part in the Battle of Loos (September 1915) and where he was wounded.

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A Japanese detective agency in Midwest America; a sex triangle with the vampish Angela at its apex, and love-sick Pohl and lust-warped Burnett at the receiving ends; a Fat Man devouring a huge luncheon amidst the splendors of his garden; and has-been vixen Violet seeking justice and revenge. Just some of the elements of No. 22 Pleasure City, a novel that ranges in flavor between Japanese manga, pulp fiction and tongue-in-cheek pornography. The novel is a story of betrayal, obsession, rejection, friendship, and--ultimately--redemption.

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In Fate's Instruments, picking up the story from where Paul's brother Jay left it in No Safeguards, Paul, an aspiring writer, marries Carlos, with whom he lived in Guatemala, and brings him to Montreal. Things go wrong from the beginning, and they break up. Then fate, in the form of a brain tumour, strikes Paul. He receives support from Jay, Lionel (himself a brain tumour survivor), friends, and the enigmatic Professor Bram. But it is Paul's exploration of his Vincentian childhood and new-found love that restores his equilibrium.

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Taking place during World War II, Somewhere in the Stars is the story of three young men from San Francisco -- Nick Spataro, his cousin Paolo, and friend Nathan Fein -- and their adventures as members of an American tank battalion chasing the Germans up the Italian peninsula, while Nick's Sicilian dad is interned as an "enemy alien" back in the USA. Despite encountering prejudice both at home and during their tank training, the three show uncanny skill in outmaneuvering and destroying German tanks, until their own tank is blown up. Tragic events both on and off the battlefield, bravery, guilt in the loss of friends, romance, trauma, feelings of regret, daring rescues and eventual re-union with loved ones make for a powerful and explosive mix.

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In 1941, 12-year-old Rivka Rosenfeld lives in the Warsaw Ghetto with her grandfather and two sisters in a synagogue because housing is scarce. When German soldiers slash her grandfather's beard, Rivka is compelled to write in between the pages of a library book by Hans Christian Andersen. Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, founder of the Underground Archive--a compilation of Warsaw Ghetto experiences, asks her to contribute her stories to the archives and Rivka agrees, imagining her words rising up from the ground on wings of their own.

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The unsolved murder of Fred Morelli, in Utica, New York, in 1947, comes to the fore more than 60 years later when 15-year-old Angel, hacker extraordinaire, has his guitar smashed by Victor Bocca, one of the original suspects in the murder. Angel hacks files that may point not only to Bocca's involvement but also that of the mob. From there, mayhem breaks loose as assassins descend on Utica to silence Angel. In the midst of it is Angel's adoptive father, Eliot Conte, who, along with his close friend Police Chief Antonio Robinson, must try to unravel the mystery of what is going on before more killings take place, including that of Angel himself.

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This book of essays examines the fictional work of Nino Ricci from a variety of critical perspectives. These perspectives include ideas about literature, culture, identity, politics, and society in terms of Canada and the modern world. Each contributor examines a specific novel or several novels, focusing on the prevailing themes and literary elements used by Nino Ricci to construct his work of fiction. This critical study allows the reader to enhance one's understanding of Nino Ricci's particular style and vision. It also provides an understanding of Nino Ricci's valuable contribution to contemporary Canadian fiction and world literature. The contributors in this book are: William Anselmi, Howard A. Doughty, Brian L. Flack, Lise Hogan, Marino Tuzi, and Jim Zucchero.

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Blood of My Blood eaves together the history, sociology and psychology of first, second, and third-generation Italian Americans. Its data is presented with scholarly precision; yet the author's personalized style, which he peppers with autobiographical tidbits, makes it immensely readable. Unlike most books written by academics, this one compels the reader to feel as well as to know.

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A sometimes satirical reflection on hope in a time of hopelessness, the poems in I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought use stubborn humour to grapple with the anxiety of moving forward during late capitalism. While many of the poems are set in Newfoundland, the book also echoes the universal experience of loss, leaving, returns, and never being able to return. The first section of the manuscript, titled Some Disasters, introduces real and imagined catastrophes. The St. Lawrence tidal wave, the history of resettlement, and the Muskrat Falls debacle stand next to poems that live in an imagined future where the capelin refuse to roll and snow refuses to fall. The second section is titled I dreamed I was an afterthought. Here, the eclectic poems turn to a more personal perspective of place, my struggles with mental illness, and a feminist exploration of familial relationships. In Of No Returns, movement through time and space is tinged with the same lurking fear of irreversibility, a fear which

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Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is divided into 7 sections. The first 5 sections focalize particular geographical regions: Southern Ontario in "The Southern Ontario Gothic Tour," North York in "The Northern Edge of Everything," New York in "Cynic's Guidebook," New Brunswick in "Vanishing Beach," and Antarctica in "Signs in the Southern Hemisphere." Though each section tells a story of people moving through these places, the poems ultimately subvert the expected conventions of travel narrative, directing critical attention to the personae and roles of travellers and to the systems of power at work in each locale. This is a book deeply concerned with psychogeography, the ways that individuals and environments mutually shape one another. Psychgeography comes to the fore particularly in the final two sections of the book, "Animals in Strange Houses" and "Genius Loci." In "Animals in Strange Houses," animals, both human and not, must literally and figuratively reconstruct homes after being displaced by urbanization and ecological destruction. In the final section, "Genius Loci," poems function as both portraits and place studies and reveal the deep intimacy between examinations of persons and places.

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In experimental lit veteran Brian Dedora's third novel, prose fragments and narrative threads come in and out of focus as, on a winter's night, a reveller in an upscale Toronto restaurant begins the most dangerous of things: a journey into memory. Is he a narcissist or is he among the wounded? What is it to be gay in a small desert town and in the heart of a sprawling city? The Apple in the Orchard navigates the truths and half-truths of a traveller, a loner plunging through city streets and into the woods, a Canadian wrapped in the myths of the North and tangled in the snare-traps of the urban. As this layered, undulating novel explores class tensions, a family in disintegration, and how the effects of sexual abuse wind through generations, and while cameos by voyageurs, cowboys, Black Robe, and Grey Owl flicker to life and vanish again, the tragic story of the unnamed Her emerges in verbal snapshots.

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Lexi, sixty-three and recently widowed, is facing the inevitable vicissitudes of life. After passing through a phase of numb immobility, Lexi makes a half-hearted attempt to meet some older men, but the experiences are disappointing. Undaunted, Lexi begins to accept the idea of being alone. Then circumstances disrupt her quiet routine – in the form of two house guests. In the physics of relationships, Lexi observes that nature abhors a vacuum. But she wonders if she herself has manipulated her circumstances to fill that vacuum. Eventually, Lexi encourages both house guests to move on. Ironically, her unselfish kindness leaves her once again alone. Through some strange physics of attraction and repulsion, however, her ex-husband reappears. Is he a changed man … or just acting like one? In the end, Lexi learns how to come to terms with her solitude, to resist entropy, and to fill the "vacuum" in her own way.

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Dead Voices is a collection of stories that are both seriously realistic and comically whimsical. They have everything from superheroes who get sick on words, to the appearance of dead playwrights, to the visit of saints and sinners from the past, to a hot stove discussion on hockey and love. They?re about the modern mind-set and its technological marvels and the older attention to character and virtue.

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Eleven Italian Americans were lynched in New Orleans on March 14, 1891. The lynching caused a crisis between the President and the Congress of the United States, between Washington and Rome. It also introduced a sinister word to America: Mafia. This book has become a HBO film starring Christopher Walken.

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Posing the question: who packed the baggage we carry from birth?Don't Ask poses the question: who packed the suitcase we carry from birth? In this literary thriller, a woman agonizes over her mother's suicide and is thrown into turmoil over her attraction to a German. Hannah Baran is 45, a successful Montreal real estate broker with a highly lucrative client who, like her parents, is a Holocaust survivor. Born in a German DP camp, she is the only child of Rokhl and the late Barak. One day, she arrives to take her mother to the doctor's but Rokhl is gone, leaving behind a mystifying note that reads: I am not her. Throughout Hannah's life, Rokhl's notes have been all the guidance she received from a laconic, distant mother, a foil to Hannah's voluble father who rescued Rokhl from Auschwitz. When Hannah announces that she must travel to Germany on business, Rokhl threatens that should Hannah 'go to that land of murderers,' it would be over her dead body. Three days later, Hannah locates her missing mother in the morgue. Secreted away in a confessional letter for Hannah to find one day is the story of Rokhl's life filled with loss, betrayal, and guilt. It is woven into the intrigue of the plot about contested land and a love affair weighted down by the baggage of history.

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Mel Buckworth, dependable family man, loses his manufacturing job through recession. Having lost his sense of purpose, his pride sidelines him as he discerns his lack of digital skills so apparent in his children’s generation. He is galled by his daughter Dani’s university friend, Stanley Best, who is about to achieve fame in the fields of nano technology and artificial intelligence. As Mel desperately attempts to find equilibrium he estranges his family, leaves his wife and enlists the help of a greedy grad student. Will Baker teaches Mel the skills he will need to wreak revenge on a system seemingly discarding him. As his aptitudes grow he begins to use the internet, the very thing he despised, as a weapon to inflict his reprisals. Slowly he turns terrorist to deliver his message: that humans will succumb to machines and the social system controlling them. As his acts grow more lethal, Mel knows he must make an indelible declaration. A “manifesto” to be remembered.

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And Along Came Alexis is a book about choices and consequences. The author's youngest daughter, Alexis, was born in 1978 with multiple disabilities, including blindness, an intractable seizure disorder and spastic quadriplegia. The choice to keep her at home despite medical advice resulted in a limiting of career opportunities for her parents and educational and other enrichment opportunities for her siblings. However, it also introduced the family to a whole community of earnest and interesting people dealing with similar challenges that they would never have known otherwise, and it provided rich perspectives on a different way of living. As for Alexis, she thrived far better than had been predicted and developed into a sweet, trusting person with a clear sense of self and an appreciation for the people in her life. The book describes the story of her life to date from her mother's viewpoint: its victories and setbacks, its grim moments and its funny moments. Overall, it is a positive story, demonstrating what is possible, even under very challenging circumstances.

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Kaidenberg's Best Sons is an enthralling portrait of a community starting over in a new land. In a series of linked stories, author Jason Heit explores the lives and fortunes of people bound together by tradition, heritage and history, yet riven by envy, greed and lust. When a community of Eastern European settlers in North Dakota learn that there is promising farmland available in the newly established province of Saskatchewan they load their wagons and head north. Along with their furnishings, they also pack up their resentments, desires and ambitions and bring them to a new, unsettled land. Heit deftly captures both the promise of a new start in a new land and the long shadow of the past that is cast over the characters as they rebuild their lives.

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Through these far-reaching and searching poems, J. J. Steinfeld's work continues to not only orbit a multitude of realities and multifaceted worlds, but to interrogate various aspects of being, whether they appear as the worldly or the otherworldly, the ordinary or the extraordinary, the physical or the spiritual. As Steinfeld concludes in his poem "The End of the World," somewhat confronting the absurd and somehow embracing the existential: "I want a poem with a good ending / all the thoughts and uncertainties / and missed opportunities / tied together with metaphoric hope / even if that poem is about the end of the world / preposterous and ludicrous / as it might be."

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Not in Vain You've Sent Me Light begins with a provocative, sometimes humorous exposé of two lovers and their collisions and triumphs, and evolves into a high-voltage portrait gallery, depicting heroes and artists, scientists and politicians, mothers and their conflicted daughters. Cora Siré draws on a multi-dimensional palette to deepen her exploration of identity, displacement and the cosmic powers of love and art.

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Long-listed for the 2022 Leacock Medal for HumourWhen King Priam's pregnant daughter was fleeing the sack of Troy, Stan was there. When Jesus of Nazareth was beaten and crucified, Stan was there - one cross over. Stan has been a Hittite warrior, a Roman legionnaire, a mercenary for the caravans of the Silk Road and a Great War German grunt. He's been a toymaker in a time of plague, a reluctant rebel in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and an information peddler in the cabarets of post-war Berlin. Stan doesn't die, and he doesn't know why. And now he's being investigated for a horrific crime. As Stan tells his story, from his origins as an Anatolian sheep farmer to his custody in a Toronto police interview room, he brings a wry, anachronistic perspective to three thousand years of Eurasian history. Call Me Stan is the story of a man endlessly struggling to adjust as the world keeps changing around him. It is a Biblical epic from the bleachers, a gender fluid operatic love quadrangle, and a touching exploration of what it is to outlive everyone you love. Or almost everyone.

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Continuing from Desire Lines, Shifting Paradigms is a collection of essays on art, poetry and culture--both high and low--gathered from the astute critical work of Toronto writer Ewan Whyte. Included: essays on Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Janet Cardiff, Damien Hirst, Viktor Mitic, Anne Carson and a number of other Canadian artists and poets.

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The Archeology of a Good Ragù offers a unique take on the recovery narrative. A damaged but savvy author finds new wholeness by way of a fascinating old city: Naples, Italy. John Domini's exploration of the place— little known to North Americans, yet rich in culture and challenge— draws on decades of research, living with local friends and family. His work has appeared previously in the New York Times and elsewhere, and he's published award-winning Neapolitan novels. This memoir will take readers into the back alleys and hidden beaches. It will examine intricacies of both romance and crime, and provide insight into the latest Naples immigrants, African refugees. Overall, Archeology of a Good Ragù turns the city into a prism that throws its colors across both urban and spiritual experience, everywhere.

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Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems 1968-2018 gathers together five decades of poetry of the accomplished Canadian poet Laurence Hutchman. He invites us to take a poetic odyssey, starting in the late 1960's enriched by his travels to Europe, leading us through the turbulent times in cosmopolitan Montreal of the 1970's, to a long residence in New Brunswick and finally his return to Ontario. Through a powerful and daring use of language and a haunting musicality of lines, Hutchman explores the relationship between real and imaginative landscape as he bears witness to his place and time.

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Inspired by American playwright Sarah Ruhl's 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, this collection is a series of miniature reflections, meditations, and ruminations on subjects encompassing matters of theatre and poetry, two subjects very close to Garebian's heart. Perceptive, witty, and intimate, the mini musings bubble with a sense of wonder, excitement, and intimacy. A vibrant, provocative series of mini musings that also affords insight into a particular artistic sensibility as several pieces are really slices of memoir and autobiography.

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I Will Be Corrupted is a collection of poems about a man who suffers from serious depression but is able to appear normal and live somewhat of a normal life. And yet what he sees and experiences in his everyday become poems and an insight into the mind of a kind and gentle person who wants to understand why he is here.

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On a quest to rescue his community from a fiery demise, possum and poet Zak, seeks assistance from rodents in the North and sets out on a journey into an ancient forest. But separated from his own surroundings and his bob-cat companion, Sena, he quickly loses his sense of direction and becomes hopelessly lost in the wilderness. Here, Zak enters a world of self-discovery as he struggles to survive starvation, predation, drowning, illness and ice. Meanwhile, his forest-folk comrades he left behind suffer the menace of drought, wildfire and the malicious deeds of Mungo, an indomitable villain actively ravaging precious ecosystems. As Zak's feathered and furry friends await such an uncertain future, they formulate the theory that Mungo and the others of his species have lost cognizance of what they are, causing them to become "familiar" and bring havoc upon the forest -- all, because they were never taught to use their noses as a reference. But unbeknownst to everyone, the havoc originates inside a dark world whose terrifying resident has, itself, become familiar; and Zak will play a key role in events that ultimately end in a savage showdown.

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The poems in A Map of Rain Days address the beauty and shadows of life while navigating the realities of racism, addiction, suicide, rape, abuse and death. Ecstasy and loneliness, romance and terror are juxtaposed. Love is brutal and intoxicating, adolescence is "the carcass of youth." Yet still we live and love and come out kicking.The poems in A Map of Rain Days span a lifetime, moving backwards from the loss of a mother to when the speaker was a "tiny girl in a third-floor walk-up." The title of the book comes from the poem of the same name, in which the speaker walks "down the corridors/in [her] mother's bruised shoes;" when she describes her mother's toes as "crooked and curled/in a misguided, arthritic map/of rain days," the speaker is describing the life she has lived.Winter is a metaphor for isolation, darkness and death. The speaker lives in a country that "is an ice storm." Aunty and Uncle are "hidden in rock/and snow." Death and winter are inextricably linked: "Mother floats around the car/with the snow" and "snow...caresses a man who struggles/with his foolproof design/for suicide." Even love and longing are locked in winter: "bent over you/I become the stillness of night, the snow itself."Love and loss feature in the poems: love for a mother and a daughter, longing for a lover, and the loss of a best friend. Love is overpowering. When the speaker has to move her mother out of her apartment on the eve of her daughter's birthday, "Love fills [her] up like a ballooon,/so full and stretched and thin [is she]." When her daughter moves across the continent, the speaker holds "tight to the pillow/that [she] laid [her] head upon/as if it were love/itself." When a friend dies unexpectedly, the speaker cannot let him go, and there is "a can of Diet Coke/that [she is] keeping for the next time/[he stops] by."Love is both brutal and intoxicating. The speaker longs for a man who, "when [she pauses] to wipe/the sand from [her] eyes...[is] gone." Romance "has been chewed/out of [her]/kisses carved away," yet still she listens to a lover's "breath fall/and the cacophony of sheets/against [their] skin."There is violence in love: a controlling husband who would "cut [her] breasts off/so no man/can look at them" and a lover who "turned [her] to ash that stuck/to the soles of [his] feet/during [his] tirades/and blackouts." In all of this, the speaker becomes "the thin voice itself/and little more." When she tries to escape, she turns around "to find him:/in his hands he holds all of me." Living in exile is another motif in the book. Born and raised in Montreal, the speaker, whose background is South Asian, experiences "the swill and gore" of adolescence in a hostile Toronto suburb. Struggling to live in a world where "sticks and stones broke all of [her]," she wonders how her father learned "to put his feet down/on unfamiliar soil." But it is possible to look racism in the eye; responding to the racist taunts of a man on a bus, the speaker tells him "my mother's black coat/against the winter-white paysage is always/and only home/and he/should be so lucky." When the speaker has finally begun to feel that "in [her] tiny radius/of the world/[she is] almost white," Donald Trump wins the American election, and racism rears its ugly head full on. However, despite all the hardships life throws at the speaker, life goes on, and she lives and loves and comes out stronger.

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Set in the small town of Grenville, Ontario, a setting perhaps familiar to the reader from the author's previous novel Cadillac Road, this story progresses from the 1950s through the 1980s. In 1940, five-year-old Martin Thorton fell from the family's apartment balcony, suffering catastrophic and permanent injuries. His accident plays a role in everything that happens afterwards -- his marginalization growing up a disabled person, his mother's guilt and unfailing devotion, his sister's alienation. Told from the point of view of his sister Gretchen, and his friend Donna, this is Martin's story.

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Bewilderness explores urban and suburban wildernesses--threshold places--in a darkly comedic, surreal set of prose poems. In Bewilderness, urban and suburban landscapes come to life as shape-shifting places, enchanted places, mundane places of magical thinking, as the reader explores the heterotopias of playgrounds and backyards, lakefront parks, splintery subdivisions, and semi-industrial wastelands. Creatures that inhabit these edged-out corners of land take on the features and neuroses of their human co-habitants in poems that are direct, declarative missives with offbeat instructions for navigating and inhabiting these liminal worlds.

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