Search results for ""Vehicule Press""

Author and radio personality Stanley Péan is a jazz scholar who takes us seamlessly and knowledgeably through the history of the music, stopping at a number of high points along the way. He gets behind the scenes with anecdotes that tell much about the misunderstandings that have surrounded the music. How could French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre have mixed up Afro-Canadian songwriter Shelton Brooks with the Jewish-American belter Sophie Tucker? What is the real story behind the searing classic “Strange Fruit” made immortal by Billie Holiday, who at first balked at performing it? Who knew that an Ohio housewife named Sadie Vimmerstedt was behind the revenge song “I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart?” And since this is jazz, there is no shortage of sad ends: Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, to name a few.

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Drug-runners threaten the West Coast!A semi-conscious man looks about a boat's cabin as a woman presses a wet cloth to his forehead. She's young, her nails are short, and her small hands are calloused. When another man tries to enter, she grabs a gun: "If you come down here, Joe, I'll shoot you."For a moment, the intruder doesn't move. "I don't want your damn' old hulk," he tells her. When the woman threatens a second time, he leaves. "You'd better too," he says. "She's near sunk."So begins the story of Clint, a reform school runaway, and Devvy, an orphaned farm girl saddled with a deceitful drunk of a stepmother. Clint and Devvy are pushed together as they struggle against the corrupt, criminal, violent adults trying to exert control over their lives.Perilous Passage first appeared in 1949 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post. It has since been published in hardcover, paperback, and in Swedish translation. This Ricochet Books edition marks the first new edition since 1952.

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From Montreal's metro stations and streets to pastoral mise-en-scenes, William Vallieres' first book, Versus, is a lyric bildungsroman filled with portraits of seduction and infatuation, loneliness and buried shame. "What yesterday had fought to bud / Is stunted under ice today." These are darkly canny poems about childhood, familial histories, lost love and the weariness of spending one's "being being / Everything I'm against." Deftly crafted, intense and compact, with barbed insights arrived at through verbal twists and syntactic half-turns, Vallieres' voice is entirely his own.

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Concluding a wide-lens journey through the American West that began with Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller (Hungary-Hollywood Express, 2016) and continued with counter-culture poet Richard Brautigan (Mayonnaise, 2018), the final installment of the 1984 trilogy delivers a heart-rending meta-biography of a technological mastermind. With Plamondon’s alter ego, Gabriel Rivages, using his Mac computer to dig deep into the internet’s detritus to reconstruct Jobs, the author devises the story of the personal computer with episodes from the lives of numerous figures who inflected the arc of one of the twentieth century’s most influential figures.

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In Four Days, an orphaned boy watches as his older brother and idol graduates from petty thievery into big-league crime. A bank heist goes awry, leaving loose threads and dangerous links back to the brothers. Following instructions, the boy leaves the city with the stolen money and travels to a rendezvous point in a mountain vacation resort. What he doesn’t know is that he is on his own, his brother will not show up—and the underworld is after him. Buell’s second novel, Four Days was first published in 1962 by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy in the United States and Macmillan in the UK.

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Praised for his darkly psychological accounts of extreme experiences, Jim Johnstone’s fifth book of poems explores his most difficult terrain to date: mental illness and addiction. Like Coleridge's opium dreams, Johnstone's narratives are hallucinatory, colored by his use of both prescription and recreational drugs. Returning often to the notion of rival realities, Johnstone is brilliantly disruptive and disorientating—a poet whose savagely austere forms, electrically precise images, and keyed-up rhythms reveal an obsession with the mind-altering properties of language itself.

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For centuries Montreal reigned as Canada’s most beguiling city. Inspired by the pages of the Gazette, Canada’s oldest daily newspaper (founded in 1778), here are seventy-five true tales to inspire, amuse, horrify and captivate. Stories include humourist Stephen Leacock’s flinty bitterness at being forced into academic retirement; a boat race through downtown Montreal in the dead of winter; a duel sparked by a society ball; and city-wide celebrations marking the end of World War II. In No Place More Suitable, author John Kalbfleisch brings into colourful focus the full range of human endeavor, genius, hilarity, poignancy and sadness from over 350 years of life on the banks of the St. Lawrence.

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A career-focused woman finds her life taken off course by an unexpected pregnancy. A troubled doctor abandons her family on her daughter’s birthday, the three-tiered pastel layer cake in the passenger seat beside her. A young mother must contend with how to explain her husband’s suicide to their child. In her first story collection, Lesley Trites digs bravely into the dilemmas faced by contemporary women who must be everything to everyone. Written with keen insight and deep affection, Lesley Trites’s A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream unearths pearls of wisdom from the secret lives of everyday women.

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Colorful and evocative, this detailed history offers an insider's glance at the eccentric owners and diverse characters that comprise the backstory of a notorious smoked meat emporium in Montreal. Mixing social history with humor, this delightful narrative chronicles the succession of employees from The Shadow to the father of steak spice, as well as the larger-than-life tourists, actors, comedians, politicians, and everyday customers that have cruised through the establishment's doors. With the eye of a social historian, Brownstein also documents and grapples with such issues as the smoked meat and pastrami debate, the food police, the perils of expansion, and language laws. Updated and expanded in a new format, the release of this narrative is scheduled to coincide with the Centaur Theatre’s world premiere of Schwartz’s: The Musical—coming to life onstage at the end of March 2011.

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Updated with new locales and the most current information, this French companion volume to Montreal’s Best BYOB Restaurants 2009–2010 provides a complete guide to 60 spots where food lovers of all types can bring their own potables. From French and African foods to South American and Greek dishes, this compendium reflects the diversity and quality of a city where good food is respected—and expected—and proves indispensable for budget-minded natives and visitors alike. Indexes by type of cuisine and neighborhood as well as information on hours of operation, credit cards, and wheelchair access are included.

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1995 Winner of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, this hilarious view of the 90s pokes fun at fat cats, bureaucrats, sign laws, snowstorms, second-hand steak fumes, quiet Canadians, noisy Americans, and other fax of Canadian life.

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The poems in Global Poetry Anthology: 2011 are new, previously unpublished works from around the world, selected in a “blind” process by a team of editors from Australia, Guyana, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Malawi, Nigeria, the U.K., the U.S., and Canada. Signal Editions, the poetry series at Véhicule Press, is pleased to offer what may be the first opportunity most readers have had to read an anthology of global poetry representing the rhythms, flavours, preoccupations and tastes of a diverse, international collection of poets writing in English.

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Modern Home Winemaking describes the process of making flawless wine, consistently, from crush to bottle, using modern techniques and the latest products. Making wine is not only about fermenting juice into wine; this book details the many other processes involved in making outstanding wine—wines that will win medals at competitions.

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“I was awake. / The hour was wrong,” de Meijer writes, and her poems track, in visceral and tender detail, the distraction, exhaustion, exhilaration, and fear of child-rearing through crisis. For de Meijer, the experience was also a crisis of language, and the struggle to find new terms for her state. Addressed, in part, to a child she calls “my grievous spectacle, / my dearest unpossessable,” The Outer Wards is everywhere marked by a joy in words—their quick-fire turns, sumptuous sounds, and nursery-rhyme seductions.

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In 1994 one of the worst genocides in human history took place in Rwanda—more than one million people were killed in 100 days. Each chapter in The Hope That Remains focuses on a Rwandan survivor and the journey to escape the violence and chaos that overtook their country. Two of the featured stories follow individuals who fled before the killing began and the events that caused them to flee. Both were then faced with the challenge of being outsiders looking in as events deteriorated and their families were slaughtered. The other eight survivors share their detailed and gripping experiences of trying to stay alive while trapped in a nation of killers. Twenty-five years after the Rwandan Genocide, the scars are still very real, and rebuilding and coping with the trauma remains an emotional struggle. Despite their horrific pasts, the survivors share feelings of hope, forgiveness, and a belief in a better future. They demonstrate the strength and courage it takes to leave behind the known to seek a better life in a new country. Their journeys to Canada contain humorous moments, thoughtful insights, and an overwhelming love and pride for the nation they now call home.

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Newspaper reporter Colin Dalhousie tracks scores of human disappearances across Vermont and Quebec dating back to the mid-1800s. What he discovers reveals a chilling pattern of events. This is an apocalyptic tale portrays an epic battle between good and evil that asks: Is there such a thing as a multiverse, where doorways into alternate realities truly exist? Are prophecies from "The Book of Revelation" reflected in cataclysmic 21st-century events like climate change, extreme weather, and political landscapes shifting sharply to the right? Is humanity experiencing the End of Days? Is it too late to reverse course?

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Rock ‘n’ Radio illustrates that Montreal was at the epicentre of the rock radio revolution in Canada, eventually attracting talented DJs from the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Their personal stories and the inevitable collision with the power of alternative FM rock radio in the late 60s take the reader through some of the best rock music recorded and the social changes that percolated in the background.The period 1926 to 1949 can be considered the Golden Age of radio when it was the hearth of the North American family. Much to everyone's surprise, it survived the incursion of television to live another Golden Age—the 1960s and 1970s when rock 'n' roll music seeped its way onto mainstream radio, pushing aside Perry Como and the Dorsey Brothers for Elvis and The Beatles.The new golden era of radio spawned what would eventually be called Top 40 AM radio, whose premise was built on the philosophy: play all the hits, then play them again. Pioneer Top 40 DJs like Alan Freed in the U.S., widely recognized as the man who coined the phrase "rock 'n' roll," spawned a new breed of radio personalities—the fast-talking salesman who delivered the goods. Hundreds of radio stations in North American gave up their entire programming day over to rock music. And with that came a legion of young, hungry Top 40 DJs such as Dave Boxer, Ralph Lockwood and Doug Pringle, looking for jobs at stations across Canada.

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The belief in translation as an act of self-portraiture drives Afterwords, Geoffrey Cook's ambitious reimagining of German poems by Goethe, Heine, Rilke, and Brecht. Cook's versions not only transform these foreign texts into English poems in their own right, but enrich and expand his uniquely prismatic voice. Cook brings a contemporary and Canadian tone to his adaptations, which also showcase the exacting craftsmanship for which his first collection, Postscript, was praised. Afterwords is a book that daringly celebrates authorship as a shared project. "Do you not feel," writes Goethe, "that, in my songs, I am one and the other, too?"

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The year is 1996, and small-town life for 14-year-old Catherine is made up of punk rock, skaters, shoplifting, and the ghost of Kurt Cobain. Her parents are too busy divorcing to pay her headful of unspent angst much attention. But after she tries mess – a PCP variant – for the first time, her budding rebellion begins to spiral out of control. Universally acclaimed as the modern-day coming-of-age story for a generation of QuÉbÉcois youth growing up in the 1990s, GeneviÈve Pettersen’s award-winning debut novel both shocked and titillated readers in its original French, who quickly ordained it a contemporary classic and a runaway bestseller. AnaÏs Barbeau-Lavalette, the hotly tipped QuÉbÉcois director behind Inch-Allah, is currently adapting the story to film. Now Esplanade Books is honored to present The Goddess of Fireflies to English readers for the first time in a powerful translation from award-winning novelist Neil Smith.

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Austrian aristocrat Franz Loebek lands in Canada penniless, having lost everything in the violent upheavals brought by the Second World War. In Montreal he finds the Old World sophistication of London and Paris mixed with the youthful vibrancy of New York. But Loebek’s adopted city is an open city, and he unwillingly becomes drawn into the violent underworld of illegal gambling, all the while maintaining a front as he moves amongst Montreal’s most privileged. Gambling with Fire is the story of one man’s struggle to navigate illicit and dangerous waters to finally find stability and peace. Originally published in 1969, it followed The Crime on Cote des Neiges, Murder Over Dorval, and The Body on Mount Royal as David Montrose’s fourth and final novel. The author died while it was in production. This Ricochet Books edition, the first in forty-seven years, marks its paperback debut.

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A blindingly blonde woman walks into private detective Mike Garfin’s downtown Montreal office, complaining that she’s being followed by a man. That evening, at a luxurious Lakeshore home, he witnesses another woman being forced into a car. Garfin gives chase, only to find her dead and disfigured beneath the wheels of a large truck on Highway 20. At first he sees no connection between the two– why should he?– but Garfin’s pursuit of the truth shows they are inextricably linked by basic vice on the highest floors of the swankiest Sherbrooke Street apartments. This Douglas Sanderson thriller follows Hot Freeze as the second Mike Garfin adventure. First published in 1954 under the title The Darker Traffic, a Dodd, Mead Red Detective Mystery, it was reissued the following year as Blondes are My Trouble by Popular Library. This Ricochet Books edition is the first in sixty years.

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Ronald J. Cooke’s second novel, The Mayor of CÔte St. Paul, is the tale of a struggling writer living in Depression-era Montreal. Winnipegger Dave Manley, arrived in the city thinking that its rich atmosphere will inspire his fiction, but was met by a stream rejection slips. His luck turns, for good and bad, when he meets Cherie, a looker from Lunenberg who does dirty work for a crime boss known as The Mayor. It isn’t long before Dave is running booze between Montreal and Windsor, learning all there is to know about the slot machine and liquor rackets. Dave wants out, Cherie wants out—but there is no easy escape from The Mayor, a man who lives in luxury—through vice and murder—surrounded by the squalor of CÔte St. Paul. Published in 1950, The Mayor of CÔte St. Paul enjoyed the month of June on newsstands, never to be seen again. This edition is the first in 64 years.

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Poet George Ellenbogen’s memoir is more than a collection of anecdotes of his immigrant family and their journey from Franz Joseph’s Austro-Hungarian empire to Montreal in the 1920s. A Stone in My Shoe charts his discovery of how an immigrant Jewish neighborhood—a tight-knit shtetl with extended families that had its own shops, institutions, and daily Yiddish newspapers—sustained him and his family as well as thousands of others. The revelations ripple outward and what surfaces—the markers of his parents’ navigation in a new world and his own youth in the 1940s and 1950s Montreal—extend to all. They become part of the universal map in which readers will recognize their own quirky courses into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

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Offering a glimpse into the culture of extreme poverty, this memoir is an insider’s view into a neighborhood then described as the toughest in Canada. Point St. Charles is an industrial slum in Montreal which is now in the process of gentrification, but during Kathy Dobson’s childhood, people moved for one of two reasons: their apartment was on fire or the rent was due. When student social workers and medical students from McGill University invaded the Point in the 1970s, Kathy and her five sisters witnessed their mother transform from a defeated welfare recipient to an angry, confrontational community organizer who joined in the fight against a city that turned a blind eye on some of its most vulnerable citizens. When her mother won the right for Kathy and her two older sisters to attend schools in one of Montreal’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Kathy was thrown into a foreign world with a completely different set of rules that she didn't know—leading to disastrous results. This compelling, coming-of-age story documents a time of great social change in Montreal and reveals the workings of an educational system trying to deal with disadvantaged children.

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Presented in its original pocketbook format, this entertaining account documents the 1950s nightlife of Canada’s second largest city. Based on the original chronicle from the era, this overview’s spirited prose complements a vast collection of archival photographs, vividly depicting the people and places of Montreal’s underbelly. From glamorous cabarets and lush restaurants to late-night bars and memorable characters, this exploration demonstrates why this city has been named one of the most colorful communities on the continent.

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Fixing its gaze on writers as they are seldom seen, this anthology of photographs and accompanying stories provides an intriguing exploration into the personal and professional lives of various artists. This series of narratives delves inside the lives of its subjects, as well as the process of making portraits, before finishing with a touch of refined literary gossip. Based on a decade of research, this study takes a remarkable tour from the seventh-century scribe, Ezra, to the contemporary literary greats such as Man Booker Prize–winner Yann Martel and MacArthur Fellowship author Ann Carson.

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States of Emergency is a book-length poem about the apocalyptic present, written in a language whose meaning is liquid and full of slippage, always spilling out from its container. In Yoyo Comay's hands, words roil, churn, and surge. By taking on different mood and modes, from the prophetic to the colloquial, he has created a form that is a constant unravellinga leap of faith into intuitive meaning, a letting go into ongoingness. I am catapulted into where I am, he writes, and the air concusses around me. Comay sees poetry as a visceral experience: a state of immanence, embodiment, emergence, emergency. This is poetry as diary and seismograph, an infinite scroll for the end of days. It is a debut like no other.

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Antonyms for Daughter, Jenny Boychuk’s poetry debut, addresses a harrowing subject: the loss of the poet’s mother to addiction. Deploying a range of forms and techniques astonishing in a first collection, Boychuk creates unsparing scenes of their complicated life together. Poem after poem attempts to wring clarity from memories ripe with trauma and love, as Boychuk questions whether it is possible for a child to ever extricate herself from an abusive parent—to become, as it were, a living “antonym” of a painful family legacy. A booklength loss-lyric of vivid beauty, Antonyms for Daughter is a singular example of grief transformed into art.

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Modern Home Winemaking describes the process of making flawless wine, consistently, from crush to bottle, using modern techniques and the latest products. Making wine is not only about fermenting juice into wine; this book details the many other processes involved in making outstanding wine—wines that will win medals at competitions.

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Set in and around post-war Toronto, I Am Not Guilty first appeared in a condensed form in the February 1954 Ladies’ Home Journal. That same year, it was published in full by Doubleday as M’Lord, I Am Not Guilty. Helen Graham has been acquitted in the murder of her wealthy husband, Alberta oil baron Steven Graham, but the eyes of the public continue to view her with suspicion. Worried for her future, and that of her young son, she sets out to find the true killer. The trail leads to the apartment of another woman—and revelations about her dead husband’s secret life—then continues to a growing bedroom community in suburban Toronto. What the widow doesn’t realize is that she is not alone in her pursuit of the murderer or how ready that murderer is to kill again.

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The nightmare began on a warm summer night. A six-year-old boy was found in a park shack, bludgeoned to death in the quiet residential district of Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grace. Soon after, an eight-year-old boy disappeared. Horror and fear gripped the city. Neighbourhoods went silent. Suspects were questioned, suspicion and alarm mounts. No arrests were ever made.When Lieutenant Detective Damiano discovers the cold case many years later and learns that the three suspects are still alive, she's hooked, on what cops call a Detective's Case. Her partner, Detective Pierre Matte, hesitantly agrees to work with her. They meet Kathryn Flynn, the ninety-year-old mother, who has kept meticulous files throughout the years--her hope has never faltered. Damiano and Matte rediscover what binds them, a reckoning for the murderers among us and justice for the victims who have no voice.

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In Dominoes at the Crossroads Kaie Kellough maps an alternate nation—one populated by Caribbean Canadians who hopscotch across the country. The characters navigate race, class, and coming-of-age. Seeking opportunity, some fade into the world around them, even as their minds hitchhike, dream, and soar. Some appear in different times and hemispheres, whether as student radicals, secret agents, historians, fugitive slaves, or jazz musicians.From the cobblestones of Montreal’s Old Port through the foliage of a South American rainforest; from a basement in wartime Paris to a metro in Montreal during the October Crisis; Kellough’s fierce imagination reconciles the personal and ancestral experience with the present moment, grappling with the abiding feeling of being elsewhere, even when here.

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“I believe in the power of original sin,” writes James Arthur, “in the wound / that keeps on wounding.” Set against a backdrop of political turmoil in the United States, The Suicide’s Son is about the complicated personal histories that parents inherit, add to, and pass on to their children. This is a confessional book of masks and personae, of depopulated landscapes haunted by history’s violence, of speakers whose conflicted truth-telling is marked by sense of complicity in the falsehoods they glimpse around them. “I’m aging very slowly, because every part of me / is already dead," says Frankenstein’s monster. With his formidable powers of observation and inimitable ear for the cadences of speech, Arthur shows himself to be, in only his second book, one of the best English-language poets writing today.

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The third and final detective tale in this gritty series of vintage mysteries—originally published in 1953—once again follows the hard-drinking yet hardworking private eye, Russell Teed, through the crooked streets of Montreal. When a brutally beaten body is found on the city’s famous mountain, private investigator Teed and his would-be Watson, MacArnold, set out to right wrongs and discover the truth behind the crime. Add a buxom brunette whose embrace brings treachery and a large dose of vicious gang warfare, this hard-boiled, noir crime story provides a glimpse into 1950s Montreal underworld life.

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Teenagers accidentally discover the body of a university student at the bottom of the abandoned Wellington Tunnel. When the apparent suicide turns out to be a murder, Lieutenant Detective Toni Damiano, guilt-ridden from her last case, finds herself investigating a chilling trail of lies and deceit, daring love and betrayal. Taylor Sanderson is the only daughter of affluent Trevor Sanderson, a legal partner on the Corruption Commission and a member of the Montreal "clan of influence." That discovery will shatter Trevor Sanderson and Lieutenant Detective Damiano, cutting its way through both their lives.

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A Holocaust memoir from Paul Schaffer, who survived Auschwitz to become a successful industrialist, honored by the country of FranceBy the age of 14, Paul Shaffer had received a comprehensive education in Vienna. He spent his teenage years, first on the run from the Nazis in Belgium and France, and then in Auschwitz from 1942 to 1945, and survived to become a successful industrialist who was honored by the government of France. The carefully chosen vignettes and descriptions in this Holocaust memoir provide insights into a middle-class Jewish childhood in prewar Vienna, attitudes to Jewish refugees in Vichy France, arrest and detention in France, survival in Auschwitz, and the return to postwar France to face the challenges of reintegration into French society. With photos of the author in the Siemens factory where he worked as an inmate, this emotional memoir is an attempt to comprehend those events and examine the range of human behavior he himself witnessed. Shaffer’s account was written with students in mind, and consequently deliberately omits detailed descriptions of the most horrifying aspects of life as a concentration camp inmate.

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A book about what’s not working in Canadian health care institutions and how to fix itDrawing on 40 years running many Canadian health care institutions, David Levine shares his experience on how to manage in this very complex environment. His career includes implementing one of the first Local Community Health Centres (CLSCs) in Montreal in the 1970s, involvement in electoral politics, managing various QuÉbec hospitals, his controversial hiring as head of the Ottawa Hospital, a term as QuÉbec Delegate General in New York City, a stint as junior minister of health in QuÉbec, and running the Montreal regional health authority under both Parti-QuÉbÉcois and Liberal governments. His experience with politics—both personal and professional—is the basis of his analysis of the impact of politics on health care. Levine supports without qualification a public, universal health care system, but he questions the effectiveness of managing the system from the Minister’s Office. Poor decision-making on the basis of politics often means best solutions are not implemented. Levine’s analysis includes what is not working and how to fix it, and the barriers to implementation. Health Care and Politics will be of interest to health care managers, health care policymakers, and all Canadians seeking a better understanding of the health care system and what it will take to fix it.

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A noir period piece and a colorful representation of Montreal in the 1950sA raw novel of sex and drugs in the years just before rock’n’roll, Hot Freeze was first published in 1954. It takes readers from the highest Westmount mansion to the lowest Montreal gambling joint and nightclub. Its hero is Mike Garfin, a man who got kicked out of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for sleeping with the wife of a suspect. Recreating himself as an “inquiry agent,” Mike takes on what looks to be an easy job: shadowing a bisexual teenager of privilege who is throwing around more money than his allowance allows. But the boy disappears and soon other disappearances follow, and Garfin’s world becomes a lonelier place.

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This groundbreaking history documents the roots of slavery in everyday colonial Canada and the extreme measures taken by subsequent generations to eradicate any record of their presence. Beginning with the French regime in colonial Canada 1629, noted historian Marcel Trudel examines the roots of slavery and its pervasive existence until its eventual abolition from the British Empire in 1834. Drawn from Trudel’s exhaustive scrutiny of unpublished 17th- through 19th-century archival records, this survey gives a human face to more than 4,000 aboriginal and black slaves who were bought, sold, and exploited in colonial Canada. The compelling narrative chronicles the slaves’ often horrific living conditions, the joys and sorrows of their daily existence, and their quest to gain liberty. The extensive research not only reveals the identities of Canadian slave owners, but sheds light on the whitewashing undertaken by politicians, historians, and ecclesiastics who deliberately falsified records and glorified their colonial-era heroes in order to remove any trace of these slaves held in bondage for more than 200 years.

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From crushing grapes to bottling wine, this essential handbook enables the home winemaker to make informed decisions about ingredients, equipment, and the winemaking process. Precise step-by-step instructions lead both novice and advanced winemakers through all of the important procedures, including selecting and working with new equipment, determining the best material for specific styles, analyzing the product, monitoring acidity levels, and common troubleshooting problems. Using accessible charts and tables to offer detailed instructions for making Pinot noir, port, and sparkling wines, this newly updated edition also covers often overlooked topics, such as ice wines and blending varieties.

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Fuzzy Logic really is about how the Internet and related technologies have infiltrated our daily lives, how it is changing established social patterns, eroding older technologies at a hugely accelerated rate. There is a social cost to this kind of change, and a personal sense of loss or melancholy. Friedman evokes this bittersweet feeling without wallowing in it. More importantly, Friedman, with considerable good humour, deflates some of the more egregious babblings of the techno-Messiahs who would have us believe that we have reached a digital state of grace. -- Mark Shainblum, Internet Quarterly

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Durable Goods is a book of a sharply imagined poems about everyday technology. Writing in the Dinggedicht or thing-poem tradition of poets like Rilke, Ponge, and Marianne Moore, James Pollock calls to surprising life everything from microwaves to kettles, sprinklers to umbrellas, with a precision both unerring and effortless. By conjuring the essential spirit of each object, the poet reveals the tools and appliances that surround us as both sympathetic reflections of ourselves—our fear, love, rage, hope, and grief—and strange beings with inner lives of their own. “It knows how much pressure you’ve been under,” Pollock writes, of the barometer, “that you could use a change of atmosphere.” Read together, these poems immerse us in an imagined world with the power to make us see our own in a new way. Suffused with dazzling wordplay, razor wit, and rippling sonic effects, the poems richly reward being read aloud. Indeed, for Pollock, the most durable good is language itself.

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Born in 1968 in The Hague, Erik Lindner is one of the Netherland’s most acclaimed poets. Admired for a style that fuses simplicity with strangeness, Lindner builds his poems through a montage of descriptive images that, by fending off closure, generate extraordinary visionary power. Gathering together new work with a selection from his previous six collections, Words are the Worst offers a range of pleasures that have made him celebrated in his home country: an austere eloquence; a hard, unsparing precision; a restless and idiosyncratic eye. Best of all is how his intensely filmic observations transform haunted landscapes of windmills, birds, dogs, and houseboats on canals into, as one critic put it, “Lindner-like” moments. Brilliantly translated by Francis R. Jones, with an introduction by Canadian poet David O’Meara, Words are the Worst introduces a leading Dutch voice to English readers.

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The rise to power of one of Canada’s most progressive municipal movements in recent memory.When it was dreamed up in the early 2000s by a transportation bureaucrat with a quixotic dream of bringing tramways back to the streets of Montreal, few expected Projet Montréal to go anywhere. But a decade and a half later, the party was a grassroots powerhouse with an ambitious agenda that had taken power at city hall—after dumping its founder, barely surviving a divisive leadership campaign and earning the ire of motorists across Quebec.Projet Montréal aspired to transform Montreal into a green, human-scale city with few, if any equal in North America. Equal parts reportage, oral history and memoir, Saving the City chronicles what the party did right, where it failed, and where it’s headed. Written from the perspective of someone who worked for Projet Montréal’s administration for almost a decade, Daniel Sanger’s book draws on dozens of interviews with other actors in the party and on the municipal scene, past and present.A highly readable history of Montreal municipal politics over the past 30 years, Saving the City will also discuss issues of interest to city-dwellers across Canada. Are political parties at the municipal level a good thing? Is Montreal’s borough system a model for other big cities? What are the best ways to control urban car use? What is the optimum width for a sidewalk? The best kind of street tree? And why free parking is a terrible idea.

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Founded in 2010, the Montreal International Poetry Prize has established itself as a major event in contemporary poetry, both in Canada and around the world. The Montreal Prize Anthology 2020 explodes with talent, combining radiant vision with striking invention in form. The loss of a father finds equivalence in a tornado’s blowing an apartment open to the night sky. Sacred and profane images of a mother pile up in couplets, making a heap of gold. Family memory stirs in the dreamy measures of a sestina. Racial injustice is defied and reversed in the unflinching mirror of a palindromic poem. A doctor confesses her life work to be a striving to right the wrong done her father. These poems, a handful of the thousands submitted to the 2020 competition, were chosen for the lone virtue of their speaking directly to the reader, with conviction and with art. In 2019, the founder of the Montreal Prize, Asa Boxer, transferred it to the Department of English at McGill University. A team of dedicated faculty and graduate students recruited a distinguished international jury, headed by Pulitzer-prize-winner Yusef Komunyakaa, to judge the entries. This book is the result.

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Memory—how we retrieve and replenish it—is at the heart of Nectarine, Chad Campbell's visionary second collection. Figures, cities, and landscapes from the author's life shift in and out of these dreamlike poems that explore the “unaccountable, uncountable” ways in which our past keeps speaking to us: through objects, through paintings, through colours, and through the spectre of places that map themselves over the places we live in. Subtle, unsettling, compressed, and full of incandescently beautiful language, Nectarine is about lost things, stranded moments, and traces preserved in time like “a glass of frozen nectarine halves / on a table made of ice.”

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