Charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm, Matt Rader conjures a vision of the present from a deep future.The follow-up to Ghosthawk, Fine is set largely in the Kelowna area of the Okanagan Valley, BC, over the period of June 2021–June 2022. The poems address the extraordinary natural, historical and social events of that period including the June 2021 heat dome and the November 2021 atmospheric river, the ongoing pandemic and resulting social anomie, the public announcement of hundreds of unmarked residential school graves across the country, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a personal level, the poems grapple with questions of disability, illness, trans identity, healing and what a good future might look like. Written in a speculative mood, the poems in Fine look back on the contemporary moment with its terrors and mythopoetic digital scrim from an imagined future, so that the voice itself becomes an incantation, a summoning of a world of survivance and beauty.
Late September is an intimate queer coming-of-age tale exploring the nuances of love, trauma and mental health. A compelling literary fiction debut for readers of Heather O’Neill and Zoe Whittall.In the summer of 2000, Ines, a grief-stricken skateboarder beginning to explore her sexuality, leaves behind her sheltered hometown on a Greyhound bus bound for Montreal. In awe of the city’s vibrancy, and armed with a journal and a Discman, Ines sets out to find a new way, befriending April, a latex-loving goth who gets her a job as a cam-girl. In the midst of a bar fight Ines meets Max, a magnetic skateboarder, whom she quickly falls for.As summer fades to fall Ines tries to uphold the bliss of their intoxicating summer, realizing that while she has escaped the confines of her small-town life, she cannot escape her past. The city changes and their romance darkens as Ines learns that Max is experiencing mental health challenges, all while a regular at the cam studio gets threateningly close. Ines learns that loving herself first requires trial and error—and that love is not always an innocent word.
A long poem in six sections, Dream House takes its cue from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space in its investigation of female embodiment by calling up such feral, liminal spaces as the pregnant body, the aging mind, snail shells, broom closets, low-ceilinged pubs and abandoned pizza boxes. Part Tardis, part townhouse, part Howl’s moving castle, this wry, surreal and many-peopled narrative interrogates what metaphor might hold of history, both personal and social, in the wake of a mother’s passing. Its migrant speaker trawls through hedgerows and recipe books to unearth stained birdsong and undead civil wars, intent on tracing a matrilineal path across four generations while traversing the haunted margins between existence and belonging.
Alternator by Chris Banks is a masterful poetry collection that blends catastrophe and consciousness, modern living and past transgressions, off-kilter imagery and the “hidden room” of the unsayable to construct a polyphonic triumph. In the title poem, Banks says, after decades, all he wants to do is “thread fire through the eye of [his] imagination,” and the product of his labour are these new poems born of whole cloth: surrealist meditations, modern ghazals and powerful narrative sonnets that are both alive and burning.
"Twelve-year-old Derik Mormin travels with his father and a family friend to Bella Bella for his grandfather's funeral. Along the way, he uncovers the traumatic history of his ancestors, considers his relationship to masculinity and explores the contrast between rural and urban lifestyles in hopes of reconciling the seemingly unreconcilable: the beauty of both the Indigenous and 'Western' ways of life -- hence beautiful beautiful. All right, that's quite enough third-person pandering; you're not fooling anyone. Redbird here, Derik's babysitter, and narrator of this here story. We're here to bring light to an otherwise grave subject, friends. Follow us through primordial visions. Dance with a cannibal (don't worry, they're friendly once tamed). And discover what it takes to be united"--
"Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet's motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing--held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing. Housty's poems are textural--blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow--and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader's whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors' bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty's exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community. Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality."--
75 All New Crosswords Come aboard and fasten your seat belts! O Canada Crosswords Book 24 takes flight with 75 large-sized puzzles jam-packed with over 10,500 clues. As is her trademark, author Gwen Sjogren checks in with fresh themes, witty wordplay and making the connection with all things Canadian. Themed puzzles include:Symbols – Pride of Province and Pride of Territory Greatest Canadians – They Made History 1 and 2 and Earmarked for Success Punishment – Jolly Jobs? and Dog-on-it A&E – Big Art, Game On and The Best of ABBA Uniquely Canadian – Local Lingo and True North Trivia In a departure from the norm, Sjogren unpacks new themes including bears, Broadway and brand names. Solvers who like a challenge can carry on with non-themed Canada Cornucopia crosswords, some of which have no fill-in-the-blank clues and/or three-letter answers.With O Canada Crosswords Book 24, you’ll be winging your way to hours of crossword-solving fun.
Essays, stories and poems on the interior lives of bookstores.Nick Thran's volume of essays, stories and poems is a quietly powerful meditation on a life of reading, writing and bookselling. Thran, who returned to bookselling when he moved with his family to Fredericton, NB, captures the rare magic of reading communities. Here, the bookstore itself sits in the middle of an expanding root system, connecting lives, nurturing interests and stoking passions. It is a place for both private daydreaming and the small talk that staves off loneliness. And it is the fertile ground on which so many authors-including Thran-find the courage to write.
A story for children by Kwantlen storyteller and award-winning poet Joseph Dandurand.The Girl Who Loved the Birds is the third in a series of Kwantlen legends by award-winning author Joseph Dandurand, following The Sasquatch, the Fire and the Cedar Baskets and A Magical Sturgeon.Accompanied by beautiful watercolour illustrations by Kwantlen artist Elinor Atkins, this tender children's story follows a young Kwantlen girl who shares her life with the birds of the island she calls home. Collecting piles of sticks and moss for the builders of nests, sharing meals with the eagles and owls, the girl forms a lifelong bond with her feathered friends, and soon they begin to return her kindness.Written with Dandurand's familiar simplicity and grace, The Girl Who Loved the Birds is a striking story of kinship and connection.
A '90s-era Gothic about holding on to the dead, voiced with plaintive urgency and macabre sensuality.In the small town of Burr, Ontario, thirteen-year-old Jane yearns to reunite with her recently deceased father and fantasizes about tunnelling through the earth to his coffin. This leads her to bond with local eccentric Ernest, who is still reeling from the long-ago drowning of his little sister. Jane's mother, Meredith, escapes into wildness, enacting the past on the abandoned bed that she finds in the middle of the forest, until her daughter's disappearance spurs her into action.The voice of the town conveys the suspicions and subliminal fears of a rural community-a chorus of whispers that reaches a fever pitch when Jane and Ernest disappear from Burr together. Throughout, the novel is haunted by Henry, a former wrestler who once stood on his bed in the middle of the night, holding up the weight of the ceiling in his sleeping hands.Mixing realism and the fantastic, Brooke Lockyer's debut novel investigates the nature of grief and longing that reach beyond the grave.
The ambitious second instalment of Renée Sarojini Saklikar's epic fantasy saga in verse, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns (THOT J BAP).This book-length poem features the time-travelling demigoddess Bramah, a locksmith and the saga's hero. In Bramah's Quest, the year is 2087 and Bramah is back on a planet Earth ravaged by climate change and global inequality. Bramah is on a quest to find her people, including the little boy Raphael, last seen at the end of Bramah and the Beggar Boy (2021). Hailed as "brilliant and masterful, timely" (Kerry Gilbert), this long poem reclaims poetry forms such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ballad and the madrigal. Each page is a portal, connecting readers to the resistance of seed savers, craftspeople, scientists and orphans, all banded together to help save their world from eco-catastrophe and injustice. Ten years in the making, Bramah's Quest weaves poetry with politics to create an epic family saga that is also a meditation on good and evil and a "real page turner" (Meredith Quartermain). Bramah, "brown, brave and beautiful," is determined to conquer the odds and deal with what fate and chance throw in her path. Each twist and turn tests her ability to live up to the motto "Let all evil die and the good endure."
The compelling biography of former British Columbia cabinet minister Bob Williams weaves his political and economical insights with the story of his unconventional life.In Using Power Well, former provincial politician Bob Williams tells his atypical life story: beginning with his childhood in the working-class east end of Vancouver, Williams goes on to describe his early years as a planner in Delta, BC, his political life on Vancouver City Council and in the BC Legislature-including a major impact on the first NDP government in the 1970s-and his more recent contributions in the world of business and co-operative economics. Williams's legacy is dotted across the physical and political landscape of BC-from the Whistler Town Centre and Robson Square to the Agricultural Land Reserve, the Insurance Corporation of BC and many projects in between. A straight shooter who refuses to mince words, Williams advocates in this highly readable and colourful book for a bottom-up approach to politics and public policy, bypassing bureaucracy in order to use power well.
debut novelauthor was born and raised in Doukhobor communityauthor was drummer for Grammy-nominated duo Tegan and Sara, Australian pop star Ben Lee and others
A thought-provoking debut novel that examines the intersection of climate change, human connection and radicalization.The Rooftop Garden is a novel about Nabila, a researcher who studies seaweed in warming oceans, and her childhood friend Matthew. Now both in their twenties, Matthew has disappeared from his Toronto home, and Nabila travels to Berlin to find him and try to bring him back.The story is interspersed with scenes from their childhood, when Nabila, obsessed with how the climate crisis will cause oceans to rise, created an elaborate imaginary world where much of the land has flooded. She and Matthew would play their game on her rooftop garden, the only oasis in an abandoned city being claimed by water.Their childhood experiences reveal how their lives are on different trajectories, even at an early stage: Nabila comes from an educated, middle-class family, while Matthew had been abandoned by his father and was often left to deal with things on his own.As an adult, Matthew¿s dissatisfaction with life leads him to join a group of young men who are angry at society. He eventually finds himself on a violent suicide mission, but Nabila isn¿t aware of the extent of his radicalization until they finally meet on a street in Berlin.
Award-winning author Darren Groth's epic story of a dog who will protect the last remaining member of his family, an intellectually disabled boy, at all costs as human civilization crumbles around them.In a time of isolation and scarcity, a regressive regime rules with absolute power, turning neighbour against neighbour and crushing dissidence with deadly force. A microcosm of this monstrous time: the tiny Pacific Northwest town of Gilder.In a house on the fringes of the decimated hamlet, Tao-a failed service dog turned pet-wakes to find his leash tied to the stairs, his hind leg broken and his family killed. With the world he knows shattered, there is one course of action: lay with his slain masters and wait for the enemy-the "hounds"-to return and end his life.But it is not the hounds that find him-it is Kasper, fifteen years old, disabled, limited ability to speak, sole survivor of the family. With the discovery of Boy, Tao understands he now has a duty: guide the last living member of his pack through the ravaged streets of Gilder to safety. The destination? The only refuge he can conceive in a world gone mad? The site of his training five years before.Boy in the Blue Hammock is an epic tale of loss and loyalty, of dissent and destruction, of assumption and ableism. With a powerful narrative and evocative prose, the novel poses one of the important questions of our time: When evil silences the people, who will protect those without a voice?
A stunning debut poetry collection confronting colonialism, relationships, grief and intergenerational wounds.Cut to Fortress considers the possibility of decolonization through a personal lens, urging for a resistance that is tied using cord and old-growth tree roots; a resistance that tethers us all together in this contemporary existence.With an upbringing in Surrey, fraught familial conflicts, the passing of his older brother and its influence on his world view, Bige slices through the forts built overtop occupied Turtle Island to examine their origin and his own. His journey climbs into the mountains while he reconnects with his Dene and Cree cultures like a gripping hand on jagged rock. His path draws into the concrete urban streets that Wetako-medicine lurks through, especially for his people. The labour of these travels brings him to the springs where healing passed-down traumas becomes possible by drawing water through vulnerability.
"A much-anticipated debut collection from one of Canada's most promising emerging poets Pebble Swing earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author's case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water's reflective surface. This collection is about language and family histories. It is the author's attempt to piece together the resonant aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which stole the life of her paternal grandmother. As an immigrant whose grasp of Mandarin is fading, Wang explores absences in her caesuras and fragmentation--that which is unspoken, but endures. The poems in this collection also trace the experiences of a young poet who left home at seventeen to pursue writing; the result is a series of city poetry infused with memory, the small joys of Vancouver's everyday, environmental politics, grief and notions of home. While the poetics of response are abundant in the collection--with poems written to Natalie Lim and Ashley Hynd--the last section of the book, "Thirteen Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals after Phyllis Webb," forges a continued response to Phyllis Webb on Salt Spring Island, and innovates within the possibilities of the experimental ghazal form."--
From the monk who sets himself on fire in a crowded intersection of Saigon (the familiar corded tendons of his hands, become / a bracken of ashes, a carbon twine of burnt), to the salmon run in British Columbia (The salmon word / for home is glacierdust and once-tall trees unlimbed, / a taste, no matter where, they know), Johnson writes of topics varied and eclectic, unified by a focus on moments both declining and revenant.
Drawn from nine collections published over thirty years, the forty-one poems in this retrospective reveal the poetic accomplishments of John Barton. In this collection, Barton explores the role of love in contemporary society, the complexity of gay experience, the persistence of homophobia, the reinvention of the idea of family, and the fear and courage that AIDS engendered and how it continues to shape the search and attainment of intimacy.
What we used to burn for lightBefore power lines snapped and hummedTheir way down the hill, pushingThin-skinned poplars to the ground.
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