Philip Resnick’s Footsteps of the Past constitutes a powerful set of reflections on the modern human condition. The book contains poems dealing with memory, recognition, and the slow passage of time, while others meditate on the deep wounds that chronic illness and disability instill. Some of the poems have a critical political edge, while others …

Hugh Garner’s Best Stories received the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction in 1963. The collection consists of twenty-four stories composed between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and reflects the immense flux of the mid-century, from the Great Depression to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights mo …

Time touches everything, and in doing so changes everything. The Arrow of Time examines the challenges, transformations and surprises wrought by change, and celebrates the ways we attempt to measure our lives against this invisible force. From John Constable’s home at East Bergholt to the shattered streets of Nanking, China, in 1937, Meyer offers …

Kate Parr is smart, confident, and passionate: a rising star in a world of intense competition. But her obligatory marriage to Henry is rife with the threat of violence and the lure of deceit; her secret liaisons with Thom, her husband’s former brother-in-law, could send her to an early grave; and her devotion to the education and equal rights of …

Concise and practical, Fundamentals of Directing is a distillation of Ric Knowles’s twenty-five years of experience as a director, teacher of directing, and dramaturge across Canada. Organized to reproduce the chronology of a play’s rehearsal, the book moves through the various stages of the directorial process, from selecting a project through …

A funny, satirical story, Never Swim Alone is about Frank and Bill, two egotisitical men locked in a ruthless competition of one-upmanship for seemingly no reason. A hilarious metaplay, This Is A Play follows three actors who, while performing, reveal their own thoughts and motivations as they struggle through crazy stage directions and an unorigin …

The day after their friend Cathy’s funeral, Margot, Tate, and Connie gather for a round of golf in honour of their recently departed fourth. There, they are joined by another woman, an old friend of Cathy’s they’d never met. Over the course of eighteen holes, secrets and confessions unravel as the women discuss love, sex, children, and everyt …

Rick, Ted, Donnie, and Cameron are home for their fifteen-year college reunion; a great time to go out for a game of golf and catch up on each other’s lives. Unlike their college days, the conversation doesn’t include talk of beer and final exams, but of colonoscopies, home-security systems, alcoholism, Buddhism, and more.

Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story is the first comparative study of eight internationally and nationally acclaimed writers of short fiction: Sandra Birdsell, Timothy Findley, Jack Hodgins, Thomas King, Alistair MacLeod, Olive Senior, Carol Shields and Guy Vanderhaeghe. With the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature going to Alice Munro, the “mast …

From the Canadian Short Story Library, twelve stories from Desmond Pacey, a major figure in Canadian Literature and criticism. The twelve stories are typical of Pacey's story-telling technique and what emerges from them is a distinctive, even powerful optimism, charity, tolerance and deep understanding of human nature. The sombre side of life is ho …

"Carol was a very fine writer and a remarkable human being, a wonderful person whose work I closely followed for more than 20 years. I interviewed her frequently over those years, with virtually every work she produced —novel, radio drama, play, book of stories. So I had a good sense of the span of her work and also her evolution as a stylist. Bu …

This is a collection of the published and previously unpublished short stories by Thomas Murtha, a Canadian writer born and raised in Ontario. Murtha was one of the notable experimental writers of the 1920s, but his work has been largely ignored by literary historians. Thomas Murtha was a classmate and colleague of other notable Canadians including …

Margaret Atwood enjoys a unique prominence in Canadian letters. With over thirty books to her credit, in genres ranging from children's writing to dystopic novels, she is as creatively diverse as she is internationally acclaimed. Her success, however, has been double-edged: the very popularity that makes her such a prominent figure in the literary …

This little book is written for Canadians who care about our democracy and the future of our planet. The Senate, surprisingly, could make major contributions to both. A People’s Senate for Canada explains how we can make that happen.

What if we had a Senate that was independent of party politics, truly committed to “sober second thought” and …

Odette is a young Rwandan-born Canadian filmmaker who has travelled to Turkey to investigate stories of genocide and hidden identity for an upcoming film. When she interviews Sahana, an elderly Muslim woman who has spent her life assisting survivors of the Armenian genocide, she learns a devastating secret about Sahana, one that she resolves to sha …

In Ballast to the White Sea is Malcolm Lowry’s most ambitious work of the mid-1930s. Inspired by his life experience, the novel recounts the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who aspires to be a writer but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been “written.” After a fire broke out in Lowry’s squatte …

Astatine is an Italian girl, who like Dante's Beatrice, haunts the narrator of Michael Kenyon's incandescent fourth book of poetry. Named after a radioactive element whose isotopes endure half-lives of mere seconds, she is simultaneously a disappearing and abiding presence who cajoles and comforts, who questions and points, who often leaves the poe …

There is the heartbreak tied to human love and there is heartbreak that points to notions of the divine. The poems in Suzanne Buffam's debut collection, Past Imperfect, enter the darkness of both -- at times simultaneously -- giving utterance to the breakage and shards of weak light found therein. Employing humour and directness to equal effect, Pa …

Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths is a book-length series of poems written from the perspective of a daughter who reads Chekhov obsessively while spending a spring and summer caring for her mother, who is dying from pulmonary fibrosis. Through the prism of the relationships in Chekho's work and life emerges an honest, intimate, and even occasionally hum …

House Dreams, Deanna Young's haunted and haunting third collection, is at once a core sample of the life we all live underground, and a view beneath the foundations of the various eras and places that make up one woman's life story. These poems have the plainspoken power, surreal shifting, uncanny logic and transformed everyday imagery of our most …

The best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured annually with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world's richest and most prestigious literary awards. The 2010 edition of the anthology includes poems from all the books to be shortlisted this year by judges Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, and Carl Phillips. Th …

Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question “what if?” What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun?

C …

Provisional, roaming, obsessed with remnants and deferrals, the poems in Charmaine Cadeau’s second collection navigate flexible and shifting terrains where the speaker’s emotional directness tethers us as we dare to read on. Though Cadeau is capable of some stunning acrobatics—somersaulting mid-line, the imagery defying gravity, the language …

A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno carries within it all the technique, vision, imaginative labour, and razor-sharp precision of Matt Rader’s first two collections, Living Things and Miraculous Hours. But it also ascends to a new and luminous, demanding, particularized realm of the human.

Wildflowers and weeds, newspaper archives a …

Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one’s birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance that happens in the face of censorship and oppression. In defiance of Saddam Hussein’s call for syco …

Bloom is the electrifying debut collection from one of our best emerging poets. If a studio technician could "remix" poems by modern and contemporary poets so they retold the story of the Manhattan Project from the viewpoint of Louis Slotin, simultaneously putting Robert Lowell in whispered conversation with Ted Hughes, as vocalized by a Canadian p …

Orient is the third collection from one of Western Canada's most accomplished poets. Composed mainly of three long poems—an extended meditation on the connection between man and fish, the lament of a big-souled cowboy poet looking up from rock bottom, and a historical envisioning of an intimate relationship between a pioneer and a powerful crone� …

Governor General's Literary Award finalist and bestselling author Steven Heighton's considerable dramatic lyric powers reach a new sophistication and intensity in his astonishing collection Patient Frame. From the court of Medici to the My Lai massacre; from love for a daughter and mother, through nightmare and displacement, to moments of painful a …

Once in a long while a lyric poet comes along whose technique, emotional pitch, and intellect combine in sublime balance and take poetry to a new level. Witness Adam Sol.

Sol's work is exhilarating in its range. Here he is gentle and mournful, attuned to his surroundings, and suddenly over here he mounts a sneak attack and hits us with erotic joy, e …

Chameleon Hours, Elise Partridge's follow-up to her much-admired Fielder's Choice (2002), is evidence that lyric poetry -- clean, bracing, unadorned -- truly can be equal to challenging subject matter. In these poems, love for friends, family, and partners, and most impressively, the urge to love strangers in need, kindles the fire of the voice. Pa …

A collection of true stories from 54 racialized immigrant and refugee women create an eclectic mix of three generations of voices. Women in their 20s to those in their 70s provide snapshots that begin in the 1960s and go to the present. Together these vividly recounted entries capture historical and everyday moments that reveal striking similaritie …

At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination collects a dozen re-evaluative essays on Marshall McLuhan and his critical and theoretical legacy; from intellectual adventurer creating a complex architecture of ideas to cultural icon standing in line in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Given McLuhan’s prominent status in many academic disciplines, th …

The world in Carolyn Marie Souaid’s latest collection is both an act of the imagination and a responsibility. Souaid’s poems zoom in and out, shifting focus to accommodate varied dimensions of experience. We move from the breakdown of a relationship to primordial ooze to a suicide bomb to a son doing his math homework. In a disarmingly personab …

Monologue Dogs is a series of contemporary dramatic monologues. Every "voice" has its own imagined rhythm and nuances of poetic speech that are as vibrant, wayward, mournful, errant, or unruly as the characters who speak. Setting the lyric against street argot, archaic language against deflating or ironic feints, metaphors against declarative sente …

Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award

Governor General's Literary Award finalist Sharon Thesen's Oyama Pink Shale is a sly, self-directed, yet joyously emancipatory work. By animating and voicing various moments and selves -- indebted adult friend to artists, cold documentarian of a haunted sanatorium, engaged contemporary ticking off beauties, …

Under the sugar maples of Montreal, family life is given mythic dimensions in this sweeping novella-in-verse.

If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L’Orfeo? Would Ariadne's thread be fashioned into tapes …

A stunning collection of poetry by one of our most beloved and renowned poets, Yesno is a companion volume to the much-praised Un (Anansi, 2003), and continues Dennis Lee's urgent poetic project, which is to grapple with the question of the earth's and humankind's future. But where the earlier book concentrated on the deadly impasse to which we hum …

Governor General's Award-finalist Steven Heighton employs his signature blend of emotional fierceness and linguistic beauty to tap into "This whim / against what drifts to dark." The Address Book is a collection of remarkably well-crafted love letters, letters of loss, and lyrical moments of complaint and redress where music and intelligence are th …

Each year, visitors from all parts of the globe find their way to a sequestered Benedictine monastery in the hills of Mission, BC, and view the art and sculptures that beautify the abbey and its walls. But the man responsible for this work rarely ventures outside the monastery, never mind the province. He is an artist who has seen few of the master …

In crisp, intimate, and uncluttered language, award-winning and critically acclaimed poet Sharon Thesen gives us a layered meditation on energy and endings: the irrepressible energy of life; and the end of the natural world, of home, of love, youth, and safety.Thesen's talent is for catching beauty at the periphery of things -- a glimpse of neighbo …

Deluxe redesign of an aching solo situated at the mid-point of a long, melodious career.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the third of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Riffs features a new introduction by the poet Paul Vermeersch, a reprint of an extended inter …

This collection of Guy’s writings includes columns and articles written between 1971 and 1978. It offers a unique glimpse of the history and culture of Newfoundland and Labrador, delivered from the pen of a master satirist.

Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award: Poetry

The follow up to The Sentinel, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, A.F. Moritz's The New Measures is a bold collection of fiery, passionate, visionary, and fiercely singing new work. These poems make unique music, by turns tender and forceful, terrified and assured, grateful and enraged …

Chaser is a book of poems that grows from the troubling premise that each of us lives in a state of pre-diagnosis. Our bodies are never under our control, and when illness strikes we must redraw the boundary between the well and the unwell, interacting with the world differently. In these poems, the experience of illness is applied to individuals, …

Testament is the summation of Dennis Lee’s decade-long exploration of the dilemma of contemporary existence. Incorporating and rethinking the work published in Un and Yesno, and featuring many completely new poems, this startling collection reminds us anew of the catastrophic reality we have made of our planet, while simultaneously insisting on a …

In this late-modern period of slackened meaning, G.P. Lainsbury's 'Versions of North' attempts to locate poetic consciousness in the drifting concept of north, using avantgarde techniques to reveal connections between disparate elements of signification. Lainsbury borrows from a wide variety of sources, filtering them through the grid of a disencha …

During the Six Day War, an Israeli general found an abandoned house and made it his home. Forty years later, the general, along with his imaginative and distant son Alex, live in peaceful solitude. When a Palestinian writer shows up with is daughter and lays claim to the house he left decades ago, an internal house war ensues. The bathroom is seize …

Poised between hope and despair, each man faces how best to move beyond the past and adapt to a future in which cultural legacy seems destined to diminish. Symbolic and politically charged, Inspiration Point speaks about life on a small Maritime reservation and the constant struggle for cultural survival.

The poems in Souwesto Home are fresh, youthful meditations on such diverse subjects as the Little Lakes near Stratford, Ontario, the flora of Elgin County, the Donnelly feud, lichens, a Department Store Jesus, and so on. The collection ranges widely in tone and technique, from the lyrical to the satirical, from the direct and straightforward to the …

Living in relative seclusion, Ev and Ec rely on the kindness of strangers as they struggle with their own internal and external problems. Ev not only suffers from agoraphobia, she believes she is dying from a fatal degenerative disease. Ec, who is obsessed with his eleventh toe (which he has named Toto), is grieving over his estranged fiancée who …