Inspired by the Rocky Mountains, ‘Land of the Sky’, the last poem in this collection, is a means of using detail from various distances to reflect on the socio-political and the human that is all around us. At the essence of all the poems in the collection: to explore the land through the distance of the sky and understand that which seems so g …

Ilona Martonfi’s third poetry collection, The Snow Kimono, can best described as an obsession with truth. The Snow Kimono invites the reader into a magical world where reality shimmers with the fragile beauty of the moment and the dark, haunting awareness of a painful past that lingers just out of sight. Compassionate and disturbing, witness poem …

With grace and courage Ann Elizabeth Carson looks to the past from the perspective of a contemporary feminist. A lively evocation of her aunts and their home in Cheltenham, Ontario, reveals the rich and powerful ground for the poet's own emerging sense of herself. As Toronto in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s comes to life in a rare blend of poetry a …

Titled after the Latin term for “unknown land”—a cartographical expression referring to regions that have not yet been mapped or documented—Terra Incognita is a collection of poems that creatively explores various racial discourses and interracial crossings both buried in the grand narratives of history and the everyday experiences of being …

Dancing on a Pin is Katerina Fretwell’s eighth poetry, and art, collection. Honest, stark, brave, and at times a humorous evoking of feelings and ideas, this collection of evocative poems is focused on the poet’s husband's illness (cancer) and eventual death, her close sharing of this process, and the frustration of dealing with modern medical …

Passing Stranger is a memoir in verse of one woman’s life. Poems weave through a marriage, a desire for motherhood, considerations of fertility and infertility, an eventual divorce and a woman finding herself in late middle age, ready to experience life to the full. Its themes will speak to all women who have experienced the joys and the tribulat …

This book tells a story that nobody knows because at the time the story happened, nobody cared. The individual lives of the labouring Irish were unrecorded, irrelevant. The Hungry Grass weaves the threads of daily routine, annual cycles, religious faith, fairy belief, communal practice, and political reality to show as clear a picture as possible o …

Why do we keep secrets and why do we confess them? The nine tales in this collection, all told in the first person, are each spun around a well-kept secret, willingly or inadvertently confessed. Sometimes the secrets are at the core of the narrator’s life, other times they appear tangential. Regardless of the magnitude of its burden, the confessi …

Into the Mystic is a contemporary spiritual autobiography written from a mystical perspective that introduces the reader to the hidden life of twentieth-century Canadian mystic, Olga Park. The book consists of a series of vignettes and poems written by the author and by Park as well as some illustrations of Park’s own spiritually inspired artisti …

This collection presents an arc of historical experience of Jewish child and teen life during the Shoah. Across Central and Eastern Europe, the young and hunted in these stories hide in forests; survive in ghettoes and camps; and assume new identities. The stories in this collection depict children as creative, resilient, aged-before their time, as …

Understories is an exploration of things visible mostly to the inner eye and memory, things below the surface. The book began as a riff on Mark Strand's brilliant title, "Planet of the Lost Things," and it is an exploration of loss, but also of recovery through memory and language. The first part, "A Perfect Afternoon" follows an unfulfilled romanc …

This book of poetry brings you the journey of a life lived in turbulent times. Its many stories are distilled from personal experience, honed and deepened into the shape and rhythm of poetry. The arc of this life begins with the child who has no fear of bombs — war being the only way of life she has known — but is afraid that she might reveal a …

Whether scholarly or popular, today’s commentaries on human dilemmas increasingly invoke empathic ways of understanding. In Changing Places, eleven authors, based mostly in Canada, show how their positions and perspectives have been changed by working against the grain. They refuse to sever sentient experiences from the grounds of knowledge and o …

In this collection, the authors illuminate the struggles and the successes encountered in the research partnership process. The authors come from a variety of disciplines, are at various stages of their academic careers, may or may not be part of the academy, adopt a variety of feminist lenses, have a range of research partners, and focus on a rang …

Class Acts, Katerina Fretwell’s seventh poetry (and art) collection, establishes a posthumous relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft, the first suffragette, whose works have carved a path for feminists for hundreds of years. In the first section of the collection, “Our Mirroring Centuries,” Fretwell uses Wollstonecraft’s life and writings as …

The poems in this collection are a voyage of self-discovery. They are poems of disclosure, of exposure, of allowing one’s self to be vulnerable, of telling truths. The poet touches upon myriad themes such as bird-watching, illness, accidents—but through all of these, she examines the complexity of human feeling and relationships. These relation …

A Gut Reaction is an entertaining as well as informative true story about the author’s battle to save her son’s life — or at least his large intestine — from a very severe case of Crohn’s disease. With persistence, humour, much searching of the Internet and the help of two unusual doctors, one in Canada and the other in Australia, she and …

Canadian and international authors offer ground-breaking work in this collection that brings together almost seventy articles by formative feminist writers, researchers, activists and visionaries to illuminate the profound globalizing processes of our time. Critical analyses of current globalization and possible alternatives are presented in the co …

Rebel Women begins by moving in and out of women’s kitchens, parlours, meetings, and wagon-rides on the eve and throughout Toronto’s 1837 Rebellion. The poems let the reader eavesdrop on the loves, fears, hatreds, and courage of these feisty pioneers as they are engulfed by an uprising some did or did not support. The poems are based on the sto …

On a remote lonely mountain, Constance (frustrated poet) skis toward her death and Harry Weinstein (brilliant author) loses himself in an avalanche. Meanwhile, back in the city, Gully Jillson (the ex-husband who won the GG) is the suspect in the investigation of a murder that has taken place in Constance’s high-rise condo. The collision of this s …

The poems in Dark Water Songs begin on the margins of islands and ancestors, and fan out, probing love, loss and life’s dilemmas. They expand and deepen the poetic exploration which began with her earlier collections, mining the reciprocal spaces enabled by the hyphen between Jamaican and Canadian, exploring silences, the weight of memory, and a …

At Odds in the World: Essays on Jewish Canadian Women Writers brings together a series of essays by Ruth Panofsky that probe the articulation of Jewishness and femaleness through the lens of literature. Showing how female Jewish identity is constructed in Canadian prose works that span the years 1956 to 2004, collectively the essays speak to the wr …

WINNER OF THE 2011 IPPY BRONZE MEDAL FOR REGIONAL FICTION

"Maura Hanrahan writes powerfully of the pain and joy of motherhood and ultimately delivers a mighty portrait of women’s lives writ large across the blue of sea and sky. I read it in great gulps. ”—Erica Eisdorfer, author of The Wet Nurse’s Tale

On the cusp of the Depression, Sheilagh …

In the thirteen stories that comprise Truth and Other Fictions, by Eva Tihanyi, women take centre stage as they experience the slippery relationship between art and truth, not merely as an aesthetic concept but a reality in their lives. Art here is present in many forms and brought closely into the personal realm of the people involved with it: the …

Black Canadian women must constantly incorporate changes to their identities to face the challenges of living in a multicultural society. Naturally Woman: The Search for Self in Black Canadian Women’s Literature examines the ways in which Black immigrant women must adapt to survive in a multicultural country such as Canada without losing their se …

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out s an anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, spoken word texts, as well as black and white artwork and photography, explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of …

A collection of articles that examine many of the struggles that Aboriginal women have faced, and continue to face, in Canada. Sections include: Profiles of Aboriginal Women; Identity; Territory; Activism; Confronting Colonialism; the Canadian Legal System; and Indigenous Knowledges. Photographs and poetry are also included. "This volume brings us …

The interrelated stories of this pseudo-memoir introduce readers to Barbara Klein Muskrat, a successful author of fiction and freelance book reviewer. Spanning some thirty years in her personal and professional life, Barbara irreverently acquaints readers with her challenges related to her schizophrenic literary career, divided between writing fict …

Butterfly Tears is a collection of short fiction that depicts the experiences of Chinese immigrant women facing the challenges of life in a new country. The stories are set in different parts of China, Canada, and the United States and examine Chinese women’s cross-cultural experiences in North America as well as women’s issues and political di …