Globe and Mail Best 100 Book of 2015
The secret world of Mauritian street-gangs is not for the faint of heart. Fraught with peril and mischief, its inner workings are a mystery to the daughter of one of its most valued members: Serge, the Grand Menteur. A liar of exceptional caliber whose sole responsibility is to purposefully confuse police with …

Secession/Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, Secession - translated by Erín Moure - joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics, Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself dis …

Breaking open colonization to reveal tangled cultural and economic networks, Webs of Empire offers new paths into colonial history. Linking Gore and Chicago, Maori and Asia, India and newspapers, whalers and writing, Ballantyne presents empire building as a spreading web of connected places, people, ideas, and trade. These links question narrow, na …

A is a work of fiction in which André Alexis presents the compelling narrative of Alexander Baddeley, a Toronto book reviewer obsessed with the work of the elusive and mythical poet Avery Andrews. Baddeley is in awe of Andrews's ability as a poet—more than anything he wants to understand the inspiration behind his work—so much so that, followi …

A mysterious letter has reached retired FBI agent Frank Malloy. A letter bearing a name from a lifetime ago, from a woman who claims she saw what really happened on the day John F. Kennedy died in Dallas. Many were there to film the president, but Helena Storozhenko snapped a photo on November 22, 1963, that would have changed everything. Then she …

Great Canadian Poems for the Aged Vol. 1 Illus. Ed. dares to go where no book of Canadian poetry has gone before; deep into the heart of darkness epitomized by the idea of the Great White North. Except white is not dark. And the heart thing was a bit overused even by the time Conrad got around to it. In any case, recalling the fundamental elements …

I Don't Know How To Behave combines the true story of Canadian daredevil and stunt driver Ken Carter (1938-1983) with imagined biographical elements from the lives of Canadian film director Bruce Mcdonald and Canadian poet Gillian Sze. Along the way, this quintessential Canadian story crashes head first into many related things, from screenplay the …

Shortlisted for the 2014 Governor General's Award for Poetry

Shortlisted for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry.

Moving from the Enlightenment science of natural history to the contemporary science of global warming, Light Light is a provocative engagement with the technologies and languages that shape discourses of knowing. It bridges …

Charlie inherits little more than the brass key that his father pressed into his hand before he passed away

When Charlie Sykes wakes up in hospital in St. John's, he learns that he and his father have been in a car accident and that his father is dying. As far as Charlie knows, he has no family in Newfoundland. But then Uncle Nick shows up and is ke …

A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones. An En …

Breathe on four. Define your terms. What is this desire?

Attuned to a body in motion, Swim pulls the reader beneath the logic of prose, into the eroticism of language itself. The arcing rhythm of a body breathing - a woman marking her birth as she swims in a pool - sustains the unique and hypnotic language that becomes the medium through which this …

City Hall proclaimed 2006 the Year of Creativity. 'Live With Culture' banners flap over the city. And across the city, donors are ponying up millions for the ROM and the AGO. Culture's never had it so good. Right?

The State of the Arts explores the Toronto arts scene from every angle, applauding, assailing and arguing about art in our fair burg. Th …

Nominated for a Governor General's Award for Translation

Yesterday, on my way back from the museum: my head is full of images of storms. A boundless sea of paintings and photographs. Other storms I build like a backdrop, with sombre and anonymous characters, impossible to identify. I remain thus all evening, pressed up against the existence of a sto …