"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt’s idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And …

On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the last of our six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Wittgenstein Elegies features an expansive Introduction by Sue Sinclair, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. …

On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fourth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of A Really Good Brown Girl features a new Introduction by Lee Maracle, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

First …

National Post "NP99" Best Book of 2015
Paul, who is not always the same Paul, but could very well be a similar Paul, another Paul in a long line of Pauls. Paul runs through forests, drinks in student housing, flirts with girls, at times is a girl, loves men, makes friends, jumps from buildings, hurts people, gets hurt, climbs up towards the sky, w …

When Andy Warhol's a, A Novel was first published in 1968, The New York Times Book Review declared it "pornographic." Yet over four decades later, a continues to be an essential documentation of Warhol's seminal Factory scene. And though the book offers a pop art snapshot of 1960s Manhattan that only Warhol could capture, it remains a challenging …

Would it be possible to compose a book that appears to be "about" its author, but is indirectly about something else, like identity or relationships or language? Maybe a book not written by a hero... but by many?

This was the challenge taken up by Kevin McPherson Eckhoff in his fourth book, their biography: an organism of relationships. This collabo …

Fracking - tar-sand runoff - dirty oil extraction. This is the language of our oil-addicted 21st century society: incredibly invasive, blatant in its purpose, and richly embedded in mythological and archetypal symbolism. The ultimate goal of the industry: To core the underworld.

Endangered Hydrocarbons, Lesley Battler's first full-length collection …

In this post-lyrical era, poems can be stories, or they can just as easily be exuberant laughter set to words, an experiment in language, or an incidental collation of plays on a Scrabble board.
the pet radish, shrunken, the third full collection of poetry from the inimitable Pearl Pirie, deals in the poetics of sound, language, and play. In true …

Metaphysical Licks, a hybrid prose-poem/novella riffing on the lives and works of Austrian poet Georg Trakl and his sister, Grete, is the restless new work by writer and translator Gregoire Pam Dick [a.k.a. Mina Pam Dick, Jake Pam Dick et al., author of Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009)]. With a mix of high and low, tragic and comic, abstract and concr …

Welcome to Kate Hargreaves' Leak, where the relationship between language and the body lives in the bumps and bruises that in turn become new ways of understanding the borders and leaks of our everyday existence. In Leak, bodies lose pieces and fall apart, while words slip out of place and letters drop away. Emergency room signage becomes incompre …

In what can be described as a verse-novel for its lyricism and rhythmic structure, Wanda Praamsma crafts a story that transcends geographic boundaries and time periods, by weaving together lives from her own family's past, including her poet-grandfather and sculptor-uncle. Subtle in its life lessons, a thin line between works at 'peeling away the …

From celebrated Quebecois author Bertrand Laverdure comes Universal Bureau of Copyrights , a bold, strange and addictive story that envisions a world where free will doesn't exist, and an enigmatic global corporation buys and sells the copyrights for all things on Earth, including real and fictional characters. Through this novel, which is part po …

From award-winning author Alisha Piercy comes Bunny and Shark, a middle-aged coming-of-age story-cum-shark-adventure that reveals and celebrates women’s power in the trenches. Plunging into the first thirteen days after the ‘bastard’ pushes his ex-Playboy wife ‘Bunny’ over a cliff in the Caribbean, Bunny and Shark is a fable about isla …

Because fear can transform into confidence, recklessness, the kind of power you can't imagine until you're inside it. And then, once you've felt it, you can't feel alive when it's gone. Sophrosyne. You understood this feeling. I know you did, though you never said it. I saw it, instead, on your face when you danced.

Sophrosyne is one of only four …

The value of Theseus is as much about its pedigree as the writing itself. The collaboration for this new book began in the autumn of 1966. bpNichol and Wayne Clifford had worked together early in their literary careers; in fact, Clifford had been the editor of Nichol's first trade book, published with Coach House Press. To begin, Nichol had also wa …

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 …

Here in There, Angela Carr’s third book of poetry, is a lyrical petition to the human faculty of attention. In constant motion, the poems locate unusual instances of connection. They ask, do we give or pay attention? And what do we attend to? How do we decide what merits our attention? In a world where stillness is elusive, can we give or pay att …

Following the successful reception of her first book, The Shining Material, comes Aisha Sasha John's THOU -- a powerful collection of two long, narrative poems exploring the social space that exists between the self and others. Using the language that connects these two states of being, THOU investigates the idea of "you" -- what it is and what it …

Employing a sort of leaping or mosaic structure and incorporating e-mails re penis-enlargement, questionable limericks, jokes, graffiti and a photo of a "penis latte," along with personal anecdotes and probes of books and films, Deep Too is a book of non-fiction stories. It is a funny and sometimes biting book about the phenomenon of male strut and …

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 …

fur(l) parachute claims as its surrogate the Old English poem “Wulf and Eadwacer.” Declining from a mutant echo of this nineteen-line fragment that appears in the tenth century Exeter manuscript as a text that might be a riddle, or an example of a woman’s lament, or even a broken elegy, the language of fur(l) parachute is further disrupted by …

In the tradition of Borges, Nabakov, and Bolaño, The Red Album is a work of fiction that questions historical authenticity and authority. Divided into two parts, the book begins with an edited and footnoted narrative of dubious origins. In the second part, a section of "documents" (including essays, memoirs, a short play and a filmography) shed li …

Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal is a poetic investigation of melancholia and the baroque. As a collaborative reading of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, David Dowker and Christine Stewart have created a series of linguistic interjections that run …

language I'll say yes
from the top of my rib cage
language will you come
out and unearth the salt the certitude

Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. A play of resonance between pronouns and persons, freely percussive between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions, …

Agony is the first in a trilogy of long confessional poems. It uses semi-rigorous mathematical and logical constraints to view the author's life and body, telescopically, as little bits of time and space. Everything written here is as true as possible – that is to say, pretty true. It attempts autobiography as a refutation of autobiography, and a …

Enter the Raccoon documents a love affair between a woman and a raccoon. They are a couple that loves without preconceptions, whose being together eschews all limits until their beliefs in the self are put to the test. Their story unfolds each time one surrenders to the other in a sometimes melancholic and cruel, other times joyful, even ecstatic e …

While Canadian poetic practices have steadily pluralised since the early 1960s, the poetry review has remained stubbornly constant. You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence is a critical, and at times hilarious survey of reviews of innovative Canadian poetry in English since 1961. What is at stake in the reviewing of poetry? What fantasie …

Bent at the Spine offers a 'pronoun'-ced frolic where the "you" is a disconnected third party - the reader is left in the position of an eavesdropper, or a listener, or a karmasurplus author. Its relentless interrogation resonates at an invigorating pace: cultural difference, different bodies, diffident accents, deafening rhymes. Sometimes rapturou …

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 OTTAWA BOOK AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 RELIT AWARD
Conflict interweaves ghosts, bad communication, the uncanny and the archival, to create a collection of poems that break down remembrance into abandoned historic markers, jet fuel, keening, or teeth. What you are given (t …

Voluptuous Pleasure is a collection of non-fiction whose title states that non-fiction does not exist. Sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths-these stories take you into brothels and bedrooms, kitchens and consciousness; they seduce you along the limits of non-fiction, making you question the veracity of anything you've ever rea …

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 …

Isabel Norris has never left the ice. Her father was a hockey legend who died before she was born, and her grandparents have raised her in his skates.

When Iz leaves her grandmother behind to play for the Winnipeg University Scarlets, she struggles to fit in on this team of hard-hitting, tough-talking women with a penchant for buffets, beer bongs an …

Shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Translation

The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find …

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back.

A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in 'search of a narrative, a narrative in search o …