Poet Margaret Christakos, throughout her eight previous poetry collections, has created ruptures and splices inside of and against the limits of the confessional lyric, often using recombinatory procedures, cyclical and serial structure, and enmeshing intimate vernacular with highly aestheticized language in writing that explores maternality, sexua …

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 …

Winner of the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama

In Greenland, the discovery of a new island off the nation's coast mirrors a growing rift between the island’s discoverer and his family.

In Iceland, set against the backdrop of the banking crisis, a confrontation between a real estate agent and a tenant takes an unexpected turn.

A young …

"Most long poems contain lyric occasions. Here is an amazingly sustained lyric that contains traces of other commodities." -Robert Kroetsch Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. The new lyric voice sustained (within) these labyrinthine verses does so by virtue of its au …

In this poignant meditation on the uneasy relationship between science and the human spirit, a group of women aged nineteen to sixty-three with HER2-related breast cancer are recruited for a clinical drug trial. For some of them the trial is renewed hope; others feel it’s a weary last resort. For Dr. Danielle Pearce, the research scientist in cha …

‘All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its v …

Amidst pushy parents, eccentric teachers, hours of repetitive practice, stage fright, the agony of competitions and exams, and the dream of greatness, Ted and Richard grow up as "piano nerds." As they mature, they become more aware of the gap between the merely very good and the great, and come to the humbling realization that concert stardom may b …

In 1981 Jake Kennedy accidentally burnt down an abandoned house. Years later as an adult, he read a story about how Kurt Schwitters' "interior house-sculpture" ("Merz Structure No. 2") was destroyed in 1951 after some children playing with matches accidentally burnt the building down. This sad 'unmaking,' so similar in nature to his own haunting ex …

Mortality, Love, Ethics, Civilization, Divine Presence, Human Body, Modernity, The Natural World, and Constructed Spaces. The Sentinel watches and reports back to us in a voice that is timeless and worthy of trust. Whether describing renewal and regeneration, the despair brought on by global capitalism, or a place where decay and loss meet their an …

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 …

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 …

To read A.F. Moritz is to find out what it means to be alive at this juncture of history. These poems are mansions, both derelict and opulent. Wander in with the mind open and hear what the ages, humanity, and the myth of progress have wrought.

Night Street Repairs contains necessary meditations on time, modernity, and our current situation as a soc …

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 …

The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. Plans Deranged by Time is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and …

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 …

Flora Lyndsay is Susanna Moodie’s prequel to Roughing it in the Bush and Life in the Clearings. Though Moodie fictionalizes herself in the context of this novel, Flora Lyndsay remains a close personalized record of her family’s experiences in planning their emigration and crossing the Atlantic.

Despite the limited critical attention it receives, …

Changes in technology and media consumption are transforming the way people communicate about politics. Are they also changing the way politicians communicate to the public? Political Communication in Canada examines the way political parties, politicians, interest groups, the media, and citizens are using new tactics, tools, and channels to dissem …

Elections are not just about who casts ballots – they reflect the citizens, parties, media, and history of an electorate. Fighting for Votes examines how these factors interacted during a recent Ontario election. Drawing on a wealth of sources, the authors ask three questions: How do parties position themselves to appeal to voters? How is informa …

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 …

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry. This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a geneti …

At 4:00 a.m. on a secluded farm, a woman fights to take her life back from a serial killer as her desperate sister and a haunted police officer reach across time and distance in an attempt to rescue her.

Sexy, irreverent, and inventive

Lovesick Stormtroopers, dowsing Girl Guides, movie stars, pool hustlers, and the mad queen Ranavalona … With Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine-grained and crude. Yearning, unapologetic women who delight in the mo …

In this illuminating essay, Neil Bissoondath explores the powerful influence exerted by narrative on the human psyche. Storytelling is a primary activity in the human experience. The stories that we tell ourselves, as well as those we hear from others, help to answer the question of who we are, "as individuals, as familial beings, as social beings. …

Shortlisted for the 2006 Gerald Lampert Award

Inter Alia is the long-awaited first collection by one of Canada’s most talented young poets. His work has been widely published in journals and was selected by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane for Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He is heir to the English metaphysical poets in many of his preoccu …

At times a call to action and at others an intimate conversation between friends, Currin’s sensual and surreal poems speak to the political upheavals and environmental catastrophes of our time. School is an instruction manual for igniting transformation through a collective effort of love and community.

'School is about the ways in which life eluc …

Merging poetry and historical records, Zits masterfully (re)creates a poetic view of the Frog Lake Massacre of April 2, 1885. His collage and cut-up techniques challenge the histories penned by the event’s recorders and reflect upon the difficult and painful complexities of past and present. He weaves together voices of Métis and First Nations p …

Glenn's new collection confronts the deaths of dear friends and family members, returns to her prairie childhood and youth, and engages hard, hard questions of mortality, and of existence in a world fraught with suffering and violence (both global and domestic). Central is the poetic sequence “A Song for Simone”—a conversation between the poe …

'This is a record of our version of grassroots theatre. The idea was to take a group of actors out to a farming community and build a play of what we could see and learn. There is no story or "plot" as such … Nevertheless, we hope that you can see many stories woven into the themes of this play and that out of it will emerge a picture of a comple …

It is the summer of 1999, and the Sweltham family leads an ordinary suburban existence. Former high school volleyball champ Parker crisscrosses the continent as a sales rep for DynaFlex Sporting Goods, while his wife Trixie serves as the managing editor of Record of Truth, an unsuccessful genocide studies journal. Their son Owen has just returned f …

A wholesome and hearty collection of authentic recipes and local history from ranch country.

Come ‘n’ Get It is an authentic collection of down-home recipes and early Western Canadian ranch lore. Featuring material and recipes gathered from letters, history books, family cookbooks, and interviews with ranching families, this book represents a cr …

A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people.

These eleven people Â? from …

Why Reporting from Night? The title of this first collection refers to the surreal night flowering of memory and imagination. In these imagistic, playful poems, the sleep-deprived thought patterns of a mother of small children, the inventiveness of a child’s-eye view and the restless brain at 4:00 a.m. all converge. With subtle wit, teasing sensu …

A relaxing weekend trip full of fishing, football, and beer is on the agenda for the Melville brothers. Unfortunately, so is confronting eldest brother Lee's terminal illness. But weekend plans are suddenly thrown for a loop when the boys meet two attractive sisters, who inadvertently change more than just their agenda. In this modern Canadian clas …

Winner of the 2015 Quebec Writers' Federation's A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

If you tore off the tops of canola --
yellow canola flowers -- would you
jump in a tub of canola margarine
just to make the best of despair?

Implored by concerned readers to be 'classy' and 'real' for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical note­books on …

"Noble's work has always engaged, in its own way, with the Western Canadian tradition of poetry as intellectual experiment grounded on local experience.… Death Drive marks a counter-turn in the work of one of Southern Alberta's most distinctive writers." - Chris Jennings, Department of English, University of Ottawa

In this collection of poetry, Ch …

The Rules of the Game reintroduces Ludwig Zeller, the great Chilean-Canadian “poet’s poet,” through a selection of his most engaging works. These short poems span a development of almost sixty years. They are Zeller’s brief songs of eroticism and love, adventure and nostalgia, youthful ardour, the sorrow of age, and undying hope. They give …

At the heart of Karyotype is the Beauty of Loulan, a woman who lived four thousand years ago, her body preserved in the cool, dry sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Karyotype’s poems range from the title sequence, which explores the DNA and woven textiles of this woman and her vanished people (a karyotype is the characteristic chromosome complement …

A searing triptych of three monologues all exposing the ugly truth behind the headlines of the Iraq War.

Based around the lives of three distinct characters—a young soldier imprisoned for her misconduct at a prison camp in Iraq, a microbiologist-cum-weapons inspector who exposes the false justifications for war, and a mother/political opponent of …

Mahmoud is an exuberant, if overwhelmingly passionate, Iranian engineer-cum-taxi driver who relishes the chance to regale his passengers with his love of Persian culture. Emanuelos, a fabulously gay Spanish perfume salesman, can talk a mile-a-minute about his boyfriend, Behnam. And then there's Tara, an awkwardly charming Iranian Canadian preteen w …

Following Prodon through the five stages of acceptance—Denial, Partying, Loss of Control, Religious Conversion, and Acceptance—the play pops in and out of monologues with Prodon and into scenes with Lady Booty, an outrageous drag queen, Ron, a man who has made AIDS his personal religion, and the ever supportive Vidor, each giving their own advi …

Canada is often held up as an example of a healthy democracy. However, the Canadian public is less enthusiastic about the way our democracy works. This first-of-a-kind book approaches the “democratic deficit” from the perspective of everyday Canadians and assesses the performance of Parliament and the media in light of their perceptions and exp …

Cast during his year in the U of A's writer in residency, wild horses is Ottawan rob mclennan's deep lyrical engagement with Edmonton, Alberta. He sees the new terrain through his peculiar, sympathising lens--characterised by impassioned tones that range from brusque to tender. There is something of the magpie in him: nothing escapes his subtle gaz …

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 …

Warning: this book may encourage a series of ungrammatical thoughts!

Welcome to the poetic landscape of Mark Truscott, where less is more than you bargained for. Said Like Reeds or Things is a book of micropoetic and linguistic koans. With a quirky, off-centre sense of humour, these poems uncover a language that has malfunctioned only to find itself …

Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize

Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare t …

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 …

Elora Dixon is a vibrant, middle-aged lawyer and disability-rights activist who has never walked a step in her life. A neuromuscular disease left her with a curved spine and a reliance on around-the-clock care. Nonetheless, she is an inexorable force when chance pits her against the notorious Julian Summer, who is in town promoting his internationa …

This stunning collection will break your heart and put it back together again, as Pamela Porter unravels a long-held family secret in a moving personal search for redemption, face to face with the question of her own identity. As she says, “It was this way when Rome was burning, / and was not so different / when dark fires flared / outside the wa …

Harold Mortimer-Lamb’s name is in the index of almost every book written on the history of Canadian art, yet his place in that world has never been clear. Photographer, writer, painter, promoter—he was a man of many parts and the ideal patron and friend to some of Canada's most famous artists, including A.Y. Jackson, Emily Carr, and Jack Shadbo …

Four disparate people confront each other--their memory and their responsibility--at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode.

Tortoise Boy is a “chamber play,” four monologues, or mon-dialogues, if you will. Through these four voices, four instruments--a quartet--these ch …