They say hindsight is 20/20. They’re not wrong.

Ten years after their parents’ death in a car accident, now-grown sisters Carmen and Manon are together for one of their rare visits – and one of them is finally ready to confront their shared tragedy.

Carmen is a boisterous country-and-western singer who has left her home, and all her past, i …

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West i …

In these thoughtful, yet playful poems, Belford builds a poetry experience for the curious reader can open anywhere, read, and read on.

Although the phrasing of his lines is unusual, Ken Belford’s poetry is not easily forgotten. His poetry collections, like this one, his slick reckoning, are experiences the curious reader can open anywhere, read, …

Act I of LaFrance’s first book, Species Branding, ends with the line: “crippled on my last leg. where are our friends?” It is a question that led to Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks 2016), where LaFrance takes aim at friendship as such.

The Tarnak Farm Incident, where four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by American Air Force pilot Ha …

Reading Sveva is award-winning author Daphne Marlatt’s response to the life and paintings of Sveva Caetani, an Italian émigré who grew up in Vernon, B.C.

Daughter of an Italian prince, leftist, and scholar of Islam, Sveva grew up with the multilingual and highly cultured European traditions of her parents who moved to Vernon in 1921, when Fasci …

Award-winning author Meredith Quartermain’s second novel and seventh book, U Girl, is a coming-of-age story set in Vancouver in 1972, a city crossed between love-in hip and forest-corp square.

Frances Nelson escapes her small-town background to attend first-year university in the big city. "You’ve got to find the great love," her new friend Dag …

In this collection of long and serial poems, Stephen Collis returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes—and stands in the path of pipelines, wh …

Anahita Jamali Rad’s debut book of poetry juxtaposes Marxist economics with pop culture lyrics, from FKA Twigs to Sonic Youth, tangling the "You & I" of relationships and social identification. She asks: How is it possible to communicate when the "I" speaks from the margins? Who is the "I" when Motown’s doo-wop and post-punk’s Telecaster jang …

It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life.

The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what’s to come, how to live? What …

Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival untangles truth from some of the myths about First Nations at the same time that it addresses misconceptions still widely believed today.
The second book by award-winning author Bev Sellars, Price Paid is based on a popular presentation Sellars created for treaty-makers, politicians, policymakers, a …

When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, the mundanities of life gradually shift to the rigours of survival. In this post-apocalyptic setting, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometres to reach his dying father.

As the narrator’s journey becomes one of essentials – gasoline, fresh w …

How much do we value clean water? Enough to stop our industrialized way of life from degrading it? The documentary play The Watershed follows an artist and her family in the struggle to chart a sustainable course between economic prosperity and environmental stewardship.

Largely constructed from original interviews conducted by the playwright, The W …

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of his only model, complete with a glossary, a …

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosed—taken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalism’s “primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call “privatization”—but it s …

Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. One of Lucia Frangione’s blasphemy plays,’ it inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In an erotic world where men are traditionally cast …

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.

Seven women in this raucous Fra …

In the autumn of 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, two young men, one a troubled Canadian soldier, the other a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer, meet in the scorched Qatari desert. Breaching the divide of a profound cultural misunderstanding and against a backdrop of massive global conflict, these two become unlikely and secret friends. This …

Music has long been considered beneficial in enhancing cognitive skills, and some have even suggested that music constitutes its own category of brain function; that it is, in fact, a separate and distinct type of thought. As is sex, which can produce, aside from children, complete dysfunction, confused mental activity – even, quite possibly, a c …

New poems from Canada’s shaman of sound and performance poetry, bill bissett.

bissett’s innovations in sound poetry, have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun …

Difficult writing has its way of illuminating the part of the world that counts. One such difficult text is Gertrude Stein’s highly experimental Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms – long considered the single most groundbreaking literary work of twentieth-century art, literary criticism, and art history. One hundred years since publication, C …

Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script

Inside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.

Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist who made a startling discovery: a bio-enginee …

Weyman Chan’s fifth collection takes poetry to the laboratory, splicing a layered, tactile network that is Human Tissue.

Short lyric poems navigate personal experience and memory, then weave into serial poems such as “Parables for Frankenstein,” diving into the material conditions of hybridity to construct the symbiotic self of a prototype mis …

Throughout these poems is a meeting of obscene or politically charged material, as well as commentary on language usage under extreme circumstances of duress such as the Arab Spring. This is poetry written under conditions of wartime. The title implies an analogy between Ezra Pound, imprisoned at Pisa after World War II, and the inhabitants of the …

Canada’s master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism.

We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed. The list of characters in We the Family reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed, it is, at least in …

For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is Tremblay’s homage to his mother, who nurtured his imagination, his reclusive reading habits and his love for the theatre and the arts, yet who did not live to witness the performance of Les Belles Soeurs—the first successful play written in joual with which Tremblay legitimized the Quebecois vernacular in …

This second revised edition of Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, which played at the 1990 Stratford Festival, is John Van Burek and Bill Glassco’s new translation of Michel Tremblay’s original French text.

Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script

Inside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.

Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist who made a startling discovery: a bio-enginee …

Award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s third collection, Injun, is a long poem about racism and the representation of indigenous peoples. Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 – the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America – Injun then uses erasure, pastiche, and …

Rita Joe is a Native girl who leaves the reservation for the city, only to die on skid row as a victim of white men’s violence and paternalistic attitudes towards First Nations peoples. As perhaps the best-known contemporary Canadian play and a poetic drama of enormous theatrical power, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe had a major influence in awakening c …

Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions—theatre of the absurd and mystery novels—to create one of the funniest and thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics. In Act One, six “savages”; noble, innocent, ignorant, fearless, wise and gay, respectively; find themselves in a locked room with the body of a white w …

Jhana, is a beautiful eighteen-year-old who lives with her mother Maddie and their boarder Bill, a sometime poet. Jhana’s father, King, shows up partway through the first act and it is his presence for the first time in a long time in this unusual family that really galvanizes all four of the characters into action.

King is an Elvis impersonator, …

Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, centred around Simon Limbeau, the boy whose heart is given, and his family.

Taking place within exactly twenty-four hours, the novel traces the thrill of an early-morning winter surf session, the terrible accident that follows, and all the urgency and compassion of the hospital workers, and shock …

On April 20, 1863, the British naval gunboat Forward attacked a Native village on Kuper Island. The naval officers believed that the village harboured individuals involved in two recent assaults against European transients in the Gulf Islands. The gunboat fired on the village and was repulsed with casualties after a fierce battle with a handful of …

George Bowering was born in Penticton, where his great-grandfather Willis Brinson lived, and Bowering has never been all that far from the Okanagan Valley in his heart and imagination. Early in the twenty-first century, he was made a permanent citizen of Oliver. Bowering has family up and down the Valley, and he goes there as often as he can. He ha …

A heartwarming comedy about two middle-aged First Nations seniors, Evie and Cecil, on their very first trip out of the country. Evie and Cecil reminisce and bicker as they review a lifetime together.

CECIL
So, what exactly are we going to do now that we’re here in Mexico?

EVIE
I’m so glad you asked. Supposedly there are some ancient Mayan ruins …

Mambo Italiano achieves its overwhelming power through a perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama. Angelo, at the prompting of his equally repressed sister Anna, has told his very traditionally Italian immigrant parents, Maria and Gino, that he is gay. Hurt, betrayed and mortified by Angelo’s coming out, his lover Nino is not unpre …

In Canada: A New Tax Haven, Alain Deneault traces Canada’s relationship with Britain’s Caribbean colonies back through the last half of the twentieth century, arguing that the involvement of Canadian financiers in establishing and maintaining Caribbean tax havens has predisposed Canada to become a tax haven itself – a metamorphosis well under …

Cerulean Blue is a comedic play about a struggling blues band invited to participate in a benefit concert for a First Nation community in conflict with governmental authorities. Upon arriving, the band discovers the entire lineup of musical acts has cancelled and they’re left trapped behind barricades. Complicating the matter, there is conflict w …

Balconville is Canada's first bilingual play. Three families and Thibault, the neighbourhood rubbie, sit on their balconies in the heat of a Montreal summer. It is election time and Gaétan Bolduc is running for re-election for the Liberals. His broadcast truck roams the streets making election promises in English and in French, and playing the mus …

What earthly use is the love of ornament? Slowing down to look closely at an inherited shawl made by hand, the title poem in Rahat Kurd’s Cosmophilia traces an object of luxury to the traditionally male art of Kashmiri shawl embroidery. The poet works with images from Kashmir, her maternal family’s place of origin, where the ability to make an …

That both autobiography and biography have acquired a position of unprecedented importance over the past 30 years is now obvious. Less obvious are the reasons for this phenomenon. Theorists and students of AutoBiography, a research subject now viewed as respectable in academic circles, have recently mapped the contours and shifting parameters of th …

In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages (English, Fr …

Canada’s top playwright takes on teen pregnancy in two comic dramas for young people.

Moss Park

It’s been twenty years since the debut of Tough!, but only two years have passed in the lives of Tina and Bobby, the main characters. Of course the poverty trap, which grips them both, is ageless.

In Moss Park, Bobby and Tina aren’t married, or eve …