Lambda Literary Award, Drama: Michel Marc Bouchard, Tom at the Farm, translated by Linda Gaboriau (Winner)

Following the accidental death of his lover, and in the throes of his grief, urban ad executive Tom travels to the country to attend the funeral and to meet his mother-in-law, Agatha, and her son, Francis – neither of whom know Tom even e …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

"V6A" is the postal prefix for what is often described as "the poorest neighbourhood in Canada"--Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Statistics about the area depict conditions related to crime, drugs, sex work, and poverty that overshadow another reality based on self determination.

The anthology V6A refracts …

This collection includes 150 letters Emily Carr wrote to her friends Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms, and 100 other letters relating mainly to Emily Carr. The letters date from 1930 to 1945, the most prolific period in Carr’s career as both painter and writer. In them she writes in colourful detail about her everyday activities, and discusses her pa …

Tom Thomson's most influential paintings as chosen by his friends and collectors, illustrating a moving, untold story in Canadian art.

In spring 1918, Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald, two members of the soon-to-be-formed Group of Seven, met in the Studio Building in Toronto. Their friend Tom Thomson had died the year before, and they determined t …

"I grew up in a blue-collar town ten minutes down the road from a white-collar town. And I've spent most of my life uncomfortable in both places."

With these opening words, accomplished poet Tim Bowling outlines the central tension that acts as a vital force in his newest book, Tenderman—the dichotomy between the sensitive poetic observer and the …

A Globe 100 Book of the Year for 2010 and shortlisted for the 2011 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.A Governor General's Award-winning author recounts the turbulent years during which a group of young Canadian painters went from obscurity to international renown.

Beginning in 1912, Defiant Spirits traces the artistic development of Tom …

The poems in crawlspace, John Pass's first volume of poetry since he won the Governor General's Literary Award in 2006, work within the narrowing passages imposed upon us by the inevitable strictures and limitations of living and experience: aging, love and loss, tightening or unraveling family ties. Close to home as always, in one instance literal …

Winner, SFU Writer's Studio's First Book Competition

Galaxy is about a wounded family (Anger brimming until it overflows / into rage in the dark living room, / his undershirt soaked through / up the back to his collar), a prairie place (Ochre River girls / have a one-room school, / walk through fields of wheat, / play in silos, storing grain dust / …

Victoria, BC, July 11th 191. . . . With red eyes and a body guard of sniffing "faithfuls" attending us, we start on our long trip abroad. . . .

So begins Emily Carr's memoir of her trip to England with her sister Alice. They travel across Canada by rail to board an ocean liner in Quebec City, meeting interesting characters and having many adventure …

Composed in three sections, Glengarry is a return in writing to the landscape of rob mclennan’s youth and a headlong rush into the fractures, slippages and buried surfaces of what the text leaves undisclosed to him.
In “glengarry: open field (a postscripted journal)” the poet discovers that “the earth remembers every scratch & scar & step …

In Floating Up to Zero, Ken Norris introduces us to “a traveller from an antique land,” though in this case that traveller’s story is not Shelley’s meditation on the vanity of ancient kings, but rather the poet’s ­meditation on the here and now, on the present moment, precariously balanced between a certain frozen past and an uncertain f …

In this extraordinary debut poetry collection, Proma Tagore's language is not the only thing that breaks explores the junctions between migration, race, the body, and desire. The poems in this book offer spaces to reflect on a variety of interlinking issues: the routes and brutal legacies of European colonization and imperialism; the interrelations …

In her first book of poetry, Ursula Vaira captures the rugged and challenging beauty of the West Coast landscape in three poignant stories.

The first, told through a set of linked poems, describes her thirty-day, thousand-mile paddle from Hazelton to Victoria with skipper Roy Henry Vickers. "Journeys 97" was an RCMP-First Nations venture to raise ad …

Gulf explores the nature of longing and belonging in a transient culture. From its opening assertion, 'A neighborhood, no matter / how known, will not slip whole / into your knapsack,' the collection contends home is a portable assortment of minutiae: the taste of dirt, the solace of Home Depot, a pennant of bone. Opening on a child's displacement, …

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 …

In 1965, Africville, the largest and oldest black community in Canada was bulldozed into memory. What was lost to the politicians of Halifax was an inconvenience, an eyesore. But what was lost to the people whose roots ran deep through the once-vibrant community was an entire way of life. The hamlet’s roots went back to the 1830s, when it began …

Bow Lake in the Canadian Rockies has inspired artists for almost a century. An early explorer who recognized the beauty of this alpine landscape was Jimmy Simpson, a legendary guide and outfitter who also collected art and painted in watercolours. He welcomed artists such as Carl Rungius, Belmore Browne and Peter and Catharine Whyte to his camp bes …

Called "the art book of the year" and "a triumph of publishing" by the Sun Times, Tom Thomson is now available in paperback. Tom Thomson is one of the first major multi-authored books on this subject, and it has a critical edge that has been missing in the mostly celebratory, decorative works that have come before. The picture that emerges from the …

In “The Axe” a literature professor arrives at the door of one of his students in the middle of the night. On his way he has stumbled (with a flask of whiskey) through the pouring rain, stopping in a city park to vandalize the statue of an angel, tormented by the image of his life’s work, ninety-seven poems he has left behind in flames in his …

Attila Richard Lukacs is one of Canada's most talented and controversial contemporary artists. He is best known for his epic paintings that depict masculine, homoerotic imagery, featuring figures such as gay skinheads and military cadets. His work has been exhibited at documenta in Kassel, Germany, as well as in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Col …

Asian Skies is the final book of Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he has previously left behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book, Limbo Road, only to find himself in the terra incognita of the new world of the second, Dominican Moon.
Now guideless, Norris continues his search for the metaphorical shortcut …

Skydive explores the world of dreams and imagination: the universal human desire to push beyond our physical limitations and to fly.

Having grown apart after a traumatic and defining moment in their youth, two brothers reconnect to fulfill a life-long ambition to go skydiving. Morgan (a feckless schemer who has recently reinvented himself as a couns …

In Triny Finlay's second collection of poetry, she asks what it means to let in the ghosts of the past. Will memories loosen the frame of a life? Will subtle fears take over? Finlay plumbs the depths of family life as she negotiates the territories of ancestry, love, and new motherhood: a great-grandmother who went to bed for seventeen years; a lov …

The mystical shores of coastal British Columbia hold boundless inspiration and an enigmatic spiritual presence for many who live along its various coves and inlets. For almost three decades, Carol Evans has been practicing and refining her art,creating stunning portrayals of the beautiful and rugged shores of Vancouver Island and the coastal mainla …

Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of the poem’s ability for “suddenness” to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening—writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional proble …

Sharing a title with Henry Kissinger’s infamous book, Tim Carlson’s play Diplomacy is a graphic, conflict-fuelled drama with moments of heartbreak and dark humour—a reflection on the international themes that have come to define our contemporary world. Nominally about Canada and America’s active military involvement in the Middle East’s …

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 …

Letters I Didn't Write is a contemplative collection of poems imbued with a sense of longing for opportunities lost and lives unfulfilled. Acclaimed poet John Mackenzie explores a sweeping range of subjects, from the tragedies of war to the musings of a discouraged physics major to the violent end of Spanish poet Federico Garc�a Lorca. At the …

Finalist, Saskatchewan Book Award: Poetry Award honouring Anne Szumigalski

Suicide Psalms is both hymn and visceral scream - of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off the ledge. …

Fastidious and fussy shoe salesman by day and secretive aspiring film screenwriter by night, Oswald Eichersen’s dreams of success are as grandly inflated as his self-esteem is hopelessly deficient. Just outside Eichersen’s place of work, street person Terence Lomy has sat encamped for two years—an indelible fixture on the sidewalk with a car …

The twenty contemporary writers featured in this anthology have one thing in common: a connection to British Columbia, to a specific time, landscape, or community in BC. Their essays and memoirs have been inspired by, or are in some way affected by, the particular "sense of place" that sets that left-hand corner of the country apart from other prov …

The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: “If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created us for his own entertainment.”

Not exactly a new idea, it works well as th …

A century of landscape art inspired by the Mount Assiniboine area of the Canadian Rockies from 1899 to 2006.

Jane Lytton Gooch's Mount Assiniboine: Images in Art is a stunning collection of 42 colour plates, only seven of which have been previously published. They represent a wide variety of styles and media from 23 artists, including:

• A.P. Col …

If, as Robert Creeley said, “form is never more than an extension of content,” what happens when we lose form? Does content retreat into its ruins, its absences? Can we never go home because it retreats from us as relentlessly and unfathomably as our future? Is the imagination of “our” future as illusory and unreliable as the memory of “o …

Everything Colin Browne has made up or invented in The Shovel seems written in prose; everything in it he has “unearthed”—from research, the stories of others and source texts—appears as poetry. In this extraordinary book, he has inverted the way we have been defining and privileging forms of language in English for the last century; self-e …

The year is 1964 and first-time film director Alan Schneider is about to embark on a project combining the talents of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. When Alan visits the home of Keaton to discuss the project, titled simply Film, he discovers the former star engaged in an imaginary card game with the long-deceased Irving G. Thalberg.

It doesn’t …

Fascinated by the ligature — a joining of two letters in a single word — Donato Mancini chose, logically, to conjure one up in the title of his second book of concrete poetry, Æthel. "Although," as Mancini remarks parenthetically, "it might be the name of the crabby old blue-rinse who calls the police if you cross her lawn." Æthel, the book, …

Copper Thunderbird is a play on canvases based on the life of Norval Morrisseau. Inside the power-lines which Morrisseau boldly defined in his art were the colours he experienced between his Ojibwa cosmology, his life on the street, and his spiritual and philosophical transformations to become the Father of Contemporary Native Art and a Grand Sham …

Shortlisted for the ReLit Award (2008)

I Cut My Finger is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet incl …

Within the last generation, Canadian drama, like other literary forms, has seen the emergence of works by women that re-vision the role of women in history. However, in order to write themselves into theatre history, women have had to negotiate a complex journey through both pages and stages, a network of public production that is highly politicall …

George Bowering has always maintained many of his poems are germinated in secret ways—secrets he has, until now, assiduously kept to himself. In suddenly giving most of those secrets away, Vermeer’s Light, much of it written while Bowering was “in office” as Canada’s first poet laureate, constitutes an extraordinary gesture of generosity …

The Cold Panes of Surfaces is the moving second collection of poems from award-winning author Chris Banks.

Rooted in the pastoral tradition of Wordsworth, Frost and Wallace Stevens, The Cold Panes of Surfaces describes the Southern Ontario landscape of trains, lakes, moose and pine with unflinchingly sharp image and metaphor. In so doing, he brings …

Earle Birney (1904-1995), the father of modern Canadian poetry, was one of Canada's finest writers and the author of "David," arguably the most popular Canadian poem of all time. One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems features Birney's best work, spanning his entire writing career from 1926 to 1987.

Born in Calgary, Birney grew up in different parts of Alb …

This fascinating version of Daniel MacIvor’s most successful play to date lets the reader in on a secret: it was never primarily written as a work for live theatrical performance, but as a vehicle for his development of a screenplay, also included in this new edition. In his surprisingly revealing introduction, MacIvor talks about the genesis of …

"Matthew Holmes brings us to the end of his rope with a nuanced precision... we are not tethered by what he hitches us to, for as he writes, generously, 'the premise of tying' is, yes and ever, 'to untie.'"
-- Er�n Moure

"A solid debut distinguished by Holmes' far-ranging versatility."
-- Steven Heighton

Hitch is the first collection from New Br …

A celebration of the life and work of Bertram Charles Binning, one of Canada's foremost artists, architectural innovators and arts educators-a seminal figure in the flourishing of the arts in British Columbia.

Artist, educator and architectural innovator -- Bertram Charles (B.C.) Binning was all of these. From the early 1930s through the mid-1970s B …