With Blue Himalayan Poppies, Jay Ruzesky collects his best poetry of the past seven years. Acclaimed as one of Canada's most interesting and innovative contemporary poets for his first two books, Am I Glad to See You (Thistledown, 1992) and the highly praised and influential Painting the Yellow House Blue (Anansi, 1994), Ruzesky has produced his be …

With its juxtaposition of Canadian prairie with the downs of southern England, with its movement between reality and dream, night and day, Norm Sacuta's brilliant debut poetry collection, Garments of the Known, uses both traditional verse forms and linguistic fracture to create a most passionate landscape.

That landscape is always half one world, ha …

A magnificent anthology of blues poems/songs by some of Canada's best poets; on the accompanying CD, the poems are masterfully interpreted by Canadian west coast blues artists.
Writing contributors include Ken Babstock, bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Coady, Lorna Crozier, Barry Dempster, Patrick Friesen, Mark Jarman, Ryan Knighton, Rob …

Connie Fife is one of Canada's warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as a …

For rob mclennan, poetry is a way of seeing, and what is seen in harvest: a book of signifiers is always a landscape as it inhabits the poet and his various personae. In the absence of capital letters, with only minimalist punctuation, and with a denial of the possessive case, (all formal signifiers of precedence and ownership), these poems do not …

In this powerful dramatic monologue, Lorena Gale remembers, by reconstructing for the audience, her childhood and coming of age as an African-Canadian in Montreal.
Her autobiographical protagonist is unabashedly one of those spoil-sport “ethniques” who, for political factions led by the likes of Parizeau, undermined and destroyed the separatis …

Lifted from an ancient Chinese astronomical text, the title Dream Pool Essays hints at Gil McElroy’s interest in cosmology: always a construct made visible between the elements of chaos.
These poems constitute an active multiple streaming of sources usually considered quite disparate: the physical sciences, particularly astronomy, theoretical co …

Since 1975, Ken Norris has produced some of Canada’s most intriguing poetry. Whether detailing the amorous lives of produce (Vegetables), documenting travels to the South Seas (The Better Part of Heaven and Islands), engaging contentious social and political issues (In the Spirit of the Times and In the House of No), or taking the measure of the …

Second Prize Winner, Canada's National One-Act Playwriting Competition (1994)

Shylock is an award-winning play about a Jewish actor who finds himself condemned by his own community for his portrayal of Shakespeare’s notorious Jew. Shylock has provided much fuel for the fiery debates surrounding censorship, historical revisionism, political correct …

"One of Canada's best poets ... Robertson's language is sparkling and sharp, and builds momentum through its rhythmic motion motion to produce a dense and difficult, but enjoyable and readable book ... The Weather rewrites the pastoral with confidence and cunning."
— Prairie Fire
"Hip, cerebral, streamlined, and dense, The Weather is about many …

Stone Rain is a triptych that investigates what it means to see. In particular, the set of three lyrical sequences asks how the artist-observer, the urban witness, and the foreign traveler all shape the world as the site of story.

In Storyboards, a Northwest Coast Mask Exhibit serves as inspiration for lyric poems in which the poet imaginatively re …

A pressing issue today is how to compensate Aboriginal peoples for the infringement of their rights. Aboriginal rights include more than a title; within the fiduciary relationship between the federal government and Aboriginal peoples is the issue of compensation for the infringement of Aboriginal and treaty rights. In an historical and legal contex …

Zoë Landale's new collection of poetry is remarkable for its fusion of rocky hardness with the luminosity of coastal British Columbia. As a poet, Landale has the lyric ability to evoke the particular with such warmth and grace that one cannot help becoming aware of a spiritual dimension.

Ronsdale Press offers a new edition of Steveston, this much loved work by two of Canada's finest poets and photographers. For this edition, Daphne Marlatt has written a new poem, never before published, to offer a postscript from 2001 on the original 1974 undertaking. At the publisher's request, Robert Minden has returned to his photographic archiv …

Doyle has a very funny problem: he hears too much. He can hear the most intimate details of the lives of everyone living in his apartment building. He can tell the temperature of a young neighbour’s bath water by the resonance of her pipes; he knows where the old lady’s lost teeth are by the way they rattle in their glass when her appliances t …

Connie Fife is one of Canada’s warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as …

Crows Do Not Have Retirement, David Zieroth's sixth book of poems, explores the many lives of the spirit and the flesh: lives that challenge, bewilder and excite. With the fluidity of language and sharpness of image that he is known for, Zieroth voyages through the conflicting worlds of dream and everyday life, exploring feelings of extreme self-ir …

For as long as we have communicated by words, men and women have turned to poets to help them express the surges of emotion that accompany the feelings we call romantic love. Recognizing that "love's domain is as huge, as vast as Canada itself," acclaimed poet Tom Wayman set out in 1997 to compile an anthology of the nation's best poetry on the sub …

In his first collection of poetry, novelist Kevin Killian views the horrors of the AIDS pandemic through a narrow prism, the films of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento.
Argento Series is structured like a horror film, populating deadpan reportage with badly drawn "characters" whose grisly deaths nevertheless come as an apocalyptic shock. For tw …

Talking Bodies collects Larry Tremblay’s four stunning and memorable solo performances for the stage. Thematically related, each deals with the reconstruction of an identity which, through trauma, illusion, accident or destiny, has been threatened, destabilized, broken or dispersed.

It is the body in which any identity finds its origin, but it is …

Bal Sethi pens his reflections on all that is happening around him with wisdom and a (sometimes) heavy heart. An example is the poem "Home for the Holidays" where the narrator discovers that his wife has been unfaithful. Yet Bal never seems to lose hope for the world. This is a truly beautiful compilation of poetry concerning all that matters most …

Sharp, accessible and witty, Slant offers a fresh exploration of issues of race, sexuality, and life in the global village. The collection alternates between three main themes of childhood and family in the Chinese diaspora; gay sexuality, community and rites-of-passage; and voyages literal and metaphorical. Slant asks "how do we belong?" and answe …

In his fourth collection of poetry, Tim Bowling continues his exploration of loss, heartache, joy and wonder. Employing a supple lyricism that is at turns tender and fierce, he draws on his experiences as a father and son, on his memories of childhood, and on his journeys into landscape as ways to explore the deep mysteries at the heart of consciou …

Billie Livingston's poems drive straight for the sharp edges--from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives and friends grappling with the torturing frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death.

These jagged re …

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is a savagely funny writer whose poetry mangles the clichés of modern life to reach a new kind of negotiated peace. She "lacks breeding and gravitas and degrees," but she's a titanic force in the new Canadian poetry, and Ogress Oblige is a jeremiad of heroic and epic proportions.
Lusk writes in a variety of avant-garde form …

The author shares not only her artistic rendition of the prominent natives she paints, but stories, legends and personal experiences of these historical figures of a vanishing nation. Mildred Valley Thornton had an abiding passion which she pursued with almost missionary fever throughout her life - the preservation of Plains Indian culture. For ove …

The poems in Ghost Children explore the spiritual and psychological losses suffered by child survivors of the Holocaust. The title points both to the one and a half million children murdered in the Holocaust and to the many child survivors who have lived out their lives as "ghosts," never managing to allow their childhood self to surface in their a …

By the time Al Purdy succumbed to lung cancer at his waterfront home in Sidney BC on April 21, 2000, he was universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest writers Canada has produced. In five decades as a published author he had produced over forty books and received innumerable distinctions, including two Governor General's Awards and the Orde …

All great art has the ability to move people collectively, to create within it some essential, participatory expression of their humanity, their culture, their heritage. But who creates this art? What is it that gives some individuals the power or the gift to create such works? Who are these works written for? Does the composer have a particular m …

Fifteen years to the day after the death of their father, three brothers get together and drive out to the place where it happened: an old fishing spot on the river down Dangerous Passes Road. Each sibling is facing a crucial rite of passage: Carl, the youngest, is to be married later in the day and it is this occasion that has brought the three o …

In this collection of two plays about the process of children becoming adults, Drew Hayden Taylor works his delightfully comic and bitter-sweet magic on the denials, misunderstandings and preconceptions which persist between Native and Colonial culture in North America.

In “The Boy in the Treehouse,” Simon, the son of an Ojibway mother and a Bri …

A very liberal contemporary couple—Angel, an urban Native science fiction writer, and Colleen, a “non-practising” Jewish intellectual who teaches Native literature—hosts a dinner party. The guests at this little “sitcom” soirée are couples that represent what by now have become the clichéd extremes of both societies: Angel’s former …

nathalie stephens' book, Somewhere Running, irreverently examines the tensions between two women ("the artist"), a photographer ("the eyes that watch"), and "the city." Beginning with a very simple premise--two women standing at a distance from one another--the text circles hypnotically as details come into focus and the pull between figures inten …

Art BC presents -- in full colour -- 100 outstanding works by 84 of British Columbia�s foremost artists. Finally, we have the much-needed history of the visual arts in British Columbia, one that also properly integrates our great heritage of First Nations art into the mainstream. In the introduction, Ian M. Thom outlines the art history of the …

This gorgeous little book challenges prevailing myths about women and love, women and lust, women and words. "When do you follow your desire?" writers were asked. "When do you censor it? When it is a source of power, and when a source of distress?" The result is a daring, funny and highly literate collection of personal essays that presents female …

Billeh Nickerson is a poet for our times--a witty, urbane chronicler of life through lavender-coloured glasses. His poems, full of astonishing pleasures, speak to the wonders of the world: about "the push of knowing you're different" and "the pull of wanting to belong." Whether it is professing his unrequited love for Wayne Gretzky, or offering his …

The images in the pages of this book -- animal, human and spirit faces -- evoke the powerful cultural legacy of the inhabitants of the Northwest Coast. Spirits of the Water presents 110 examples of the art produced by the Native peoples of a region of great linguistic, cultural and geographical diversity. Six essays by leading experts Paz Cabello, …

In As Though The Gods Love Us, Goh brings a lifetime of love, despair and passion to his work with the skill of a master craftsman. Amidst some of the world's most exotic locales, he uses graceful and lyrical language to understand his world and to bring us closer to ourselves and each other. From Vancouver neighbourhoods to the tropical darkness o …

The first section of this book features an alphabetical list of words relating to Northwest Coast art, with definitions, descriptions and explanations and synopses of the major myths associated with them. As an aid to identification and understanding, many of the crests, beings and symbols are illustrated in the 6 black-and-white reproductions of c …

Bent Box is the first collection of poetry by Lee Maracle. The poems speak volumes of emotion ranging from quiet desperation to bitter anger to the depths of love. Maracle adds a rich blend of prose and poetry to her impressive list of fiction and autobiographical titles which include Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, I Am Woman, Ravensong, Sundogs and her …

The multifaceted pun in the title of Mark Cochrane’s latest book of poems (a room is a stanza, is a space, is an enclosure; in which a change, a transaction, a metamorphosis takes place) is a barbed hook of seduction for the reader in love with the body of language. And it is ever so clearly the body as a willful and skillful construct of the co …

Mom’s the Word was created out of a Saturday morning writers’ support group. Getting together to share their experiences, six women performers struck upon the idea to write about what they were going through as mothers trying to maintain their careers, their individual identities and their relationships with their partners. The result is an eve …

Brimming with a dark and brittle humor, 15 Seconds is a play about a young female advertising copy writer, her pro-sports-fan ex-boyfriend, a Gen-X welfare-bum loser and his brother handicapped by cerebral palsy. These four characters are constantly making choices about reality and illusion; imagination and fantasy; the hale and the handicapped; a …

Heaven is George F. Walker’s ‘millennium play.’ Well, sort of, if we can free ourselves from the expectation of the usual science-fiction-based projection and imposition of our current personal, cultural and spiritual values on the future of the coming millennium, considered almost mandatory for authors working in this particular genre. As u …

Adeena Karasick’s fourth book of poetry achieves an astonishing layered complexity and maturity. Dyssemia Sleaze is at one and the same time Karasick’s most political and most personal book to date. Its performance is that of an inter-folded language, woven (shuffled) back and forth between the perpetual absence of intimations of the thing its …