WASPs is one of those plays where the whole is quite literally much greater than the sum of its parts—so much so that it becomes, in retrospect, the subject of the play, “what the play is about,” and that doesn’t hit you until you are half-way home after a fun evening of bizarre, exotic, and hilarious entertainment. Although signified only …

Canada. 1940. In a time and country fraught with the uncertainties of war, Prime Minister MacKenzie King calls for the destruction of any “subversive elements” on the nation’s soil. The Act is supported by the majority of Canadians: anxious, patriotic and “intolerant” of fascism. After Canada officially declares war with Italy, Romano, a …

Willful Acts is an expanded and updated collection of Margaret Hollingsworth’s best-known and most popular plays, including The Apple in the Eye, Everloving, Diving, Islands, and War Babies (nominated for a Governor General’s Award); along with her latest play, Commonwealth Games. Hollingsworth’s earlier work showcases recurring women’s iss …

Lost Souls and Missing Persons premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1984. It is a comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class—a trope of insulating banalities which trades the body’s physical and spiritual content for the artifice of a formalized security and predictability. Ha …

Banana Boots is a one-man-show / memoir in which Fennario recounts, with astonishing insight and wit, the phenomenon of taking his famous bilingual play Balconville to Belfast on a British / Canadian cultural mission. Given the subject of Balconville, that the real problem in Quebec is not one of language or culture, but one of British imperialism …

London, 1483. From the aged Duchess of York, who is 99 years old and will never sit on the throne, to the young Lady Anne who will marry Richard III in order to reign, Chaurette traces the shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre and portray them here in the timelessness of their quest. As Ernst Kantorowicz ha …

Corker uses the familiar but difficult and treacherous nineteenth-century device of representing the family as a microcosm of the nation state. Opening with the extended family’s awkward attendance at the funeral of Serena, aging flower child of the sixties, the symbolic conflicts build quickly. Serena’s sister Merit, the hard-driving, social- …

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 …

Lawrence and Holloman, a hapless nerd and a loquacious salesman, meet by chance. From this fleetingly irritating and insignificant encounter, the viciously murderous and incredulously bizarre plot emerges into the full-blown twilight of what appear to be their insignificant and meaningless lives. And it is this very absence of significance and mean …

Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is the emotional story of a woman’s struggle to acknowledge her birth family. Grace, a Native girl adopted by a White family, is asked by her birth sister to return to the Reserve for their mother’s funeral. Afraid of opening old wounds, Grace must find a place where the culture of her past can feed the t …

"Many of Stewart's poems honour the ordinary and domestic; others get dressed up and strut their stuff. The female body and mind, from adolescence to maturity, bask in their glory, seducing the reader from cover to cover."
--Lorna Crozier

In this first poetry collection, Shannon Stewart spans a century of female experience, from an 1890s Victorian h …

How I Joined Humanity at Last, David Zieroth's fifth book of poems, explores the mid-life road to renewal and tells the story of one man's journey toward compassion.

Zieroth's work delves deeply into the issues that affect all of us, from relationships between children and parents and "the old blood turbulence/ of families, tribes," to the day-to-d …

This collection by the award-winning writer Goh Poh Seng is the first volume of his poetry published in North America. It spans more than thirty-five years of his work and traverses cultures as well as continents.

Goh's settings range from the wharfs at Singapore's harbour to a backwater bar in Papeete, Tahiti, from a park in Halifax to the streets …

"What are memories?" writes Eric Nicol in this volume. "Laundered biography?" In this case, memoirs are the rollicking, funny life and times of Eric Nicol.

Harold Enrico is a rare poet who combines the deepest traditions of our history, our spirituality, with the colourful imagery of the Pacific Northwest. He has been hailed as a major poetic voice by George Woodcock, praised by Theodore Roethke, and selected by Poetry Chicago and Choice magazine. A Second Earth contains the finest poems from his thre …

Award-winning cowboy cartoonist Wendy Liddle is back, providing wonderful and whimsical art that is the perfect complement to the poetry of Mike Puhallo and Brian Brannon. This book will be enjoyed by anyone who has ever dreamt of ten-gallon hats and little doggies. The third collection of cowboy poetry in a series, it offers readers a look into th …

Before he passed away, the Haida artist Bill Reid was internationally renowned for his totem poles and other large pieces, as well as for his work on a small scale in silver and gold. His masterpiece, The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, is a bronze canoe six metres (20 feet) long, filled to overflowing with the creatures of Haida mythology. Two copies of th …

In this beautifully designed and richly illustrated book, Diane Eaton and Sheila Urbanek re-create Paul Kane’s heroic journey across Canada and bring to life the people, places, and events he experienced.

Determined to document the lives and customs of the Indians of the Northwest, Paul Kane set out in 1845 to cross the continent “with no compa …

In this collection of poems written in English and French parallel versions, Inge Israel evokes the life and work of Russian-born painter Chaim Soutine. Living and starving alongside his artist friends Modigliani, Chagall, Lipschitz and others on the Left Bank in the 1920s, Soutine was acclaimed by them as the expressionist par excellence.

These poe …

The reflective poems in Threadbare Like Lace comment on the world as Jacqueline Baldwin has experienced it. She is an expatriate New Zealander who has lived and worked in such far-flung places as Montreal and the remote Robson Valley in the Canadian Rockies. Her poems are a mediation between the private and public worlds and are reminiscent of many …

In 1938, in a world about to go mad with war, an Ontario insane asylum seems to offer sanctuary to the characters in Can You See Me Yet? But as Cassandra Wakelin begins to confuse her fellow inmates with members of her own ill-fated family, the question arises: Can anyone find sanctuary anywhere?
Can You See Me Yet? premiered at Ottawa’s National …

Blonds on Bikes is George Bowering’s first book of poetry since Urban Snow was published by Talonbooks in 1992. Characteristic of Bowering’s other work, this book is largely made up of sequences. The longest one, the title poem, is a composition of daily riffs during an autumn in Denmark and Italy. “Pictures” is an album of verbal portrait …

According to Joan MacLeod, her play 2000 grew out of a story she read about a cougar that had wandered into a sports arena in Vancouver, BC: “I was intrigued by the notion of the wild invading the city and the city invading the wild, by the idea of things being not quite right in nature and the approach of the millennium.”
In the play, the cou …

A college student’s life is given meaning when he chooses to sponsor Elias, a Salvadoran refugee, as a class project. When Elias arrives, his hosts Sander and his family learn what it means and feels to be a refugee and how to relate to someone who has endured such intense personal grief. The warmth and humour of the characters invite us to embr …

Poems that tell stories on many different levels: through sound, visual images, political insights, non-narrative fusion and linguistic music.

accepting th radiant dances uv being

4 kleerances uv ko dependenseez n help

th selvs being plural storeez sound

vizual politikul non narrativ fuseyn

linguisteek mewsik letting go uv th

rashyunalizasyuns irrashyuna …

Roy Kiyooka’s reputation as an artist has long been recognized. Such is not the case with his writing and poetry, even though his engagement with language as a medium of artistic consciousness had been a preoccupation all along. For Kiyooka the poet, the poetic text was not a supplement to his visual art, but a medium that he explored in the same …

A ride into the land of the cowboy, where tomorrow always holds a new adventure. This book is a collection of poems written by members of the Alberta Cowboy Poetry Association celebrating ten years of writing and reciting. Collection of over 50 poems from authors in Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and even Montana. Thes …

’Ordinarily, theatre relies on illusion in order to reveal truths; The Noam Chomsky Lectures relies on truths in order to reveal illusions. Following the impetus of Chomsky himself, Brooks and Verdecchia have recognized that mass media, mass spectacle, have trivialized and severed consciousness and conscience, separating both from a communal base …

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 …

Lisa Robertson has applied her rhetorical skills to the epic, and what emerges is a spectacular, subversive vision of the world through female eyes. This is an act of sheer writerly bravado, taking and tweaking the form, enlarging the world between the covers of a book. The language is lush, the concept superactivated, growing over the page at an a …

Cree Adelaide McCauley and her two children witness the shooting of their Metis husband/ father by a crazed white miner. She attempts to nurse him back to life but he dies after several painful days. This tragedy takes place in the Robson Valley and the nearest court of justice is 300 miles away, over treacherous mountain trails, in Golden, BC. Ade …

Patrick Lane, one of Canada's most distinguished and acclaimed poets, has published over twenty books of poetry in his long career. This collection, the only comprehensive book of his poetry since 1988, gathers together the work of two decades, presenting his best work as a mature poet.

In a letter to his brothers in 1818, John Keats remarked on a curious expression in vogue among his friends: "they call drinking deep dying scarlet." The poems in this collection, inspired by Keats' misspelling of "dyeing," explore the ways in which we drink deep from life, searching for beauty and passion despite a melancholy awareness of our own …

An extended tour de force with no act or scene breaks, Marcel Pursued by the Hounds examines how our “innocent” childhood games and fantasies can come back to haunt us in adult life, full of the dangers and realities that were invisible to us as children. An extended dialogue between the characters Marcel (one of the main characters in Tremblay …

Cultural Mischief is a collection of prose poems on the hyperbolic absurdities of multiculturalism in action. Whether digging up the midden under Greg Curnoe’s house, revisiting Hiroshima, attending a dog breeder’s show or retelling the history of Quebec from the point of view of its founding nations, the Mohawks and Algonquins, Davey delivers …

In this her first book of “prosaics,” Renee Rodin discovers a home in the wilderness surrounding her. Pieced together from childhood memories of Montreal, dreams of her mother’s towering absence, long distance calls with her father, street politics and the joy of children, Bread and Salt, what you bring for luck to a new house, is a joyous af …

A story of the ill-fated romance between a wandering musician-social-idealist and a Cape Breton coal miner’s daughter, whose dreams are reawakened by their passion. The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum is a play in which the all-consuming brightness of dreams and memory are overshadowed by absentee greed, callousness and exploitation. It is a tragedy t …

Marya Fiamengo is one of Canada's truly fine poets. For nearly four decades, she has been publishing poetry of unusual distinctiveness. Intelligent, richly evocative, formidable in its clarity, lyrical and yet austere, the voice in Fiamengo's poems is like no other in Canadian poetry.

White Linen Remembered, her seventh collection, expresses her con …

One of Canada's best known and best loved artists, Emily Carr's passionate nature paintings have been compared to those of Georgia O'Keeffe, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. She was also a popular writer whose engaging books are still widely read. The 40 full-colour paintings chosen for Beloved Land: The World of Emily Carr from the collection of …

" 'The Sound of Whales' is a lyric-comedy about language, our obsessive reliance upon it, and how linear thought can inhibit understanding. David MacLean's play has its roots in his personal experience in dealing with governmental, educational, and medical bureaucracies. The frustration the playwright expresses toward these institutions is balanced …

W.H. New's Poems, variations on the sonnet form, explore growing up in British Columbia, from the coast to the Kootenays, Through the Metaphysics of science. In this his first book of poems, New contemplates a world in which chaos and order, growth and tradition, imagination and empiricism, placement and displacement coexist. He writes about his na …

Paterson Ewen is one of Canada's most accomplished and admired painters. He is famous for his monumental paintings of phenomena, powerful works that capture the grandeur of nature and extend the tradition of landscape painting in Canada. According to Michael Ondaatje, "Perhaps there is a balance and security in these precarious works because of the …

Cape Dorset sits at the very heart of Inuit culture. Since the late 1950s, this community has symbolized the essence of Inuit art, thanks to the widely acclaimed work of artists such as Kenojuak Ashevak, Mayureak Ashoona, Pitseolak Ashoona, Qaunaq Mikkigak, Oopik Pitsiulak, Napachie Pootoogook, Lucy Qinnuayuak, Pitaloosie Saila and Ovilu Tunnillie. …

Morris Panych’s brilliant new black comedy is structured around what happens when an extremely self-centred and shallow person finds himself, through his own errors and inattentiveness, in a life-and-death situation with profound and far-reaching consequences. A play of twisted circumstance, mistaken identity and surprising turns, it is delicious …

How does an “outsider” feminist read a contemporary Canadian literature that is profoundly inscribed with the contradictions of late 20th-century capitalism, nationalism and globalism, and with vigorous class, race and gender struggles for access to power and representation? What does “literature” become when its own strategies variously pl …

Her star rising as a Hollywood diva, Frances Farmer chooses to join the socialist Group Theatre in New York. This idealistic, raucous and non-conforming movie star, pursued by the government for her alleged communist connections, was finally incarcerated with the help of her mother at Steilacoom, a Seattle psychiatric hospital, where she was loboto …