After moving in with her grandparents in the small close-knit community of Dearing Bay, on the east coast of Newfoundland, Patience discovers what really is the key to happiness. Patience of Dearing Bay is a poignant story of growing up in rural Canada which offers a fond portrayal of a vanishing way of life.

In a series of short stories based in her native Britain, as well as in her adopted country of Canada, Margaret Thompson delights us with her pictures of ordinary life... or is it so ordinary? Sometimes brittle, sometimes gentle, she delivers telling shots at individuals and society's foibles.

"Can you type?" asked the colonel. So began young Sue Ward's induction into army life. She joined the army ' the first ever Canadian Women's Army Corps ' hoping to go overseas to entertain the troops fighting World War II. Instead, she spent the next four years travelling from coast to coast, entertaining the home troops and, as lieutenant, looking …

A selection of poems by the man described by the Globe & Mail as "the greatest of our poets." Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets includes three decades' worth of thought-provoking work, including poems from the Governor-General's Award-winning The Cariboo Horses to Naked with Summer in Your Mouth.

Purdy personally made this selection, assisted by S …

Diane Tucker writes from experience and "the sustaining power of memory" in this first collection of poems. She writes of falling in love with the wrong person: "For you I ride without a seat belt, willing to be thrown clear at first impact"; her daughter at four months, whose fingertips "are globes of amber salmon roe/ cool smooth/ and salty"; and …

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 celebration of his 70th birthday, Ronsdale Press is pleased to release Robin Skelton's The Edge of Time. In this new collection of poems, Skelton walks the edge, looking forwards and backwards. Meditating on roads taken and not taken, he employs his poetic gift to consider our relation to time: how we are both immersed in it, and yet able to ste …

Two Shores is the first collection of poetry in English by a Vietnamese immigrant to the West. Born in Hanoi in 1940 and then moving to Saigon in 1954, Thuong Vuong-Riddick first describes life in Vietnam under the influence of the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietminh, the French, and the Americans, as well as the difficulties of living through "the …

Rhymes on the Range will take you into the life of genuine no-B.S. cowboys. These poems about actual happenings in the life of Canada's working cowboys. You will smell the stench of burning hair at the branding fire and welcome fragrance of coffee on a campfire during roundup. You'll hear the music of spurs jingling in stirrups, as a cowboy rides b …

In her third book, Zoë Landale explores the darkened rooms of family myth and history. Focusing on family members from the past - matrons, suicides and brilliant eccentrics - she investigates their lives and the shadowy but potent power they exert over the present.

It is rare for a single work of sculpture to become the subject of a book at any time, much less at the moment of its installation. But Bill Reid's Spirit of Haida Gwaii is no ordinary sculpture. Commissioned for the courtyard of the new Canadian chancery in Washington, DC, it sits directly across the street from the National Gallery and is destine …

There’ll Be Another delivers on the promise of the title: It is actually three books of poems in one, each offering the reader the unique new opening of an entirely different language.

The first, Heavy-Hearted in Havana, is made up of a series of poems written during McFadden’s sojourn in Cuba in the spring of 1994. His observations on the decay …

Loved and admired by readers for the grace of her language and the humanity of her vision, Sharon Thesen is one of Canada’s finest and most respected poets. Thesen’s poems express the pleasure and magic of a language fully transformed into visions of grace.

The terminal illness and death of the author’s father and a recent trip to Egypt led Lola Lemire Tostevin to explore what she perceives to be the essential relation between language and death. In the hieroglyphs and carvings of ancient Egyptian temples she experienced how the bleakness of death and the desert were transformed into something that …

What is logic? Isn’t it a sickness we create? Useful for certain things, but not paramount in helping us be & share & change. Angels are rising in spirit places, helping us through & set against a back-drop of deaths, tortures, imprisonments, AIDS, big religious right-wing power control grabs, unroyal families, increasing poverty & the growing un …

On a Friday morning in a “frighteningly well-groomed living room” in Scarborough, Lindalou, 31, is packing up to return to Cape Breton after visiting her mother, Betina, for the first time in five years. Mother and daughter have a turbulent relationship, exchanging refrains of put-downs as a way of avoiding speaking and listening to each other. …

The editor of this lively, updated assortment of reviews, interviews and other critical deliberations on contemporary Canadian drama has gathered material from books, theatre and scholarly journals; from major daily newspapers in Canada and abroad; from critics, academics, journalists and playwrights. This new expanded and updated edition of Canad …

The enigmatic American artist Georgia O’Keeffe flourished in the desert solitude where her creativity and vision thrived and was challenged by its dangerous energies, its desolate and hard beauty. In John Murrell’s The Faraway Nearby, Georgia O’Keeffe resigns herself to an old age spent in the auburn and tawny light of her beloved Faraway mou …

Poems and stories based on actual events and experiences of a proud Northerner. Raven - both her symbol and spirit guide, as well as the undisputed hero of myth and legend in the Pacific Northwest - is often reflected in her poems and stories which are based on actual events and experiences of a proud Northerner.

These poems span fifteen years of life in the northern industrial output of Prince George, BC. They portray family, friendship, sex, death, health, work, love and human hope as subjects of a harsh social, economic, and bureaucratic system that is itself trapped in its own contradictions and ironies. The Centre is McKinnon's first full-length book s …

A raga is a melodic composition in Indian classical music that imparts certain emotions. Ragas From the Periphery is a collection that uses language as its instrument.
Phinder Dulai is first and foremost a South Asian writer, and while issues of identity and cultural immersion are central to his work, they are not all-encompassing. His poems are i …

Too Spare, Too Fierce, a new collection of love poems and elegies, is the twenty-second volume of poetry Patrick Lane - hailed as "the best poet of his generation" - has produced during his 30-year career as a writer.

During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country, consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes th …

In the title poem of this extraordinary first book, Sally Ito remembers her childhood in Alberta, when she set frogs in the rain barrel and watched them swim like stars in a "pool of still and nether depths/ whose mirrored surface was all."

Those imagined depths become a powerful metaphor in these poems, which reflect Ito's experiences as a young Ja …

In the language of the Fraser River fishermen, "low water slack" is that particular tide when everything slows down: the wind, the river, even the human heartbeat. It is a time to reflect, to count the stars in Orion's belt, to listen for the slow creak of the heron's wings. During low water slack, the challenges of life on the river give way to so …

In these poems, Nicholas Catanoy recreates the diary that he kept as a young cadet in Romania when he was imprisoned by the invading Russians. Taken out three times to be executed, Catanoy was one of the few from among the 200 prisoners to survive the random executions. After being released, Catanoy recreated in this memoir the impact of being a pr …

As the title implies, Dementia Americana is about the craziness of America. In what he describes as "the most personal writing I have ever done," Keith Maillard meditates upon the implications for private life of the two most bizarre wars of our time: the Gulf War and the Vietnam War. Working within traditional closed forms, but stretching them to …

Ulli Steltzer, a distinguished photographer, takes the reader into the carving shed and studio to see Robert Davidson as he creates both monumental poles and intricately detailed powerful masks. More than 100 of her black-and-white photographs, reproduced in duotone, record both the evolution of Davidson and his art, from the early days up to the p …

Opening in the Sky is Armand Ruffo's first collection of poetry. Drawing from his Ojibway heritage, the author explores identity, alienation, liberation, love and loss. His poems examine the violence against the Native peoples and the land. Black-and-white illustrations by Leo Yerxa are also featured in the book.

These poems employ the short lyric as it derives from the haiku tradition. Through progressions of image clusters, anne mckay captures states of experience that elude the conscious mind: "but young / was there / . . . and heat / hung with scarlet hurry / and gates forgotten / under sly and hunting moons / of summer hurting." A high point of the col …

Imagining Ourselves gathers together selections from Canadian non-fiction books that in some way have had a major impact on how we view ourselves as Canadians, revealing how the national identity has been shaped and informed by the written word. Included are selections from such well-known Canadian books as Wild Animals I Have Known (Ernest Thomas …

Together and apart, the poet A. F. Moritz and the artist Ludwig Zeller enact the search for meaning within a shattered mechanical universe. The poem is present as well in a Spanish translation by Susana Wald, who has also conducted an interview with the poet and artist.

Life Without Instruction is based on a true story and a real trial. Artemesia Gentileschi’s father, the late-Renaissance painter Orazio Gentileschi, takes the unusual step of having his daughter trained in the art of painting under the instruction of his friend, Agostino Tassi. Tassi rapes Artemesia, and is taken to trial by both Artemesia and O …

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.

Here are twenty-one user-friendly tales, set in the Okanagan Valley, Austria, Washington, Nanaimo, the Yukon, Iceland, Germany, the future — and Daphne’s Lunch Diner. The Rain Barrel is George Bowering’s first collection of short stories since 1983. Ten years in the making, these stories display Bowering’s meticulous attention to the detail …

Merging autobiography, criticism, feminist theory and poetry in an economy of desire, Mêmewars puts a poetics of rupture, displacement, obsession and exile into praxis. This text writes against a sexist, imperialist discourse of mastery and idealization. It challenges the mythologies of cohesion, autonomy and stable identity—the capitalist visio …

A “crucible-inspired” drama surrounding an inquiry into a doubtful molestation incident in a small town daycare, All Fall Down is a play about witch-hunting in the late 20th century.
The rumours and whispers in the community—every suspicion of the unusual, the eccentric, the unexplained—are added to the growing body of evidence that a hein …

In 1876, Jack the Ripper, otherwise known as Canadian Doctor Thomas Neill Cream, graduated with merit from McGill’s faculty of medicine. Cream was a backstreet abortionist and managed an exclusive brothel called The Elite Club. His notorious reputation eventually forced him to flee Canada for London. He was hanged in 1892 for the murder of four …

Other Schools of Thought is a collection of three unique plays that allow adult audiences to reflect on their past and young audiences to reflect on their future. With stark sets and minimalist presentational styles, they leave no room for condescension—for dismissal of “adult concerns” by the young. In their treatment of sexuality, substance …

A long poem that blends and bends the lyric, procedural poetry, the travelogue and extended forms, Dwell lives in, or dwells on, the interaction of a restless subjectivity with the seemingly transparent, yet identifiable, social codes that encase us.

These wildly funny articles, observations of life in the tiny village of Nazko in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, were first published in the Quesnel Cariboo Observer. Just about everyone in the Cariboo started out as babies when they were quite young, which gives Kishkan a lot of material right there. The other subjects of these real-life stories range fro …

In this twenty-year retrospective of Barbara Munk's work, she pays close attention to the world around her: the man who rustles through garbage cans and dumpsters for his food, the undertaker who wants his ashes spread outside the Elks hall, a robin outside the window. And she invites the reader to look at the world in new ways.

While Munk's poetry …

Lonely in a Cool, Sweet Way is the latest collection of poems by a writer whom Al Purdy has compared to Emily Dickinson and Margaret Avison. "I have the sense of seeing things with her eyes and mind," Purdy said in his introduction to her first book, She Reminds Me of Vermeer, "of actually being in her situation, and it's this intimacy that gives h …

Tender Agencies explores the ephemeral yet tangible presence of language in our lives, and the manipulation of language and meaning; chaotic, confrontational, and laced with black humour.

Radical Innocence is an "invitation to reverie," a collection of poems that is at once suffused with marvels and a brilliant historical and cultural critique of our society's development. In this ambivalent look at classical christian attitudes and how they have influenced the western world, Pass moves beyond the ordinary, taking images and persona …