bpNichol
Scobie illuminates bpNichol’s relationship to Dadaism, contemporary French literary theory, and the writing of Gertrude Stein, and argues strongly for Nichol’s importance as a writer of fiction.
Other titles in The New Canadian Criticism Series:
- ABC of Reading TRG
- Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism
- Michael Ondaatje: Word, Image, …
Remember Me
It has been some time since Luc, a 32-year-old actor and Jean-Marc, a 38-year-old French teacher, have seen each other, but the wounds from their seven year love affair are only partially healed. Each of them has current worries as well: Jean-Marc, apparently secure and well off, is tired of the endless procession of insensitive and seductive stude …
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s writing, according to Davey, reveals not only an extraordinary facility with language, but also a deep mistrust of it as something shaped by an instrumental and largely male culture. Her language directs its readers to a hidden level of itself – unspoken, symbolic, gestural – and away from denotative meaning. In discussions …
bpNichol Comics
The scope, innovation and depth (down to the heart) of bpNichol’s writing makes him one of the most important writers in English of the 20th century. He is widely known for his research into genres as diverse as the lyric, the long poem, sound poetry, concrete poetry, critical theory and now, with the publication of bpNichol Comics, we can even …
Walsh
A historical documentary of Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the Montana massacre at Little Big Horn. The play examines Sitting Bull’s relationship with superintendent Walsh of the North West Mounted Police and is the study of the disillusionment of a man who believes in his government’s integrity but who is betrayed by that government. …
Saga of the Wet Hens
One night in the Promised Land of the North of the Americas, at the centre of a fabulous vortex, four women—Laure Conan, Germaine Guèvremont, Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hèbert—meet, and perform six tableaux. Onstage, the women talk and gallop, they sit and rock; they descend from the heavens like angels, they menstruate, they sing; they bake brea …
Affaires of the Heart
A book of long poems about being on the edge, the cost of life and death, and loving.
Goosequill Snags
Peter Trower is a poet known for what he writes about: the lives of west coast loggers, the rural culture of the B.C. Coast, skidroad life in Vancouver, and his personal love of the western landscape. He has established himself as a unique voice, lyircal and regional, a Canadian original. Goosequill Snags is the first major collection of poems sinc …
Cold Comfort
Cold Comfort: a play of love & bondage is the third in a quartet of plays that Jim Garrard calls “Bondage Plays for My Country.” The play could take place anywhere along the Trans-Canada Highway, but it happens to be set in Saskatchewan, the geographic centre of the country. There are three characters in the play: Dolores, a fifteen-year-old gi …
Billy Bishop Goes to War
Billy Bishop Goes to War ranks as one of Canada’s most successful and endearing musical dramas in history. The Governor General’s Award-winning musical documents the glorious World War I exploits of Canadian flying ace Billy Bishop.
The Fairies Are Thirsty
According to the 19th-century historian Michelet, “Les fées” were women who would rather sing than pray. For this crime, they were punished by being imprisoned in containers that would be opened only at the end of time. In Les fées ont soif (The Fairies Are Thirsty) Denise Bocher takes this image and focuses on it. The Fairies Are Thirsty is …
Selected Poems
This volume includes work selected from each of Phyllis Webb’s books of poetry published prior to 1982, including: Trio, Even Your Right Eye, The Sea Is Also a Garden, Naked Poems, Selected Poems 1954-1965, Wilson’s Bowl, Sunday Water, Thirteen Anti Ghazals and Talking.
Sainte-Carmen of the Main
In Sainte-Carmen of the Main, Carmen—a character who appeared previously in Forever Yours, Marie-Lou—returns to the Rodéo from Nashville, where she has been sent to “improve her technique” in yodelling. But not only does she improve her technique, she also begins to write her own songs whose lyrics speak directly to the people about their …
Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra
In Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, Michel Tremblay examines the sacred and the profane—their similarities and differences; how they merge and become one another. The play consists of two interweaving monologues on religion and sex spoken by Manon (from Forever Yours, Marie-Lou) and Sandra (from Hosanna). In the end, both characters realize that th …
Breathin' My Name with a Sigh
With the publication of this present edition, Talonbooks is pleased to make available to the reader the first complete version of Fred Wah’s Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh, the seventh book of poetry from one of the most important poets in North America today.
The Impromptu of Outremont
Each year, the Beaugrand sisters meet for their sister Yvette’s birthday party—and to have a little “impromptu”—at which they lash out at each other’s personal failures and at the failure of society to support them in their opinions about the world. The four sisters represent the French-Canadian intelligentsia of the fifties, whose inte …
Selected Writing
This volume includes work from each of Daphne Marlatt’s earlier books of poetry: Frames of a Story, leaf leaf/s, Rings, Vancouver Poems, Steveston and Our Lives; from the forthcoming What Matters; the prose work Zócalo; magazine selections from Imago and The Capilano Review and unpublished work.
Selected Poems
This volume includes work selected from six of Frank Davey’s books of poetry—Weeds, Four Myths for Sam Perry, Griffon, Arcana, King of Swords and The Clallam—as well as the manuscript edition of his War Poems.
Selected Writing
This volume includes work beginning with bpNichol’s visual poetry (progressing from the use of individual letters, to words, to distinct shapes on the page), moving through his sound poetry (in its written form) for one voice only, to poems which combine visual and traditional lyric qualities (leading to an excerpt from The Martyrology), and conc …
Selected Poems
This volume represents the most definitive and comprehensive selection of bissett’s writing from the 1960s and 1970s, in voices “erotik, politikul, humorous, lyrikul, sound-vizual, narrative, meditative, konkreet, collage, nd song-chants.”
Sainte-Marie among the Hurons
Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons is James W. Nichol’s play concerning the disastrous mission that the Jesuits made to the Huron Indians in the 17th century. The play is about the conscience of a priest who refuses to accept salvation of his soul through the destruction of a proud people.
Balconville
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 …
Waiting for the Parade
Waiting for the Parade is John Murrell’s play, set in Calgary during World War II, in which five women gather to work for the war effort while their men are away. Waiting for the Parade was first performed by Alberta Theatre Projects, Calgary. Subsequently, it has been performed by Northern Light Theatre, Edmonton; Bastion Theatre, Victoria; Tarr …
Emily Carr
An in depth look at the more personal side of one of Canada's most prominent and memorable artist/writers. Who was this woman who is generally recognized as one of Canada's foremost painters and who also achieved an enviable reputation as a writer? She is thought of by some as a cranky oddball who wore outlandish clothes, had innumerable pets, and …
Boiler Room Suite
Boiler Room Suite is Rex Deverell’s play about two Skid Row winos who have climbed into the boiler room of an abandoned hotel on the Prairies to seek refuge from winter and from the world, until it turns kinder. Aggie Rose is a former actress and Sprugg is a failed poet. Together they act out their fantasies, trying to bring “a little warmth, …
Green Water Blues
First John Skapski was a commercial gillnet fisherman, then he got an MA in creative writing, then he became a lawyer. But he's still a fisherman. One of the finest books to come out of the workplace - piercing, memorable, authentic.
Cruel Tears
Cruel Tears is one of the most original and inventive theatre pieces ever staged in Canada. Shakespeare buffs may see in the play certain intriguing parallels to Othello, but in Cruel Tears, the jealous hero is a Ukrainian truck driver from Saskatoon, not a moor of Venice. Described as a “country opera,” the play is written in the idiom of coun …
Two Plays
This volume contains two uniquely Canadian stories of exile. Whether portraying the romantic lovers in The Island of Demons, or the political revolutionary Gabriel Dumont in Six Dry Cakes for the Hunted, the plays are related by their underlying themes. From the earliest days of settlement in Canada, those who have adhered to their ties to colonial …
Nothing to Lose
It is 1976. In a tavern in the Point Saint Charles working class district of Montreal, three friends gather on their lunch hour and reminisce about the past. They are survivors of a decade. One is Jerry Nines, a writer who has had some success, having written a novel and a hit play. The others are Jackie Robinson and Frank Saladini, old friends of …
Les Canadiens
Les Canadiens begins on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 when a French-Canadian soldier throws his rifle to his son and it becomes a hockey stick. It ends in the Montreal Forum on the night of November 15, 1976, when Montreal Canadien fans turn a hockey game into an election victory rally for the indépendantiste Parti Québécois. In between, it is a …
The Execution
The Execution is Marie-Claire Blais’s only play for the stage. Set in a boarding school, it tells the story of two schoolboys who plot the murder of one of their classmates and enact the crime. As a play, it is a study of innocence, evil and complicity, themes well-known to readers of Blais’s fiction.
Duchesse de Langeais & Other Plays
La Duchesse de Langeais and Other Plays is a collection of five short plays by Québec’s best known playwright, Michel Tremblay – “La Duchesse de Langeais,” “Berthe,” “Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs,” “Gloria Star” and “Surprise, Surprise.”
The Great Wave of Civilization
The Great Wave of Civilization is Herschel Hardin’s play about the destruction of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy by the liquor trade in Montana and Alberta in the 19th century. Little Dog of the Northern Blackfoot tribe vs. Snookum Jim, free trader, I.G. Baker, merchant-prince of Fort Benton and the rest of the “great wave of civilizat …
On the Job
It is Christmas Eve, 1970. In the shipping room of a Montreal dress factory, the workers get drunk and decide to go on strike.
“So many of the guys I knew on the street are gone dead or crazy, man. There’s no escape. This whole country is just one big factory, one big jail, Billy … Either you’re a good nigger or ya die. Know what I mean? … …
Tiln & Other Plays
Three short plays by Michael Cook: Tiln, Quiller and Therese’s Creed.
In Tiln, two old men are caught in a personal power struggle. Using a lighthouse setting, Cook explores the modern man's dilemma in an uncaring world. Cast of 2 men.
In contrast, Quiller is a one-person play set in a Newfoundland outport. In this play, Cook creates a portrait of …
En Pièces Détachées
En Pièces Détachées is Michel Tremblay’s look at “The Main” in Montreal. The play concerns Hélène, a waitress who used to work in a bar called the Coconut Inn, but who now works slinging smoked meat in a joint on Papineau Street. She is married to Henri, who sits around all day watching Captain Cartoons on television. They live in a ten …
Bethune
Set in landscapes which move from Detroit to China, Bethune is a study of how one man’s vision may shape the world. In this play, Rod Langley attempts to chronicle the journey of Dr. Norman Bethune toward his final destiny. Bethune premiered at the Globe Theatre in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1974.
Fifteen Miles of Broken Glass
There I was just out of high school, all eager for the future, and there was the road to the future stretching out in front of me like fifteen miles of broken glass.”
Set in Winnipeg in August, 1945, Fifteen Miles of Broken Glass is Tom Hendry’s look at post-World War II Canada from a recent high-school graduate’s viewpoint. The play was co …