In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues—to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.

In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles, in Act 2 it is Alex who visit …

In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues—to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.

In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles, in Act 2 it is Alex who visit …

400 Kilometres is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Janice Wirth, a thirty-something urban professional, having discovered her roots as the Ojibway orphan Grace Wabung in Someday, and having visited her birth family on the Otter Lake Reserve in Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, …

Daniel Danis’s homage to Aeschylus, the “father of tragedy,” is set on an imaginary island in the St. Lawrence River. The eccentric islanders are about to join in the outdoor “Rages” staged by the trickster Coyote—wild Bacchanalia where the participants, under the influence of his potions, lose all vestiges of their civility and abando …

More than 30 years in the making, Frank Davey’s careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence his youthful imagination assembled growing up in and immediately after World War II is a work of astonishment.
This is no lyrical work of sentimental nostalgia, no attempt to return to a romanticized “simpler past,” no rediscovery of “the child …

In this elaborate agitprop theatrical collaboration, the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the “war on terror” are exposed as the propaganda vehicles for the neo-colonialism of the West that they are. “Ali Hakim” and “Ali Ababwa,” refugees from the imaginary country “Agraba,” attempt to seduce their audience i …

Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress

Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough)

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he …

Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's new selection of Canada's finest young poets.

Nine years ago the first volume of Breathing Fire was published to rave reviews, introducing 31 of Canada's finest new poets to a wide and appreciative audience of readers. The anthology has since gone into several printings and become a basic text in …

In 1949, the forest magnate, H.R. MacMillan, opened an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled "Design for Living," a show which brought together design and artistic communities to create four imaginary households for postwar Vancouverites. It also heralded an unprecedented level of cooperation between the province's industry and its artis …

When the Westray mine exploded, the human tragedy and suffering that resulted were chilling proof that the age-old price paid for coal is human blood. After the dead were laid to rest, the bureaucratic back-stabbing and corporate refusal of responsibility were all too familiar to followers of the history of mining and labour.

Andrew and Pam have a y …

Reckless women inhabit the spaces of these poems: women who dare to travel without maps or even "a single sign," women who dare the seduction of cliff edge leaps into deadly waters, women who dare the midnight garden to ensure their crop. When Cecelia Frey considers the pain recklessness causes to others, she returns to the source that impels a rec …

Dragging Newfoundland “kicking and screaming into the 20th century” (a quote attributed to Joey Smallwood), resettlement was a carrot-and-stick approach to depopulating the province’s fishing outports. Communities were encouraged to abandon themselves in exchange for financial aid and the promise of better services in centralized “growth” …

Viral Suite explores our relationship with self, other, environment, space, and time. The sensual and the cerebral. How the we/here/now is evolving and mutating with each downloaded packet.

Praise for Viral Suite:

"The poems in Viral Suite are exuberant in their exploration of the body as 'a vast zone of sensation,' including a palpable face-to-face …

In his debut poetry collection, A.J. Levin presents a world in which the past overlays our modern existence, where classical allusions and philosophical observation are married to slapstick humour and carnival: Plato is a blues singer, Tantalus is a prospector in BC, and Descartes wanders around a Montreal amusement park. Monks' Fruit is above all …

Mambo Italiano achieves its overwhelming power through a perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama. Angelo, at the prompting of his equally repressed sister Anna, has told his very traditionally Italian immigrant parents, Maria and Gino, that he is gay. Hurt, betrayed and mortified by Angelo’s coming out, his lover Nino is not unpre …

Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. One of Lucia Frangione’s blasphemy plays,’ it inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In an erotic world where men are traditionally cast …

Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2005)

Honeymoon in Berlin examines the extremes of human desire, and investigates the human fascination with limits, the line between courage and fear, life and death.

Praise for Honeymoon in Berlin:

"A book of bold contrasts, Honeymoon in Berlin is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, alluring and repulsive. It's an achi …

Bringing Canadian poetry back to the achingly honest tradition of John Newlove and Bronwen Wallace, Chris Banks eschews linguistic showmanship, sketching in deft strokes the foreignness of things familiar.

Framed within the rural landscape of southwestern Ontario and Al Purdy's "country north of Belleville," Banks turns his pen to modern life and th …

Spirit of Powwow has evolved as we have talked with dancers and drummers until we feel we now have a powwow book that goes beyond the usual mere description of regalia and dances. The photography and text cover every component of the powwow, not just the dance competition. The Nahanee family and their friends make this book a very personal experien …

Rose is the eagerly awaited third installment in Tomson Highway’s “rez” cycle—a large-cast musical set on the Wasaychigan Hill Reserve in 1992, reintroducing many of the characters from the first two plays, The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.

The play features, as the title suggests, Roses. One Rose has recently become c …

One of the greatest mad, sad literary love affairs of the twentieth century was that between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In her collection of poems, Hurdle adapts her own research on their lives to explore the love and loss in this relationship of poetic collaboration and rivalry, which lasts, in Hurdle's recreation, even after Plath's suici …

Heather Haley's poetry is tough, irreverent, and in-your-face. She asks all the questions that a nice girl's not supposed to ask. Down back roads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers - and potential violence - hover like heat on the horizon. Whether they're …

In Bordertown Café, seventeen-year-old Jimmy faces the archetypal Canadian dilemma: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south (young man) to the Land of Opportunity. Jimmy’s dad is the powerfully encoded Western hero of American popular myth – the cowboy as trucker, living his freedom and riding the roads of Wyoming. He offe …

Cruise Control knows no borders, hurtling down BC's Coquihalla Highway, sightseeing in Regina, tearing through Windsor, "plunging beneath the Earth" in Chicago, visiting some eccentric characters in Germany and even exploring the "non-presence (i.e. lostness)" of Atlantis.

Ken Howe's reckless intellect and insatiable curiosity for everything -- Cana …

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 …

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 …

"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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

What happens when the “other woman” becomes your roommate? What happens when she starts to confide in you about her affair?

From the playwright of “A Common Man’s Guide to Loving Women,” comes a claustrophobic drama, set in the Black community of Toronto’s Bloor and Bathurst neighbourhood, which challenges the distance between deception …

It's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before, she had vacationed with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For herself and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery.

Both of the girls fall in love with two of the local boys. Daisy …

By the time he was writing Gossip in 1977, George Walker had already begun to shift his settings from, on the one hand, North America’s colonial roots in Europe, and on the other, its fascination with other, exotically foreign locales. Yet, even in The Power Plays, Walker is still exploring the ironic and dramatic possibilities of the stereotypes …

Where is the East End? It’s where the sun comes up and where you bury the dead. It’s where George Walker set six of his plays. It’s the East End of Toronto; the Lower East Side of New York; down by the East River; East L.A.; East Vancouver. It’s where you get down to the basics of beginnings and endings, and how you get from each of those e …

The Recovery of the Public World is a collection of texts and talks which address the work of poet Robin Blaser and the field inhabited by his work. It is a field in which the private and the public are grounded in a poetic thinking that operates within the problematics of companionship and community. The companions are “you, dear reader,” the …

ABC of Reading TRG examines the writings of Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, with a special focus on their collaborative work as the Toronto Research Group (TRG). The book expands what little criticism there is on the Group’s collaborations by exploring their engagements with literary theory, by differentiating between each writer’s personal conc …

scars on th seehors is bill bissett’s latest report from and to the image nation, in which his metric performs a kind of absence of narrative intent that lets everyone and everything speak for itself:

eye dont have 2 invent th world ium / alredee in it

There is much evidence of wounding here, of things gone completely raging:

whats th mattr / why yu …

Betty Goodwin is one of Canada's most accomplished and influential artists, and her powerful works about death, loss and the traces of life have influenced a generation of Canadian artists. "Her work is not a catalogue of distress," Anne Michaels writes, but "a record of hope in its most distilled form, potent and fiercely earned." To celebrate a c …

Above all
a poem records speech:
the way it was said
between people animals birds
a poem is an archive for our times
-Dorothy Livesay, "Anything Goes"
Dorothy Livesay, who died in 1996, is considered a pioneer of Canadian poetry; her work is infused with an extraordinary grace and power, and shaped by a prescient feminist sensibility which le …

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 …

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 …

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 …

"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 by …