A stunning collection from Governor General’s Award winner Roy Miki, Flow presents all of this critically acclaimed writer’s poetry – from his collections Saving Face, Random Access File, Surrender, There, and Mannequin Rising – as well as a substantial chapter of new, previously unpublished works. Including a foreword by poet and critic Lo …

The years when John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives were in office were among the most tumultuous in Canadian history. Coming to power on a surge of optimistic nationalism in 1957, the “Rogue Tory” had stirred up more controversy than any previous prime minister by the time he was defeated in 1963. This was nowhere more apparent than …

From the award-winning Canadian playwright, performer, and radio broadcaster Tetsuro Shigematsu comes 1 Hour Photo, the follow-up to his acclaimed one-man play Empire of the Son, which was nominated for six Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. Shigematsu’s outstanding new play, another multifaceted portrayal of a singular figure, tells the story of …

Nan’s family is home for Thanksgiving, but some unsolicited truths are about to be dropped at the dinner table. Old wounds and new realities collide, and sibling rivalry is stoked, but the enduring spirit that guides this family charges on, ever fierce. Thanks for Giving offers plenty to chew on. This intimate and restorative new play from Govern …

A literary journey around Calgary as seen through the eyes of writers, from its frontier beginnings to today’s contemporary city.

Shaun Hunter tours readers and urban explorers through a place that has captivated writers since 1792. She has selected excerpts from over 150 novels, stories, poems and essays that sing the city’s human and natural t …

Comprised of two lines of poetic text flowing along a 114-foot-long map of the Columbia River, this powerful image-poem by acclaimed poets Fred Wah and Rita Wong presents language yearning to understand the consequences of our hydroelectric manipulation of one of North America’s largest river systems.

beholden: a poem as long as the river stems f …

Raymond Souster Award nominee. Finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima. This long-poem memoir tracks the author's experiences …

In 2002, Nightwood published Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation, a successful first-of-its-kind collection of interviews with literary luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Avison, Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier and P.K. Page, conducted by “the younger generation” of poets of the day. Sixteen years late …

On the Count of None is the first full-length poetry collection by Kingston poet Allison Chisholm. The surprising poems in this audacious debut explore the relationship between the serious and the absurd, the formal and the illogical, whimsy and threat, and meaning and tone. Chisholm’s poems, whose content is often inspired by guidebooks, podcasts …

This biography of George Bowering, first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, reveals the intimate, intellectual, and artistic life of one of Canada’s most prolific authors, offering an inside look at the people and events at the centre of the country’s literary and artistic avant-garde from the 1960s to the present.

A distinguished novelist, p …

In this superb new collection of poetry, Antony Di Nardo explores the interplay between a disintegrating natural world and the human observer, a relationship characterized by both beauty and terror. “A talking tree, a talking tree / in the language of dead leaves” ends a poem in the award-winning suite, “May June July,” where cancer cells a …

Acclaimed for his superior craftsmanship (“half the meaning of a lyric poem is in the music”) and his summoning of sentiment without sentimentality, John Donlan in his sixth collection confronts our inevitable sense of loss and mourning as we live through the sixth extinction of the natural world. Yet always his work reveals the comfort and cou …

A breathtaking art book profiling twenty-six wood carvers, sculptors, and artisans who draw inspiration from the natural beauty of the Salish Sea.

It could be a pile of driftwood on a rock-strewn beach resembling the bleached bones of some ancient creature. It could be the old growth of the lush coastal rain forests, or the winds that blow across th …

Shatter the Glass, Shards of Flame contains a wide array of narrative and confession-lyric poems written over the last fifteen years, examining the various joys and tragedies, the losses and redemptions, of the poet's life. These poems span a diverse range of Moore's experience, from his time in the Canadian military and on humanitarian work projec …

Take a delightful journey through BC's extraordinary bounty and explore the secrets of locally grown fruits and vegetables. In Jane Reid's new book, FRESHLY PICKED, foodies, locavores and gardeners will discover fascinating information about the plentiful harvests that BC farmers produce every year. In this beautiful colour edition, Reid shares val …

“... without a doubt the greatest poet English Canada has ever produced.”

—Dennis Lee

“A hundred years from now, one of the few Canadian poets whose work will still be read will be Al Purdy.”

—Maclean’s

Al Purdy (1918–2000), known as Canada’s unofficial poet laureate, wrote poetry that anyone could read. Having come from working-class …

The Mystery Play is a detective story, a ghost story, and a memory play: a theatrical blending of Wit and The Woman In Black. Though fully self-contained, The Mystery Play is also the second in a trilogy about crime-solving Sister Vivian Salter, a flinty, fifty-ish Catholic nun forced into the role of amateur sleuth. Each story in her trilogy was p …

How might poetic practices undermine racist ideologies and colonialism, engendering ecological attentiveness, and anomalous and compassionate communities? Christine Stewart’s Treaty 6 Deixis takes up these timely and pressing questions as it investigates what it means to be a non-Indigenous inhabitant of Canada’s Treaty 6 territory, “in this …

‘A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.’

How you view 21st century life depends largely on the view from your place, which depends on where you can afford to live. In this suite of texts and poems written over twent …

What Your Hands Have Done looks at how life spent in a close-knit fishing family in rural Prince Edward Island marks a person. The book is rooted in PEI but moves from there to Toronto where the malaise of life proves to be unbound to the sameness of small-town days spent hauling gear on the Atlantic or toiling in rust-red potato fields.

Bailey exam …

The poems in The Broken Face explore a sacramental, imaginative vision within contexts of crime, perception, memory and love. In this collection, Russell Thornton returns to the vital themes of intimacy and family, loss, fear and hope, bringing to each poem the essential quality of a myth or incantation. Reverent and revealing, within those familia …

Rife with colloquialisms, irony and a healthy dose of sass, the poems collected in Bec and Call refuse to be silent or subtle; instead they delve into the explicit, the audacious, the boldly personal. Bec and Call subverts the notion of female sexuality as male appeasement, the French wordplay in the title using the meaning of “bec”—a kiss, m …

Combining visuals and text, this collection of poems travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities; social relationships; literature, cinema, and art; as well as dreams, as it moves between the page and the exhibition.

The Eyelash and the Monochrome asks: what happens when material becomes thought and thought becomes object …

Political Elites in Canada offers a timely look at Canadian political power brokers and how they are adapting to a fast-paced digital media environment. Elite power structures are changing worldwide, with traditional influencers losing authority over prevailing social, economic, and political structures. This volume explores the changing landscape …

Bill Graham – Canada’s minister of foreign affairs and minister of defence during the tumultuous years following 9/11 – takes us on a personal journey from his Vancouver childhood to important behind-the-scenes moments in recent global history. With candour and wit, he recounts meetings with world leaders, contextualizes important geopolitica …

The idea of political unity contains its own opposite, because a political community can never guarantee the equal status of all its members. The price of belonging is an entrenched social stratification within the political unit itself. This book explores how the desire for political unity generates a collective commitment to certain lived fiction …

Jim Wong-Chu is a legend in the Asian Canadian writing community. As founder of the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop (and its magazine Ricepaper), he constantly encouraged and inspired writers across the country to get their work published and acknowledged, from Paul Yee and Evelyn Lau to Madeleine Thien and Catherine Hernandez. When Jim passed awa …

An uproariously funny and sharply inquisitive new play from one of Canada’s leading Indigenous playwrights, Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion explores the possibility of reconciliation between Peoples and urgently questions past and contemporary forms of Canadian colonialism. Taylor’s twenty-seventh play, Sir John A’s charact …

In the thousand-channel universe, politicians must find innovative ways to reach citizens via television. Viewership for news and current affairs television programs has dropped dramatically. Meanwhile, the rise of programming that blends information with entertainment – infotainment – on French Canadian television has provided new opportunitie …

In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways. Her phrases, her metaphors and similes, slam up against each other like strangers on the street. Apologies, changes in direction, barometric pressure, objects ping and ricochet, but some residual thing clings after the …

BOLT, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over both familiar and unexplored landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from 20 years as a welder with the Boilermakers' Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, B …

Canadian members of Parliament (MPs) are often dismissed as “trained seals,” helpless to do anything other than take commands from party leaders. Representation in Action challenges this view of MPs and shows that the ways they represent their constituents are as diverse as Canada itself. Royce Koop, Heather Bastedo, and Kelly Blidook examine t …

Drawn from 22 books of poetry published by David Bromige in his lifetime, if wants to be the same as is chronicles the career of one of contemporary poetry's most distinctive writers. Born in London, England, in 1933, raised in Canada, and a resident for most of his adult life of California, David Bromige is just as difficult to pin down in terms o …

In her uncompromising follow-up to 2012's Sympathy Loophole, Jaime Forsythe offers a breathless cascade of evocative somethings: mysterious sounds, faint rumblings, biographies real and imagined, tabloid rumours, nagging memories, an animal stirring, a baby waking, a storm threatening, an escape hatch beckoning, and an inexplicable machine coughing …

Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. The acclaimed author of the memoir, In the Slender Margin, turns her focus back to poetry in this amazing and condensed work of prose poetry.

The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty co …

Finalist for a 2019 BC Book Prize

Finalist for a 2019 Victoria Book Prize

A handsome new retrospective on one of BC’s most beloved artists that unveils, for the first time, photographs, sketches, and ephemera from the artist’s estate.

The reputation of E. J. Hughes in British Columbia is second only to that of Emily Carr. His paintings, collected …

Set in 1920s Hong Kong, Nine Dragons is a hard-boiled detective fiction with a twist: an inquisition into colonialism, racism, assimilation, and the clash of cultures. It’s the classic mystery/detective genre overlaid with the topical issue of identity – a struggle that any person of colour faces in any society that privileges whiteness.
It st …

The two one-act plays in Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever are set in a small northern B.C. mill town in the 1960s. They portray identical characters and action from entirely different gender and cultural perspectives. In many ways, the two separate works are inter-related coming-of-age stories, with transformation as a key theme.

The ce …

Among the first by a writer with Down syndrome, these two plays demonstrate an ability to riff and shift perspective, with disarming, hilarious, and occasionally heart-stopping results. Based on the iconic stories of King Arthur and Peter Pan, they are modern-day mash-ups that meld the fictional, the meta-fictional, and the real in ways that are c …

Passageways is a major collection of Philip Resnick’s poetry, spanning over 40 years. A number of the poems in the first section of the book, “Of the Greeks and Hebrews,” were in earlier collections, which have long been out of print. The other four sections of the book tackle a wide variety of topics. “Faraway Shores” evokes various plac …

Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces – concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms – that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection.
The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is a p …

Our Familiar Hunger is a book about the strength, will, struggle and fortitude of generations of women and how those relationships and knowledges interact, inform, transform and burden. These poems are memories of reclaimed history and attempts at starting over in a new place. They are the fractured reality of trickle-down inheritance, studies of t …

Little Wild explores the performance of masculinity in contemporary Canada, with a focus on how toxic masculinity relates to mental health, aggression, substance abuse and crises of identity. Through the reimagining of family histories and personal experiences, the poems in this collection exact a representation of a young man in conflict with outd …

After the Hatching Oven explores chickens: their evolution as a domesticated species; their place in history, pop culture and industrial agriculture; their exploitation and their liberation. Alexander takes us deep into the world of this common species, examining every conceivable angle: chicken politics, antics, pretenses and pleasures. These poem …

Edward Byrne’s Duets consists of interpretative translations of sonnets by Louise Labé, who lived and wrote in sixteenth-century Lyon, and those by thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti.
In the case of Labé, the twenty-four sonnets – twenty-three in French, one in Italian – constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the duration …

When Canada committed forces to the military mission in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, little did Canadians foresee that they would be involved in a war-riven country for over a decade. The Politics of War explores how and why Canada’s Afghanistan mission became so politicized. Through analysis of the public record and interviews with offi …