The Baby Blues is Drew Hayden Taylor’s highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of “fancy dancers” of every stripe on the powwow trail. In juxtaposing three generations of careless wandering hedonists, progenitors of a string of offspring from their six-night stands, with their erstwhile naïv …

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 …

Just as for Dante, for whom the image of the beloved gave entrance to a complete imagination of the world, an “imago mundi,” the betrayal of a beloved can also shatter the poet’s vision, no matter how elaborately conceived. Such a betrayal can turn the world upside down, where what was loved is now hated, what was benign becomes threatening, …

Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism: Intertextual Collaboration and Resistance investigates the troubling relationship between narrative meaning and representations of violence within Timothy Findley’s novels, throughout which writing and reading literature are portrayed as dangerous and political acts.

Findley’s novels often expose th …

Fragments of a Farewell Letter Read by Geologists is a dramatized inquiry in which five geologists are interrogated about the death of one of their colleagues in the Mekong Delta, Cambodia.
It is a play about the beginnings and endings of all things. It is a ritualized drama in which meaning is stripped first from reason, then from authority, then …

The story of a woman (her name is never given), sent away from her family by her brother, the Bishop, after she is found exploring her sexuality at age seventeen. In a series of twenty-four “snapshots,” That Woman is a devastating Judeo-Christian allegory where voyeurism, fantasy, masturbation, seduction, violence and loss are revealed in fugue …

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 …

Anthropologists have traditionally studied Europe’s “others” and the marginalized and excluded within Europe’s and North America’s boundaries. This book turns the anthropologist’s spyglass in the opposite direction: on the law, the institution that quintessentially embodies and reproduces Western power.

The Pleasure of the Crown offers 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 …

March, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Édouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay’s Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana—The Fat Woman who is here finally named—is gravely ill and her days a …

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 …

Guillermo Verdecchia is primarily known for his award-winning plays; Citizen Suárez is his first book of short stories, and it is a remarkable debut.
These stories take on the quintessential issues forced upon a generation betrayed by their citizenship—a betrayal the more profound because it subsists primarily in the global death of the nation-s …

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 …

Otto Landauer was a modest man. He was proud of Vancouver, felt strongly that his photographs recorded the continuum of the history of the city and he had an archivist’s determination that the photos he produced with such loving care, like those of his predecessor, Leonard Frank, should be preserved for posterity. But it never would have occurred …

Specially edited, updated, revised and rewritten by the author, and for the first time complete in one volume, Great Lakes Suite includes A Trip Around Lake Ontario, first published in 1988, as well as A Trip Around Lake Erie and A Trip Around Lake Huron, both of which were first published in 1980. These books have come alive in a remarkable way an …

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 …

From Mary Meigs, the celebrated author of In the Company of Strangers, comes an autobiographical novel, The Time Being. An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia. With a lifetime of relationships already behind them, the two women approach each other cautiously, each filled with t …

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 …

Bambi and Me consists of 12 autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the young life of Michel Tremblay, one of their biggest fans. Among others, he talks about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, Orphée and the Night Visitors and about how each led to his disco …

’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 …

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 …

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.
American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical …

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 …

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 …

A vivid, contemporary travelogue, Salonica Terminus explores a current landscape thronged with figures bent beneath the weight of history. It peers beneath the rotting logs of ideology, and prods the decomposing hulks of historical corpses that litter this region of dark mountains and misty valleys. Through its pages lurch extremists, confidence me …

This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.

Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” an …

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 …

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 …

Edmond Rostand’s beloved classic, Cyrano de Bergerac, is an epic and heroic tale that has fascinated and enchanted generations. Not since 1938 has there been a more readable or stageable prose translation of this classic favourite. With a rich tapestry of gallant soldiers, starving poets, musketeers, marquises and bluestockings, Cyrano de Berger …

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 …

On January 23, 1995, British Columbia’s then premier announced that he was cancelling Alcan’s Kemano Completion Project. But is such a simple political announcement all it will take to cancel this $1.4 billion hydro megaproject? Many tough questions remain: about who will pay for the cost of cancelling this megaproject, already half-completed a …