The Renter
"Absolutely brilliant!" — Guy Maddin
The sentimental and financial education of a young Jewish Winnipegger in and around 1968.
1968. Winnipeg Beach. Summer. Poor Jewish boy meets rich Jewish girl. The sun is high, libidos soar, even the high is high. And as the poor boy tries to marry up, the Jacob-Rachel myth gives way to an Icarian leap.
The stil …
Writing and Reading
In the course of a writing life that has spanned more than five decades and encompasses almost eighty books of fiction, poetry, history, and criticism he's written and another thirty that he's played an editorial role in, George Bowering has learned a thing or two about the craft.
Writing and Reading features thirty recent essays, ranging from a sin …
Shot Rock
When the smell of October's raked leaves gives way to that of morning frost, a mature Winnipeg man's fancy turns to thoughts of curling.
But this fall Blackie Timmerman has been hogging stones off the ice. His wife of twenty years Deirdre has left him; his precocious son Tino has moved out of the house and into political radicality, mentored by a r …
I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be
"Hailed by the Call as I stepped across
Venables at Clark following a transverse line
like all the other commodities circulating aimlessly
I drifted along corrugated steel walls
sun burning every body every building every form
cash exploding from crowns of distant towers
occupied by the rentiers in this haemopolis of
arteries and conduits branchi …
9x11
‘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 …
if wants to be the same as is
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 …
Some End / West Broadway
A masterpiece of late style and friendship, this volume combines back to back two powerful new works by old masters, George Bowering and George Stanley.
Stanley's West Broadway is a long poem, composed over the past decade, following on Stanley's other long city poems, "San Francisco's Gone," "Terrace Landscapes," and Vancouver: A Poem. Like those …
Anarchy Explained to My Father
Translated from the French by John Gilmore.
Anarchy Explained to My Father (first published by Lux Éditeur in 2014 as L'anarchie expliquée à mon père) is a provocative and accessible discussion of the revolutionary mode of thought that rejects all forms of domination and seeks, in the words of Louise Michel, "order through harmony." Francis Dupu …
Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots
Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots is the story of a man who had no obituary and no funeral and who would have left no trace if it weren't for the woman he'd called Toots, who took everything she remembered of him and — for seven days — wrote it down.
Erín Moure, a poet who once lived in Vancouver, begins this "work of the imagination" ("m …
The Receiver
The Receiver is Sharon Thesen's thirteenth book, and the first from the three-time Governor-General's Award finalist since Oyama Pink Shale, six years ago.
More formally various than Thesen's recent books, The Receiver includes the short lyrics documenting the poet's witnessing that readers of her work will recognize, as well as various kinds of fou …
Culture Gap
The time is the early 1980s. Judith Plant and her new partner, Kip, are ready for a change. Inspired by the charismatic Fred Brown, their communications professor at Simon Fraser University, they join a commune in a remote valley near the Yalakom River, deep in BC's Coast Mountains. Culture Gap: Towards a New World in the Yalakom Valley tells the s …
Maria Mahoi of the Islands
Since its original publication in 2004, Maria Mahoi of the Islands has become a classic in its field, and an important document on the history of Indigenous Hawaiians known as Kanakas, who had an early presence across the Pacific Northwest and are now part of the broader Hawaiian diaspora across North America. Born in the mid-1850s on Vancouver Isl …
A Series of Dogs
John Armstrong uses his wry wit and vivid prose to evoke a life immeasurably enriched by one best friend after another. He tells boyhood tales of romping along the railroad tracks with Spooky the mutt, touching accounts of Sluggo the Rottweiler befriending sex workers, howl-inducing memories of laying a treasured friend to rest during a rain-and be …
A perimeter
A new child, a new house, a new neighbourhood: rob mclennan takes the measure of his environment in A perimeter, a collection of shorter and longer pieces from 2010 to 2014. The birth of a child, and the moves that follow in its wake, brings about a defamiliarization of the world, and the poems in A perimeter reflect this newly enhanced awareness. …
Posh Lust
Posh Lust is about poetry that is everywhere findable, provided the bits of "everywhere" are words and provided this life is lettered. People study poetry and some read it. Poetry is a pinnacle art — as in "a small ornamental turret" — even when it's a drunk imaginary communist, or just a drunk imaginary. Kitsch makes the serious art of poetry …
Seize the Time
A photo portrait of Vancouver's extended "summer of love," Vladimir Keremidschieff's Seize the Time captures an era of profound change in Lotusland. Vlad's infatuation with photography began in 1967 when a friend introduced him to the craft and then left town, taking his 35mm Pentax camera with him — Vlad just had to get one of his own. His bloss …
Svend Robinson: A Life in Politics
Finalist, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Few politicians have enraged opponents, frustrated colleagues and polarized Canadians like Svend Robinson — but few embraced the causes he did. Over his twenty-five years as a New Democrat MP, Robinson was imprisoned for blocking loggers from clear-cutting in Clayoquot Sound, assaulted by police while …
Mac-Pap
Ron Liversedge could hardly wait for the call from the International Brigades. A veteran of the Great War, Canada's Great Depression, and scores of battles for social justice, he wanted to get to Spain to fight against Franco's attack on the young Spanish republic. It was the spring of 1937; Liversedge was nearly 40. The call came on May Day. Liver …
Rebel Life
Extensively revised throughout and including a chapter of new material, Rebel Life chronicles the life of labour organizer, revolutionary, anarchist and labour spy Robert Gosden. Mark Leier's revisions incorporate new information about Gosden's career that has come to light since the first edition was published in 1999. Canada's west coast was rife …
After Desire
"Don't gaze into the abyss," George Stanley states in his new book. "Gaze out." And this is what the reader receives from Stanley's eighth book, After Desire: the observations of a poet, and a consciousness, as they arrive together at old age. Not what the poet is thinking — although we get to watch him thinking too — but what he sees and notic …
Voyage Through the Past Century
Finalist, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Though unaffiliated with any institute of higher learning, Rolf Knight has established himself as a writer of significance, and has produced some of the most influential works of history of British Columbia. A Very Ordinary Life, exploring his mother's life as a working-class immigrant to Vancouver, esta …
Gardens Aflame
Accustomed to the dark, dripping stands of Douglas-fir, spruce and hemlock that blanketed the Hudson's Bay Company outposts on the remote western coast of the "new World," the first Europeans were surely startled to see the wide-open landscapes of the Garry oak meadows they encountered on Southern Vancouver Island — landscapes that might have rem …
Sturgeon Reach
Sturgeon Reach is the name some have given to a stretch of the Fraser River between Hope and Pitt Meadows, where its flow slows, and it deposits the gravel it's been carrying from the province's interior. Its story is one of rocks and stones, from its geological origins, from the mythic beginnings of human settlement, and from the arrival of Simon …
Words, Words, Words
Words, Words, Words is a wide-ranging collection of literary essays that astonish the reader with their candor, insight, and generosity. Many of them reveal the absurdity that so often underlies our most passionate thoughts, our most cherished moments, even our most disturbing fears and recognitions. They echo everywhere with a kind of cosmic laugh …
The Shiva
Failures in business and marriage tip poor Mooney into a spell in a psychiatric ward. But he has the great fortune of befriending an Indian seer, one of his pals from the casino where Mooney hangs out, who promises to put Mooney's life back together. Dennis is no ordinary Indian seer. For one thing, he's a rez Indian, from right around Winnipeg, ju …
Along the No. 20 Line
In Along the No. 20 Line, Rolf Knight takes the reader on a tour through working-class East Vancouver of a century ago. Knight's "through-line" is literally a line: the old No. 20 streetcar route that ran between downtown Vancouver and the present-day neighbourhood of the Pacific National Exhibition. From 1892 to 1949, when it was shut down and rep …
Stranger on a Strange Island
In Vancouver, $600 a month gets you half a bachelor suite. On Mayne Island, it gets you a three-bedroom house overlooking the waters of Active Pass, with varied wildlife and lush trees as neighbours. With that in mind, Grant Buday trades in the high-powered city life in Vancouver for the small town eccentricities of Mayne Island. The scenery, howev …
Buffet World
Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's collection of poems about food, trade and life under late-late-night-snack capitalism. Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture, and the politics of language, Mancini organises his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors of con …
City of Love and Revolution
City of Love and Revolution takes readers back to Vancouver in the sixties, the decade when everything changed for the Baby Boomer generation. Dozens of rarely seen photos accompany Lawrence Aronsen's account of the tumultuous decade, bringing to life the sights, the sounds, and the passions of the era of psychedelia and free love, when for a brief …
Every Day in the Morning (slow)
Every Day in the Morning (slow) is a work that looks and reads like no other. Sam, a composer, reflects on his floundering career, life with his lover, and tensions with his father. Some thoughts, like facial hair and breakfast, are mundane; others, like love, money and war, are often overwhelming. At turns laughable and vain, at others, tender and …
Robin Blaser
Divided into two parts, Robin Blaser consists of two essays by people who knew Blaser intimately, as a life-long friend, a mentor, and intellectual influence. In part one, award-winning author Stan Persky offers a cohesive guide to reading Robin Blaser's poetry and the ways in which Blaser's work was "an attempted rescue or defense of poetry". In p …
The Briss
Sammy and Anna Ostrove raised a typical Jewish family in Winnipeg: Marilyn, the older daughter who is a successful lawyer and Teddy, a son who was to be a doctor. Life, of course, had other plans. Marilyn just ended an affair that should have been kept a secret. Teddy, who dropped out of medical school, went on a ten-day Birthright Israel tour whe …
More House
"From the opening 'cast list' that includes such characters as 'Grandad' played by 'My mother's father,' to a narrator who admits, 'Actually, this is not even a story,' because, as s/he/it later declares, 'There is always more than one possible life,' this book keeps you guessing, laughing and dropping your jaw at the weird insights and awesomely d …
Shoot!
With an Introduction by Sherrill Grace.
Cowboys and Indians, sometimes one and the same, occupy the rugged landscape of the late nineteenth-century British Columbia interior in George Bowering's Shoot! Meet the McLean Gang — brothers Allan, Charlie, and Archie — and their sidekick Alex Hare. Halfbreeds who grew up bitter outcasts, rejected by bo …
Vancouver: A Poem
The Lions bare of snow, crowded express buses, a giant red turning letter W. Vancouver: A Poem is George Stanley's vision of the city where he lives, though he does not call it his own. Vancouver, the city, becomes Stanley's palimpsest: an overwritten manuscript on which the words of others are still faintly visible. Here the Food Floor's canned ex …
Wages
John Armstrong has worked as a paperboy, a caddy, and a Bible camp counsellor; as a janitor at the Regal Theatre, a shipper of video porn, and a real live punk rock star. As if those jobs weren't punishment enough, at the tender age of thirty he entered the trenches of journalism. Armstrong's first job — a slave-labour gig shovelling rabbit shit …
Clam Gardens
For many years, archaeologists were unaware of the ancient clam terraces at Waiatt Bay, on Quadra Island. Author Judith Williams knew no differently until she was advised of their existence by a Klahoose elder named Elizabeth Harry (Keekus). By liaising with other observers of clam gardens in the Broughton Archipelago and conducting her own survey …
