O Canada Crosswords Book 22
Over 250,000 O Canada Crosswords books sold in twenty years!
O Canada Crosswords rides again with the twenty-second instalment of this popular series, which features large-sized puzzles split between Canadian and other themes. With over 20 per cent of the clues focusing on Canadiana, you’ll be chomping at the bit as author Gwen Sjogren harnesses h …
The Whole Singing Ocean
Part long poem, part investigation, this true story begins with a whale encounter and then dives into the affair of the École en bateau, a French countercultural school aboard a boat. The École was based on the ideals of ’68, but also twisted ideas about child psychology, Foucault’s philosophy and an abolition of the separation between adults …
The East Side of It All
The East Side of It All, written from the perspective of a drug user and single-room occupant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, explores the ongoing process of healing through reconnection with family, the natural world and traditional Indigenous (Kwantlen) storytelling. Dandurand’s voice is lyrical yet intimate, obscured yet sitting with you a …
O Canada Crosswords Book 21
Nightwood Editions is proud to present its annual O Canada Crosswords release with Gwen Sjogren’s tenth book in the series, which features 100 puzzles and over 12,600 clues. If you’re counting, 23.5 percent of the clues focus on Canadian references, and you can depend 100 percent on Sjogren’s usual mix of witty wordplay and unique themes. Her …
it was never going to be okay
it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to ter …
The Sasquatch, the Fire and the Cedar Baskets
“Deep in the thickest part of a cedar forest there lived a young Sasquatch. He was over nine feet tall and his feet were about size twenty. He had long brown hair that covered all of his body. His hands were so big and his arms so long he could wrap them around the biggest of the cedar trees. He had been born here many years ago and he did not kn …
Body Count
In this vital début, Kyla Jamieson sifts through the raw material of her life before and after a disabling concussion in search of new understandings of self and worth. Energized by the tensions between embodiment and dissociation, Body Count flickers between Vancouver and New York, passing through dreamscapes and pain states. Both earnest and irr …
In the Beggarly Style of Imitation
Born on the twin backs of torpidity and obsession, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation is a voyage into the mind of one of the Canadian literary underground’s most unruly writers. Equal parts tribute to the historical genesis of the novel and the well-trodden subject of love, the exercises of imitation contained in this collection offer a brief su …
Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation
Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation explores the experience and greater social implications of mental illness, specifically OCD and Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder. It asks the questions: How does anxiety inform both how we act and how we interpret those actions afterwards? How does the fear of retribution from one’s own mind lead t …
Pluviophile
Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. Its poems continually revitalize form, imagery and sonancy to reconsider the ways we value language, beauty and body. The collection houses sonnets and other shorter poems between larger, more meditative runes. One of these longer poe …
Un-Canadian
Un-Canadian: Islamophobia in the True North is a provocative warning to Canadians that the values they cherish are being eroded through a pattern of political, legal and social prejudice directed towards Muslims in Canada since September 11, 2001. Featuring never-before-published interviews with key politicians and journalists, influential Muslim l …
Belated Bris of the Brainsick
Belated Bris of the Brainsick traces 1) a belated and in some ways violent revelation about one’s ancestry and one’s past, 2) a resultant mental breakdown and 3) the pursuit of a new life with someone else who lives with mental illness. These events and the styles in which they are told are inflected by queer, transgender and disabled perspecti …
Renaissance Normcore
Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tra …
O Canada Crosswords, Book 20
O Canada Crosswords just keeps on giving to thousands of solvers who like their crosswords Canadian. Nightwood Editions is proud to celebrate O Canada Crosswords’s milestone twentieth anniversary with Gwen Sjogren’s ninth book in the series, which features one hundred larger-sized grids and over 2,600 Canadian clues.
With themes that touch on ar …
Let ’Em Howl
Patricia Sorbara has been a political operative for more than forty years—a mainstay in the background of both federal and provincial politics in Ontario, dedicating her career to the Liberal Party. She’s worked for and with Liberal Opposition Leaders, Premiers, Members of Parliament, Members of Provincial Parliament and more candidates than an …
Outside, America
Outside, America criss-crosses the Canadian–American border to understand dilemmas that occur across a variety of scales, from global spheres to the most intimate domestic spaces. Sarah de Leeuw digs through grief, loss, aging, technological frustration, environmental degradation, nationalism and confusion to grasp the state of the world. These p …
Near Miss
Near Miss considers the relationship between close calls and the tenuous conditions of contemporary life. From actual cataclysms such as meteor collisions and volcanic eruptions to everyday failures and accidents, these inventive poems collide with the perpetual unease created by life’s unpredictability while contemplating mortality, fragility, g …
Fresh Pack of Smokes
“This night in Oppenheimer Park Dan asked me to shit-kick this chick in the face as she owed money and I said no because I didn’t know who she was and I wasn’t about to play with fire so he sat on the bench then stood up and did a flying kick twice to her chin and she convulsed and passed out he said he didn’t want to spill blood because s …
What the Poets Are Doing
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 …
Bec and Call
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 …
What Your Hands Have Done
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 …
O Canada Crosswords Book 19
Featuring 2,600-plus Canadian clues—that’s over 20 per cent of the total—the nineteenth instalment of this popular series offers a motherlode of national content, puns and fun. As always, author Gwen Sjogren digs deep into the Canadian landscape with geography themes like “Water Marks,” “Destination: Fredericton” and “Go West, Young …
Army of the Brave and Accidental
A genre-bending retelling of The Odyssey, Army of the Brave and Accidental is a modern fable: a story about relationships, parenthood, and trying to have an impact on the world told from the shifting perspectives of ten characters. A hundred years after James Joyce stitched together a version of the epic tale, Canadian writer and essayist Alex Boyd …
After the Hatching Oven
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 …
Little Wild
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 …
Our Familiar Hunger
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 …
Cruise Missile Liberals
WARNING: Cruise Missile Liberals contains few proper poems. That is, poems with proper manners, proper etiquette, or proper service to our national narratives. Poems that reassure the powerful.Poems that lie inert—with the smell of the museums. Poems that are, in a word, nice.
Instead, Spencer Gordon's debut smoulders with explosive contradicti …
Landfall
In Landfall, Governor General's Award-nominated poet Joe Denham revisits the plaguing environmental issues in the poetic journey he began ten years ago with his second collection, Windstorm. Writing in long elegy form, using a voice harnessed by concern, pathos, anger and empathy, Denham's fourth collection is the result of age, time and love, draw …
The Panic Room
Preoccupied with the complexities of identity and selfhood, memory, embodiment, loss, and family, Rebecca Păpucaru carefully examines details that make up one’s lived experience.
“Lobster Dinner” describes a happy childhood memory of eating an entire lobster with an admiring father as her audience. “Take It or Leave It” is the casual and …
Bad Ideas
Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the li …
Next Door to the Butcher Shop
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Rodney DeCroo's second poetry collection, Next Door to the Butcher Shop, explores the permeability of memory and uncovers heart-wrenching beauty from shadowy grit.
How quickly age
descends on us. Our memories are maps
to places that don't exist. I was an emperor
on a green lawn wearing a white sheet
and a paper crown. Th …
then/again
Michelle Elrick's then/again is a poetic account of finding home, and the meanings and moments that the concept of home can come to embody. The collection tracks the poet through a landscape of intimate places--an ancestral home in Scotland, a mother's birthplace in Salzburg, a childhood home on the West Coast--as well as the memory-warped terrain …
O Canada Crosswords Book 17
Puns, fun and Canadiana-they're all standing on guard for solvers in O Canada Crosswords 17. These ninety-five new crosswords provide a playful mix of sixty-five Canadian- and other-themed puzzles in larger grids, plus thirty non-themed Canada Cornucopia crosswords.
For anyone passionate about puzzles, author Gwen Sjogren's books are a go-to sourc …
Witness, I Am
Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada's most recognized poets. The first part of the book, "Dangerous Sound," contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. "Muskrat Woman," the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that c …
Digsite
Digsite draws on Nicholson's experience working in the Alberta oil sands and arboreal forest, taking an archaeological lens to its subject, and in this way, reimagines tens of thousands of years of human existence. These poems grow from a schism between the current place of living and the ones in which we are pulled back to, in particular, the plac …
The Duende of Tetherball
The Duende of Tetherball fearlessly ransacks the scrutinizing role of the past on the present; the interactions and accountabilities of ourselves and other species; the challenges and pleasures of getting older and forever striving to balance our most cherished and often incomprehensible relationships both with the world and each other.
Bowling st …
If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You
If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You is a collection that travels through both time and place, liminally occupying the chasm between Canadiana and Americana mythologies. These poems dwell in surreal pockets of the everyday warped landscapes of modern cities and flood into the murky basin of the intimate.
Amidst the comings and goings, there's …
Bearskin Diary
Raw and honest, Bearskin Diary gives voice to a generation of First Nations women who have always been silenced, at a time when movements like Idle No More call for a national inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Carol Daniels adds an important perspective to the Canadian literary landscape.
Taken from the arms of her mother as s …
Regeneration Machine
Twenty years ago Nevin Sample walked into a small bank in Deep Cove, robbed a teller at gunpoint and fled into the forest of Cates Park. After a lengthy pursuit, he hid behind a stump at the edge of a small clearing. The police called to him. He raised the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Nevin had a magnetism, an understated complexity: the …
O Canada Crosswords Book 16
This latest instalment of the bestselling O Canada Crosswords series serves up an appetizing palate of Canadiana, pop culture and whimsical wordplay. Canadian themes touch on hockey, music, industry and places, and author Gwen Sjogren brings to the table several of her trademark pun puzzles like Money Changes Everything and Fit for a Witch. Seven g …
Floating is Everything
Sheryda Warrener's second poetry collection touches on the illusion of remaining grounded and a sense of belonging. A retired cosmonaut returns from a record-breaking 438 days in space and attempts to re-immerse himself in the world. One speaker considers reinvention from the top floor of the World's Tallest building; another, our complicated futur …
Mayor Snow
"Thran's poems offer a meditation on the creativity involved in viewing, engaging with its productivity as well as its superfluity, spilling past the edges of what is represented to reflect the ways through which viewers come to imaginatively inhabit what is seen."
--Michael Borkent, The Journal of Canadian Poetry
Mayor Snow is about both the abdica …
O Canada Crosswords Book 15
With eighty-five all new crosswords, Gwen Sjogren's O Canada Crosswords Book 15 features plenty of puns and challenging wordplay for Canadian solvers from coast to coast. The specifically Canadian-themed crosswords cover writers, landmarks, music and cities, and include puzzles called Shining in Sochi, Leading Canadian Men, National Parks and Playi …
Cycling with the Dragon
Cycling with the Dragon is a personal investigation of family,love, culture, self, and the helpless feeling of "smallness." Elaine Woo's poems take the form of the words that they speak: she forms an "o" for the buoy that is a child's safety-raft (found in the solitude of a notebook and Harriet the Spy), and weaves a poem about fearing snakes and d …
The things I heard about you
Shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch award for innovative poetry, The things I heard about you is an exploration of precision and the unspoken, executing a process whereby vignettes and scenes break apart into fragments, rumours or suggestions of the original story. When stories decompose or self-destruct, the results vary, producing an effect …
Canoodlers
The candid, direct poems of Canoodlers interrogate sexuality, friendship, family, language, and social, cultural and political phenomena. Straddling genders, sexualities and social positions, the collection hilariously but harrowingly follows the growth and class leaps of a "townie tomboy."
From family relations ("Dearly beloved, Don Cherry has bett …
Old Hat
Old Hat is the third book of poetry and first collection of occasional poems by the author of the 2007 Globe 100 book, Muybridge's Horse: Governor General and Trillium Awards nominee, Rob Winger. Driven by an attempt to understand how to reorder common experience, the book's transitional sections - "Set," "Re/Set," and "Lect" - all intertwine and o …
There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Anymore
There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Anymore explores the manipulative pull of self-mythology and how it informs the telling of story--whether by a fan worshipping her idol, or an old vaudevillian star reminiscing about a glamorous past. Intimate glances into the lives of the famous bring back points of reflection on their relation to the everyday. Poem …
Pluck
Pluck is a series of poems taking on issues of sexuality, female vulnerability and parenthood with delicacy and intent. In turn, Rosnau employs words that give way to feelings of both solid surety and waning doubts. From the harsh realities of sexual assault to the routine heaviness of child-rearing, Pluck's sharp portrayals evoke how "beyond the s …
How Does A Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?
Building on the success of the Journey Prize-shortlisted title story, the stories of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? present an updated and whimsical new take on what it means to be Canadian. Lau alludes to the personal and political histories of a number of young Asian Canadian characters to explain their unique perspectives of the …