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Showing 1 - 20 of 238 items
By Jane Poulson. 2002
Autobiography of Dr. Jane Poulson, the first blind person in Canada to become a practising doctor. Poulson suffered from diabetes…
and because of the disease, lost her sight and then experienced severe heart problems. Nonetheless she was an extremely accomplished doctor, published widely in leading medical journals, and showed great courage and endurance to all who knew her. She wrote this book during the last two years of her life. 2002.By Johanna Skibsrud. 2016
In this collection of poems, the author asks: is our world really what it appears to be? How do we…
shape it through language? And if language can create our world, can it also transform or destroy it? She brings us to the edges of dreams and waking. With lines that are searching, but spacious, she deftly turns over ideas of perception and reality, inviting us to join her as she releases the abstract figure from its painting, or brings the poet in from the wilderness. 2016.By Ross A Slotten. 2004
Physician traces the life of nineteenth-century British naturalist and explorer Alfred Wallace (1823-1913), a colleague of Charles Darwin. Examines Wallace's…
lower-class background, self-education, and socialist views. Discusses his acceptance of spiritualism, environmentalism, and other ideologies scientists typically avoided. Also covers his research travels into dangerous tropical jungles. 2004.By Ian Brown. 2009
Walker Brown was born with a genetic mutation so rare that perhaps 300 people around the world also live with…
it. Walker turned twelve in 2008, but he weighs only 54 pounds, is still in diapers, can't speak and needs to wear special cuffs on his arms so that he can't continually hit himself. Expanded from Brown's Globe and Mail series about Walker, he sets out to discover his son. Some strong language. Canada Reads 2012. 2009.By Sam Snake, Emerson S Coatsworth, David Coatsworth, Francis Kagige. 1979
During the 1930s, the stories told by the elders of the Rama Ojibway Band were compiled and translated into English.…
These 16 stories tell of Nanabush, one of the most powerful, and most mischievous, spirits of the Ojibway world. Grades 4-7 and older readers. 1979.By Maxine Trottier. 2005
Terry Fox was a typical Canadian kid who liked to play basketball and soccer, but whose 'ordinary' life was changed…
suddenly at age 18 when his leg was amputated because of cancer. This biography covers the life of Terry Fox and his reasons for running across Canada. Traces his progress from the run's beginning on April 12, 1980 in St. John's until its premature conclusion in Thunder Bay on September 1, 1980. Grades 2-4. 2005.By Dan Yashinsky. 2004
The art of storytelling is very much alive in today's world. Yashinsky has lived with storytelling all his life, first…
listening to storytellers and then becoming one himself. It's the traveler who stops to hear the voice of the dusty little mouse on the road who is rewarded with the treasure. 2004.By Sandra Ridley. 2016
In a sequence of five feverish elegies, Ridley combines narrative lyric and experimental verse styles to manifest dark themes related…
to love and loss: the traumas of psychological suffering (isolation and confinement), physical abuse (by parent and partner), terminal illness (brain tumour and heart attack), revelation, resolution, and healing. With a blend of fervour and sangfroid, these serial poems accrue into a book-length testament to a grief both personal and human, leaving readers with the redemptive grace that comes from poetry's ability to wrestle chaos into meaning. Because of its overarching themes and serial form, "Silvija" is best read cover-to-cover, analogous to a work of fiction, rather than a book of individual or occasional poems. 2016.By Laurie D Graham. 2016
In the stunning poems of "Settler Education", Graham explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake -- the death of…
nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. In ways possible only with such an honest act of imagination, and with language at once terse and capacious, she reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present. Poems from this book won the 2013 Thomas Morton Poetry Prize. 2016. Uniform title: Poems.By Cathleen Lewis. 2008
How can an 11-year old boy hear a Mozart fantasy for the first time and play it back perfectly, but…
struggle to navigate the familiar surroundings of his own home? Lewis shares the mystery of her son Rex, blind and autistic, and the highs, lows, hopes, dreams, joy, sorrows, and faith she has journeyed through with him. 2008.By Mary Loudon. 2006
The author's quest to find her sister Catherine, a schizophrenic, in Catherine's home, in her last hospital room, her paintings,…
her letters, her clothes. But in facing the truths about Catherine's life and death, she asks hard questions about sanity, family responsibility, love, and about what it means to say that a life is - or is not - worth living. 2006.By Charlotte Gray. 2006
Biography of Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone and champion of the deaf. Discusses his temperament; creativity; marriage…
to Mabel Hubbard, who was deaf; family life; and friendship with Helen Keller. Covers his many inventions, years living in Washington, D.C., and association with the National Geographic Society. 2006.By Michael Chorost. 2005
Science writer recounts his decision to get a cochlear implant, or a computer surgically imbedded in the skull, to artificially…
restore hearing after he became totally deaf in 2001. Describes his physical and mental changes and reflects on the implications of technological advances on the deaf community and on humanity. 2005.By Erin Robinsong. 2017
In this time of ecological precarity, "Rag Cosmology" is an urgent invitation to reinvent our modes of engagement with the…
environment we not only inhabit, but are. Refusing the lamentation that leaves us as resigned witnesses to devastation, "Rag Cosmology" counters fatalist narratives with the pleasures of ecological entanglement and engagement. Tracing relationships between seemingly irreconcilable things--economy and ecology, weather and lust, bills and inner voices, wages of avoidance and wages of listening--these poems offer the intimate and lush language of thought that yearn for an imaginative reinvention of how we understand what we are part of and what we are losing. Winner of the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (QWF). 2017.By Erik Orsenna. 2005
By Colleen Murphy. 2015
At 4:00 a.m. on a secluded farm, a woman fights to take her life back from a serial killer as…
her desperate sister and a haunted police officer reach across time and distance in an attempt to rescue her. Winner of the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Drama. 2015.By France Gauthier. 2017
" Ma belle amie Anne-Marie est décédée le 20 août 2016. " C'est ce que nous annonce d'entrée de jeu…
l'auteure et conférencière France Gauthier dans ce témoignage sensible et sincère. D'une plume inspirée, elle y raconte les trois dernières semaines de vie de son amie et " jumelle d'âme " Anne-Marie Séguin, qu'elle a accompagnée dans son chemin vers le grand passage. Ponctué de moments forts, touchants et parfois troublants, le récit aborde la mort (et la vie?!) de façon lumineuse, sans peur ni tabous, afin d'inspirer ceux qui tiennent la main d'un être cher qui s'apprête à traverser le voile. Ni elle ni moi ne savions dans quelle expérience transcendante nous plongions, sans autre outil que notre foi en la Vie, ici, comme ailleurs. 2017.By Richard Harrison. 2016
In his final years, Richard Harrison's father suffered from a form of dementia, but he died without ever forgetting the…
poems he had memorized as a student and had taught to Richard as a child. In 2013, the poet feared his father's ashes had been lost in the flood water that ravaged Alberta--a crisis that would become the inciting event and central theme of this collection. Combining elements of memoir, elegy, lyrical essay and personal correspondence with appreciations of literary works ranging from haiku to comic books, Richard Harrison has written a book of great intellectual depth that is as generous as it is enchanting. Winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. 2016. Uniform title: Poems.By Adrienne Clarkson. 2011
Reviled as a communist by some, revered as a humanitarian by others, Norman Bethune was a surgeon, medical innovator, and…
political activist who deployed his skills on the battlefields of Spain and China in the 1930s. His prodigious talents included inventing surgical instruments, mobile blood-transfusion units, teaching, and advocating for social justice at home and abroad. Includes violence. 2011.By Ken Babstock. 2011
“Carolinian forest” echoes back as construction cranes in an urban skyline, “Second Life” returns as wildlife, as childhood. Even the…
poem itself - the idea of a poem - as a unit of understanding is shadowed by a great unknowing. Fearless in its language, its trajectories and frames of reference, these poems gaze upon the objects of their attention until they rattle and exude their auras of strangeness. Some strong language. 2011.