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Showing 1 - 20 of 134 items
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.By Michel Tremblay. 1974
By Claudia Emerson. 2005
A woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and…
her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, 2005.By Phil Hall. 2011
Poems of critical thought that have been influenced by old fiddle tunes, essays that are not out to persuade so…
much as ruminate, invite, accrue. Includes memories of, and homages to Margaret Laurence, Bronwen Wallace, Libby Scheier, and Daniel Jones. Hall writes of the embarrassing process of becoming a poet, and of his push-pull relationship with the concept of home. Winner of the 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Some descriptions of sex and some strong language. 2011.By Henrik Ibsen, Hiro Kanagawa. 2016
Rita and Alfred Allmers live in an isolated family cabin on native leasehold land overlooking Indian Arm, a still untamed…
glacial fjord just north of Vancouver, BC. With Alfred now struggling with his latest work, Rita has been tasked with caring for their adopted son Wolfie, a sensitive First Nations teen who has been designated as 'special needs' for much of his life. Rita's resentments and frustrations are further embittered by her younger half-sister, Asta, a constant reminder of the innocence, idealism and sexual allure Rita once had and yearns for again. Winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Drama. 2016.By Jan Zwicky. 2011
By Vivek Shraya. 2016
Vivek's debut collection of poetry is a bold, timely, and personal interrogation of skin - its origins, functions, and limitations.…
Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible, and undeniable. 2016. Uniform title: Poems.By Jean McKay. 2001
The exploded view is a diagram which shows how each component of an object relates to the whole, and is…
usually applied to machinery. McKay uses it to explode everything from macaroons to metaphors. In her alphabetical essays she explodes language and her world view, taking a variety of things apart, from babies and crabapples to funerals and acorns, and putting them back together in unexpected ways. Some strong language.By Randy Bear Lacey. 2013
This book of poems deals with the trials of losing your vision as an adult and having to learn how…
to live a new lifestyle. It also illustrates how the writer’s faith in God keeps him grounded and gives him hope to carry on. 2013.Lawrence Hill shares his experiences of how ignorance and the fear of ideas led a group in the Netherlands to…
burn the cover of his widely successful novel, "The Book of Negroes", in 2011. Why do books continue to ignite such strong reactions in people in the age of the Internet? Is banning, censoring, or controlling book distribution ever justified? Hill illustrates his ideas with anecdotes and lists names of Canadian writers who faced censorship challenges in the twenty-first century, inviting conversation between those on opposite sides of these contentious issues. Includes violence. 2013.By Leonard Cohen. 2006
A collection of musings, jottings, quatrains, lyrics, prose meditations and offhand epigrams, including previously unpublished poems dating as far back…
as 1970. Cohen displays both a surface humility and an underlying self-confidence as he reflects on women, Zen doctrine, his own advancing age, and the legacy of the '60s. Descriptions of sex and strong language. 2006.By Irving Layton. 1989