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Showing 1 - 20 of 16796 items
By Donna Thomson. 2014
Donna Thomson’s life was forever changed when her son Nicholas was born with cerebral palsy. A former actor, director, and…
teacher, Donna became his primary caregiver and embarked on a second career as a disability activist, author, and consultant. Thomson vividly describes her experience in treading delicately through daily care, emergencies, and medical bureaucracy as she and her family cope with her son’s condition while maintaining value and dignity (for Nicholas, too). She demonstrates the vital contribution that people with disabilities make to our society and addresses the ethics and economics of giving and receiving care. 2014.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 Frieda Zames, Doris Zames Fleischer. 2011
By Margaret Atwood. 2007
A collection of fifty poems, ranging in subject from the personal to the political. They investigate the mysterious writing of…
poetry itself, as well as the passage of time and our shared sense of mortality. 2007.By Martin F Norden. 1994
Film has often shown people with physical disabilities as deserving isolation from the rest of society. Norden examines hundreds of…
Hollywood and international movies and uncovers the industry's practices for maintaining this status quo, while offering an array of physically disabled characters who embody or break out of stereotypes. He observes the arrival of a new set of stereotypes tied to the growth of science and technology in the 1970s and 1980s, and underscores later movies that display a newfound sensitivity. Some descriptions of sex, strong language. 1994.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 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 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 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 Margaret Atwood. 2002
Margaret Atwood looks back on her own childhood and the development of her writing career and examines the metaphors which…
writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain their activities. Her wide and eclectic reference to other writers, living and dead, is balanced by anecdotes from her own experiences as a writer, both in Canada and on the international scene. 2002.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.Explores the way disability activists in the United Kingdom and Canada have transformed their aspirations into legal claims in their…
quest for equality. It unpacks shifting conceptualizations of the political identity of disability and the role of a rights discourse in these dynamics. In doing so, it delves into the diffusion of disability rights among grassroots organizations and the traditional disability charities. 2011.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 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 Janet Freedman, Marie Howes. 2003
More people suffer a disability before age 65 than die before age 65. Shows how to manage a mid-career disabling…
experience from a personal, financial, and legal standpoint. A guide through government and private insurance and rehabilitation programmes, housing and living assistance, and legal and money management considerations. 2003.