Welcome to the small town of Tartan Cross, Nova Scotia, where skeletons rattle in closets and past histories are so intertwined that the lives of four fortysomething, eccentric characters have become so complicated that something needs to change. In the comedy, Odd Ducks, award-winning playwright Bryden MacDonald positions his four…

A phenomenal critical success when first produced by Western Theatre Conspiracy in 2004, Omniscience is much more than a murder-mystery set in a quasi-familiar contemporary landscape of high-tech urban warfare. The plot, not surprisingly optioned already for a movie, is redolent with untrustworthy “embedded” journalists manufacturing positivist pseudodocumentaries about the…

It is Christmas Eve, 1970. In the shipping room of a Montreal dress factory, the workers get drunk and decide to go on strike.“So many of the guys I knew on the street are gone dead or crazy, man. There’s no escape. This whole country is just one big factory,…

Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book.Composed almost entirely of quatrains (each page being comprised of four four-line stanzas) and written while travelling through North…

In this collection of long and serial poems, Stephen Collis returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes—and stands in the…

A work exploring sibling and romantic love, and the complexities of being a biracial person looking for completion in another

Charlie Evans, a pool shark down on his luck in the bedroom as well as in the pool hall, has two days to pay off a $3,000 debt, or have his legs broken by Bulldog, a psychotic debt collector who also happens to be having an affair with Charlie’s wife,…

Written in sixty short epistolary chapters, award winning author M.A.C. Farrant’s latest offering represents a search for hope and appeasement in a rapidly changing and often perplexing society.

Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is the emotional story of a woman’s struggle to acknowledge her birth family. Grace, a Native girl adopted by a White family, is asked by her birth sister to return to the Reserve for their mother’s funeral. Afraid of opening old wounds, Grace…

Hoping to snag their perfect home in a red-hot housing market, an African Canadian man, a Chinese Canadian man, and a Jewish/Indigenous lesbian couple show up to an open house run by a white settler real estate agent. Each potential buyer feels most deserving of the prize. When a police…

ORACULE occurs at the intersection of poetry and theatre. Its characters inhabit a classical and cosmological world where psychic phenomena constantly threaten to impinge upon the arc of combat occurring between the women trapped within. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, the writings of Plato, the films of…

The poems in this collection examine how our experience of movement through space is what lends time its dimensionality, from childhood memories of the Cold War to the Julian calendar, making manifest the arc of a complete year-long cycle of both “sacred” and “ordinary” time, returning to our ongoing attempts…

Orwell in Cuba: How ‘1984’ Came to Be Published in Castro’s Twilight is a personal account of today’s Cuba at a pivotal point in its history, with the Castro brothers passing power on to a new generation. The book is akin to a detective story, as the author investigates how and why a state-run publishing house has come to release a new translation of George Orwell’s iconic anti-totalitarian novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four, formerly taboo.

Other Losses caused an international scandal when first published in 1989 by revealing that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s policies caused the death of some 1,000,000 German captives in American and French internment camps through disease, starvation and exposure from 1944 to 1949, as a direct result of the policies…

Other Schools of Thought is a collection of three unique plays that allow adult audiences to reflect on their past and young audiences to reflect on their future. With stark sets and minimalist presentational styles, they leave no room for condescension—for dismissal of “adult concerns” by the young. In their…

How does an “outsider” feminist read a contemporary Canadian literature that is profoundly inscribed with the contradictions of late 20th-century capitalism, nationalism and globalism, and with vigorous class, race and gender struggles for access to power and representation? What does “literature” become when its own strategies variously place history, genre,…