Roy Kiyooka’s reputation as an artist has long been recognized. Such is not the case with his writing and poetry, even though his engagement with language as a medium of artistic consciousness had been a preoccupation all along. For Kiyooka the poet, the poetic text was not a supplement to…

Death, desire, and divination are the threads running through Jónína Kirton’s debut collection of poems and lyric prose. Delicate and dark, the pieces are like whispers in the night – a haunted, quiet telling of truths the mind has locked away but the body remembers. Loosely autobiographical, these are the…

An exquisite and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel.

Canada. 1940. In a time and country fraught with the uncertainties of war, Prime Minister MacKenzie King calls for the destruction of any “subversive elements” on the nation’s soil. The Act is supported by the majority of Canadians: anxious, patriotic and “intolerant” of fascism. After Canada officially declares war with…

In the gold-rush era of the 1850s, the McKinnons settled on an island off the west coast of Canada, where the first thing they did was to turn this “wilderness” into an English country garden complete with vegetables, flowers, fruit trees and an elegant gazebo. After six generations, times and…

In Albertine in Five Times, Michel Tremblay portrayed one of his most unforgettable characters during five decades of her life, beginning in her thirties. Now, in Past Perfect, we meet Albertine at twenty and discover the dark secret of her being. Still reeling from the heartbreak that plunged her into…

The more one reads about Paul Martin’s business affairs, the more troubling they appear. In Paul Martin & Companies, Alain Deneault offers a piercing look at what it means when a Canadian prime minister puts his private interests outside the laws he has been elected to apply. Using Martin’s business…

Mohawk spoken-word artist Janet Marie Rogers’s newest collection pulses with the rhythms of the drum and the beat of the heart. Poems drawing on the language of the earth and inflected with the outspoken vocality of activism address the crises of modern “land wars”—environmental destruction, territorial disputes, and resource depletion.

When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s…

When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s…

Pell Mell, the middle voice, the syntax meeting its astonishments in its forward stride looking backwards, imagining an image nation where the heart is always torn—to pieces possessed by the other(s). A book so sure of itself that Blaser can begin, after the act of said-and-done, a series called Great…

People Live Here is a collection of three exciting new plays by George F. Walker, Canada’s king of black comedy and a winner of two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Drama. The Chance, Her Inside Life, and Kill the Poor complete the the author’s Parkdale Palace trilogy of plays that deal with issues of social justice and ally heart, humour, and a contemporary reflection on human inequalities.

"Part treatise on phenomenology, part theatrical score on ontology, part billet-doux to poetry itself” (Divya Victor), PEЯFACT is a three-part series of poems interrogating the nature of experience, language, trauma, and identity.

If you have ever wondered why the Scots love Michel Tremblay or what Sharon Pollock has to say to Japanese audiences, or just how a Canadian play—or being Canadian—is viewed in England or the United States, you should read this volume. Each author holds a mirror up to Canadian theatre,…

In an age when visual images have become infinitely manipulable, and have thus forfeited their credibility, words alone can convey the multifaceted, fleeting, elastic yet intractable truth of memory and events. Persian Postcards, the fruit of ten years of travel to the Islamic Republic as both journalist and impassioned observer,…

bissett’s latest book marks some significant boundaries, draws some sharp, clear lines for this veteran of the evolving phonetic alphabet, and of sound, concrete and performance poetry. While the work remains overwhelmingly playful, subtly layered, and full of the astonishment and sheer delight at seeing and hearing things one has…

Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, Webb is no…

In “The Axe” a literature professor arrives at the door of one of his students in the middle of the night. On his way he has stumbled (with a flask of whiskey) through the pouring rain, stopping in a city park to vandalize the statue of an angel, tormented by…

Witty, prickly and fresh, Playing Bare is a mordant satire on the relation between theatre and life. An accomplished actress is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she directs Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In her deranged effort to expose the emptiness of playing fictional characters, she casts…

Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press / Evergreen in the U.S.A. and the U.K., burst onto the literary scene in 1960 to become the single most important and influential book of poetry in the English language published in the second half of the 20th…

This book of prose poems strips down the codes and conventions that make up our society’s “popular narratives.” A revealing and witty, exploded view of our culture.

“Prairie poetry,” as it came to be known in the 20th century, has found no more eloquent and accomplished a practitioner than Robert Kroetsch. Yet the North American prairie his work has made so recognizably visible in all of its characteristic particularities is changing profoundly in the 21st century. This…

Pots and Other Living Beings is made up of poems with paired photographs, each describing an aspect of living in the postmodern, neoliberal age, with its promised and failed utopia, ruin, and dispossessions.

Throughout these poems is a meeting of obscene or politically charged material, as well as commentary on language usage under extreme circumstances of duress such as the Arab Spring. This is poetry written under conditions of wartime. The title implies an analogy between Ezra Pound, imprisoned at Pisa after World…

In this contrapuntal follow-up to Governor General’s Award finalist Discovery Passages, Garry Thomas Morse traces multiple lines of his mixed ancestry. These include the nomadic “pre-historical” movements of Wakashan speakers who were later to form various West Coast First Nations; the schismatic mindset of Jedidiah Morse, the “father of American…

Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival untangles truth from some of the myths about First Nations at the same time that it addresses misconceptions still widely believed today.The second book by award-winning author Bev Sellars, Price Paid is based on a popular presentation Sellars created for treaty-makers, politicians,…

Combining text from government questionnaires and reports, lyric poetry, and photography, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes examines the possibility of a privatized prison system in Canada leading up to then Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative government passing the Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51. This legislation criminalizes Indigenous peoples’ attempts to…