In this companion to Governor General’s Award finalists Discovery Passages and Prairie Harbour, Garry Thomas Morse resumes his expansionist mapping of lyrical consciousness onto geographical concerns, acknowledging the unsettled edges of an imaginary territory.

Four Quebec women writers meet at the centre of a fabulous vortex. Cast of 4 women.

The tragic life of Frances Farmer, the raucous, idealistic, non-conforming movie star of the ’30s and ’40s. Cast of 4 women and 4 men.

A play about cultural identity and cultural awakening based on a country and western singer of Montreal’s “The Main.”

Test
Cast of 4 women, 13 men and a chorus.

A play about the conscience of a priest during the disastrous mission the Jesuits made to the Huron Indians in the 17th century. Cast of 11 men.

In his extensive travels in the Balkans, Reed encounters a landscape inscribed with a shocking testimony of ethno-racialist aspirations.

The third book of the Mercer family saga. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

Same Diff by Donato Mancini meets at the intersection of contemporary poetry, art, and current politics. Influenced by documentary cinema such as the films of Frederick Wiseman, Dada poets, montage techniques, and a range of modern poets, Same Diff explores the way social and economic histories become imprinted within language itself.

bissett’s metric performs a kind of absence of narrative intent that lets everyone and everything speak for itself. As bissett puts it, “eye dont have 2 invent th world iumalredee in it.”

The rush of events in a small town apocalypse is recorded barely at the edge of syntax, with a participatory narrator scrambling to keep up with the unfolding perceptions within the others.

Full of warmth and poignant humour this drama set in a one-room schoolhouse evokes a way of life shared by generations of rural North Americans, exploring timeless themes of rejection, of compassion, of damage, of hope. Cast of 5 women and 7 men.

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped…

Seeds is part courtroom drama and part social satire about the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada showdown between Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser and biotech company Monsanto Inc. In question is the legitimacy of patenting genetically modified food crops. The play takes us back to the seminal moment when a single farmer stood up to international agribusiness and almost won.

A definitive and comprehensive selection of bissett’s work.

Selections from seven of this important poet and editor’s long poems.

Poems of landscape, language and memory from Wah’s earlier books.

Poetry distinguished by its attention to form and thought.

Poetry and prose with an instantaneous recognition of perceptions and thought.

Selections from visual poetry to translations by one of the most important poets in the 20th century writing in English.

Seven Sacred Truths presents a powerful exploration of an Indigenous woman’s healing journey. Seeing the world through “brown” eyes, poet Wanda John-Kehewin makes new meaning of the past, present, and future through a consideration of Love, Wisdom, Truth, Honesty, Respect, Humility, and Courage. By sharing her views on these Seven…

A dark and steamy comedy that explores the harmonies and dysfunctions of six sexually entangled musicians on an ill-fated winter tour. When a blizzard strands this sextet for an extra night, they have only their instruments, each other, and their secrets to keep them warm.

Discusses all of the major Islamic faiths in its search for the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements.

These stories all re-examine the myths of mother-daughter relationships, both in the classical sense of “myth” and in the modern sense of “myth” (lies about relationships).

The history of language as a made thing – a linguistic and structuralist primer.

In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages (English, French, and Inuktitut).

French delivers a thriller guaranteed to have audiences perched on the edge of their seats. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.

Working for decades in English and French in poetry, novels, and translations that investigate the relationship between language and female subjectivity, Lola Lemire Tostevin has hewn her own unique and intensely aesthetic path across the national literary landscape, earning her the reputation as one of Canada’s leading feminist writers. Tostevin’s…

An uproariously funny and sharply inquisitive new play from one of Canada’s leading Indigenous playwrights, Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion explores the possibility of reconciliation between Peoples and urgently questions past and contemporary forms of Canadian colonialism. Taylor’s twenty-seventh play, Sir John A’s characters include Canada’s…

A tough uncompromising look at a convent-run Native residential school. The soul-destroying devastation caused by these institutions from the point of view of the nuns running the school. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.

In these theatre pieces stripped to the essentials of character sketches in quick, subtle lines, the emphasis is on the performer’s resources as an actor, rather than the externals of scene changes and stage contexts.

Having grown apart after a traumatic and defining moment in their youth, two brothers reconnect to fulfill a life-long ambition to go skydiving. Morgan (a feckless schemer who has recently reinvented himself as a counsellor) arrives on the doorstep of Daniel (a housebound agoraphobe), offering to help “liberate” his brother by administering his newly invented technique of “Paratherapy.” Convincing Daniel to face his fears by pursuing their long abandoned childhood dream of jumping from an airplane, the brothers begin a series of misguided training exercises to prepare for their adventure.

In these thoughtful, yet playful poems, Belford builds a poetry experience the curious reader can open anywhere, read, and read on. Although the phrasing of his lines is unusual, Ken Belford’s poetry is not easily forgotten. It’s not necessary to begin at the beginning or to read to the end to get a good sense of what this poet is about. Read a little, or read a lot; he’s worth it.

Esau Mercer, a veteran of the First World War, tries to persuade his alienated 16-year-old son, Jacob, not to leave. Slowly Esau’s devastating and unsparing account of what secrets lie in his soldier’s heart brings father and son together. Cast of 3 men.

This urban epic of love and desire brings us a burlesque world of transgression and madness, where pleasures are far from simple, and love is somewhat less than pure. An evocative account of romantic adventure stamped with Tremblay’s signature wit and ironic humour.

Contains Walker’s own selection of his early plays which matter; which for him have stood the test of time: Beyond Mozambique (1974), Zastrozzi (1977), Theatre of the Film Noir (1981) and Nothing Sacred (1988).

Three brothers strive to unite and care for their ailing sister after the death of their adoptive parents. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.

Republished with a new introduction, this is Audrey Thomas’s classic coming-of-age novel about madness, loneliness, despair and escape.

When McClure’s Specks was first published in 1985 by Talonbooks, it was a revelation in terms of its transcending the proprioceptive poetic methodology of Charles Olson and entering an Aristotelian realm of metaphysical questions that alchemically combined matters both scientific and mystical. With mind aglow in recognition of muscular imagination and the intelligence of the sensorium in all its unapologetic tonality, McClure’s luminous journey leaps with the grace of Muhammad Ali and Fred Astaire, and tempts the reader into the mysterious abyss of dark energy that Federico García Lorca calls duende.

Arguably the first North American play, this edition includes the original French script, two English translations, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and an extensive historical and critical introduction.

George Bowering’s first book of poetry. With a preface by Robert Creeley and original line drawings by Gordon Payne.

Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector
Georges Feydeau & Maurice Desvallières’ Hotel Peccadillo
Arthur Schnitzler’s The Amorous Adventures of Anatol
Introduction by Jerry Wasserman
The universal mark of good satire is still to make audiences laugh at the worst traits in human nature. Here, in his own words, is how Morris Panych updated these three great comedy classics from a century ago.

Strange Comfort collects the best of Sherrill Grace’s many published essays on the novelist and writer Malcolm Lowry.

Difficult writing has its way of illuminating the part of the world that counts. One such difficult text is Gertrude Stein’s highly experimental Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms – long considered the single most groundbreaking literary work of twentieth-century art, literary criticism, and art history. In the centennial year of its publication, Carl Peters offers a sustained reading of the 1914 edition, responding to the eccentric sounds and rhythms of this long prose-poem with annotations that bring understanding, in particular, to the composition’s syntax, which is noted for its defiance of conventional norms.

The stop-motion sequences of pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured the moving body on film for the first time and laid the foundation for modern cinema. Kevin Kerr vividly dramatizes this technological breakthrough in this multimedia drama.

Composed of autobiographical stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of a memoir, Subject to Change is a series of self-portraits along the road of a life well-lived. Each story is an articulate, intelligent, passionate record of how an encounter with a significant “other,” be it a parent, a lover, a neighbor, a child, a grandchild, a politician, or a friend, has changed and shaped the humanity, character, and community—the “subject”—of the writer. What makes this book such a great read is Renee Rodin’s masterful ability to show the reader that things we usually think of as too ordinary to talk about or too extraordinary to be able to communicate to others are often the most formative elements of our social lives.

sublingual is perhaps the most highly structured yet of bissett’s “textual visions.” Its first seven poems construct a Genesis, beginning with a poem of birth—our pre- or sub-lingual first breath, a phenomenological gesture of recognition, of both being and belonging, in and of the world. Following this short creation story, the book continues to unfold in luminous and lucid delight.

Six plays that take place in the same hotel room: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta and The End of Civilization.

Summerland presents largely unpublished selections from essays, short stories, plays, novels and poems that George Ryga wrote in Summerland, BC, from 1963 until his untimely death in 1987.