Frontlist Then Now » Books » Talonbooks


ISBN: 9781772012873
Pages: 112 pp
Pub. Date: March 23 2021
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.3125"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Poetry / POE024000

  • POETRY / LGBTQ+
  • POETRY / Canadian
  • POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Family
  • POETRY / Women Authors

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Then Now
By Daphne Marlatt

A lyrical exploration of memory, family, catastrophe, immigration, and colonialism, Then Now was inspired by the discovery of letters written by Daphne Marlatt’s father, Arthur Buckle. Buckle left England in the early 1930s to join a British accounting firm in multiracial Penang, Malaysia. He continued living and working there until taking leave in 1941, returning after WW II, whose looming threat striates his early letters, and staying until 1951. Decades after the letters’ composition, Marlatt began writing poems in response to them, interwoven with memories they provoked from her postwar childhood there. These poems are written from a sense of place and home on Canada’s West Coast now on the brink of another catastrophe, global climate change, so that throughout the book, “There Then” permeates any “Here Now” of immigrant consciousness and highlights the impermanent quality of “home.”

Daphne Marlatt was at the centre of the West Coast poetry movement of the 1960s, studying at the University of British Columbia and with many of Donald Allen’s New American Poets, most notably Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Her early literary associations with the loosely affiliated TISH group encouraged her nonconformist approach to language and form. Her unique disposition toward language shapes and is shaped by her commitment to exploring and honouring silenced histories and experiences. For her, writing has been a lifelong ethical project, deeply engaged with feminism, immigrant experiences, and ecological issues. Her innovations in the prose poem form have influenced an entire generation (and beyond) of Canadian poets.

Frontlist

PearlFront Cover
Pearl
By George Bowering

The making of a poem is like the making of a pearl – you take something gritty and create a jewel. George Bowering’s final book of poetry, Pearl, follows this impulse, sprawling in search of the next glimmering insight, tugging at different threads with a multifarious large-heartedness. Pearl centres around…


$19.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772017137
Pages:117
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.125"
Pub. Date: March 31 2026
Poetry / POE023010

Selma BurkeFront Cover
Selma Burke
By Caroline Russell-King & Maria Crooks

Winner of the Theatre BC Canadian Playwriting Competition, two Betty Mitchell Awards, and two Calgary Theatre Critics’ AwardsSelma Burke: Carving a Sculptor’s Life is a flight of fancy based on the incredible life of Dr. Selma Hortense Burke, who lived from 1900 to 1995, approximately 49,932,000 minutes. Here, imagined, are…


$18.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772017151
Pages:108
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5" x 0.5"
Pub. Date: March 31 2026
Drama / DRA013000

White NoiseFront Cover
White Noise
By Taran Kootenhayoo

Two neighbouring families, one Indigenous and one white, dine together during Truth and Reconciliation Week. As cultural misunderstanding, colonial violence, and racism both covert and overt surface, White Noise asks, “How do we deal with internalized racism? Do we keep pushing it away … or do we make a change?”…


$19.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772015577
Pages:145
Dimensions: 8.5" x 7.875" x 0.5625"
Pub. Date: April 7 2026
Drama / DRA024000

Growing My Way HomeFront Cover
Growing My Way Home
By Jenn Ashton

Sad, shocking, and truthful, Growing My Way Home chronicles one woman’s struggle through events all too common among a people who have been separated from their culture and their language. From abuse to early involvement in the criminal justice system, from her experiences as a thirteen-year-old drug dealer, a fifteen-year-old…


$24.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772017038
Pages:203
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5" x 0.625"
Pub. Date: April 7 2026
Fiction / FIC082000

sometimes, forestFront Cover
sometimes, forest
By Elee Kraljii Gardiner

sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker yearns for in herself. But the coastal temperate rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. Returning daily to…


$19.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772017113
Pages:87
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.4375"
Pub. Date: April 14 2026
Poetry / POE023030

Save Your Prayers – Send MoneyFront Cover
Save Your Prayers – Send Money
By Jónína Kirton

Save Your Prayers – Send Money boldly takes on the wellness industry. Kirton delves into disability politics through the lived experience of a seventy-year-old Métis woman and recovering New Ager. A hybrid collection that moves fluidly between prose and poetry, Save Your Prayers – Send Money weaves intergenerational trauma and…


$19.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772017090
Pages:107
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.4375"
Pub. Date: April 28 2026
Poetry / POE024000

SUBTEXTFront Cover
SUBTEXT
By Nicole Raziya Fong

SUBTEXT refracts the language of identity formation. It collages the echoes of diasporic and colonial histories through poetry, drama, autobiography, and archival uncovering. Divided into four parts, SUBTEXT peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed…


$19.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772017076
Pages:86
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.4375"
Pub. Date: April 28 2026
Poetry / POE024000

Verbal ViolenceFront Cover
Verbal Violence
By Danielle LaFrance

Verbal Violence unravels, dissects, and shreds the language of the professional managerial class. Critically straining the email thread, the Freedom of Information Request, and the white paper through an aesthetics of anger that appropriates their last gasps at relevancy, LaFrance registers the absurdities of a purposeless people “just doing their…


$19.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772017052
Pages:111
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.4375"
Pub. Date: May 5 2026
Poetry / POE021000

Beautiful Unknown FutureFront Cover
Beautiful Unknown Future
By Taryn Hubbard

Haunted by the looming shadows of our compounding crises, Beautiful Unknown Future reflects with candour and wit on the precarity we share with the nonhuman world. Written while Hubbard’s children were young, these poems hold space for messy feelings about motherhood and care, the climate crisis, family ghosts, and office…


$19.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772016482
Pages:97
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.4375"
Pub. Date: May 12 2026
Poetry / POE023050

Fire Never DiesFront Cover
Fire Never Dies
By Carmen Aguirre

What is the purpose of art in the face of fascism? Can art serve the poor? And what is the personal cost of militancy?In Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, bestselling author and Electric Company Core Artist Carmen Aguirre explores the intersection of art and revolution through the life…


$19.95
Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772017175
Pages:112
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5" x 0.6875"
Pub. Date: May 26 2026
Drama / DRA038110