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Mysteriously, overnight, a father disappears from his family home. A few months later, the mother vanishes too. As the police investigations go on and on and reporters descend on the home week after week -- as well as visits by social workers, doctors, and concerned relatives -- the abandoned seventeen-year-old Cirrus starts his own investigation into who his parents really were, or who they might have been.

Having circumnavigated the world and also visited both Poles, Yosef Wosk, a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, has been a progenitor of psychogeography. The title piece describes the time he almost died while climbing the Great Pyramid of Giza at midnight. The next day, he descended into an ancient cavern beneath the Great Pyramid where he took off all his clothes, alone, and meditated. Probably more people have walked on the moon.NAKED IN A PYRAMID is an unconventional book by an original thinker, a former rabbi who owns ancient Torah scrolls, a yellow star from the concentration camps, and Pee-Wee Herman's yellow bike. There is quite simply nobody like him. Yosef Wosk is a reclusive Lone Ranger who frequently helps others but remains a stranger. Here, for the first time, he has gathered a medley of observations to reveal his private world.

In GONE TO PIECES an entire family's lives are consumed by a single story: a tall tale about a forest fire and the horses who fled into a lake of ice to escape the flames. Everything they do, everything they watch, and everything they speak about revolves around the story of that fire and those horses and their father's deep belief that it is real.Curzi grew up feeling both resentful and beholden to her father's story. Something that causes her to flee her family when she is young, but also, upon learning that her father is on his deathbed, makes her determined to wade through the tale just as he would have wanted.But GONE TO PIECES is a story about more than just this one thing: it's about the habits we form, the complexities of family, and the complicated histories that we escape and revisit. The story spans decades and continents -- from Curzi's father's birthplace in Italy to the butcher-shop-filled Chicago of her childhood, on to her estranged brother's home in Stockholm and the Russian Lake Lagoda with its fabled story of the "ice horses" from Italian writer, Curzio Malaparte's 1944 novel, Kaputt.

ASKING FOR DIRECTIONS is a happy hour of poetry, blurring the lines between straight-up realism, goofy weirdness, linear narrative, dreamscape, lovestruck awe, wonder, and joy.Poetry for Firth is under every rock. Poetry is the handyman who should be tiling a kitchen backsplash but instead relives lost dreams of hockey glory. Poetry is a creepy and distracted high school geography teacher. Poetry is snowmobilers on a patio drinking beer next to a thawing, late-March lake. Poetry is impending heart surgery, birds, the dead, euchre parties, funerals, graffiti, Sunday morning hotel rooms, ashtrays, blue flowers, desiccated chipmunk carcasses, and, of course, sex, love, and laundry.

Literary Nonfiction. Film Studies. Art. The Pacific Cinémathèque Monograph Series was initiated to explore the spectrum of contributions and innovations of Western Canadian filmmakers, videomakers, and fringe media artists. Monograph Number One focuses, fittingly, on David Rimmer, one of Canada's foremost experimental filmmakers.

Literary Nonfiction. BC Books for Everybody pick. CBC Radio Toronto selection, one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year (2008). In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. SCALAWAGS, the lot of them. But you can be an adventurer, a conman or conwoman, a fool, liar, gambler, rodomontade or ragamuffin and not be a scalawag. Many adventurers are not even interesting, come to think of it, let alone scalawags. There is an ineffable quality, an indefinable something or other that sets some people apart, places them in the special category that Jim Christy calls scalawag. You might call them something else; nuts, perhaps. And quite frankly in many instances--George Francis Train, for instance, or Louis De Rougemont--you'd probably be right. In 2008, it was a CBC Radio Toronto pick for one of the best nonfiction books of year. Christy's work reminds us that losers are cool, that the middle-of-the-road might be smoother but the ditches are more interesting, and that every rounder has a good story to tell. One is reminded of Blake: 'Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.'--The Globe and Mail These are larger-than-life characters in stranger- than-fiction stories. From the film star Tallulah Bankhead, 'a force of nature' whose sexual appetites almost matched her appetite for fame, to Lady Jane Digby, who changed names, ranks and countries as she changed husbands, ending her life as the wife of a Bedouin sheik; from Morris (Two Gun) Cohen, who went from being a hired gun to working with Sun Yat-Sen, to Florence Lowe (Pancho) Barnes, who faced off against the US Air Force, these are curiosity- piquing figures. Most readers will wonder why they hadn't heard of them before. In a way, Christy's columns, and this book, are something of a public service...--The Vancouver Sun If the proverb is correct and a life lived in fear is a life half lived, then these unapologetic oddballs knew nothing of doubt and fear.--The Westender

Drama. BRAVE NEW PLAY RITES presents twenty years of original and startling theater from Canada's best young writers. The book is a collection of short one-act plays written by students in the Creative Writing Program at UBC and produced at the annual festival, Brave New Play Rites, for public performances. Many successful writers have had their plays produced in the festival, including Lynn Coady, Steven Galloway, Dennis Bolen, Kevin Chong, and Aaron Bushkowsky. The release of BRAVE NEW PLAY RITES coincides with the 20th anniversary year of the festival, and the familiar names in this collection will be of interest both critically, and to readers who already follow the careers of these writers. This is a terrific anthology, generous, varied, and utterly engaging--a compelling argument for the short play, the achievement of the UBC Creative Writing Program, and the future of Canadian theatre... --Martin Kinch, Executive Director/Literary Manager, Playwrights' Theatre Centre, Vancouver, BC BRAVE NEW PLAY RITES has been a turning point in the development of some of Canada's most dynamic writers. It is a festival that is unlike any other, and I'm grateful as hell that I got a chance to participate. --Steven Galloway, author of Finnie Walsh and Ascension ... collects twenty-five short plays to celebrate the twenty-year history of the annual festival of work written by students of UBC's Creative Writing Program... The anthology not only samples the history of the festival, it is a compendium of experiments with the twenty-minute play...--Letters in Canada

Poetry. LGBT Studies. BC Poetry in Transit selection (poem displayed on Vancouver city buses). Poems from THE SLEEP OF FOUR CITIES selected as Poems of the Day on US websites Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Powered by lush imagery and lyricism, the poems in THE SLEEP OF FOUR CITIES use the city as a metaphor for the complexity of self. This book invites the reader to take a journey through multiple cities--cities of memory, of desire, of imagination, of discovery, of loss--with only the map of language as a guide. The cities in this book are not always easily unlocked--they are at once tangible and invisible; they exist both inside and outside the speakers of the poems. Throughout the book, these speakers seek to discover what is within their grasp and what, like water, will slip through their fingers. She has created an enchanted universe--where senses quiver, and colors are so saturated, they're almost hallucinogenic. But beauty draws the reader close, only to plunge into emotional risk: everything is transient and uncertain. Even nostalgia is uncomfortable, like 'working...a new glove, ' as if memories had arrived in the wrong size...There's no complacency here; Currin's bold lyric poems startle readers awake.--Foreword Reviews Currin's poetry attends us, lighting the ball at midnight, where first love and first terror are arm-in-arm, waiting in their figurative, gesticulating disguises to welcome us to a primitive happiness.--Rain Taxi Review of Books Jen Currin's THE SLEEP OF FOUR CITIES comes into Canadian poetry with the same electric intimacy as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon brought to the drawing rooms of Europe a century ago, and with a similar omnipresent dimensionality burning on the shore between touch and cognition. Currin's poems are reminiscent of Don Domanski's or John Ashberry's, except that with Currin's every link between every seemingly random image is precisely contained by a rigorous set of story-telling rules. Think Marilyn Bowering's Autobiography meets Erin Mouré in a gallery of brilliantly coloured painterly surfaces with their roots in wisdom literature and folk-tale magic, and you have a hint of it. With this volume, an entire tradition, with its roots in Latin American and Eastern European poetry, all shaped with the rigour of the New York School in which Currin trained, has the potential to inspire and define a generation. There hasn't been a debut like this since Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susannah Moodie...--A rc Poetry 'My mask hangs by a threat, ' writes Jen Currin, and indeed an air of menace suffuses these brilliantly erotic and dangerous poems. Currin is a startling new talent who bears watching.--John Ashbery

Literary Nonfiction. Canadian History. BC Books in BC Schools pick. Reading the Riot Act is a phrase that has entered the popular lexicon, meaning the action taken by authority figures when they perceive that their charges are getting out of hand. The act itself is a seldom-used piece of legislation actually designed to prevent a riot from taking place. Supposedly, the mere mention of the Riot Act is enough to bring hardened miscreants bent on destruction to their collective senses. But if a riot has started, it's already too late to read the Riot Act. Every city has its distinct history of rioting--the Rocket Richard riots in Montreal, the Christie Pits riot in Toronto, the Winnipeg and Regina riots, even the Shakespeare riots in New York where rival factions rioted over which actor was the better interpreter of Shakespeare's work. READING THE RIOT ACT is a popular history that rereads and rewrites the legacy of riots in Vancouver. The project was conceived following the city's Stanley Cup riots in 1994, when official reports and media coverage differed significantly from eyewitness accounts. Later, media reports on the APEC riots downplayed and obscured certain facets of the conflict. Seeking out sources beyond the official reports, Barnholden has compiled a record of participants and observers, allowing the vanquished to have their say. Barnholden shuns the simplistic bad apple explanation, and explores the deeper economic causes and effects of riots. This book contains some stirring narrative of conflicts that have defined the history of Vancouver.--Prairie Fire ...demonstrates that even unexpected, apparently spontaneous flarings are about something deeper, from unemployment pressures, freedom of speech and inhumane conditions in prisons all the way to racism and the disappointing performances by our professional sports teams and Axl Rose, the frontman of the notorious GM Place no-show rock band Guns'n' Roses... This tapestry is woven against a backdrop of class war, demonstrating that while the rowdies ground beneath the heels of the police are always the working poor, it's suspiciously rare that they take their grievances to the neighbourhoods of their bosses... Challenging the popular conception that riots are just the result of 'a few bad apples' sowing discontent, Barnholden advances the competing thesis that the entire orchard may in fact be infested with parasites.--The Columbia Journal Until Reading the Riot Act was published, the book containing the most detailed information on riots in Vancouver was the local police department's autobiography, A Century of Service (1986), which Michael Barnholden makes reference to in his own text. The difference with Reading the Riot Act is its focus and perspective, which presents riots as battles in the class war, as it aims to cut through the media distortion around such events and dispense with the 'bad apple' theory of their cause. It makes for a more engaging, accessible and believable read than the police department's book.--Max Sartin, The RAIN TAXI Review of Books

Poerty. VIRAL SUITE explores our relationship with self, other, environment, space, and time. The sensual and the cerebral. How the we/here/now is evolving and mutating with each downloaded packet. The poems in VIRAL SUITE are exuberant in their exploration of the body as 'a vast zone of sensation, ' including a palpable face-to-face throat singing with the poem as a body, proprioceptive and linguistic, and always right in front of us. Mari-Lou Rowley takes us down a homeo path of scientific and poetic lyric in an amazement of molecular dance through the lush genetics of life on the move. Very contagious stuff.--Fred Wah

Fiction. Amazon.ca's 50 Essential Canadian Books selection. Finalist, ReLit Award. Debut novel from the author of 19 Knives and New Orleans Is Sinking. SALVAGE KING, YA! is a gritty, down-to-earth story of a hockey player's last few years in the minors. Drinkwater, an almost-got-to-the-NHL tough-mouthed romantic is skidding through the tail end of his 30s on a high-octane journey of self-actualization. Chip-toothed and soaring he struggles to come to terms with the conflicting aspirations of his youth and the reality of inheriting the family junkyard. Roving. Luminous. Rowdy. Funny. Fantastic: funny, cluttered, driven, as if Denis Johnson had written a hockey novel--The Stranger If it's the best hockey book ever written, does that make it The Great Canadian Novel?--The Danforth Review a brilliant work... a postmodern Canadian classic--National Post A wonderfully fierce and funny book... imagine Hunter S. Thompson on hockey skates--Vancouver Sun

Fiction. African American Studies. Winner, 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest (2001). SOCKET tells the gripping tale of Ronald Percy, an international aid worker who travels to Ethiopia to assist with an irrigation project for the African Development Organization. Upon arrival, he is unable to locate his agents or company representatives, and soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of bureaucracy and state corruption. SOCKET was selected as the Grand Winner from over 400 entries in the 2001 International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest. engrossing--The Globe and Mail The language is vivid and economical, and the plot charges ahead with relentless momentum.--Broken Pencil The story is so tightly written that you can't put it down.--Geist

Poetry. SWING IN THE HOLLOW is a debut collection that struggles with the service and spoil of lyrical attention. In quirky and precise turns, Knighton's language teases a sense of phenomena from the rubbish and rubble of atrophied urban experience. ...meditative and immediate ... hewn deftly out of pop culture ... imploded epic and a localism played closer than white on rice.--Wayde Compton At once attentive and receptive to the kitsch and debris of branded recognitions and cartoon iconographies--the geography of Vancouver days--Ryan's poem traces a bright path through pandemonium, a place where 'beauty seems sometimes best served blindly.'--Sharon Thesen It is wonderfully subtle and witty, with the title setting a tone for the poems to follow. --Winnipeg Free Press

Literary Nonfiction. We've all had good, bad, and sometimes ugly experiences on public transit. EXACT FARE ONLY is an anthology of real life stories about heading out, heading back, and everything that happened in between, whether the trip was across the country or just across town. ...an anthology dedicated to the interaction forced by public commutes across the world, be it by train, ferry, passenger ship, or, most commonly, the bus.--The Stranger This book should be sold in bus terminals and train stations from coast to coast to coast and required reading for commuters everywhere. Laced with humor and subtle social commentary, EXACT FARE ONLY is a timely portrait of that cramped, public space, otherwise known as the bus, the train or the subway.--Matthew Firth, Front & Centre ...the reader... glimpses rare truths and moments of clarity that we can all see if we look around in our travels. Reading EXACT FARE, like in any good journey, I didn't want to step off. Instead, I wanted to see what happened along that road.--The Antigonish Review

Fiction. Finalist, ReLit Award (2012). This collection continues Firth's deep mining into the bowels of Canadian life. From there he unearths tales of forgotten people who survive with their wits and guts during these harsh times. Behind the covers of SHAG CARPET ACTION are stories about rival garbage collectors warring over a possible strike; suburban lust and yearning involving the creative use of a son's Spider-Man toy; the travails of a man who has a vasectomy but then finds out there are far more painful events to deal with on his agenda; shameless and bombastic people who just don't care who overhears their conversation--and on it goes. These are absurd, raunchy, funny stories whose sharp, salty characters are boldly credible and wonderfully rendered by one of Canada's most adventurous and courageous fiction writers. Firth's strength lies not simply in provocatively deploying overt sexuality, but rather the way he leverages bald carnality to make broader, potent statements about the human condition.--Quill & Quire Short stories work best when they're memorable, and Firth's gift is to lodge a vivid image in the reader's numb brain to keep him from nodding off and perhaps linger on. This gift is clever, concise writing--no superfluous flowery shit. To the point, bold, matter of fact.--OttawaXpress Firth's stories remind us of the realities of being human; what we think, feel, and do. The writing is easy to read, raw-to-the-bone honest, and refreshingly real. And that's why I highly recommend you forget about your clean-cut CanLit filler and get your knees dirty with something a little more to the floor--Shag Carpet Action.--Jerrod Edson (Blog)

Literary Nonfiction. Photography. Vancouver Sun books list: 30 best reads from B.C. and beyond. It was an era of gambling, smuggling rings, grifters, police corruption, bootleggers, brothels, murders, and more. It was also a time of intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions. VANCOUVER NOIR provides a fascinating insight into life in the Terminal City, noir-style. These are visions of the city, both of what it was and what some of its citizens hoped it would either become or conversely cease to be. The photographs--most of which look like stills from period movies featuring detectives with chiselled features, tough women, and bullet-ridden cars--speak to the styles of the Noir era and tell us something special about the ways in which a city is made and unmade. The authors argue that noir-era values and perspectives are to be found in the photographic record of the city in this era, specifically in police and newspaper pictures. These photographs document changing values by emphasizing behaviours and sites that were increasingly viewed as deviant by the community's elite. They chart an age of rising moral panics. Public violence, smuggling rings, police corruption, crime waves, the sex trade, and the glamorization of sex in burlesques along and nearby Granville Street's neon alley belonged to an array of public concerns against which media and political campaigns were repeatedly launched. VANCOUVER NOIR: City comes of age in fascinating text...City outgrew its steam-age industrial economy, but the changes didn't come easily or overnight...This is a book about working-class Vancouver in the three decades between, say, the opening of the Marine Building in 1930 and the death, in 1959, of Errol Flynn, in the arms of his teenage girlfriend after an enthusiastic evening at the Penthouse Cabaret on Seymour Street. It's illustrated with about 150 maps and black-and-white photos, including shots of murder victims and other crime scenes: the sort of images that always contain a great deal of visual information. --Vancouver Sun Much like a ride on the Giant Dipper rollercoaster at Happyland (the 1930s precursor to Playland), VANCOUVER NOIR is chock full of informative thrills, spills, and chills.--BC Studies The atmosphere of the mean streets is conveyed in the book's many photographs: black-and-white images of rain-slick pavement, crime scenes, nightclubs, mobsters and hookers...VANCOUVER NOIR retrieves this disreputable side of the city's history and presents it in all its black-and-white glory.--Geist

Fiction. Illustrations by Francesco Gallé. THE MOUNTIE AT NIAGARA FALLS is an astonishingly absurd and humorous collection of brief stories. Ranging in length from fifty to seven hundred words, these vital and sudden fictional forays transport the reader to worlds both big and small: a land where green goats roam, voodoo dolls inflict crushing migraine headaches, a typographer from South Porcupine kills a potential love affair with a discussion of sans serif type, a benevolent judge imparts clemency on an admittedly violent man, and the road of experience turns this way and that for a truffle-snuffing boar and a talking cat. These brief tales are alternately fantastic, humorous, menacing, contemplative, absurd, hallucinatory, violent, confessional, and always provocative. A master of the miniature, Sal Difalco's micro- fictions achieve a wry resonance that longer efforts often miss. They are simultaneously concrete and whimsical, ranging from a woman with the head of a fish, to ballroom dancing lessons, to a pair of thieves in Brian Mulroney masks. Each story is as sharp as a slap. An eloquent and exciting read.--Grant Buday, author of Dragonflies and Rootbound Salvatore Difalco's stories are small miracles: fresh, literate, startling, and a bit off-kilter, like something seen in a dream or out of the corner of your eye.--Stephen Osborne, Geist Salvatore Difalco's THE MOUNTIE AT NIAGRA FALLS has more stories in it than I can count. More than 100 in 142 pages. They are intense narrative chunks, full of incident, frequently spliced with zingers and twists, emboldended with absurdity, on occasion sad. It's the full-meal deal, rapid fire. I don't know what to compare it to, except John Lennon and Spike Milligan.--Underground Book Club, (Michael Bryson's blog)

Fiction. HIDER/SEEKER is the debut fiction collection from award-winning poet Jen Currin. These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality. They take place in cafes, in snowy woods, on city street corners, and at Zen retreats--where conversations happen in the margins of books and filthy shoes are treated with reverence. Ex-wives reunite only to be confronted with their past; an aunt believes she has made a heartbreaking discovery about her niece; a seemingly never-ending hysterical pregnancy becomes the talk of a cafe. These stories are always unflinchingly honest in their portrayal of relationships--in particular the relationships of the book's lgbtq+ characters--as they navigate change, spirituality, and sex. Currin welcomes the reader into the complicated lives of her characters and invites them to stay.

Poetry. BOLT, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over familiar and unknown landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from twenty years as a welder with the Boilermakers' Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, BOLT investigates rough terrain and long horizons. A compilation of poetry, performance scores, and autobiography, it is full of voices, places, fleeting encounters, animals, busted hearts, machinery, and extreme weather. Delicate portraits of birds muscle in on experimental scripts. Buffalo thunder through the text. Lovers are left weeping, factory stacks rear up against boiling skies, and coal trains thread silently through clouds of fugitive dust. BOLT is a collection of scars and a compendium of remedies; a measurement of lightning. It's the familiar impulse that occasionally seizes us all, to suddenly run, out of control. But it's also a carefully engineered fastener that holds things together.

Poetry. In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways. Her phrases, her metaphors and similes, slam up against each other like strangers on the street. Apologies, changes in direction, barometric pressure, objects ping and ricochet, but some residual thing always clings after the parting. We acknowledge, we recognize, we nod knowingly, and not just from familiarity but because her words have snapped our head forward. And we realize the dummy on her lap -- frozen and smiling -- is us, and the jaw drops from laughter and dismay, but just as often it drops in awe.

Fiction. LONG RIDE YELLOW is the debut novel from two-time Journey Prize Finalist Martin West. The novel explores the limits of sexual desire and willfully prods the veil at the edge of reality. Nonni is a dominatrix who likes to push the boundaries; she is also easily bored. Her disdain for all that is conventional and vanilla launches her on a journey of personal discovery: first via the local swingers' scene, then through the world of clandestine S&M clubs, and on to more adventurous and dangerous private diversions. She eventually pushes the envelope so far that she attracts the attention of alien beings she refers to only as the Woodenheads. They do strange things to her, alchemic things, as she is slowly transformed into wood and steel and electricity. You won't soon forget Nonni; she won't let you. Praise for CRETACEA AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE BADLANDS: ... Martin West's impressive debut short story collection ... readers will encounter echoes of Flannery O'Connor and Barry Hannah. --Foreword Magazine the 11 tales in Martin West's debut collection ... often surprise with strange, startling images. --Alberta Views

Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. YOU ARE NOT NEEDED NOW is a brilliant new collection of stories from Annette Lapointe, author of the Giller- nominated novel STOLEN. Often set within the small towns of the Canadian prairies, the stories in YOU ARE NOT NEEDED NOW dissect and examine the illusion of appearances, the myth of normalcy, and the allure of artifice. Lapointe presents characters who are extraordinarily real. They are often strange, vulgar, or messy: collecting blood-stained cotton pads and hairs from shower drains, slicing through skin to get more urgent medical treatment for testosterone withdrawal, storing the heart of a dead infant in a glass jar, kneeling on the dirty wet floors of a bathroom stall to perform oral sex. Despite the diversity, strangeness, and complexity of her characters, Lapointe illustrates a remarkable understanding of each one. She knows them so intimately, and gives her reader the gift of knowing them, too. Lapointe is adept at looking closely, and exposes her characters' faults and vulnerabilities, humiliations and vanities, in illuminating and surprising ways. Trapped in this inescapable place-life-her characters linger somewhere between apathy and obsession, compassion and disregard, conflict and avoidance. This is a bold collection of stories, rich with nuance, originality, and depth.

Fiction. Kobzar Literary Award, Finalist. Eric Hoffer Award, Shortlist. City of Victoria Book Prize, Finalist. Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale of fate and destiny. Set in Vancouver in 1962, we follow Cyril Andrachuk, son of immigrant parents from the former Ukraine, as he makes his way from high school to menial labour jobs, from first love to first heartbreak, from sibling rivalry to malicious family betrayal. Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived the Holodomor, Stalin's systematic starving of the Ukraine in the 1930s during which two million people died. Cyril's mother carries the scars and memories of a past she can't let go of; she mourns the early death of her husband and feels responsible for the malnourished, brittle bones of her eldest son, Paul. Cyril is a mystery to her: he wants to be an artist--he draws incessantly and talks about going to art school. He draws his late father's tools--saws, drills, hammers, wrenches, everything. When Cyril produces a series of large commemorative Stalin stamps his mother questions her son's insensitivity; when an act of impassioned violence erupts in the house, it is Cyril's sanity that is called into question. The Delusionist is a darkly comic novel about love, loss, creativity, and coming to terms with the horrors of history. Subtle and elegant, his account of one's man's stumble-filled movement toward his fate commands attention and gives readers new ways to comprehend the process of maturation.--The Vancouver Sun Buday captures the ambiance of 1962 Vancouver like an archaeologist opening a time capsule...--John Moore, BC BookWorld ...a realistically uplifting portrayal of a child of immigrants who is trying to pull himself out of a rut.--The Globe and Mail

Poetry. THIS DRAWN & QUARTERED MOON makes pre-millennial San Francisco its epicenter, and from there ranges out in time and space. Characters abound. The reader will meet a plagiarist, a Vietnam vet named Othello, a Mafia don, a drug mule en route to jail, Elvis Presley (the poet's father was his doctor), a Sculptor of the Lower Fillmore Head Shot, a dying Arab king and Courtney Love. Autodidact and gregarious loner Kurt Lipschutz, aka klipschutz, alternates personal with public poems, satires with romance, dramatic monologues with prose poems, street swagger with delicate songs that carry their own music. Over ten years in the making, this collection evokes the restless spirits of predecessors such as Nicanor Parra, Gregory Corso and Kenneth Patchen. A succinct, speedy chronicle of events as they come at the author with bewildering multiplicity and congestion. To encompass it all, he responds with such variety that some poems look surreal despite their very real particulars.--Carl Rakosi Breathtaking sound and rhythms. Endless wordplay, trippy delight, passion, heartbreaking rage, the comedic, the horror. Sorrow so deep it's liberating.--Sharon Doubiago THIS DRAWN & QUARTERED MOON is an illuminating text, verbally sharp as a tack, spinning a web of language that catches many a random fly, but most importantly speaks of and about what most people never venture to say, and then says it with such irony as to twist the audience into the volume's tornado lines.--Rattle ...there's a pretty fine ride to be had in THIS DRAWN & QUARTERED MOON...A close examination of the man's work on paper reveals that, more than mere zaniness, there is frequently a beguiling complexity to his poems that lingers long after their reading. Reviewing a book of poems by klipschutz is a little like critiquing a force of nature: the first instinct is to step back uncritically and admire the man's penchant for conversational wit and incisive panache...--The Pedestal

Poetry. Second Prize Winner, John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Competition. Finalist for three Saskatchewan Book Awards (University of Regina Book of the Year Award; Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award; City of Saskatoon & Public Library Saskatoon Book Award). In this, her ninth collection of poetry, Mari-Lou Rowley explores how we, as a species, have moved beyond our search for a union with the cosmos--in the spiritual sense--to the desire to conquer its mysteries and exploit its resources. This manuscript is scientifically, philosophically, and aesthetically informed, and uses formal conventions and strategies to unique and surprising effect. We are taken on imaginative journeys through space, time, and objects in the CosmoSonnets, and into fifth and sixth dimensions through such poems as 'This morning the gangsta movie in my head exploded' and 'Mutated Interview with European Space Agency Astronaut on Space Debris and other Interstellar Phenomena.' A confident and challenging voice; a cosmic vision.--Jury Comments, John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award Rowley repeatedly astonishes with her ability to incorporate science and the vocabulary of science into her poetry all while remaining attuned to the musicality of the language: lovemaking, for instance, is '[p]article energy measured in electron volts, / the untidy oblate geometry of love' and, in a later section, a fish is described as a 'voracious gleaming / skin slick / and sinking fast'... Rowley's ninth collection is ambitious and sophisticated, and a must-read for anyone interested in science poetry, ecocriticism, or who wants to a fresh vision of the unity underlying our 'one world.'--Alexis Motuz, Arc Poetry Rowley has a ferociously active and fertile mind and she covers vast territories more easily than one can imagine. She does this with poetry that challenges and rewards in equal measure...This is an experienced poet at the top of her game and in full control.--Michael Dennis, blog

Fiction. ATOMIC STORYBOOK is a new novel from the author of SPAT THE DUMMY. It's about Albert Einstein, an explosion on the moon, and a group of friends who seem to be living in a long, strange dream. A delightful stew of lust, blood, ennui, and physics, ATOMIC STORYBOOK is about living and dying in what is undeniably, an illusion. Macdonald does an excellent job through multiple perspectives of keeping the reader on edge as to what is real and what is not... It's a barometer of excellent writing when a novel can get you to stop reading, causing you to daydream and get lost in one magnificently imagined scene.--The Winnipeg Review The humour in SPAT was dark, bloody, and laugh-out-loud funny and STORYBOOK is even better. It is also a more thoughtful and emotionally nuanced book and makes the reader experience Macdonald's stated goal as an author to 'feel the shock of the future as it splashes over me like a bucket of ice water on a sunburn.--Cape Breton Post Praise for Ed's previous novel, SPAT THE DUMMY: This novel is unforgettable both for its subject matter and its form of narration. The style is electrifying and there are images that will burn in the reader's mind forever. Ed Macdonald is a gripping writer. --Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief, winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award