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"For readers of Fatimah Asghar's If They Come for Us, here is a searing, multidimensional debut about the search for language and self, which is life itself. I knew it was time to build what could carry, what could find the high point to name what I knew to be the world and carry it with me At the heart of The Knot of My Tongue is Zehra Naqvi's storying of language itself and the self-re-visioning that follows devastating personal rupture. Employing a variety of poetic forms, these intimate, searching poems address generations, continents, and dominions to examine loss of expression in the aftermath of collisions with powerful forces, ranging from histories to intimacies. Naqvi follows a cast of characters from personal memory, family history, and Quranic traditions, at instances where they have either been rendered silent or found ways to attempt the inexpressible--a father struggling to speak as an immigrant in Canada; a grandmother as she loses her children and her home after the 1947 Partition; the Islamic story of Hajar, abandoned in the desert without water; the myth of Philomela who finds language even after her husband cuts off her tongue. Brilliantly blending the personal and the communal, memory and myth, theology and tradition, the poems in this collection train our attention--slow and immediate, public and private--on our primal ability to communicate, recover, and survive. This example is striking for the power of its speaking through loss and a singular, radiant vision."--

Shortlisted for the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book PrizeA vivid, expansive vision of intergenerational witness and repair.The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay.shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt yamagushiku’s practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. The poet says, I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, shima anchors this interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet’s homeland is an impossible destination.

"A hallucinatory literary horror novel set deeply in the consciousness of a woman exploring a changed and frightening world. Our protagonist wakes up in a basement, tied to a chair, with a man looming over her. But someone has a knife. We follow her as she emerges from captivity into an unnamed, nightmarish city, seeking some meaning to her new reality. As figures emerge from the night, some offer sanctuary, and others judgement, but she keeps moving, making her way through this fever dream of a narrative."--Provided by publisher.

"An ambitious and wholly original poetry collection that examines how state violence is ever-present and often operates invisibly. In 2021, a year into the pandemic, the City of Toronto started demolishing plywood structures for houseless people at a time when COVID rates were exploding in homeless shelters. The media reporting on the incident didn't delve into the broader societal and historical contexts that give rise to houselessness. This real-life set of circumstances prompted Anna Lee-Popham to consider how AI technology might act as a tool to understand the news. What content would such an AI translator be fed? What form would the communication take? What would be the relationship between the AI translator and the human? In response to these questions, Empire of the Everyday examines (over two acts and five episodes) how state violence is ever-present and often operates invisibly. The "I" of the poems is the piece of AI machine technology that translates life in the city into a less linear language. The poems often address multiple individuals of various subjectivities ("you") to examine ways that life is confined and at times defined by the city. Powerful, thought-provoking, and devastating, Empire of the Everyday offers a new understanding of the current social and political moment."--

CBC Poetry Prize finalist and National Magazine Award honoree Faith Arkorful’s breathtaking, surpassingly thoughtful debut collection of poems.Hauntings form the canopy of The Seventh Town of Ghosts. These titular towns, centred in yesterdays, tomorrows, and the ongoing, lead to a special kind of singing: songs to the reader who wrestles with existence, the unsure peace within family, and the often-tense interdependence of life.Here, discernment is ever-present, guided by Faith Arkorful’s insights on not only the ravages of the state and the police upon the Black family and life at large, but also on a kaleidoscope of connections—sisterhood, daughterhood, kinship, solitude, death, romance—and how tenderness, chosen and repeated, can shield against life’s blows. These towns also enchant, shape-lifting through humour, irony, and the small refractions of language where Arkorful guides us through the fault lines and the undertow, in the form of fruit, island volcanoes, Formula 1, and the expansive hum of life.This poet-as-sojourner bears careful, caring witness, her attention reserved not only for her living and her dead but hyphenated two-fold by the fragile things and the lasting things. These poems remind us of what contours our mysterious and fleeting presence on Earth.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERFrom global art superstar Kent Monkman and his long-time collaborator Gisèle Gordon, a transformational work of true stories and imagined history that will remake readers’ understanding of the land called North America.For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character—an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years in films and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew. The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island is a genre-demolishing work of genius, the imagined history of a legendary figure through which profound truths emerge—a deeply Cree and gloriously queer understanding of our shared world, its past, its present, and its possibilities.Volume One, which covers the period from the creation of the universe to the confederation of Canada, follows Miss Chief as she moves through time, from a complex lived experience of Cree cosmology to the arrival of European settlers, many of whom will be familiar to students of history. An open-hearted being, she tries to live among those settlers, and guide them to a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings and the world itself. As their numbers grow, though, so does conflict, and Miss Chief begins to understand that the challenges posed by the hordes of newly arrived Europeans will mean ever greater danger for her, her people, and, by extension, all of the world she cherishes.Blending history, fiction, and memoir in bold new ways, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle are unlike anything published before. And in their power to reshape our shared understanding, they promise to change the way we see everything that lies ahead.

"A pulse-pounding new thriller from the bestselling author of Wherever She Goes and Every Step She Takes. If someone were threatening your home, how far would you go to protect it? A stranger is trespassing in Celeste Turner's backyard, moving through the shadows around her shed. It could be a harmless backpacker seeking temporary refuge, but experience has taught Celeste to be extra wary. Not wishing to draw unwanted attention, she cannot turn to the police. Celeste is an outsider to this region of rural Florida, and all the locals see is a "city girl" who swooped in to secure her inheritance. But Celeste needs her new life to work, so she must confront her intruder. To her surprise, she finds out that her unwanted guest is a young backpacker named Daisy. She is polite and friendly, just taking advantage of some shelter as she makes her way through the area. Swiftly, they begin an unlikely and beneficial friendship--Celeste can't help herself, and besides, Daisy will be moving on soon. Why not take advantage of the extra help? Both women have secrets they want to keep buried, and when a body is discovered near Celeste's house, they must move quickly to prove their innocence and protect the lives they've built for themselves."--

"The poems in Lorna Crozier's nineteenth collection, After That, present raw, intensely moving snapshots of life after a staggering loss. As ever, Crozier has an acute attentiveness to the everyday, which lifts the poems and offers readers a glimpse at sustaining, life-affirming, tender moments of acceptance and deep appreciation."--

A career-spanning volume that brings together new and selected works by an iconic voice in Canadian literature.From the Lost and Found Department, by the trailblazing Joy Kogawa, is a profound work of spare, trenchant, and haunting poems that lets us stay with the quietest qualities of beauty and the sublime.This essential volume brings together thrilling new work with selected poems from The Splintered Moon (1967), A Choice of Dreams (1974), Jericho Road (1977), Woman In the Woods (1985), and A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems (2003).Kogawa’s poems here are evidence that our every vulnerability can open into vast channels of grace.

The debut memoir from award-winning journalist Morgan Campbell: an incredible history of a family’s battles across generations, a hilarious and emotional coming-of-age story, and a powerful reckoning with what it means to be Black in Canada—particularly when you have strong American roots.Morgan Campbell comes from “a fighting family,” a connection and clash that reaches back to the south side of Chicago in the 1930s. His father’s and mother’s families were both part of the Great Migration from the U.S. rural south to the industrial north, but a history of perceived slights and social-class differences solidified a great feud that only intensified over the course of the century after the families came together in marriage and split up across the border.Morgan’s maternal grandfather, Claude Jones—a legendary grudge-holder, as well was an accomplished musician, peer of Oscar Peterson, and fixture of the Chicago jazz scene—was recruited to play some shows in Toronto, fell in love with the city, and eventually settled in Canada in the mid-1960s, paving the way for Morgan’s parents to join him amid the tumult of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. Morgan’s paternal grandmother, Granny Mary, however, remained stateside, a distance her schemes and resentments would only grow to fill. That fighting spirit wasn’t limited to the family’s own squabbles, though—it animated the way every generation moved through the world. From battling back as a group against white supremacist newcomers who violently resisted Black neighbours, to Morgan’s pre-teen mother burnishing her own legend by cold-cocking some racist loudmouth bullies, the lesson was clear: sometimes words weren’t enough.In Canada, the Campbells started a family of their own, but the tensions between in-laws never ceased, even as divorce and disease threatened the very foundations of the life they’d built. Bearing witness to all of this was young Morgan, an aspiring writer, budding star athlete, and slow-jam scholar, whose deep American roots landed him an outsider status that led to its own schoolyard scraps and exposed the profound gap between Canada’s utopian multicultural reputation and the very different reality. Having grown up bouncing between these disparate identities and nationalities, real or imagined—Black and Canadian, Canadian and American, Campbell and Jones—My Fighting Family is a witty, wise, rich, and soulful illumination of the journey to find clarity in all that conflict.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Shortlisted for the 2024 Speaker’s Book AwardFrom bestselling author Ken Dryden, a riveting new book.On Tuesday, September 6, 1960, the day after Labour Day, class 9G at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute in a suburb of Toronto assembled for the first time. Its thirty-five students, having written special exams, came to be known as the “Selected Class.”They would stay together through high school, with few exceptions. They would spend more than two hundred days a year together. Few had known each other before. Few have been in other than accidental contact in all the decades since.Their ancestors were almost all from working-class backgrounds. Their parents had lived their formative years through depression and war. They themselves were born into a postwar world of new homes, new schools, new churches. New suburbs. Of new classes like this one. Of boundless possibilities.When almost anything seems within reach, what do we reach for?Ken Dryden was one of these thirty-five. In his varied, improbable life, he had wondered often how he had gotten from there to here. How any of us do. He decided to try and find his classmates, to see how they are, what they are doing, how life has been for them. They talked many long hours, in a way they had never talked before. Most had married, some divorced, most have kids, many have grandkids.This is the story of a place, a time, and so much more.

"A tragic plane crash that leaves two women stranded and fighting for their lives kicks off this sweeping and hilarious novel from award-winning writer Drew Hayden Taylor that blends thriller, murder mystery, and horror with humour and spectacle. Elmore Trent is a professor of Indigenous studies who finds himself entangled in an affair that's ruining his marriage; Paul North plays in the IHL (Indigenous Hockey League), struggling to keep up with the game that's passing him by; Detective Ruby Birch is chasing a string of gruesome murders, with clues that conspicuously lead her to both Elmore and Paul. And then there's Fabiola Halan, former journalist-turned-author and famed survivor of a plane crash that sparked a nationwide tour promoting her book. What starts off as a series of subtle connections between isolated characters quickly takes a menacing turn, as it becomes increasingly clear that someone--or something--is hunting them all. Taking tropes from murder mystery, police procedural, thriller, and horror, Drew Hayden Taylor weaves a pulse-pounding and propulsive narrative with an intricate cast of characters, while never losing the ability to make you laugh. Cold takes Indigenous myth and folklore and thrusts it into the modern streets of Toronto, exploring themes of displacement and trauma, as well as offering playful satirical critiques of the current landscape of Indigenous literature."--

"An enchanting collection of stories from the life of philanthropist, art collector and former president of Cineplex Media, Salah Bachir--who through his sheer joy of life, art, and human interaction has captivated some of the most famous people in modern history, including the likes of Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali, Andy Warhol, and Katherine Hepburn. Salah Bachir, who immigrated to Canada from Lebanon in the 1960s, has been in the movie business for four decades, first as the originator of syndicated in-theatre magazines, and most recently as the president of Cineplex. While this has given him undeniable front-row access to Hollywood's biggest stars, it's Salah's personal charm and kindness, his philanthropy, his overall style (think capes, sashes, pearls, diamonds, etc.), and involvement in the art world that has made him a friend, companion, lover, and/or confidante to everyone from Katherine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Joan Rivers, Mary Tyler Moore, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to Andy Warhol, Edward Albee, Orson Wells, Aretha Franklin, and Elizabeth Taylor. Collected here in this wonderful book are personal stories of them all, some short, some long, some surprising, others juicy, and all fascinating. Through them we get to know Salah, a larger-than-life character that embodied the worlds he lived in and shaped--the kind of person it would be hard to make up if he didn't already exist."--

"To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Indigenous Voices Awards, an anthology consisting of selected works by finalists over the past five years, edited by Jordan Abel, Carleigh Baker, and Madeleine Reddon. For five years, the Indigenous Voices Awards have nurtured the work of Indigenous writers in lands claimed by Canada. Established in 2017 initially through a crowd-funded campaign by lawyer Robin Parker and author Silvia Moreno-Garcia that set an initial fundraising goal of $10,000, the initiative raised over $116,000 in just four months. Through generous support from organizations such as Penguin Random House Canada, CELA, and others, the award has grown and have helped usher in a new and dynamic generation of Indigenous writers. Past IVA recipients include Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tanya Tagaq, and Jesse Thistle. The IVAs also help promote the works of unpublished writers, helping launch the careers of Smokii Sumac, Cody Caetano, and Samantha Martin-Bird. For the first time, a selection of standout works over the past five years of the Indigenous Voices Award will be collected in an anthology that will highlight some of the most groundbreaking Indigenous writing across poetry, prose, and theatre in English, French, and in an Indigenous language. Curated by award-winning and critically acclaimed writers Carleigh Baker, Jordan Abel, and Indigenous scholar Madeleine Reddon, this anthology will be a true celebration of Indigenous storytelling that will both introduce readers to emerging luminaries as well as return them to treasured favourites."--

"Following an accident resulting in the tragic loss of his mother on their family property in Douglas Harbour, New Brunswick, photojournalist Darren Calabrese--a new father himself--knew it was time to move back to Atlantic Canada, the place both he and his wife called home. Living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, his tremendous sense of loss led him to reflect on the meaning of home and his appreciation for New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador: their geographies, histories, and traditions, turning his lens to explore the tension between the perseverance of tradition and the inevitability of change. Darren's photography led him from province to province, into cities, towns, homes, and Indigenous communities, who welcomed him to document the inextricable relationship between people, their stories, and the landscapes--equally beautiful and harsh--where they live and work. Personal essays on loss, family, and coming home, as well as Darren's experiences traveling to the regions he photographs, are woven throughout this evocative collection of carefully curated photographs and narrative captions, accompanied by archival photographs from Darren's deep family history. Elegant, spare, and revelatory at every turn, Leaving Good Things Behind: Photographs of Atlantic Canada brings to light both the challenges and joys of the places we live."--

"With honesty, love, and humour, in this moving memoir, Kelly S. Thompson explores her relationship with her older sister, Meghan. Tested by addiction, abuse, and illness, the sisters' relationship crumbles, only to be rebuilt into an everlasting bond. Kelly Thompson, and her older sister, Meghan, are proof that sisterhood doesn't always equate to friendship. While they were mostly temperamental opposites, growing up in a military family forged their connection--Kelly, an anxious child, looked to her big sister for protection, and Meghan, who was being treated for kidney cancer, adored her younger sister. But when, as a teenager, Meghan becomes addicted to cocaine and opioids, putting the family under new strain, Kelly is forced to reevaluate her family role as her relationship with Meghan is torn apart. As time passes, the distance between the sisters only increases as Meghan slips deeper into addiction and chooses a series of abusive partners. Meanwhile, Kelly sets her own course, enrolling in the military at eighteen, moving across the country and marrying the love of her life, while pursuing her dream of becoming a writer. It's only when Meghan becomes a mother that she and Kelly tentatively begin to face past hurts and reexamine what sisterhood really means. Just as they reunite, Meghan is diagnosed with terminal cancer the day after the birth of her second child. Now, as the family reels at the prospect of the biggest loss, Kelly and Meghan will draw on their mutual dark sense of humour and deep understanding of each other, to share all they can in the time that they have. At once funny, inspiring, and heartbreaking, Still, I Cannot Save You is a story about addiction, abuse, tragedy, and illness, but above all, it is a powerful portrait of an enduring love between two sisters."--

An original, inventive--and visually stunning--exploration of place, identity, language, and experience from the acclaimed poet, novelist, and sound performer.GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE FINALISTQWF A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY FINALISTThe poems in Kaie Kellough's third collection drift between South and North America. They seek their ancestry in Georgetown, Guyana, in the Amazon Rainforest, and in the Atlantic Ocean. They haunt the Canadian Prairie. They recall the 1980s in the suburbs of Calgary, and they reflect on the snowed-in, bricked-in boroughs of post-referendum Montréal. They puzzle their language together from the natural world and from the works of Caribbean and Canadian writers. They reassemble passages about seed catalogues, about origins, about finding a way in the world, about black ships sailing across to land. They struggle to explain a state of being hemisphered, of being present here while carrying a heartbeat from elsewhere, and they map the distances travelled.

In this definitive and meticulously researched account of the Jewish experience in Canada, award-winning and critically acclaimed author Allan Levine documents a story that is rich, accessible, often surprising, and epic in its scope. Relying on an abundance of primary sources and first-hand documentation and interviews, Seeking the Fabled City chronicles the successes and failures, the obstacles overcome and those not conquered, of a historic journey and the people who travelled it.Seeking the Fabled City is a story that unfolds over 250 years--from the decade after the conquest of New France in 1759, when small numbers of Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent arrived in British North America, through the great wave of Russian and Eastern European Jewish immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, to the present, in which Canada's large Jewish community, no longer hindered by the anti-Semitism of the past, is free to flourish. This is a chronicle of a people that takes place at hundreds of locales across the country--mainly in the large urban centres of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg, but also in west coast and maritime villages and tiny prairie towns--in a riveting drama with a cast of thousands.Relying on an abundance of primary sources and first-hand documentation and interviews, Seeking the Fabled City chronicles the successes and failures, the obstacles overcome and those not conquered, of a historic journey and the people who travelled it.

One hot afternoon in 1998, Dave Bidini - who loves hockey, watches it, plays it, and breathes it - found the Stanley Cup final so tedious to watch that at one point he clicked channels to Martha Stewart - and never switched back. This made him wonder where in the world the game might exist free of the complications of professional sport. He set out to find the tropic of hockey. His quest took him to a rink on the seventh storey of a mall in Hong Kong - a rink encircled by a dragon-headed roller coaster - and to the gritty city of Harbin in northern China, where a version of hockey has been played for 600 years; to Dubai in the desert of the United Emirates, where hockey is brand new and incredulous Bedouin drop by the Al Ain rink to touch the ice; and to Transylvania, where the game is a war between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians, who were introduced to hockey by a 1929 newsreel of Canadians chasing the puck. Bidini's encounters with odd-sized rinks and players of wildly different talents and experiences have inspired him to interweave his stories of hockey in unlikely places with funny and eyebrow-raising stories about places and players back in Canada. As a bonus, readers are also treated to some striking observations about the game, its fans, and the testosterone, the profanity, and the moments of grace that enrich it. "From the Hardcover edition.