Lilac in Leather: A Tale of Forsythia, Bedbugs, Faded Cotton & Time

Sarah Murphy

Pedlar Pr

Cheez 100 is Toronto-based artist Fiona Smyth's first 100 graphic panels from her celebrated comic Cheez, a comic that ran for many years in the monthly paper Xclaim! Luminously reproduced and accompanied by musings from six of Canada's best art writers, including Lynn Crosbie, Jane Farrow, Michael Holmes, Roy Mitchell, SiSi Penaloza and Gary Michael Dault.

Cheez 100

Smyth, Fiona

Literature & Fiction

John Degen's first collection of poetry, Animal Life in Bucharest, received high critical praise from some of the finest poets writing in Canada today. Degen's second collection, Killing Things, brings a precise eye to Toronto and its surrounding landscape to observe the deadly fineness of everyday life. Moving between, and confusing, elements of the city and of suburban and wilderness living, the collection is fuelled by a tone of existential uncertainty and a persistent questioning of realities.

Killing Things

Degen, John

Poetry

Comix guru Lorenz Peter is one of the most prolific and consistentlyworthwhile artists around. Peter's comix portray disenfranchised kids doingwhat comes naturally---smoking hash, having sex and talking endlessly. But instead of presenting a stagnant slacker lifestyle (which makes for dull reading), Peter...offers a variety of perspectives...Both art and narrative are reminiscent of Julie Doucet's juicily detailed technique. --- Joanne Huffa, eYe Weekly

Chaos Mission

Comics & Graphic Novels

Peter, Lorenz

Graphic Novels

PUBLIC WORKS is poet Ronna Bloom's third collection of poetry. In it, several themes emerge:1. The private experience of the public (the idea that everything we experience -- a book, a speech, a hospital, a religion, water running into the taps -- we experience privately);2. The public role of the poet (as in Ginsberg's lines: "While I'm here, I'll do the work/and what's the work?/To ease the pain of living"); and3. The placement of the individual in a wider context (the places we findourselves inhabiting: a body, a house, a job, a memory, as in the common phrase on maps in shopping malls: "You Are Here.") -- Some poems address overlapping themes: physical location in a body, astreet, a city; and recognition of one's own response to the institutions or services found there. Bloom is interested in the way individuals move back and forth between and within the public/private landscape. These poems, moving through personal, physical and social realms, chart the uneven, uncertain trajectory of a life.

Public Works

Follett, Beth

Reminiscent of Pablo Neruda's Elemental Odes, Small Arguments is a stunningly original debut by a gifted young poet. The language of Small Arguments is simple yet there is nothing simple in its ideas. The work touches on the structures of argument, orchestrating material around repetition, variation and contrast. Thammavongsa's approach is like that of a scientist/philosopher, delicately probing material for meaning and understanding. The poet collects small lives, and argues for a larger belonging: a grain of dirt, a crushed cockroach, the eyes of a dead dragonfly. It is a work that suggests we can create with what we know and with that alone. -- "This is the voice of a pilgrim, the one who bends to see, leans to hear... Thammavongsa has distilled her meaning from her details so masterfully and with such confident wisdom that she seems to be reading nature. Through her eyes, we can believe we see the true meaning in things." - Anne Michaels"A formidable work." - George Elliot Clarke

Small Arguments

Souvankham Thammavongsa

Black Stars in a White Night Sky, Lawson's second book of poetry for children, includes fractonyms, concretes, as well as short lyrics and poems that don't rhyme. Lawson stretches the boundaries of what is normally thought of as "children's poetry," but not at the expense of the book's entertainment value or clarity. The poems are written within hearing of both children and adults; philosophy and tomfoolery are equally at home in this exemplary new tome.

Black Stars in a White Night Sky

Lawson, JonArno

Between is a collection of stories about people on the edge of change. They are people for whom family is a love, an embarrassment, a burden and a relief. They are witty and fumbling and they are trying their best, caught between memory and dreams. This is Laurie Petrou's first book.

Between

Laurie Petrou

Hannus is a poetic biography of Ida Hannus, a Finnish-Canadian suffragist and socialist living in Vancouver and in the BC Finnish commune Sointula, through the turn of the 20th century to the Cold War. This is Rachel Lebowitz's debut book of poetry.

Hannus

Lebowitz, Rachel

There is a joke that is sometimes made about Jacob Wren's new book Families Are Formed Through Copulation. The joke is that Families Are Formed Through Copulation is a book designed to convince the reader not to have children (or if they already have children simply not to have any more).Why should the reader not have children? Well, first they should honestly try to assess just exactly how they feel about their own parents. If this proves insufficient perhaps they might also contemplate the fact that the world we live in isn't particularly fit to bring a child into. Keep in mind this is only a joke. Mr. Wren is well aware of the fact that essentially he will convince no one. That people will continue to have children regardless. Families Are Formed Through Copulation is also a book that continuously hovers on the verge of becoming a novel, focusing on a distorted family situation that can certainly be read as that of a single family but just as easily can be seen as the multiple, overlapping experiences of many different families, perhaps even all families. This narrative ambiguity parallels the thematic moral ambiguity of the extreme situations the characters continuously find themselves within, never losing sight of the fact that our feelings towards our own families are some of the most personal and intense emotions we are capable of experiencing.Finally, and most ironically, Families Are Formed Through Copulation describes what happens when one such family comes into contact with a particularly convincing and conflicted conspiracy theorist, sharply parsing the paranoia and media-saturated secret service logic of the times in which we live.

Families Are Formed Through Copulation

Wren, Jacob

Dramas & Plays

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