Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of the crows who, aside from fledgling season, fly across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. This durational study echoes their flight, occasionally touching down to reflect on human-crow interactions. Attentive to the great intelligence and perspectives of corvid and non-human communications, the poems in Crowd Source engage historical and strategic examples of how these songbirds gather and disperse. Continuing Nicholson's engagement with the contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned about practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities, caw.
Four individuals show up at Eve Rhodes's open house, hoping to find their perfect home. Each feels like they are the most deserving of the prized house. Debate ensues and emotions ignite. Open House is a literal and philosophical exploration of our tendency to compare and compete, frequently along cultural lines.
When forced to choose a topic for a mandatory high school project, Alex sarcastically says "hummingbirds" because one is hovering outside the window. Alex has no idea that this offhand choice will lead them to uncover hidden family histories in a mysterious journal from the 1860s, find an essential role in a community nest-finding network, open up to a vibrant ecosystem, and learn how a hummingbird disrupted a major pipeline project.
Revolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to find four metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame, pleasure, waiting, and surveillance. In an extended conversation with Mona Hartoum's + and -, Revolutions asks how young Arab women - who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable - make and unmake their identities.Revolutions works between poetic traditions. It places its response to Hatoum's artwork in a Palestinian and Iraqi lineage, drawing on other artists such as Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma. At the same time, Revolutions looks to feminist Canadian poets like Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nicole Brossard, and Syd Zolf in the way it manipulates sources, erases text, and invokes many simultaneously possible readings. Revolutions invites us to read across its poems, finding echoes along the way, turning and re-turning around the circles.
Convivialities is a collection of dialogues with contemporary writers and artists conducted over great distances and extended periods of time. These conversations focus on poetics, both the theory of poetry (its forms, histories, and critical categories) and the theory of poiesis (i.e., making). The dialogues vary. Some are chatty, others theoretical. They model how we might talk, think, and listen together, both to one another and to the sites and greater communities where we are situated. Convivialities investigates how the collected writers and artists craft their works, the contexts in which they make them, the intellectual and artistic histories that inspire their own ways of working, and the cultural issues that are at the core of their practices. And, perhaps most of all, it asks how they continue to create in a world ravaged by climate crisis, economic crisis, settler colonialism, and imperialism.
In kiskisomitok ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿: ¿¿¿¿¿ to remind each and one other, nêhiyaw educator reuben quinn uses the spirit marker writing system as a foundation for teaching ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ nêhiyawewin. The spirit marker writing system holds forty-four spirit markers and fourteen minor spirit markers. Some people call that system the star chart. Each spirit marker holds a law. These laws are meant to guide us in ways that support us in life. They are meant to guide us in ways of living well with the elements: fire, land, water, and air. The spirit markers remind us that these elements form the foundations of all relationships on earth.
Cottage Radio and Other Plays is a collection of four plays by award-winning playwright and director Taylor Marie Graham. While each work is unique, they all feature the strong and hilarious rural women of Southwestern Ontario. The title play, Cottage Radio, is a three-act drama that zeroes in on the often sarcastic and always charismatic Marley clan as they band together in the aftermath of a storm. White Wedding is a large-cast comedy set at an old high school, in a hallway above a wedding reception, where friends and lovers sneak off to reconnect, recalibrate, and swim in the nostalgia of past lives. In Post Alice, four Huron County women (reminiscent of four of Alice Munrös protagonists) gather around a fire for an evening of stories, song, laughter, and releasing secrets into the air. A true Huron County mystery weaves its way in as the women wonder what really happened to Mistie Murray, a teenager who disappeared from the region in the mid-nineties. Finally, Corporate Finch is a one-act dark and eerie horror thriller set in St. Jacob¿s, Ontario, starring two overly adventurous teenagers.Altogether, Cottage Radio and Other Plays animates a wild cast of Southwestern Ontario characters with complex histories and relationships to the land they call home.
Acclaimed Québec feminist writer Martine Delvaux turns her sharp eye and sharper pen on the brazen misogyny of men in power in every field, including Hollywood, politics, tech, law enforcement, architecture, religion, and the military. In this piercing study of patriarchy, Delvaux points out the deleterious effects of the tunnel vision that results from only seeing and reflecting the male experience. A study of the social impacts of visual media, The Boys' Club looks at the history of gentlemen's clubs and male fraternity on a global scale. Examining popular media produced about men by men, Delvaux seeks to challenge the positioning of women as 'object' and men as 'subject'. The Boys' Club exposes a culture of consumption which profits off the female experience while disregarding the female voice.This activist text is also a work of cultural scholarship: The Boys' Club is deeply informed by Delvaux's long engagement with the work of feminist scholars, film critics, historians, writers, and journalists. Beyond the gender disparities portrayed in film and television, Delvaux speaks to a pattern of contempt, exclusion, and patriarchal violence. But it is not enough to keep pointing out inequities; by naming misogyny's circular, self-propagating systems, Delvaux undermines the mechanisms of social, cultural, economic, and political machines in order to break up the boys' club.
Inspired by a true story, we the same opens in 1979 Vi¿t Nam, where six children and a mother become separated from their father and husband as they flee their homeland by boat. Against all odds, they survive pirate attacks, typhoons, and starvation, ending up shipwrecked on a desert island. Thirty-five years pass, and the mother at last shares heartfelt secrets and an unbelievable story with her daughter ... allowing the past to be escorted into the present.Oscillating between humour, romance, and devastation, this powerful debut play explores the aftermath of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective. Its central threads tell of intergenerational healing, alienation and estrangement from peers, family relationships, and hope overcoming adversity.
Out for a walk in their Vancouver neighbourhood, interracial couple Mike and Marissa meet a dog with an unfortunate breed name: Redbone coonhound. This detail unleashes a cascading debate between them about race and their relationship that manifests as a series of micro-plays, each satirizing contemporary perspectives on modern culture. Through hard-hitting comedic elements, Redbone Coonhound explores the intricacies of race, systemic power, and privilege in remarkable and surprising ways.
"You're Gonna Love This tells the story of three entwined relationships: those between the narrator of the poem and her spouse, her television, and herself. A distinctly working-class long poem with a sharply nuanced media literacy, You're Gonna Love This explores how television and media culture's around-the-clock presence impacts our views of the world and our connection to it. At the same time, these poems consider caretaking and the narrator's journey as a caregiver, addressing the steps in her own mental-health journey with dark humour, wry cultural references, and deeply personal stories. You're gonna love You're Gonna Love This."--
"At once raw and skillful, painful and funny, personal and pervasive, the poems in Jump Scare dig deep into mental health, neurodivergence, grief, dreams, monstrosity, identity commodification, sexuality, pop culture, and queer consumer culture. This is a book that tackles isolation and loss head-on and thinks hard and with wry humour about how to position ourselves in this lonely, scary, compelling world."--
lettuce lettuce please go bad is an incantation and a plea for transformation. Using the idea of compost as composition - since the organic process of recycling leaves, words, or food scraps into valuable fertilizer enriches both soil and human life - the book draws on divination systems, herbal healing rituals, the cycles of the moon, experiences of stress and grief, and inherited and invented agricultural practices to tease out a poetics of rural embodied language. Situated at the moment when thought becomes image, lettuce lettuce please go bad expands on the author's personal history of familial migration and agrarian labour - picking, pruning, grafting, tending, planting - entangled in issues of colonization, land manipulation, ownership, extraction, and food production. In an effort to think through the ways vegetables, fruits, and other foods can stand in for complex situations and emotions, La Melia reconsiders how value is allotted and advocates a return to love to mitigate both personal and collective crises.
allostatic load navigates the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuous years marked by global racial tensions, an ongoing pandemic, the commodification of care, and the burden of systemic injustice. Moving between diaristic intimacy and the remove of news reportage, Désil's second poetry collection invites readers to hold the vulnerability and resilience required to navigate deep healing in a world that does not wish you well, in a world that is inflamed and consequently inflames us, in a world where true restoration and health must co-occur with the planet and with each other.
"In Wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. She navigates place and placelessness while observing other migrant workers toiling outdoors despite the hazardous conditions. Through photographs and language shot through with empathy and desire, Wet unravels complexities of social stratification, sexual privation, and environmental catastrophe."--
Inspired by the classic play by Sophocles, Antigone in Spring takes us to a fictional Québec where dead birds fall from the sky, covering highways, rooftops, and parks. The citizens demand an explanation, but the answer never comes; the government, led by the autocratic Creon, refuses to tell the truth. A revolution is brewing, however, and the population's youth and their supporters, inflamed by the unprecedented ecological disaster, are calling for freedom. Amid this upheaval, Antigone and her brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, narrate their tale. Born into a happy family that flees to their cottage in Rivière-Éternité every summer, they lived in the certainty that the world was a safe place of warmth and honesty. But when they accidentally learn the truth - that their mother Jocasta is married to her own son, Oedipus, who is both their father and their brother - everything falls apart, and the three siblings are caught up in the revolution sweeping through the city.Written in free verse and fuelled by the courage and integrity of the protesters during the student demonstrations that rocked the streets of Montréal in 2012, Antigone in Spring is an ode to all the revolutions whose stories remain untold.
For the past four decades, world-renowned Haida artist Clarence Mills (¿'aak'insk'us) has been creating artwork in the cultural tradition and style of his people, including a totem displayed at Expo 86 in Vancouver. He made history as the first Haida artist whose work was shown at the Louvre, and is presently carver-in-residence on Vancouver's Granville Island. Haida Book of Stories is a stunningly powerful poetic attempt to carve out the artist's aesthetic evolution.The artist's statement: "This book is about a boy that wanted to find something inside, things from being born half-and-half on Haida Gwaii. Its passages depict the art within through years of focus inside, outside, on myself. Finding art at a young age through creating made something from nothing, got somewhere by creating: Argillite, Cedar, Paper, Glass. The discovery that being quiet, calm, and in Mom's basement invented a style, a person, an artist."I feel Like I have been A tiny drop of water That started a puddle That overflowed To form a stream Then a river That eventually empties Into the ocean To become free -Clarence Mills (¿'aak'insk'us), November 2022
Another Order gathers the dynamic and previously inaccessible works of Judith Copithorne, the boundary-pushing writer, artist, community worker, and outspoken feminist who has been a key figure in Vancouver's literary scene since the 1960s. Including poetry, fiction, visual art, comics, and life writing, Another Order captures Copithorne's "embodied approach to text" and her tireless experiments with media - from typewriters and pens to computer software - in texts that engage issues of gender, sexuality, desire, subjectivity, spirituality, and revolution. Edited and introduced by Eric Schmaltz, this volume affirms Judith Copithorne's position among the leading avant-garde poets and artists of her time.
"The berry takes the shape of the bloom originated as a gesture towards optimism after loss and pain, difficulty and fear. It began as a linear narrative, contented and secure, offering a window into one trans person's life after they felt contented and secure. But in the end these poems, which capture particular moments in time, may recur in any given present: sometimes what surfaces is anxiety or anger, sometimes love or eagerness. Some poems bear witness; others hold grudges or shake free of them. Together, they entwine around enmeshed experiences of gender, family, trans pregnancy, abuse, fear, and becoming: "Before blueberries grow, they grow a bloom that looks like a proto berry. The berry then takes the shape of the bloom that came before it. The berry displaces the bloom that came before it ... My mother bloomed and then I was a wave or a skateboard or a foraging deer. My mother bloomed and I did not displace her in the right way. Did I berry?""--
"A Family of Dreamers is an exploration of the coming of age of a Mâetis woman who moved from her small rural town to the city. It investigates conversations around desirability, fat liberation, and being a young Indigenous woman. A Family of Dreamers is a meditation on community and personal grief, and a love song for kin that interrogates the question of where is and what is 'home'."--
No Town Called We writes through the death of elders, social panic, and the climate crisis via the lens of the multiply disabled, female-coded body approaching midlife. Punching through the veils of complacency and greed that shape the cultures of the petrostate, these poems are meditations on an emergency, dispatches from wombat burrows and prairie hospitals. They consider the variegated forms grief can take, both marking and resisting their own decay. Reimer asks: How do you and I relate? How might we commune? Can we enjoy our sick prostrated time? What does it mean to occupy a land? What duty of care do we owe each other? And poet, what have you done with the moon?
Celebrated humorist and short-story writer M.A.C. Farrant's new non-fiction work comprises ninety-three puzzle pieces that mimic the actual practice of assembling a jigsaw puzzle. By turns whimsical, insightful, meditative, funny, and factual, the "pieces" of Jigsaw touch on themes readers of the celebrated humorist and fiction writer M.A C. Farrant have encountered before: existence, love, joy, science, history, aging, roads, and Buddhism - and our seemingly universal love of jigsaw puzzles.Once again, the author of the bestselling memoir One Good Thing and of the literary miniatures The World Afloat, The Days, and The Great Happiness writes against the prevailing zeitgeist of doom, accessing its flip side via humour and curiosity. Jigsaw is a much-needed mental respite that offers playful, rejuvenating potential answers to the dreaded question, How in the world are we going to get through these fearful times?
"This timely memoir by Art Miki, former president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians and central player in the Japanese Canadian Redress Campaign, describes the journey to find resolution to the historic event that deprived Japanese Canadians of their basic human rights during and after World War II. The book explores the intense negotiations that took place in the 1980s between the Government of Canada and the National Association of Japanese Canadians, which finally resulted in the historic Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement on September 22, 1988, and the acknowledgment by then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney that Canada had wronged its own citizens. Miki vividly recollects his past experiences and family history, revealing the beliefs and attitudes that shaped his life's journey as a youth in British Columbia, an educator in Manitoba, and a community leader across Canada. He shares personal reflections on his work as a school teacher and principal and on the Japanese Canadian Redress Campaign, as well as on the many endeavours, challenges, and projects that followed. He details his involvement with Indigenous communities and the dispute that would lead to the historic Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, his foray into politics during the 1990s as a Liberal candidate, and his role as a Canadian citizenship judge. Gaman - Perseverance provides a unique, intimate glimpse into Miki's involvement with the Japanese community, in Canada and abroad, and the projects that enhance meaningful historical preservation."--
Isolating in Nogent-sur-Marne, Wajdi Mouawad embarks upon a spectacular inner voyage, travelling from his own microcosm to the eye of the Big Bang. We follow him from Peter Handke's office to his father's retirement home, from the banks of the Saint Lawrence to Montréal, Greece, Greenland, and the Lebanon of his childhood. Through Kafka and Star Wars, by way of French phonetics and the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, he explores the razor's edge of madness, conjures a dream shared by all humanity, and probes the bestiality of our everyday lives.Mouawad's plays, novels, and essays speak to us all, confronting our ghosts, addressing the obscure and the impenetrable, which dissipate as they are put into words. The musings in Speaking through the Night, born out of solitude, confront the mysteries of the universe with supple introspection.
Survive! Survive! transports readers to September 1935, to glorious, tragic times in the colourful company of Ti-Lou and "the Duchess" Édouard, whose sparkling exchanges hide indissoluble pain; to sombre, twilight times with Victoire and Télesphore at the bottom of the ruelle des Fortifications, and between Josaphat and Laura Cadieux, his ill-fated daughter who wants at all costs to find her mother, Imelda Beausoleil. "How to survive?" they all ask, inextricably caught in life's cycle of lost illusions and forgotten dreams. Even as this chronicle of resilience dwells in the difficulties and disenchantments of ordinary life, it reveals existences that accommodate a happiness that passes - always too fast and almost too late.The series closes with Crossing Through Grief, whose action unfolds in August 1941, when the families of Nana and Gabriel unhappily cram together in a new apartment. Nana, inconsolable after the loss of her two eldest children to tuberculosis, is forced to live with Victoire and Édouard, as well as with Albertine, her husband Paul, and their children, Thérèse and baby Marcel. Outside this unbearably crowded household, war rages and rationing deprives everyone of basic necessities.These characters don't know what readers of Tremblay do: that in a year, in May 1942, Nana - the Fat Woman Next Door - seven months pregnant, will open the fabulous Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal ...
Three timely and provocative plays by the award-winning, internationally produced Portuguese Canadian playwright Elaine Ávila.
A powerful new play by the author of Jabber and The In-Between, with a text exploring social issues, interclass dialogue, and the possibility of communal improvementAward-winning playwright Marcus Youssef takes his readers to the future with his riveting new play Do you mind if I sit here? Thirty years from now, three social planners visit Vancouver¿s Russian Hall, long abandoned due to earthquakes and flooding, with a seemingly straightforward task: repurpose the hall for common use. But the trio soon discover the project won¿t be as easy as they¿d thought. An eccentric squatter has made the damaged hall his home, and he not only possesses a trove of Soviet industrial films on 16-mm stock but also refuses to leave. Do you mind if I sit here? is a witty theatrical allegory about the possibilities of radical transformation, in which Youssef dares us to imagine a future borne from our most important beliefs, fears, and hope.
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