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Demonstrating once again why he is one of Canada's most loved jokesters, Black masterfully captures the laughter that often bursts out of the seams of everyday life. From an unexpected drag race to a Google search for a picture of the illusive "Arthur the Meek", you just never know when a regular day is going to turn into comedic genius. Black provides uproarious insight into uses a matador might have for a teacup, mango, or simply some paper towel....

Reverse engineering the word, meme splicing, morpheme replacement therapy, phonetic modifications: These are some of the techniques in play throughout Reading the Bible Backwards, the lyrical thought experiments that make up this eagerly anticipated new collection of poems by Robert Priest. By throwing the Bible and other cultural narratives on the turntable and spinning them backwards, Priest unleashes surprisingly new but strangely familiar music and meaning. Whether the movements are sideways, inverted, or omni-directional, his satire has never been sharper—or darker.

Kate Braddock, a sexually ambiguous ex-Spacer, isolates herself on Luna. After detecting a faster-than-light ship en route to Earth several years ago, she now conducts geophysical surveys for a mineral resources consortium. One day, she and a young intern, Mary Atteberry, discover an anomaly in the dust near the Mare Marginis that is clearly unnatural, and clearly alien.

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone is the final installment in Service's trilogy of Yukon verse. Conceived while returning to the Yukon via the daunting Edmonton Trail, and completed in his little cabin in Dawson City, this volume contains 50 new poems of life, love, and hardship in the North.

This new and revised edition of poems about the men and women of the North features the most loved ballads by Robert Service, and is narrated by Michael Puttonen. While living in Whitehorse, Robert Service wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee, and other well-known poems. He wrote and published into his mid-eighties. He was quoted as saying, "I just go for a walk and come back with a poem in my pocket."

Text Messages is the first multi-genre collection by Montreal-based Iraqi hip-hop artist, activist, and professor Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman. Composed entirely on a smartphone during air travel and married to artwork from comrades, Narcy’s writing speaks of the existential crises experienced by diasporic children of war before and during imperialism in the age of the Internet. Narcy’s verses span the space between hip-hop and manifesto, portraying a crumbling, end-stage capitalist society, visions for a new reality, and the myth of multiculturalism in post-9/11 America.

A sorrow has taken root in my heart, and although it hurts every day I know there is a place where we laugh together under an open sky. To that sanctuary, I am travelling. This is that story. Stanley Park is a collection of 35 poems from parables author Sapphira Olson charting the story of two lovers through history as they are separated and then reunited all within the island of Stanley Park in Vancouver. Olson weaves a beautiful and poignant narrative through a progression of emotional poetry taking the listener on a journey of hope driven by love.

Stella's world was one of misery and despair, wandering the streets of Victoria, BC, cold, wet and hungry. She had adapted to street-life, but on most days, she would rather be dead. Living amongst the nameless, faceless and placeless tribe of the homeless, Stella's very existence depended on the generosity of strangers. She never spoke of her past, determined to keep her life-story a secret. Faced with constant hunger, Stella begged and pushed her trolley filled with junk, trying to remain invisible as she moved from alcove to park bench and back again, clinging to anonymity.

Long listed for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Lemon is the story of a teenaged girl with the numbers against her: Three mothers, one deadbeat dad, one cancer-riddled protégé, two friends, one tree-hugging stepbrother, and a 60 percent average. The adults in her life are all mired in self-centeredness and the other kids are busy getting high, and she just can't be bothered to fit in.

From the endangered Canadian boreal forest to the environmentally threatened Svalbard archipelago off the coast of Norway, Jenna Butler takes us on a sea voyage that connects continents and traces the impacts of climate change on northern lands. With a conservationist, female gaze, she questions explorer narratives and the mythic draw of the polar North. Blending travelogue and poetic meditation on place, Jenna Butler draws listeners to the beauty and power of threatened landscapes, asking why some stories in recorded history are privileged....

Once an amusing extrovert with a reputation as a prankster, Mr. Rosen is entering his senior years as a stoic, thirty-year converted introvert who hates change, has little to no interest in people and is more than content to have his wife sit in the navigator's seat of his life. Since becoming a practising introvert, there have been almost no changes in his life, and for the few that there were, his wife had walked him through them, including the recent move to a much smaller home in a lower/middle-class neighbourhood.

This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, 15-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book - Mauve, the Horizon - is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert.

In her fifth volume of poetry, Carla Coles once again brings us into her inimitable inner world. This time, along with her odes to the pleasures of coffee and cake and writing, she delves into the darker emotions of betrayal, endings, and coming through the fire with her sense of humour intact and her gift with words honed to a new level of insight.

In these exquisitely rendered poems, people fall in and out of love, in and out of religious belief and in and out of accepting the distance between their imagined lives and the lives they live. They look back as much as forward and pick mercilessly at the open wounds of failed relationships. They inhabit geographies that are both their emancipators and captors. And they find joy, or succumb to sorrow, amid life’s inescapable ephemerality and fragility.

This is a book about women and ageism. There are twenty-nine contributing writers, ranging in age from their forties to their nineties. Through essays, short stories, and poetry, they share their distinct opinions, impressions, and speculations on aging and ageism and their own growth as people. In these thoughtful, fierce, and funny works, the writers show their belief in women and the aging process.

Pain and trauma are what makes us human, arguably unifying us as a species. Finding our way out can be traumatic itself at the best of times, always confusing and so often riddled with false starts and mistakes. Through poetry, this collection will make you cry, laugh, empathize, question, and eventually help you find your way through and out of that dark place. From someone who has experienced the journey, and put in the years of study and work required to build a tool set to make the needed progress toward better mental health—the time is right to share this work with the world.

Life is full of poetry. Diary of a Life takes its listeners on the poetic journey of author Kimella Louise Gosse, leading us through her childhood and adolescence, her adult years of freedom and travel, motherhood and matrimony, and everything she discovered when her marriage ended and she learned to embrace herself and the world around her. With narrative storytelling and thoughtful poetic offerings, she clearly illustrates the ebb and flow of life, from slow-moving stream to rushing white water, and invites her listeners to join her on the ride

This is a collection of stray thoughts and daydreams, poetry and prose, fueled by caffeine and punctuated by the papercuts we get when we try to turn the pages of our life without being careful enough. Speaking up can change the world...but even when it doesn't, what we have to say is still worth saying. Even if the difference is only to one person. Enjoy the efforts within, let them make you smile and laugh, or think carefully about experiences shared. After, consider writing your own. Whether it's intellectual or idiotic, make a brew, pick up a pen, and enjoy what happens next.

Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, bringing a transmasculine wisdom, humor, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing—Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance.

The poems in Hail, the Invisible Watchman are as tidy as a picket-fence—and as suggestive. Behind the charms of iambs lurks a dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. Metered rhyme sets the tone like a chilling piano score as insidiousness creeps into the neighborhood. A spectral narrator surveils social gatherings in the town of Sherbet Lake; community members chime in, each revealing their various troubles and hypocrisies; an eerie reimagining of an Ethel Wilson novel follows a young woman into a taboo friendship with an enigmatic divorcée.