From meditations on peacekeeping to praise for the toothpick, The Vinyl Cafe Notebooks runs the gamut from considered argument to light-hearted opinion. Whether McLean is visiting a forgotten corner of the Canadian Shield, a big-city doughnut factory, or Sir John A. Macdonald's gravesite, his observations are absorbing, unexpected, and original. With thought-provoking proposals about the world we live in and introductions to the people he meets in his extensive travels across our country, The Vinyl Cafe Notebooks is informed by McLean's intimate relationship with Canada and Canadians. Yet the collection is also an intriguing look at the writer himself—his past, his present, and his vision of the future. Sometimes funny, often wise, and always entertaining, The Vinyl Cafe Notebooks is sure to provide a wealth of reading pleasure that fans will return to again and again.

    In acclaimed poet Suzanne Buffam's second collection, her unusual range, formal rigor, and imaginative force are on full display as we are introduced to the wry meditations of a literary "irrationalist" who pursues her own poetic logic beyond the bounds of reason. Throughout the collection, in resolutely modern, rueful and eccentric lyrics, Buffam investigates the shifting grounds of knowledge while refusing to take any philosophical authority too seriously. Together, these poems compose a swift, durable, protean argument for the necessity of interior maps in a world that may be on the eve of extinction, but whose darkness is continually illuminated by a pyrotechnics of curiosity, candor, and wit.

    Everyone around him, including his coaches and his father, is going to make sure that he gets the ultimate prize: a chance to play in the National Hockey League. When he is selected to play for the San Jose Sharks, everyone is thrilled. But an on-ice fight turns deadly and has lasting repercussions; Ricky is forced to question everything he knows. How much is hockey worth to him?An inside look at life in professional hockey, this story of a young hockey star’s career derailed by a misplaced punch is a compelling, ripped-from-the-headlines read.

    Widowed mother Bay has never lived anywhere but Louisbourg; restless Tansy left the town as a a teenager and stayed away for years.And now, Tansy is home. Home, and unwittingly falling in love with her sister's almost-boyfriend. Home, and befriending Ashley when all Bay can do is fight with her teenaged daughter. Home, and desperately hiding the real reason she fled all those years ago.When crisis hits the family, the sisters draw closer. But the closer they are, the more explosive their relationship, and soon their troubled history threatens to shatter what's left of their family forever.Complex and heartwarming, Her Mother's Daughter is an exploration of family and friends and the tangled skeins of love, mistakes, and secrets twisting between us all.

    She was not just a soldier on equal footing with her fellow troops; she was a leader, a "sunray", in military parlance, in one of the most dangerous positions in the armed forces, a Forward Observation Officer with the artillery unit.

    At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a perpetual state of movement. She leads a solitary clandestine life, crossing borders actual (Algiers, Cuba, Canada), and timeless. Cold-eyed and cynical, she contemplates the periodic crises of the contemporary world. This is a work of deep engagement, sensuality, and ultimate craft from an essential observer of our time and one of the most accomplished poets writing today.

    Carry a swarm / in your pocket to feed the beasts you meet." Sweet is a gravity-clutched leap into personal emergency and the turbulent landscape surrounding ambivalence, including what lives in that landscape — invited or not. Dani Couture's second collection of poetry takes the traveller from the emerald ash-borer infested trees of Essex County, Ontario, to the frozen lakes of Alaska and to points in-between. Dogged by tree-snapping winds, garbage-hungry bears, global uncertainty and war movie prophecy, the heart bends toward greater and deeper persistence through the intimate and at times anxious metre of Couture's new poems."Couture’s . . . poems are precise, taut with meaning, and quietly filled with curiosities of fact and phrase . . ."  - Books in Canada

    The rhyming text and endearing illustrations are sure to delight babies, preschoolers and adults alike.A growing body of research has shown a child's first six years of life are the most important in terms of brain development. In The Ways I Will Love You a mother shares the many ways she will love and nurture her baby as he grows. From days spent reading, singing and giggling to times spent snuggling and playing together, The Ways I Will Love You looks at the many nurturing moments present in everyday family life.Learn more about The Ways I Will Love You and author Rachel Boehm by visiting the book's Facebook page.

    It is inspired by a post-apocalyptic vision of the future as well as past human history. This story follows a group of zombie hunters as they go though life as survivors of the undead outbreak. The characters reside on an artificial island, the former site of the Argus Research Campus. The hunters, like so many others on the island, are infected- they carry a dormant strain of the undead virus, which will cause them to turn into one of several different types of undead when they die.The infected are marked and segregated from the rest of the inhabitants on the island, making a living by working offshore in the wastes, hunting zombies and collecting salvage, trading their freedom for safety. As the story unfolds you'll find out more about the characters and their sordid pasts and discover hidden secrets about them, their world, and the people that surround them.

    All Ruby wants to do is remember... Ruby Donaldson has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's Disease, and she'll be damned if she won't straighten out her troubled family before she no longer knows how. Ruby spent years fighting to hold on to the home her grandmother built on Ward's Island. The only way she can ensure that her younger, mentally scarred daughter Grace can live there for the rest of her life is to convince her older daughter, Liz, to sober up and come home. Ruby always thought she'd have a lifetime to make things right, but suddenly time is running out. She has to put her broken family back together quickly while searching for a way to deal with the inevitable- and do it with all the grit, stubbornness, and unstoppable determination that makes Ruby who she is...until she's Ruby no longer.

    In tongues alternately vulnerable, defiant, resigned and hopeful, The Inquisition Yours speaks to the atrocities of our time – war, environmental destruction, terrorism, cancer and the erosion of personal rights – fashioning a tenuous bridge between the political and the personal. Trying to make sense of a world where even language is 'a danger,' Currin’s poems reject the old storylines in favor of a vigilant awareness, and wonder what might happen if we 'change the feared penmanship' and embrace a narrative that empowers everyone.

    Lola and St. Olga in northeastern Ontario. Whether reflecting on the broken lives of others in the community or mourning the death of a friend who drowned in a freak fishing accident, the characters in this collection face tragedy with grace, humour and perseverance. These stories deal with both the rundown and ruined aspects of our humanity but also with the redeeming and renewing love that can hold a community together when tragedies threaten to make it crumble.

    After a bewildering series of rapid diagnoses and emergency interventions, Charlene's daughter Chloe is born. But her too-brief life is spent in the neonatal intensive care unit, and her mother, leveled by an epidural anaesthetic procedure gone wrong, can barely make it to her daughter's side. In the months following Chloe's death, more medical crises make it nearly impossible to even begin the grieving process, let alone return to any semblance of a normal life. But return she does, along a path that is both arduous and rich. With a poet's ear for language, Charlene Diehl shares her discovery of joy amidst a devastating loss.

    Encountering a wide range of arresting events—from a best friend’s suicide to the war in Afghanistan and improvised memorials to the plastinate corpses of Body Worlds—these innovative poems survey the forces and forms that shape what and how people mourn. The lively lines, vivid images, and richly-textured voices of the collection are composed in various forms—the lyric, the ballad, the graphic poem, and the fabricated document, among others—as a means of grappling with the many acts and practices that link the living and the dead.

    This is a brilliant and original work that should be mandatory reading for any student of race and history."—Danzy Senna, author of CaucasiaAfter Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed African Canadian poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century. Written from the perspective of someone who was born and lives outside of African American culture, it riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of slavery. These varied essays, steeped in a kind of history rarely written about, explore the language of racial misrecognition (also known as "passing"), the failure of urban renewal, humor as a counterweight to "official" multiculturalism, the poetics of hip hop turntablism, and the impact of the Obama phenomenon on the way we speak about race itself. Compton marks the passing of old modes of antiracism and multiculturalism, and points toward what may or may not be a "post-racial" future, but will without doubt be a brave new world of cultural perception.After Canaan is a brilliant and thoughtful consideration of African (North) American culture as it attempts to redefine itself in the Obama era.Wayde Compton's previous books include the poetry collections 49th Parallel Psalm and Performance Bond. He teaches English in Vancouver, BC.

    Sure, the past decade has had more than its share of stupid wars, obsessions about terrorism, denial about climate change, rapacious turbo-capitalism, and lies, lies, lies. But signs of progress actually do abound. While the world is far from perfect as we embark on a fresh decade, Dyer believes that the "sense of sliding out of control towards ten different kinds of disaster has gone." When things go wrong it’s always easy to pin blame — but singling out the forces that lead to positive change can be trickier.In this illuminating collection of columns from the last five years, Gwynne Dyer ferrets out the signs of hope — without overlooking the issues that remain seemingly intractable. Mining the events of recent history, Dyer contextualizes the recent past and anticipates what the future might have in store. This journalist’s beat is global: from Africa to South America, from Europe to the Middle East, and any other region with a political pulse. Acerbic and iconoclastic, Dyer has never been afraid to call ’em like he sees ’em — and we are all the better for his trademark candour and the breadth of his knowledge and expertise. For anyone seeking to understand the larger forces that shape our society and our world, Crawling from the Wreckage makes for necessary reading.

    Additional discussion highlights the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and its ties to Israel’s Mossad.

    All proceeds raised by the sale of this book will be given in support of the Reformed Reading Room in Recife, Brazil.

    The Amber Coast tells the story of one family's flight from war-torn Latvia, struggle to survive, to gain strength and begin all over again in a new country. Though many immigrants never see their old country again, Ilse enjoyed a fortuitous return to Latvia in the summer of 1990, just as the small Baltic country teetered on the brink of freedom from the Soviet Union. Optimism abounds. Change is in the air. Long-separated relatives meet, many for the first time, and the past becomes vividly present. Steeped in nostalgia for the homeland and the longing to return, it is a story that any immigrant can relate to. This historical non-fiction is steeped in memories from Latvia, Germany, Sweden and Canada. In Canada, Ilse grew up in a Latvian family, belonging to the Montreal Latvian community, while being drawn to the Canadian world of school and neighborhood around her. Ilse Zandstra is a published author of two children's books about Ukuku, a Peruvian spectacled bear, as well as several scientific works. She was born in Latvia but is a well-travelled Canadian, having lived in Europe, Canada, USA, Colombia, the Philippines, and Peru. She now lives with her husband in Ottawa.

    Letters to My Grandma weaves together the remarkable stories of two women, inextricably linking their histories and delving into how the hatred bred between Hindus and Muslims in the Old World consumes families in Canada today.

    And like the husband in Fireproof (the film where The Love Dare originated), readers know this 40-day challenge to understand and practice unconditional love with their spouse need not end when the book does.With that in mind, The Love Dare Day by Day (available here in Spanish) encourages and challenges couples toward new steps in faith and love with 365 marital encouragements, reminders, and action points worth repeating year after year.Unconditional love is eagerly promised at weddings, but rarely practiced in real life. As a result, romantic hopes are often replaced with disappointment in the home. But it doesn't have to stay that way. Whether your marriage is hanging by a thread or healthy and strong, The Love Dare Day by Day is a journey you need to take. It's time to learn the keys to finding true intimacy and developing a dynamic marriage. Take the dare-every day of the year!