After the overwhelming interest generated by the original limited letterpress edition of Execution Poems, Gaspereau Press released this trade edition which went on to win Canada's highest literary honour in 2001. The jurors of the Governor General's Literary Award called this book "raging, gristly, public — and unflinchingly beautiful," and remarked on Clarke's "explosive, original language."In 1949, George and Rufus Hamilton were hanged for the murder of a taxi driver in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Fifty years later, Clarke has written, in his abundant style, a series of poems that embody both damnation and redemption, offering convoluted triumphs alongside tragedy and blurring the line between perpetrator and victim. What Clarke presents in Execution Poems is uncomfortable. He reminds us of racism and poverty; of their brutal, tragic results. He reminds us of society's vengefulness. He blurs the line between the perpetrator and the victim — a line we'd prefer remain simple and clear. At the heart of it, Clarke is frustrating the notion that society deals any better with these issues today than it did in the 1940s.

    A potpourri of musings assembled with a hint of practical spirituality, to be savoured passably as an oracle of hearts to the many answers, whose questions our minds are yet to comprehend. Ivory Gleam is split into three chapters of learning, longing and loving. Each chapter is a journey traversing a different road to the ultimate destination of self-reflection.

    John's. By the Rivers of Brooklyn traces the story of the Evans family across two countries and three generations, exploring the hopes, passions and heartbreaks of those who went away and those who stayed behind. By the Rivers of Brooklyn transforms into fiction the experience of the 75,000 first- and second-generation Newfoundlanders who once lived in Brooklyn, New York - and the experience of Newfoundlanders throughout history who have gone away to find work and prosperity but never stopped dreaming of home.

    People living happy lives, some not-so-happy lives, people in love, hopeless romantics, people dealing with heartbreak, the ones who believe life is better with a bit of whimsy, this book, hopefully, has a little something that resonates with everybody, lets the reader find the silver lining when needed and discover the joie de vivre even when times are hard.

    When a series of dramatic events brings a strange man to her door, Mary emerges from the comfortable isolation that she knows to follow her dreams in Boston. Those desires do not come without sacrifice and hard choices. When her past comes back to haunt her, Mary must decide whether there is room for both her aspirations and her heart—or if she must surrender one to have the other.

    She leaves the cold shack she shares with her father for the warmth of her kneading table at Cameron's store and gets caught in a snow storm, sparking events that expose the raw humanity of those around her. Loyalty and betrayal, guilt and shame, and faith and doubt collide as the dirty secrets of the bleak coal mining community throw lives into turmoil. A series of brutal attacks, a murder, and an ambitious sergeant intent on seeing someone hang, reveal a town, oppressed as much by its dreary prospects, as it is by its institutionalized corruption, sexism and racism.Mabel just wants to bake bread, but she has her own secrets to protect.The Bread Maker is a rich, beautifully told narrative that seamlessly weaves humour and tragedy into a touching story about life, love and the potential of the human spirit to overcome great odds....

    MacLeod’s young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as she discovers within herself both the capacity for and the conflict between impulses of good and evil. In thinking back on the history of her own tight-knit group of friends, she begins to see how in the excitement of belonging to a ritualized, secret collective, the self is created by the increasing dehumanization of the other—of both the bully and the victim. The Shape of a Girl goes far beyond a simple dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized Reena Virk murder in 1997 on which the play is based. It speaks eloquently and compassionately to a world increasingly dominated by all forms of collectivised and ritualized tribalist hatred, and offers the embrace of trust as the only way out of this circle of violence.Jewel is also based on a real-life catastrophe—the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Three years later, a widow, Marjorie Clifford, at home in her trailer in Fort St. John, British Columbia, begins to take the first step in understanding that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralyzed and dominated by loss.

    Searching for work, sex and big-city life is Ted Owen, who quickly finds himself swept into the complicated lives of the young and the jaded, people who thrive in a strange world of hip fashion and surreal night-clubs.

    No more than eeny, meeny, miney, mo and who we were supposed to catch by the toe.Wish Mooney’s earliest memory in life is finding a corpse in the Waterford River. Jarring stuff for a four-year-old, yet far from the most shocking or bizarre he would witness growing up in west end St. John’s next door to the Waterford Hospital. Or, as it was unabashedly labelled before the advent of political correctness: the Mental.An unfortunate moniker, but one legitimately derived from the original name of the place—the Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases—when it opened in 1854. Not until 1972 would it be renamed after the river that runs by it. But in Mooney’s world, which revolved mostly in and around the asylum’s drab, depressing confines in the mid-1970s, it was colloquially the Mental, just as its largely despondent inhabitants were the mental patients.Thus was the oft-surreal environment that unavoidably enveloped Wish and the rest of the Irish Catholic Mooney clan, including the quietly acknowledged other realities of the place—the sad, the tragic, the maniacal. Little did Wish ever consider that any or all of that would come full circle later in life when, as the court reporter for the Daily News, he would be thrust into the middle of his own life story, replete with shocking conclusion.

    Follow the flailing escapades of maverick music manager Campbell Ouiniette at the Calgary Folk Festival, as he leaves a trail of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, bruised egos, and obliterated relationships behind him. His top headlining act has abandoned him for the Big Time. In a fit of self-delusion or pure genius (or perhaps a bit of both), Ouiniette devises an intricate scam, a last hurrah in an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of his girlfriend, the music industry, and the rest of the world. He reveals his path of destruction in his own transparently self-justifying, explosive, profane words, with digressions into the Edmonton hardcore punk rock scene, the Yugoslavian Civil War, and other epicentres of chaos.

    Simultaneously, Vintage Canada is delighted to publish Downie's first book of poetry, under the same title. It will also contain the lyrics to the sixteen songs on the record.Coke Machine Glow is a rich, haunting collection that reveals both the public and private selves of one of Canada's most enigmatic musicians. In poetry that is urban, gritty and political, as well as romantic, nostalgic and whimsical, Downie allows us a glimpse inside his world. With his acute and observing eye, he gives us snapshots of his life, both on the road and at home; he writes of loneliness and isolation; of longing and desire; of the present and the past; of dreams and nightmares; love lost and love of family. Ultimately, this book is about the distances that bridge and separate us.Layered and deceptively simple, imbued with Downie's wit, insight, anger, compassion and rock 'n'roll edge, Coke Machine Glow is a remarkable debut. With its publication, Gordon Downie becomes a part of the wonderful literary tradition of Canadian songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell who are also poets.

    Enjoy modern poetry, scanned pieces of typed words on scraps, and full color original artwork.Open your mind and let your heart go on an adventure.

    I read his work with awe and admiration.”—Ben Marcus “Joe Wenderoth's brave new poetic talent is like nothing so much as a live wire writing its own epitaph in sparks. [His poems] throb brilliantly with a sense of the 'too much.' . . . But in Wenderoth's case the too much is the too little or the too ordinary—a very remarkable discovery to have made so late in the history of poetry. Philip Larkin and a few American poets have approached it, but Wenderoth's instrument is sharper than theirs; he makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible.”—Cal Bedient This clear-eyed new work from a favorite young poet is searching and solemn, dissatisfied with artificial condolences and pat maxims. Joe Wenderoth’s determination in the face of harsh realities is what rescues us, and him, from hopelessness. “Luck” So a screaming woke you just in time An animal’s scream, or animals’. What kind of animal it was doesn’t matter, and cannot, in any case, be determined. The point is you are saved. Your mouth has been opened. Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore and is the author of five books of prose and poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Davis.

    A year later, she was reborn. Or so her mother said.The crash occurred on a July night in 1955. The truck hit the Gallant family's car head-on; a few weeks later, newborn baby Gail died from her injuries. Mad with grief, her mother prayed feverishly for Gail's return, convinced that God would bring her child back to her. And when she gave birth within a year to a baby girl who looked identical to her lost child, she believed her prayers had been answered.She named that newborn baby Gail.In this haunting memoir about having and losing faith, Gail Gallant recounts her awe-inspiring true story of life as a changeling--a child born to replace her deceased baby sister. A middle child in a large Catholic family, Gail embraced the belief that she was especially anointed, a status that was reinforced by her stern, devout mother and distant, hard-drinking father. Babies sometimes die, after all, but she was the one that God had chosen to bring back to life.Eventually, this special status--the feeling that she had been singled out by God, and just as importantly, by her mother--became a source of secret anxiety for Gail. Doubt began to cast its shadow. As she grew up, questions plagued her: Why did God save her? What did he want in return? And what if she couldn't live up to his--or her mother's--expectations? What if she wasn't so special after all? Or worse, what if she was a mere imposter, only pretending to be the first Gail, whose life she now lived?For this changeling child with a tortured soul, finding her own identity meant wrestling with sainthood and sin alike. As she rewrote her origin story, Gail battled blinding depression and loss of faith. Ultimately, she discovered her own sense of what is extraordinary in becoming simply herself.

    If you have ever experienced loss, heartbreak, love, or joy, reading this poetry will bring back a shocking wave of emotions.Dark Mermaid Song was previously published as Le Chant Des Sirènes: Poems. It has been expanded in this new edition.