Book picks similar to
Questions I Asked My Mother by Di Brandt


poetry
assigned-reading
tbr-fiction
canadian

Not One of These Poems Is About You


Teva Harrison - 2020
    She plunges deep into her inner world, shadowing the progression of the disease. Reality takes on sharp edges: the swell of cancer and its retreat with chemo. Her inner corporeal reality versus her outer manifestation of health, vitality, and femininity. Holding fast to the great love of her life, while preparing to leave him behind. Contemplating who she was before cancer, and who she is now.Starkly honest and wholly profound, Not One of These Poems Is About You distills life to its essence. Teva Harrison continues to gift the world with her clear-eyed insight and her open heart.

The Shape of a Girl / Jewel


Joan Macleod - 2002
    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.

Lost Geography


Charlotte Bacon - 2000
    "Lost Geography" takes the complexity of migration as its central subject: Why do landscape, work, and family lock some people in place and release others? In settings both rural and urban, these stalwart, tragically dispersed yet resilient people respond not only to new environments and experiences but to the eruption of sudden loss and change.As the settings and characters shift in this wise, resonant book, readers are invited to see how habits of survival translate from one generation to another. How are we like our forebears? How does circumstance make us alter what our heritage has told us is important? With unfailing subtlety and elegance, "Lost Geography" teaches us, in a luminous sequence of intense personal dramas, that what keeps us alive isn't so much our ability to understand the details of our past as having the luck and courage to survive the assaults of both the present and history.

Sleeping Preacher


Julia Kasdorf - 1992
    

How Insensitive


Russell Smith - 2002
    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.

Being Mary Ro


Ida Linehan Young - 2018
    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.

Chuvalo: A Fighter's Life: The Story of Boxing's Last Gladiator


George Chuvalo - 2013
    After teaching himself the basics, he turned pro as an eighteen-year-old in 1956 and over the next twenty-three years fought some of the sport's greatest names: Joe Frazier, George Foreman and, most famously, Muhammad Ali (twice). Since retiring from the ring in 1979, Chuvalo has had to come to terms with a series of crushing body blows. His youngest son, a heroin addict, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Two other sons died from heroin overdoses. His first wife, overcome with grief, took her own life. Yet Chuvalo has stoically fought back. He formed his Fight Against Drugs foundation in 1996 and has spent the past seventeen years travelling across Canada and to parts of the United States, talking to tens of thousands of students and young adults about what happened to his family.An inspirational story of a Canadian icon, Chuvalo is both a top-flight boxing memoir and a poignant, hard-hitting story of coping with unimaginable loss.

Whitewater Cooks: Pure, Simple and Real Creations from the Fresh Tracks Cafe


Shelley Adams - 2007
    Despite constant pleading from customers, recipes for dishes made famous there were as unattainable as snowflakes in July. Even the cafe staff was sworn to secrecy. Now, Whitewater Cooks opens the kitchen doors.With this eagerly anticipated book, home cooks can re-create chef Shelley Adams' signature dishes. Readers will enjoy over 70 recipes from the cafe's selection of top sellers -- from warming soups to desserts -- indulging in such culinary favorites as:Whiskey-smoked salmon chowder Ymir curry bowl Whitewater veggie burger Runaway train wrap Peppercorn, brandy and gorgonzola sauce Crackle top snowy mountain cookies Whitewater brownies.Whitewater Resort is internationally recognized for its alpine scenery and the fine quality of its food. Now home cooks everywhere can share its most celebrated dishes.

Buying on Time


Antanas Šileika - 1997
    The book manages to be both harsh and sympathetic. It welds humour, tragedy and the personal embarrassments we all live through in a colourful and memorable way.

The War Poets: A Selection of World War I Poetry (a selection of poems from Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, all with an active Table of Contents)


Rupert Brooke - 2011
    The collection includes:RUPERT BROOKEPEACESAFETYTHE DEADTHE DEADTHE SOLDIEREDWARD THOMASADLESTROPTEARSTHE OWLRAINTHE CHERRY TREESAS THE TEAM'S HEAD-BRASSSIEGFRIED SASSOON"THEY"THE REAR-GUARDI STOOD WITH THE DEADSUICIDE IN TRENCHESTHE GENERALHOW TO DIEGLORY OF WOMENTHEIR FRAILTYDOES IT MATTER?SURVIVORSEVERYONE SANGTO ANY DEAD OFFICERSICK LEAVEIVOR GURNEYTO HIS LOVETHE SILENT ONEISAAC ROSENBERGBREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHESLOUSE HUNTINGON RECEIVING NEWS OF THE WARDEAD MAN'S DUMPRETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKSWILFRED OWENANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTHAPOLOGIA PRO POEMATE MEODULCE ET DECORUM ESTSTRANGE MEETINGFUTILITYDISABLEDMINERSS.I.W.

Admission Requirements


Phoebe Wang - 2017
    The poems in Admission Requirements attempt to discover what is required of us when we cut across our material and psychic geographies. Simultaneously full and empty of its origins, the self is continually taxed of any certainties and ways of being. The speaker in these poems is engaged in a kind of fieldwork, surveying gardens, communities, and the haphazard cityscape, where the reader is presented with the paradoxes of subsumed histories. With understated irony and unsettling imagery, the poems address the internal conflicts inherent in contemporary living.

Land to Light On


Dionne Brand - 1997
    “Out here I am…not even safe as the sea,” she writes. “If I am peaceful…is not peace,/is getting used to harm.” Brand writes about a place where she is an outsider – as any poet or painter must be – and also about the many outsiders who have come here and settled over the years, uncomfortable with the land and its people, uncomfortable sometimes with themselves.No one writes about this country like Brand, free of post-colonial cant yet selvedged with Black suffering in the Americas. Speaking of memory but without a longing for the past, these poems hover between story and song; between groundings of life, wherever your landfall, and the grace of love and light. They ring with a poet’s hesitations, a woman’s praise and prayer for her people and their place. “It always takes long to come to what you have to say, you have to/sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and point to the/signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth and guess/at the fall of words.”

Fifteen Poems


Leonard Cohen - 2012
    These fifteen poems, including “Death of a Lady’s Man,” “On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken,” and “The Embrace,” are drawn from across his remarkable career and appear here for the first time with his illustrations. With its lyrical intensity and sensual immediacy, Fifteen Poems offers a potent distillation of the genre-crossing genius of one of the most admired artists of our time.

Two Tears on the Window: An Ordinary Canadian Couple Disappears in China


Julia Garratt - 2018
    In August 2014 State Security agents grabbed them, accusing them of espionage. In shock, they were unaware of a Chinese spy arrest in Canada, giving the US “some leverage over China to bring a stop to more than a decade of rampant cybertheft” or that they’d become “bargaining chips in China’s desperate countermove”. (Graff, Garrett M. “How the US Forced China to Quit Stealing—Using a China Spy”. Wired Magazine. October 11, 2018) This compelling story of a Canadian Christian couple who spent 30 years working and raising their family in China, involved in aid, education and social enterprise is a unique parallel journey. From the early days teaching English in a decade of ration coupons and collective work units, Kevin and Julia watched with admiration as China catapulted into the modern age with unprecedented speed. Well-loved in China, the Garratt’s had always been thanked for their work in education, social welfare, social enterprises and community service. In 2007, along with two of their children, they moved to the China/North Korea border, opened a popular coffee shop and provided aid and assistance for marginalized communities in Dandong, China and North Korea. Their sudden disappearance plunged them into a journey where survival took every breath. Through their harrowing ordeal and intense suffering comes life-changing insight. They find themselves part of new community of those who’ve tasted yet overcome the pain of injustice. Courage and kindness, friendship and faith, resonates through the ordeal with the heartbeat of a love journey. Artfully written, Two Tears in the Window combines Kevin’s gifted story-telling and humour with Julia’s ability to let you see through their eyes and draw readers into deeply painful yet profoundly life-changing experiences. For more information or to contact the authors, visit www.twotearsonthewindow.com

Fronteras Americanas


Guillermo Verdecchia - 1993
    This one-person play works through bold juxtapositions and satiric reference points: Simón Bolívar and Speedy Gonzales; Columbus and Fodor’s travel guides; Ricky Ricardo and the Latin Lover; �La Bamba’ and Placido Domingo; Carlos Fuentes and American made-for-TV drug-wars movies. Verdecchia twirls stereotypes and clichés, offers comparative histories, examines myths and mysticism, and provides lessons in language and dancing.Cast of one man.