Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist.A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, The Flame is a valedictory work.“This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet,” writes Cohen’s son, Adam Cohen, in his foreword. “It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”Leonard Cohen died in late 2016. But “each page of paper that he blackened,” in the words of his son, “was lasting evidence of a burning soul.”

    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.

    Includes "The Spell of the Yukon," "The Heart of the Sourdough," "While the Bannock Bakes," and "The Squaw Man."

    Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

    Utilizing medical terminology and iconography to work through loss and detachment, McHugh’s startling rhymes and rhythms—along with her sarcastic self-reflection and infectious laughter—serve as antidotes to the sufferings of the world. Being “upgraded to serious” from critical condition is a nod to the healing powers of poetry."Not to Be Dwelled On"Self-interest cropped up even there,the day I hoisted three insteadof the ceremonially called-for twospadefuls of loamonto the coffin of my friend.Why shovel more than anybody else?What did I think I’d prove? More love(mud in her eye)? More will to work?(Her father what, a shirker?) Christ,what wouldn’t anybody giveto get that gesture back?She cannot die again; and Ido nothing but re-live.

    It is 1984, the height of Nicaragua's post-revolutionary war, and the peace-activist Friesens have come to protest American involvement. In the midst of this tumult, Juliet's family lives outside of the boundaries of ordinary life. They've escaped, and the ordinary rules don't apply. Threat is pervasive, danger is real, but the extremity of the situation also produces a kind of euphoria, protecting Juliet's family from its own cracks and conflicts.When Juliet's younger brother becomes sick with cancer, their adventure ends abruptly. The Friesens return to Canada only to find that their lives beyond Nicaragua have become the war zone. One by one, they drift from each other, and Juliet grows to adulthood, pulled between her desire to live a free life like the one she remembers in Nicaragua, and her desire to build for her own children a life more settled than her parents could provide.With laser-sharp prose and breathtaking insight, these stories herald Carrie Snyder as one of Canada's most prodigiously talented writers.

    There are 366 poems (one for each day of the year, and one for leap years), to delight, inspire and excite. Chosen for their magic and memorability, the poems in this anthology are an exultant mix of old and new from across the world, poems to learn by heart and take to heart.

    Seventeen-year-old Sylvia (Harper) Kostak is caught between her mother’s regrets and the strictures of small-town life in the interior of British Columbia. When Harper meets Gabe, an intense and enigmatic young man living on the ’60s-style arts commune outside of town, she is transfixed. Gradually we learn Gabe’s story and what led him to join his estranged mother on the commune, where, in a bid for freedom, Harper eventually finds herself, setting in motion a series of events leading to tragedy. Resonant with longing and a sense of isolation, the novel brings alive the agonies and ecstasies of growing up, sexual discovery, and how the need to belong can shape both decisions and destinies.Author Biography: Laisha Rosnau was born in Pointe Claire, Quebec, and grew up in Vernon, British Columbia. She has worked as a child-care worker, a landscaper, a waitress, a fruit picker, an interpretive guide, a journalist, and an editor. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she was the Executive Editor of PRISM international. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies in Canada, the United States, and Australia. The Sudden Weight of Snow is her first novel. Laisha Rosnau lives in Vancouver, where she is at work on a collection of poetry and on her second novel.

    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.

    A disgruntled follower of a self-esteem blog posts a rambling critical comment. On the hunt for the perfect coffee table, a pregnant woman and her husband stop to visit his terminally ill ex-wife. The office cat lady reluctantly joins her fellow employees' crusade to cheer up their dying co-worker. A man grieving his wife's miscarriages follows his deluded friend on a stealth photo-taking mission at the Auto Show. A shoplifter creates her own narrative with stolen anecdotes and a kidnapped baby. In this collection, society's misfits and losers are portrayed sympathetically, and sometimes even heroically. As desperately as these characters long to fit in, they also take pride in what sets them apart.

    The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.

    . . then I might have a chance to live; I might have a chance to be something more than just a struggling crackhead.From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up.Abandoned by his parents as a toddler, Jesse Thistle briefly found himself in the foster-care system with his two brothers, cut off from all they had known. Eventually the children landed in the home of their paternal grandparents, but their tough-love attitudes meant conflicts became commonplace. And the ghost of Jesse’s drug-addicted father haunted the halls of the house and the memories of every family member. Struggling, Jesse succumbed to a self-destructive cycle of drug and alcohol addiction and petty crime, spending more than a decade on and off the streets, often homeless. One day, he finally realized he would die unless he turned his life around.In this heartwarming and heartbreaking memoir, Jesse Thistle writes honestly and fearlessly about his painful experiences with abuse, uncovering the truth about his parents, and how he found his way back into the circle of his Indigenous culture and family through education.An eloquent exploration of what it means to live in a world surrounded by prejudice and racism and to be cast adrift, From the Ashes is, in the end, about how love and support can help one find happiness despite the odds.

    Does it move us with its beauty? Can we make a living from it? But what if we examined a landscape on its own terms, freed from our expectations and assumptions?This is what celebrated writer Helen Humphreys sets out to do in this stunning, groundbreaking examination of place. For more than a decade Humphreys has owned a small waterside property on a section of the Napanee River in Ontario. In the watchful way of writers, she has studied her little piece of the river through the seasons and the years, cataloguing its ebb and flows, the plants and creatures that live in and round it, the signs of human usage at its banks and on its bottom.The River is the result, a gorgeous and moving meditation that uses fiction, non-fiction, natural history, archival maps and images, and stunning full-color photographs to get at the truth. In doing this, Humphreys has created a work of startling originality that is sure to become a new Canadian classic.

    The semi-autobiographical book is divided into two parts and takes place between two countries; Part I, “is a cloud a living thing?”, takes place during the Author’s tumultueuse teen years with tropical Florida as a backdrop. Part II, “Inside my Shell”, explores themes of transformation as the Author creates a new life in Paris, France. ​The poems in this collection explore the surreal rollercoaster of youth, the performance of identity, being an outsider and the tension between romantic idealism and the dystopic world in which the author finds herself. Her approach to her work as a visual artist is mirrored in her poetry style, which is accompanied by all original illustrations by the Author.

    In these new poems, the ghosts of the past are conjured as part of the present day: the deceased beloved, the father long dead, the ailing mother, the victims of holocaust and war. With these spirits beside her, Gallagher confronts her own illness and mortality, and celebrates love and friendship in these spare lyrics and muscular narratives, each punctuated by her resilience and grace. Here is the new work by one of America's most accomplished poets.