In Sea Change, Graham brings us to the once-unimaginable threshold at which civilization as we know it becomes unsustainable. How might the human spirit persist, caught between its abiding love of beauty, its acknowledgment of continuing injury and damage done, and the realization that the existence of a future itself may no longer be assured?There is no better writer to confront such crucial matters than Jorie Graham. In addition to her recognized achievements as a poet of philosophical, aesthetic, and moral concerns, Graham has also been acknowledged as our most formidable nature poet (Publishers Weekly). As gorgeous and formally inventive as anything she has written, Sea Change is an essential work speaking out for our planet and the world we have known.

    Here love is defined as a force of reclamation and repair in times of trauma, and trauma is understood to exist within all times. The poems are grounded in what feels like an eternal present, documenting moments of clarity that lift the speaker (and reader) out of the illusion of linear experience. This is what we mean when we describe a work of art as being timeless.Like the river they speak to, these poems return again and again to the same source in search of new ways to reconstruct what has been lost. Vermette suggests that it’s through language and the body ― particularly through language as it lives inside the body ― that a fragmented self might resurface as once again whole. This idea of breaking apart and coming back together is woven throughout the collection as the speaker contemplates the ongoing negotiation between the city, the land, and the water, and as she finds herself falling into trust with the ones she loves.Vermette honours the river as a woman ― her destructive power and beauty, her endurance, and her stories. These poems sing from a place where “words / transcend ceremony / into everyday” and “nothing / is inanimate.”

    In Little Boat, Valentine continues her exploration of spiritual life, confronting the realities of aging and death in the serene and dreamlike voice so beloved by her many readers. Infusing even the most melancholy subjects with warmth and humanity, Little Boat explores such subjects as grief, ordinary objects, illness, and memory, carrying the reader into disparate worlds, rendering the complexity of our common experience through startling images. The poet's extraordinary juxtapositions blur the boundaries of the material world and the invisible, the given and the assumed, the present and the sometimes recently absent. Readers will find Valentine's quiet epiphanies on rich display here, as this much-heralded poet quietly merges the sorrowful and the sublime.

    – Shubhangi Swarup (Latitudes of Longing)

    This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter. A unique personality for each vowel soon emerges: A is courtly, E is elegiac, I is lyrical, O is jocular, U is obscene. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, this uncanny work of avant-garde literature promises to be one of the most important books of the decade.

    Up there, he’d hoped, he and Sophie could step away from trouble for a while.” Lewis Book, a doctor with a history of embroiling himself in conflicts, and his daughter, Sophie, travel to Nepal to join a climbing expedition. One evening, as Sophie sits on the border between China and Nepal, watching the sun set over the Himalayas, she spots a group of Tibetan refugees fleeing from Chinese soldiers. When shooting starts, Dr. Book rushes toward the ensuing melee, ignoring the objections of Lawson, the expedition leader, who doesn’t want to get involved and spoil his chance to be the first climber to summit Kyatruk. Lawson is further enraged when Amaris, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker recording the expedition, joins Book with her camcorder in hand. When the surviving Tibetans are captured just short of the border, Lawson and Sophie look on helplessly as Book and Amaris are taken away with them, down the glacier into China. From that point, Lawson continues his ascent, and the fugitives are caught in an explosive and thrilling pursuit that will test their convictions, courage, and endurance.From one of Canada’s finest writers comes a literary page-turner of the highest order. Inspired by an actual event, Every Lost Country is a gripping novel about heroism, human failings, and what love requires. When is it acceptable to be a bystander, and when do life and loyalty demand more?

    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.

    The voice in these poems is as witty, vulnerable, direct, and incisive as we've come to know in later works, such as Power Politics, Bodily Harm, and Alias Grace. Atwood writes compassionately about the risks of love in a technological age, and the quest for identity in a universe that cannot quite be trusted.Containing many of Atwood's best and most famous poems, The Circle Game won the 1966 Governor General's Award for Poetry and rapidly attained an international reputation as a classic of modern poetry. This beautiful edition of The Circle Game contains the complete collection, with an introduction by Sherrill E. Grace of the University of British Columbia.

    It is the first book-length collection by an accomplished, original voice. Sunday mornings are never going to be the same again."The voice is laconic and composed but its images come off these pages resonant (more than resonant, shaking) with their own newness." -- Don Coles

    Darcie Friesen Hossack's stories in Mennonites Don't Dance offer an honest, detailed look into the experiences of children - both young and adult - and their parents and grandparents, exploring generational ties, sins, penance, and redemption. Taking place primarily on the Canadian prairies, the families in these stories are confronted by the conflict between tradition and change. One story sees a daughter-in-law's urban ideals push and pull against a mother's simple, rural, ways. In another, a daughter raised in the Mennonite tradition tries to break free from her upbringing to escape to the city in search of a better life.

    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.

    Includes a 5 track cd/ep featuring performances by Shane. Currently in a 2nd edition and going to a corrected and remastered 3rd edition available at end of summer 2007. Voted to *Best Books of 2005* lists in the Guardian (UK) and Globe and Mail newspapers.

    Stone's poems blend the personal with dimensions of the larger world in a manner reminiscent of the late William Stafford. Few poets have this gift for taking the workings of ordinary life and fusing them with a poetic process that sustains intense emotion, allowing human experience to be felt through the mysteries of language.... Ruth Stone belongs to every generation of poets who have taken the responsibility to give back to the world." —The Bloomsbury Review"This volume rightly secures (Stone's) status as a sui generis treasure who has survived poverty, a lack of formal education, profound personal tragedy, and decades of obscurity to emerge as a pre-eminent American poet who is still writing vital poems at the age of ninety-three." —Harvard ReviewWhat Love Comes To, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, gathers nearly half a century of poems from a National Book Award-winning poet who, over the course of her career, has written in a wide range of voices and forms. Drawing from eleven previous volumes, this collection offers a trajectory through that career, presenting Ruth Stone from her early formal lyrics, through fierce feminist and political poems, to her most recent meditations on blindness and aging. Stone, at age ninety-two, returns often to the theme of loss in her work, all the while maintaining what the Vermont poet laureate nominations committee calls “a sense of survival surpassing poverty and grief. . . . Her poetry’s irrepressible humor and intellectual curiosity are unique among contemporary American poets.”What Love Comes To is the perfect entry point into Stone’s world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance.When I forget to weep,I hear the peeping tree toadscreeping up the bark.Love lies asleepand dreams that everythingis in its golden net;and I am caught there, too,when I forget.A recipient of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ruth Stone has taught at numerous American universities. The author of eleven books of poetry, she has lived in Vermont since 1957.

    Sands of the Well, first published in hardcover in 1996, shows the poet at the height of her considerable powers, as she addresses the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest coastal landscape in terms of music, memory, aging, doubt, and faith.

    The poem explores the actual world of history transformed into the mythical world of poetry, where what we remember about the past may be more real than history tells us.