Book picks similar to
Bewilderness by Catherine Black


poetry
canadian-literature
canadiana
modern

New Poems Book One


Charles Bukowski - 2003
    Although he published over 45 books of poetry, hundreds of his poems were kept by him and his publisher for posthumous publication, This is the first collection of these unique poems.

Landing Gear


Kate Pullinger - 2014
    A volcano unexpectedly erupts in Iceland and airspace is shut down over Europe. Harriet works in local radio in London, and with most of her colleagues abroad, she seizes a unique career opportunity. Her husband, Michael, stuck in New York on business, travels to visit an old flame, and their teenage son, Jack, feeling liberated from normal life, takes an unexpected risk only to find himself in trouble. Meanwhile Emily, a young TV researcher, loses her adoptive father to a heart attack, and half a world away, a Pakistani migrant worker named Yacub is stranded in a Dubai labor camp. Two years later, Yacub, attempting to stow away, falls out of the landing gear of an airplane onto Harriet’s car in a London supermarket parking lot—and survives—while Emily accidentally captures it all on film. Yacub’s sudden arrival in the lives of Harriet, Jack, Michael, and Emily catapults these characters into a series of life-changing events, ultimately revealing the tenuous, often unexpected ties that bind us together.Inspired by real-life accounts of airplane stowaways, Landing Gear is about the complex texture of modern life, and how we fight the loneliness of the nuclear family to hold on to one another.

The Continuous Life


Mark Strand - 1990
    It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking", but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit.

Dead Girls


Nancy Lee - 2002
    A marriage is tested as a mother struggles to cope with the disappearance of her prostitute daughter. Two angry women in a minivan act out their frustrations as they rampage through the night. A pill-dependent nurse juggles neuroses, infatuation, and exhaustion while supervising a high school dance-a-thon. A quiet tattoo artist takes in a homeless woman, and stumbles upon the true nature of beauty, jealousy, and love. Written in taut, unflinching prose, these stories are edgy and dark, sharply observed and uniquely imagined. As provocative as it is brilliant, Dead Girls introduces Nancy Lee as an astonishing and original new literary talent.

The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book


Ted Kooser - 2014
    Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of America’s most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him.

Ana Historic


Daphne Marlatt - 1988
    Richards, a woman of no history, who appears briefly in 1873 in the civic archives of Vancouver. It is also the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with the possibilities of Mrs. Richards's life. Ana Historic was Daphne Marlatt's first novel, and was originally published by Coach House Press in Canada and The Women's Press in the U.K. The French translation was published by Les Éditions du remue-ménage.

Midnight Milkshakes: Ice Cream And Suicide Vol. II


Jack Ray - 2018
    The book features raw, blunt, and in your face poems depicting the darker side of relationships. Readers will find themes such as lies, cheating, and heartache abundant in much of this collection. Midnight Milkshakes, being the second volume of Ray's Ice Cream And Suicide, is great for returning readers to the series. The book focuses on much of the same style and mood that is common in his writings.

Hay


Paul Muldoon - 1998
    For I saw Fionnuala,"The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane,"when a girl reached down into a freezer binto bring up my double scoop of vanilla.-"White Shoulders"Seamus Heaney has called his colleague Paul Muldoon "one of the era's true originals." While Muldoon's previous book, The Annals of Chile, was poetry at an extreme of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay is made up of shorter, clearer lyric poems, retaining all of Muldoon's characteristic combination of wit and profundity but appealing to the reader in new and delightful ways. His eighth book, it is also his most inviting-full of joy in language, fascination with popular culture, and enthusiasm for the writing of poetry itself. This is the first of his books to really capture the effect of America on his poetic sensibility, which is like a magnet for impressions and the miscellany of the culture.

The Strangers


Katherena Vermette - 2021
    Phoenix has nearly forgotten what freedom feels like. And Elsie has nearly given up hope. Nearly.After time spent in foster homes, Cedar goes to live with her estranged father. Although she grapples with the pain of being separated from her mother, Elsie, and sister, Phoenix, she's hoping for a new chapter in her life, only to find herself once again in a strange house surrounded by strangers. From a youth detention centre, Phoenix gives birth to a baby she'll never get to raise and tries to forgive herself for all the harm she's caused (while wondering if she even should). Elsie, struggling with addiction and determined to turn her life around, is buoyed by the idea of being reunited with her daughters and strives to be someone they can depend on, unlike her own distant mother. These are the Strangers, each haunted in her own way. Between flickering moments of warmth and support, the women diverge and reconnect, fighting to survive in a fractured system that pretends to offer success but expects them to fail. Facing the distinct blade of racism from those they trusted most, they urge one another to move through the darkness, all the while wondering if they'll ever emerge safely on the other side. A breathtaking companion to her bestselling debut The Break, Vermette's The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family, the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that--despite everything--refuse to be broken.

Sweetland


Michael Crummey - 2014
    By turns darkly comic and heartbreakingly sad, Sweetland is a deeply suspenseful story about one man's struggles against the forces of nature and the ruins of memory. For twelve generations, when the fish were plentiful and when they all-but disappeared, the inhabitants of this remote island in Newfoundland have lived and died together. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, they are facing resettlement, and each has been offered a generous compensation package to leave. But the money is offered with a proviso: everyone has to go; the government won't be responsible for one crazy coot who chooses to stay alone on an island.  That coot is Moses Sweetland. Motivated in part by a sense of history and belonging, haunted by memories of the short and lonely time he spent away from his home as a younger man, and concerned that his somewhat eccentric great-nephew will wilt on the mainland, Moses refuses to leave. But in the face of determined, sometimes violent, opposition from his family and his friends, Sweetland is eventually swayed to sign on to the government's plan. Then a tragic accident prompts him to fake his own death and stay on the deserted island. As he manages a desperately diminishing food supply, and battles against the ravages of weather, Sweetland finds himself in the company of the vibrant ghosts of the former islanders, whose porch lights still seem to turn on at night.

The Lonely Hearts Hotel


Heather O'Neill - 2017
    The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. An unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to thwart one's origins. It might also take true love.Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1910. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen. Separated as teenagers, sent off to work as servants during the Great Depression, both descend into the city's underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs and theft in order to survive. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes after years of searching and desperate poverty the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they'll go to extreme lengths to make them come true. Soon, Rose, Pierrot and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls have hit New York, commanding the stage as well as the alleys, and neither the theater nor the underworld will ever look the same.With her musical language and extravagantly realized world, Heather O'Neill enchants us with a novel so magical there is no escaping its spell.

Y


Marjorie Celona - 2012
    That perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over. Why? . . . My life begins at the Y." So opens Marjorie Celona's highly acclaimed and exquisitely rendered debut about a wise-beyond-her-years foster child abandoned as a newborn on the doorstep of the local YMCA. Swaddled in a dirty gray sweatshirt with nothing but a Swiss Army knife tucked between her feet, little Shannon is discovered by a man who catches only a glimpse of her troubled mother as she disappears from view. That morning, all three lives are forever changed. Bounced between foster homes, Shannon endures abuse and neglect until she finally finds stability with Miranda, a kind but no-nonsense single mother with a free-spirited daughter of her own. Yet Shannon defines life on her own terms, refusing to settle down, and never stops longing to uncover her roots — especially the stubborn question of why her mother would abandon her on the day she was born.Brilliantly and hauntingly interwoven with Shannon's story is the tale of her mother, Yula, a girl herself who is facing a desperate fate in the hours and days leading up to Shannon's birth. As past and present converge, Y tells an unforgettable story of identity, inheritance, and, ultimately, forgiveness. Celona's ravishingly beautiful novel offers a deeply affecting look at the choices we make and what it means to be a family, and it marks the debut of a magnificent new voice in contemporary fiction.

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 Story of Bobby O'Malley


Wayne Johnston - 1985
    His memories cluster around the houses they lived in, the schools he went to, the uncles and aunts and cousins he knew as a boy. This is an extremely funny book and the account of how Ted O'Malley repaired the plumbing is likely to become a classic of its kind. It is also a warm and touching book. As a picture of its time, it is clear, true and absolutely unforgettable

Leaving Home


David French - 1972
    The first part of what has come to be known as the Mercer Series, Leaving Home tells the story of a Newfoundland family that has emigrated and lost all sense of its place in the world.Leaving Home was named one of the "100 Most Influential Canadian Books" by the Literary Review of Canada.