Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There's a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.from "Signs Taken for Wonders" ... Too delicate for these dog-days, small, clover-blonde, my sister sews indoors. I ask her to fashion me into something nice, ivory silk. I am a big girl, sunburnt skin like raw meat, sweating two pews in front of the Blessed Virgin....

    Living in the port city of Halifax, Goyette’s days are bounded by the substantial fact of the North Atlantic, both by its physical presence and by its metaphoric connotations. And like many of life’s overwhelming facts, our awareness of the ocean’s importance and impact waxes and wanes as the ocean sometimes lurks in the background, sometimes imposes itself upon us, yet always, steadily, is. This collection is not your standard “Oh, Ocean!” versifying. Goyette plunges in and swims well outside the buoys to craft a sort of alternate, apocryphal account of our relationship with the ocean. In these linked poems, Goyette’s offbeat cast of archetypes (fog merchants, lifeguards, poets, carpenters, mothers, daughters) pronounce absurd explanations to both common and uncommon occurrences in a tone that is part cautionary tale, part creation myth and part urban legend: how fog was responsible for marriages, and for in-laws; why running, suburbs and chairs were invented; what happens when you smoke the exhaust from a pride of children pretending to be lions. All the while, the anthropomorphized ocean nibbles hungrily at the shoreline of our understanding,refusing to explain its moods and winning every staring contest. “I wrote these poems,” comments Goyette, “because I know very little about the ocean and yet rely on it like a mirror, a compass.” In Ocean, Goyette demonstrates how a spirited, playful and richly mythopoetic engagement with the world can actually strengthen our grasp on its bigger truths.

    As the journey progresses, secrets are unveiled, a friendship is tested, and there is a run-in with the Hurley family, a family both men have feared since childhood. In The Architects Are Here, Winter’s fifth and most emotionally resonant novel to date, he explores the nature of grief and friendship in unwaveringly powerful prose, and sheds light on who we are and how we go on when the future seems uncertain.

    Instructions: An elimination dance begins with a crowded dance floor. At a signal, the band stops playing and the announcer reads an elimination, say, "Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine's Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis." Any dancer answering this description must sit down, and his partner is also disqualified. The process continues (e.g. "Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board") until a single couple remains. And now, the post-Meech Lake edition.

    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.

    A god-like ocean deposits many a thing, yet it also takes away. The 1960s blaze off shore and draw the island’s inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement. Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, AKA the Republic of Nothing. Where else can a dead circus elephant, a long-dead Viking, the discovery of uranium, a raven-haired castaway who may be psychic, an anarchist turned politician, and refugees fleeing from the United States all be part of everyday life? Where else is eccentricity embraced with such open arms? In this new readers’ guide edition, complete with an afterword by Neil Peart, Lesley Choyce’s novel about resilience, independence, and anarchy comes alive, leading readers to discover once again that everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

    This new book takes place in Lockdown Three. This time Key can make Government-sanctioned expeditions out onto the streets of London (remember?). And it is there that the inaction takes place. Phone calls to his mother, promenades with his loyal friend, bubble-negotiations, sitting his fat arse down on benches, drinking mocha. Another three months of mind-freezing inertia. This time on the move. Conversations interspersed with poetry.

    Shifting from memoir to fiction, it focuses on the commonplace experiences underlying our lives that are the true basis for storytelling. At the book’s core is Isabel Huggan’s old house in rural France, from where she contemplates the real meaning of “home,” and the mysterious manner in which memory gives substance to ordinary things around us. With a light touch, she brings to life the people she has met in her travels from whom valuable lessons have been learned.Isabel Huggan writes with the candour and compassion that made her earlier books so well loved, and here she speaks even more clearly from the heart. Belonging is an intimate conversation between the narrator who needs to examine her life because it has not turned out as she expected, and her readers, who will find their own concerns illuminated in surprising ways. Slowly, a pattern emerges as certain motifs become apparent: happiness, friendship, landscape, language, heartache. As the book draws to a close, readers will understand the fictional character who says, “There is nothing in our lives that doesn’t fit.”

    She mothers everyoneher social work clients, her husband, her twenty-something daughters, and her reclusive sister who lives in the attic. Elsie is committed to taking care of everyone--everyone but herself. So, when crazy Aunt Hildy writes to demand a bedroom in their Halifax home, Elsie cant help but say yes. When Hilda arrives, she enchants and enrages the family with her moxie. That and her proclamation that she has hidden treasure in the house and the kings ransom will go to whoever loved her most. When someone threatens Aunt Hildy, she responds with her trademark sass: Go ahead. Shoot me. I dare you. Whoever it is takes her up on it. Suddenly, the house is turned topsy-turvy as Elsies family searches for a treasure that Elsie doesnt believe even exists, and for a killer that could be any one of them. Shoot Me is a funny and sometimes heart-wrenching story about family, fortune, and figuring out who you are and who you love. In Elsie, Crewe has created a character who speaks with humour and honesty to conflicts that exist in the lives of so many women: between work and home, between loving one man and wanting others, and between feeling fulfilled not only as a wife and a mother, but as a woman.

    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.

    Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who — not unhappily — finds that cockroaches are drawn to her.“God draws a life. And then begins to rub it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws a world in What the Soul Doesn’t Want, and then beckons us in. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.

    Samson captures the essential images of contemporary life. Whether on the streets of his beloved and bewildering hometown of Winnipeg, an outpost in Antarctica, or a room in an Edward Hopper painting, he finds whimsy and elegance in the everyday, beauty and sorrow in the overlooked.This collection gathers together Samson's writing, starting with his band The Weakerthans' 1997 debut album Fallow, through Left and Leaving, Reconstruction Site, and the award-winning Reunion Tour. It also features lyrics from Samson's newly released solo album, Provincial, and selected poems.

    Johnson’s greatness to Bono’s gratingness, from doubts about Obama to utter belief in Don Cherry, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s outstanding oeuvre to — well, Pamela Anderson.The topics are as eclectic and wide ranging as the intelligence that put them together. The perspective is thoroughly Canadian, and so are many of the recurring topics and themes: of our domestic politics and our military involvements abroad, of our national identity, of human rights and human decency. You’ll find assessments of the reputations of Paul Martin, Conrad Black, Adrienne Clarkson, and Tim Hortons; tough but affectionate views of Newfoundland — of course — but also from Rex Murphy’s constant travels across Canada.But all the world is here, in all its glory and folly. The hard-hitting attacks on politicians, celebrities, those who would ban smoking, and anyone who uses the expression “global warming denial” will have you cheering or tearing your hair out, depending. You will be informed, infuriated perhaps, but always fascinated.

    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.

    But Wanda's life changes radically on a routine trip to the grocery store when a gunman enters the supermarket and opens fire. The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes is the highly anticipated debut novel by Bridget Canning, one of the most promising new writers from Newfoundland, and is an energetic page-turner about the power of selflessness in a contemporary culture of fear and suspicion.