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To devote oneself to the study of beauty is to offer footnotes to the universe for all the places and all the moments that one observes beauty. I can no longer grab beauty by her wrists and demand articulation or meaning. I can only take account of where things touch.Part lyric essay, part prose poetry, Where Things Touch grapples with the manifold meanings and possibilities of beauty.Drawing on her experiences as a physician-in-training, Orang considers clinical encounters and how they relate to the concept and very idea of beauty. Such considerations lead her to questions about intimacy, queerness, home, memory, love, and other aspects of human existence. Throughout, beauty is ultimately imagined as something inextricably tied to care: the care of lovers, of patients, of art and literature, and the various non-human worlds that surround us.Eloquent and meditative in its approach, beauty, here, beyond base expectations of frivolity and superficiality, is conceived of as a thing to recover. Where Things Touch is an exploration of an essential human pleasure, a necessary freedom by which to challenge what we know of ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Fifty years ago, in July 1969, human beings embarked on an epic journey to land on the moon. Now, in July 2019, poet Ken Hunt utilizes NASA's Apollo 11 voice transcription document, a chronicle of the first six days of that mission, to create The Odyssey, an erasure poem of star charts carved from the technical jargon and offhand remarks found in that transmission.

Is it possible to archive the invisible symptoms of an illness? Is the archive emotional? Emmalea Russo's Wave Archive moves between essay and poetry while also pondering the mind-body connection and the unreliability of thought patterns and histories. Here, Russo invokes her own experiences with seizures, photographs and art-making, archival and indexical processes, brain waves, and the very personal need to document and store while simultaneously questioning the reliability of memory and language. Drawing upon the history of epilepsy in both ancient and modern brain treatments, Wave Archive disrupts and restores the archive over and over again, exploring the very edges of consciousness.

From July 7th to August 6th, 2015, we walked 700 kilometres, from Pennsylvania to Ontario. A stranger asked if we were walking to learn how to work and be together. This was certainly part of it.In July 2015, Erin Brubacher and Christine Brubaker, two politically left, secular, Canadian women traced the migration route of their Mennonite ancestors by walking from Pennsylvania to Ontario, through the American Bible Belt. Along the way they were hosted by a series of people with whom they had next to nothing in common. They were welcomed into strangers' homes and treated as family. On their journey they encountered folks with religious and political beliefs very different from their own and learned to question what conversations to enter and how far to take them. They accomplished this and so much more while navigating their own relationship and the challenges of being with another person, on foot, for 32 days. 7th Cousins: An Automythography documents the walk itself and the performance text they generated afterwards. Included throughout are photo essays from the journey and commentaries from their collaborators Christopher Stanton, Andrea Nann, Kaitlin Hickey and Erum Khan.Praise for 7th Cousins: "7th Cousins is a sharp, very personal and insightful work of documentary theatre that embodies a kind of honest female friendship that is so important to experience in our current moment, as well as a journey into the U.S. that gives trenchant insights far beyond what I was expecting." --Jacob Wren, author of Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART and Rich and Poor

Winner of RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging WritersWinner of CBC Poetry PrizeFrom hybrid bodies to shifting landscapes, Re-Origin of Species blurs the lines of the real. These poems journey through illness and altered states to position disability and madness as evolutionary traits; skilled adaptations aligned with ecological change.A lyric contemplation of our relationship to the environment, this book looks at the interdependence of species. Weaving personal narratives with a study of the insect kingdom, it draws parallels between human illness, climate change, and the state of peril in the natural world.

In Vancouver for Beginners, the nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards, childhood landmarks long gone and a developer who paces at the city's edge, shoring it up with aquariums.In these poems you will traverse a city lined with rivers, not streets. Memory traps and tourist traps reveal themselves, and the ocean glints, elusive, in the background. Here there are many Vancouvers and no Vancouver, a city meant for elsewhere after the flood has swept through. This place of the living and the dead has been rewritten: forests are subsumed by parks, buildings sink and morph, and the climate has changed.Vancouver for Beginners is a ghost story, an elegy, a love song for a city that is both indecipherable and a microcosm of a world on fire.

Amidst the dangers of figurative language, the coercion of sentimentality, and the insidious freight of abstraction, these poems embody the necessity for the critical, the communal, the real. Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real uses conceptual critiques of public discourse and experimental social cartographies, as well as lyrics of intimacy, to defy prescribed ways of being. This is an act of resistance against dangerous and domineering narratives, and the power they inscribe.

Rather than making "e;something"e; out of "e;nothing,"e; what follows is an endeavour to express the potential of language and thought to encounter what is infinitely beyond both yet to be imagined.In The Nothing That Is, Johanna Skibsrud gathers essays about the very concept of "e;nothing."e; Addressing a broad range of topicsincluding false atrocity tales, so-called fake news, high-wire acts, and telepathy, as well as responses to works by John Ashbery, Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson, and morethese essays seek to decentre our relationship to both the "e;givenness"e; of history and to a predictive or probable model of the future.The Nothing That Is explores ways in which poetic language can activate the possibilities replete within our every moment. Skibsrud reveals that within every encounter between a speaking "e;I"e; and what exceeds subjectivity, there is a listening "e;Other,"e; be it community or the objective world.

Symphony No. 3 follows the life of renowned French composer Camille Saint-Sans as he ascends from child prodigy to worldwide fame. As his acclaim grows in Paris, the musical world around him clamours with competitors, dilettantes, turncoats and revenge seekers. At the height of his success, Camille leaves everything behind to embark on a Dantean quest for his dead lover, Henri. At the end of this adventure, still haunted by the holes in his past, he takes up an invitation to journey by ocean-liner to the New World.Finely crafted in its own unique rhythmic language, Symphony No. 3 is cast in four sections to mirror Saint-Sans's famous work, popularly known as the Organ Symphony. Written and performed in London England in the infamous late 1880s, this was the composition he hoped would finally destroy Beethoven's stranglehold on the industry and reinvent the form. Though set in the decades surrounding the fin de siecle, Symphony No. 3 speaks directly to our present moment and the rise of political violence.

Fanny, a seventeen-year-old high school senior, has lost both her parents in a car accident. Granted permission to live independently in the family home located on the outskirts of a small Norwegian town, she passes the days performing her unchanging routine: going to school, maintaining the house, chopping and stacking wood, and keeping the weeds at bay. As Fanny grieves and attempts to come to terms with the sad circumstances of her life, a fairy tale-like world full of new possibilities begins to emerge around her.Written by Rune Christiansen, one of Norway's most exciting literary talents, and masterfully translated by Kari Dickson, Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest is a beautiful, poetic portrait of grief, friendship, independence, and transgression.

Throughout their youth, Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter wrote poetry with their mother, award-winning author Lee Maracle. The three always dreamed that one day they would write a book together. This book is the result of that dream.The wide-ranging poems in Hope Matters focus on the journey of Indigenous peoples from colonial beginnings to reconciliation. But they also document a very personal journeythat of a mother and her two daughters.Written collaboratively, Hope Matters offers a blend of three distinct and exciting voices that come together in a shared song of hope and reconciliation.

Hasan Namir's debut collection of poetry, War / Torn, is a brazen and lyrical interrogation of religion and masculinitythe performance and sense of belonging they delineate and draw together. Namir summons prayer, violence, and the sensuality of love, revisiting tenets of Islam and dictates of war to break the barriers between the profane and the sacred.

If poetry is a place to question, I Am a Body of Land by Shannon Webb-Campbell is an attempt to explore a relationship to poetic responsibility and accountability, and frame poetry as a form of re-visioning.Here Webb-Campbell revisits the text of her earlier work Who Took My Sister? to examine her self, her place and her own poetic strategies. These poems are efforts to decolonize, unlearn, and undoo harm.Reconsidering individual poems and letters, Webb-Campbell's confessional writing circles back, and challenges what it means to ask questions of her own settler-Indigenous identity, belonging, and attempts to cry out for community, and call in with love.Edited, with an introduction by multiple award-winning writer and activist Lee Maracle.

Fraught with fatal mishaps and disastrous near misses, the missions of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States defined an era and exemplified the global socio-political conflict of the Cold War. The Lost Cosmonauts by Ken Hunt is an elegy to humanity's fledgling efforts to explore outer space, and to those who lost their lives in pursuit of this goal. This wide-ranging collection of poems looks deep into the largely unexplored cosmos for experiences of the sublime, not only in celestial bodies and mythical figures among the stars, but also in those astronauts and cosmonauts who dared to explore them.

Where, the Mile End, Irish poet Julie Morrissy's debut collection, embodies an energetic lyricism that whips through Europe and North America with humour, curiosity and a distinct edginess. Morrissy's lines track emotional, physical, and geographical change, as she intimately links the vitality of two continents: the snow, the streets, the sensual memories. Where, the Mile End reimagines the places we inhabit, the moments we remember, the things we long for.

Poetry. The third book in a trilogy that explores the limits of individual expression, HONESTLY is an intimate, quiet, and unresolved little book about talking and listening. It begins with research into a forgotten relative who was kicked out of the author's family after he was jailed for conscientious objection to WWII, and who then moved to New York to become a composer. From there the poem swerves into a series of minor-key personal anecdotes, interlaced with conversations with friends about work and relationships. Throughout, communication is framed by the economics and psychology of the home. Dialogue takes place in close quarters--constrained by money, space, ego, and empathy. "Steven Zultanski is a great raconteur. In HONESTLY, he loquaciously monologues about everything from municipal corruption to asparagus horticulture with charm and authority. But this prose-like poem isn't merely a filibuster. As it unfolds, HONESTLY spirals closer and closer to the silence behind speech."--Chris Kraus "Steven Zultanski is in love. 'When I was a boy I compulsively told my parents I loved them, ' he informs us, then adds: 'I still have that compulsion.' With HONESTLY, Zultanski has written a deft, side-winding a love poem (a true love poem) to urban life, with its apartment banalities and moving days, worried friends and fresh cuddlefests, troubled family history and film lore. He loves, we learn, in fits and starts, through compulsions and diversions, with a wry eye on the plain, everyday things--those 'details in stories transversed with other details'--that shine when they are remembered and held close. Honestly gives us what we seem to need most: the real and the true."--Andrew Durbin

Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART is a compelling hybrid of history, memoir, and performance theory. It tells the story of the interdisciplinary performance group PME-ART and their ongoing endeavour to make a new kind of highly collaborative theatre dedicated to the fragile but essential act of "e;being yourself in a performance situation."e;Written, among other things, to celebrate PME-ART's twentieth anniversary, the book begins when Jacob Wren meets Sylvie Lachance and Richard Ducharme, moves from Toronto to Montreal to make just one project, but instead ends up spending the next twenty years creating an eccentric, often bilingual, art. It is a book about being unable to learn French yet nonetheless remaining Co-Artistic Director of a French-speaking performance group, about the Spinal Tap-like adventures of being continuously on tour, about the rewards and difficulties of intensive collaborations, about making performances that break the mold and confronting the repercussions of doing so. A book that aims to change the rules for how interdisciplinary performance can be written about today.When Jacob finished a first draft of the book he sent it to many of those who had co-created or worked on PME-ART projects asking for their comments. Therefore, the book also features contributions from: Caroline Dubois, Richard Ducharme, Claudia Fancello, Marie Claire Forte, Adam Kinner, Sylvie Lachance, Nadia Ross, Yves Sheriff, Kathrin Tiedemann and Ashlea Watkin.

Winner of the 2016 Grand Prix litteraire ArchambaultWritten with gritty humour in the form of a confession, Mama's Boy recounts the family drama of a young man who sets out in search of his mother after a childhood spent shuffling from one foster home to another. A bizarre character with a skewed view of the world, he leads the reader on a quest that is both tender and violent.A runaway bestseller among French readers, Mama's Boy is the first book in a trilogy that took Quebec by storm, winning the 2016 Grand Prix litteraire Archambault, and selling more than twenty thousand copies. Now, thanks to translator JC Sutcliffe, English readers will have the opportunity to absorb this darkly funny and disturbing novel from one of Quebec's shining literary stars.

In a kind of Catherine Millet meets Roland Barthes baring of life with hints of the work of Chris Kraus, Sludge Utopia by Catherine Fatima is an auto-fictional novel about sex, depression, family, shaky ethics, ideal forms of life, girlhood, and coaching oneself into adulthood under capitalism.Using her compulsive reading as a lens through which to bring coherence to her life, twenty-five-year-old Catherine engages in a series of sexual relationships, thinking that desire is the key to a meaningful life. Yet, with each encounter, it becomes more and more clear: desire has no explanation; desire bears no significance.From an intellectual relationship with a professor, a casual sexual relationship, to a serious love affair, to a string of relationships that takes Catherine from Toronto to France and Portugal and back again, Sludge Utopia presents, in highly examined, raw detail, the perspective of a young woman's punishing though intermittently gratifying sexuality and profound internalized misogyny, which causes her to bring all of life's events under sexuality's prism.

Winner of the 2016 Grand Prix litteraire ArchambaultWritten with gritty humour in the form of a confession, Mama's Boy recounts the family drama of a young man who sets out in search of his mother after a childhood spent shuffling from one foster home to another. A bizarre character with a skewed view of the world, he leads the reader on a quest that is both tender and violent.A runaway bestseller among French readers, Mama's Boy is the first book in a trilogy that took Quebec by storm, winning the 2016 Grand Prix litteraire Archambault, and selling more than twenty thousand copies. Now, thanks to translator JC Sutcliffe, English readers will have the opportunity to absorb this darkly funny and disturbing novel from one of Quebec's shining literary stars.

Longlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Awards In October 2012, lovers William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill moved into a former barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market neighbourhood and turned it into an art space called Videofag. Over the next four years Videofag became a hub for counterculture in the city, playing host to a litany of performances, screenings, parties, exhibitions, and all manner of queer fuckery. But hosting a city in their house took its toll and eventually William and Jordan broke up, closing the space for good in June 2016. The Videofag Book is a chronicle of those four years told through multiple voices and mediums: a personal history by William and Jordan; a love letter by Jon Davies; a communal oral history compiled by Chandler Levack; a play by Greg MacArthur; a poem by Aisha Sasha John; a chronological history of Videofag's programming; and a photo archive curated by William and Jordan in full colour. Praise for Videofag: "Videofag was a busy nexus of performance and art, a focal point for a wide assortment of communities, including the queer art scene, underground film culture, comedy, and theatre." --Torontoist "The queer arts hub [known as Videofag] has served as the incubator for countless projects and artists over its life, becoming a critical meeting point for creators from around the city and across the country." --Daily Xtra

Guinea-Bissau, 2012. Mixing fiction and fact, Sylvain Prudhomme revisits the famous '70s music group Super Mama Djombo, as seen through the eyes of Couto, the laconic guitarist. After learning of the death of the singer, Dulce--once the love of his life&mdashCouto wanders through the capital city, from bar to bar, friend to friend. Thirty years file past in his memories: of the woman he loved, of guerillas fighting against Portuguese colonizers, and of the golden days of a legendary band that played all over the world with a sound that was new, fresh, and driven by the pride of an entire country. Tension mounts page after page as the group prepares a final concert in Dulce's honour, even as a coup d'ï¿1/2tat is prepared by her husband, Guinea-Bissau's Army Chief of Staff.

Precious Energy, the fourth collection of poetry from Hamilton-born poet and playwright Shannon Bramer, is a uniquely playful collection of vibrantly sad, peculiar, and often funny poems about domestic life, motherhood, and the baffled child that remains within us all even as we grow up and into whatever person we keep trying to become. Featuring a coterie of subjects, from fish sticks and LEGO pieces to mothers too tired to have sex and solitary swans in everyone's basement, these poems dexterously navigate a landscape of domestic isolation, insecure attachments, and confused personal boundaries with honesty and unexpected humour.

Poetry. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Alessandro Porco. In the spring and summer of 1949, Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro--two teenage pranksters with the right mix of bad attitude and artistic ingenuity--composed, circulated, and performed a collection of poems on the campus of Black Mountain College, an experimental school located just outside Asheville, North Carolina. Now, BookThug brings this previously unpublished work to light for the first time in POEMS BY GERARD LEGRO, edited with annotations by noted Canadian poet and scholar Alessandro Porco. Porco's insightful work (including a critical introduction, explanatory notes, and rare photographs sourced from archival documents and historical materials) offers an enlightening exploration of a side of the Black Mountain College canon that's rarely seen. Rich with aleatory compositional methods and found materials, and replete with scatological puns, doggerel rhymes, and surreal imagery, POEMS BY GERARD LEGRO was meant to be a critique of the 'obscurity' of modernist poetry from two disaffected teens in post-war America who were desperate to fight back against aesthetic and moral codes of maturity, propriety, and sophistication. "Beautiful Gerard Legro is alive. At Black Mountain College two students rebelled against their teachers, Josef Albers and Charles Olson, to create a mythic figure-part hoax, part avatar of disenchanted youth-who is entirely their own... These poems are a vital addition to the history of the extraordinary educational experiment that was Black Mountain."--Kaplan Harris "The literary history of Black Mountain College has received a useful amplification and illumination in the form of POEMS BY GERARD LEGRO... Through his detailed and insightful introduction, and in his careful annotation of both the poems and the circums

Did she say, at the beginning, that it rained every day? She was wrong. She misspoke. She didn't mean it.... No. It did not rain every day. But it rained for a hundred days, that year, which was enoughmore than enough, even.In prose by turn haunting and crystalline, Carellin Brooks' One Hundred Days of Rain enumerates an unnamed narrator's encounters with that most quotidian of subjects: rain. Mourning her recent disastrous breakup, the narrator must rebuild a life from the bottom up. As she wakes each day to encounter Vancouver's sky and city streets, the narrator notices that the rain, so apparently unchanging, is in fact kaleidoscopic. Her melancholic mood alike undergoes subtle variations that sometimes echo, sometimes contrast with her surroundings. Caught between the two poles of weather and mood, the narrator is not alone: whether riding the bus with her small child, searching for an apartment to rent, or merely calculating out the cost of meager lunches, the world forever intrudes, as both a comfort and a torment.In elliptical prose reminiscent of Elizabeth Smart's beloved novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, One Hundred Days of Rain exposes the inner-workings of a life that has come apart. Readers will engage with Brooks' poetic and playful constraint that unfolds chapter by chapter, where the narrator's compulsive cataloguing of rain's vicissitudes forms a kind of quiet meditation: an acknowledgement of the ongoing weight of sadness, the texture of it, and its compositionnot only emotional weight, but also the weight of all the stupid little things a person deals with when they're rebuilding a life.

Because fear can transform into confidence, recklessness, the kind of power you can't imagine until you're inside it. And then, once you've felt it, you can't feel alive when it's gone. Sophrosyne. You understood this feeling. I know you did, though you never said it. I saw it, instead, on your face when you danced.Sophrosyne is one of only four virtues identified by Socrates – four traits which, if lived deeply, define who we are as human beings. But sophrosyne is a concept our culture has long forgotten. 'Self-restraint,' 'self-control,' 'modesty,' 'temperance' – none of these terms expresses the essence of the word.In this provocative new novel about desire and restraint in a digital age by acclaimed author Marianne Apostolides, 21-year-old Alex is consumed by the elusive problem of sophrosyne for reasons he cannot share with others. While Alex's philosophy professor believes studying it will help shed light on the malaise of our era, Alex hopes it will release him from his darkly disturbing relationship with his mother. As he attempts to uncover his mother's truth, Alex is drawn inside an amorphous, indefinable undercurrent of love and violation. Only through his lover, Meiko, does Alex open into a new understanding of sophrosyne, with all its implications. Reminiscent of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Sophrosyne asks readers to surrender themselves to the book's logic and language. Infused with a sensuality balanced by its intellect, Sophrosyne reads like "e;the music's rhythm... soft like wax and supple, warm,"e; pulsing through your veins.

Secession / Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, Secession - translated by Erin Moure - joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics, Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself disrupts and reforms poetics and the possibility of the poem. In solidarity with Pato, Moure echoes Barthes: "e;A readerly text is something I cannot re-produce (today I cannot write like Atwood); a writerly text is one I can read only if I utterly transform my reading regime. I now recognize a third text alongside the readerly and the writerly: let's call it the untranslatable."e;In Secession / Insecession, a major European poet and a known Canadian poet, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the mid twentieth century and with vastly different experiences of political life, forge a 21st century relationship of thinking and creation. The result is a major work of memoir, poetics, trans-ethics and history.

Poetry. Edited by Stephen Cain. While bpNichol (1944-1988) has attained iconic status in Canadian literature in recent years, particularly through his lifelong poem THE MARTYROLOGY, and his work in visual and sound poetry, there are numerous early "fugitive" sequences that are often referred to in critical studies, but are long out of print and only available in library special collections or in the hands of rare book collectors. BP: BEGINNINGS brings together these pre-Martyrology materials in one comprehensive collection, including such key texts as Nichol's first chapbooks Beach Head and Cycles Etc., the minimal lyric sequences The Other Side of the Room and The Journeying and the Returns, and various concrete and sound-texts such as Lament, The Year of the Frog and Ballads of the Restless Are. These collected sequences show nichol developing his talents in both visual poetry and lyricism, pointing the way towards the union of the two forms in the later MARTYROLOGY. Combined with THE CAPTAIN POETRY POEMS COMPLETE (published by BookThug in 2011), BP: BEGINNINGS now makes all of Nichol's major poetry sequences available to both the avid nichol specialists and to aficionados of innovative poetry everywhere.

Guadalupe Muro, recipient of the Raul Urtusan - Frances Harley Scholarship for Young Emerging Artists from Argentina, has always had her own unique way of experiencing life. When applied to her writing, Muro says she finally "e;felt like a dog deciding to be a dog."e; Muro's Spanish publications have achieved strong acclaim, and now, BookThug is proud to introduce this remarkable new talent to the Canadian literary market. Air Carnation features an absorbing narrative that bridges non-fiction and fiction, poetry and song, as Muro explores themes of independence in love and the writerly life. With sojourns in Argentina, Buenos Aires, New York, Washington, and a cross-Canada train passage from Edmonton to Toronto, Air Carnation is an affecting work that will have readers laughing, crying, and all the while, enjoying this fascinating meta-fiction that sings of hippiedom in Patagonia.