Bøger udgivet af Coach House Books

The kid sells lemonade. Not a lot of people buy lemonade, especially now that its winter, but the kid makes good lemonade, even if his friend Mullen thinks it ought to be sweeter.They dont talk much with the other ten-year-olds most of the others are Dead Kids anyway. Except for Jenny Tierney, but shes busy breaking kids faces with her math book. Besides, the Russians from the meat-packing plant are a lot cooler, and they always win at curling.But in small-town Alberta, there are just too many roman-candle fights, bonspiels, retaliatory river diversions, black-market submarines, exploding boilers, meat-packing-plant suicides and recess-time lightning strikes for one lonely kid to get any attention. He might as well go to Kazakhstan. Then the adults in his life start disappearing down tunnels and into rendering vats. Being ten is hard enough without all that, especially when your best friend is ruining the lemonade.But the Milk Chicken Bomb should change everything.Frenetic, hilarious and gently heartrending, The Milk Chicken Bomb takes us inside the mind of a troubled ten-year-old who is just beginning to understand that the adults around him are as lonely and bewildered as he is in the face of the slapstick demands of the world.

The Canada Council for the Arts established the Prix de Rome in Architecture. During the years the Prix de Rome was in place, from 1987 to 2003, some of Canada's most important architects were given the opportunity to explore a more theoretical and experimental practice. This book reproduces the work of each of the Prix de Rome laureates.

Touch to Affliction is a text of ruins: ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body, of the barbarism of the twentieth century. At once lament, accusation and elegy, this work articulates the crumbling of buildings, the evisceration of language, the inhumanity that arises from patrie.Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Grecki, Simone Weil. In the end, this work considers what we are left with indeed, what is left of us as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.Touch to Affliction is political but never polemical. It lives at the interstices of thought and the unnameable. It is a book for our times.

When Hazel's beat-up old Duster stalls at the Star Trailer Park, she knows it's a sign. This just might be the new life she's looking for. So, she settles in. She buys a trailer, covers the yard with wildflowers, and gets a job at the thrift shop. And then, she falls head over heels in love with the hard-drinking, guitar-playing King.

First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mlanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book Mauve, the horizon is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original.Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.

In the vast, unnamed metropolis of Hello Hello, art and commerce have finally and completely conjoined; stylish cafs serve up zebra mussels and the air is thick with a gentle rain of sparrows plummeting down from the mirrored office towers. Everywhere, people are falling for an edgy new fashion accessory: a shiny ball filled with poison that hangs from a delicate chain.In this oddly peaceful world, Cassandra, a salesgirl at a clothing store called the Abyss, meets a charismatic ad man named Ben in the graveyard where she is mourning her lover, the last true artist on earth. They find themselves helplessly attracted to one another. Ben walks Cassandra home and invites her out to dinner, which leads to sex, marriage and a house in Semi-Residentia. Then comes baby. All one and a half inches of her.Hello Hello, nominated for several Dora awards, including Best Play and Best Musical, is a tragic, comedic and curiously erotic attack on western societys predilection for escapist consumerism and entertainment. If the boy-meets-girl musical is the shiny happy ball, then the content of the play, and its characters, are the poison held within.

Theatre doesnt have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren ODonnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isnt really a show; its an interactive chitchat about memory, depression, and 9/11, a dazzling whirl of talking streetcars, pizza and schizophrenia. And its hilarious.ODonnells artistic practice has evolved into something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission. With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, ODonnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity, abundance and power of the social sphere.Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic.

Features a poetic fantasia, a disorienting yet compelling dreamscape of butterflies and caterpillars and killing jars, where the waking mind's prose transforms into the sleeper's poetry. This collection of poems tracks the stages of sleep and pairs them with the life cycle of Lepidopterae.

Drawing on texts ranging from Thorstein Veblen's groundbreaking "The Theory of the Leisure Class" to "Star Wars" (the nerd Bible) for inspiration, this suite of poems documents the tribulations and insecurities of one's inner geek.

2007 Winner of the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Literary AwardAs meditative practices focus on the axis of breath, these poems focus on the moment of action, of thought, on the flux of speech.This is a poetry not of snapshots or collages but of long-exposed captures of the not-so-still lives of women. One sequence imagines Virginia Woolfs childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, On the Scent, makes us flneurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while The River Is All Thumbs uses a palette of vibrant repetition to paint a landscape.Queyrass language astute, insistent, languorous repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do we make a moment firm? These postmodern, postfeminist poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?Sina Queyras's latest collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford and Concordia University in Montreal where she now resides.

When a mad dentist steals people's teeth, Miss Lamp comes to town.Miss Lamp, a young and savvy lawyer, is holed up in Room 32 of the Peachland Hotel, waiting for a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and reviewing the case of Delano, the teeth-stealing dentist everybody loves to hate.Meanwhile, the narrator takes us on a tour of Miss Lamp's memories, stories of her family, the adventures of those who knock on her door. There's Miss Lamp's mother, Abby, and her mean grandmother. There's the supremely lovable Paper Boy, abused by Delano and in love with a younger Miss Lamp. There's naive Room Service Boy, on the hunt for the perfect tomato soup to accompany Miss Lamp's grilled cheese; at the grocery store he meets the assertive Banana Tray Hair could it be love?These characters' stories weave together into a tangle - like moths to a light, they all kaleidoscope back to our Miss Lamp in her floral hotel room. She invites you in to smell the flowers, to walk in someone else's shoes, to eat a peach, to watch a magpie pick for gold.

Carla Carlson is at the Hotel Clarendon in Quebec City trying to finish a novel. Nearby, a woman, preoccupied with sadness and infatuated with her boss, catalogues antiquities at the Museum of Civilization. Every night, the two women meet at the hotel bar and talk about childhood and parents and landscapes, about time and art, about Descartes and Francis Bacon and writing.When Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon appeared in French (as Hier), the media called it the pinnacle of Brossards remarkable forty-year literary career. From its intersection of four women emerges a kind of art installation, a lively read in which life and death and the vertigo of ruins tangle themselves together to say something about history and desire and art.

This remarkable autobiographical play by the award-winning author of Building Jerusalem and Martin Sloane, is a Russian-doll-like play: concentric stories enveloping each other. A writer is told, in confidence, a terrible tale of murder and injustice and he promises never to repeat the story. Goodness is the writer breaking his word.Recently divorced, Michael Redhill goes to Poland to get away frm his life and to do some research on the Holocaust. Thwarted by witnesses unwilling to talk, he returns home via England, but in London is introduced to someone who can tell him a 'real' story of evil. Through this reluctant witness, Redhill learns of a genocide. He encounters, through the memory of the storyteller, an alleged war criminal, about to be put on trial. But this is an old man with Alzheimer's who can no longer remember the time his crimes were allegedly committed. Has his guilt dissolved with his memory? Could he be pretending to be ill in order to escape punishment? The witness conjures for Redhill the war criminal's passionate and beautiful daughter, who will defend her father at all costs. There is also the prosecuting attorney, who has much in common with the old man whose destruction he seeks. As well as an uncomfortable attraction to his daughter. Each is drawn to the other. All is witnessed by a female prison guard the one who tells the playwright, years later, what really happened in the quest to give a nation some closure. Everyone's story is compelling, and the ending is as unexpected as it is shocking.Who do we believe? A prison guard still wounded by history? A writer suffering from heartache? A dying war criminal? What is our responsibility? Who does memory serve? Did the past really happen? And if it did, who has a claim on it?Goodness is a play about what happens in the gaps between experiencing, telling and hearing.

Described by Variety as Yukon Gothic, Claudia Deys acclaimed play Trout Stanley is set in northern British Columbia, on the outskirts of a mining town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley. In this inhospitable setting live a pair of sisters, twins who are not identical in any way: Sugar, a complicated, insecure waif who still wears the tracksuit her mother died in ten years prior, and Grace, a rough-and-tumble hellcat who owns the local dump. At the plays opening, it is their thirtieth birthday, and the TV news has announced the disappearance of a local Scrabble-champ stripper. While Grace is at the dump, housebound Sugar is surprised by a mysterious drifter, one Trout Stanley, foot fetishist and fake cop, who is searching for the lake where his parents drowned a fishy story if there ever was one. He quickly becomes mired in a surreal love triangle with the two sisters.Trout Stanley is about three people who confuse codependence for co-operation and affliction for affection. An eccentric, captivating story in which the biggest catch of all is love.Lavishly illustrated by Jason Logan.

A handbook to a landscape at the crossroads of meteorology and neurology, where the electrical storms without and the electrical impulses within converge. It features a collection of poems by the author who is fascinated with weather, ghosts and brain disorders.

Imagines poetry as a kind of cubist fascination, at times even a fascination with fascination itself. This book features the delusory spiral reasoning of artistic schools; the fluid politic of desire, gender and domesticity; and, the recurrent trials of revulsion and arousal.

March 6, 1934. Hundreds gather outside City Hall to celebrate the Toronto Centenary. In the crowd, pickpocket Mona Kantor and her partner, Chesler, are in the tip, finding easy pickings among the jostling masses. Eli Morenz, city man for the Daily Star, is covering the festivities and uncovering the pickpocket racket working the scene. A surreptitious photo and some keen research lead him to an underworld dive in Kensington Market where Torontos pickpockets converge and to Mona.Moving from a tense newsroom on King Street to the frenetic grift at Union Station, The City Man is a romance that begins in an instant and careens towards peril. Aklers prose is as deft as a thiefs fingers, as precise and powerful as a heavyweights punch. Packed with enchanting, arcane period slang and comparable in its evocation of a lost Toronto to Michael Ondaatjes In the Skin of a Lion, this is a novel of exceptional grace, excitement and beauty.

Toronto has experienced a wave of civic pride and enthusiasm not felt in decades. This collection of essays explores issues such as: Toronto's plans to redevelop the Island airport into a Ward's Island-style community; how the Zeidler family is energizing artist-run centres; and, what a car-free Kensington Market might mean.

Expose yourself to one of the most original new voices in theatre with this collection of two uncompromising plays by Greg MacArthur.Snowman: After years of wandering, Denver and Marjorie find themselves in a remote northern community at the edge of a glacier, chopping wood, renting out stolen videos and doing cocaine with Jude, a young gay man whose parents have abandoned him. When Jude discovers the body of a prehistoric boy frozen in the glacier, everyone finds their lives beginning to shift and thaw in unexpected ways.girls! girls! girls!: Splitz deserved to win. Missy stole first place. Set in the cutthroat world of high school gymnastics, this play follows the Friday-night exploits of four teenage chums as they seek revenge for a loss on the vaulting horse. Told in a hypnotic, rap-meets-nursery-rhymes style, this play, which takes its cue from A Clockwork Orange and the Columbine massacre, is brutally violent as it explores what happens when emptiness becomes the norm.Exposure includes an introduction by Peter Hinton.

The Refrigerator Memory is an exuberant, strangely funny celebration of sadness.With fable-like miniature stories and short lyric poems, Shannon Bramer creates a world littered with stolen pears and prosthetic arms and inhabited by Kindness scientists and hot-air-balloon operators. The poems invoke a world of childhood delights and demons in the context of grown-up fears and appetites: heartbreak, loss, jealousy and old-fashioned sibling rivalry. Youll find the hopelessly misunderstood Love the Clown (never goes out without his red wig) and Noni, a forlorn young man who cant stop crying.But while sadness plays a starring role, the true hero of the collection is the imagination; its transformative powers warm widows and drunken gods and designated mourners.You wont forget The Refrigerator Memory: the icebox cometh to warm your heart.

What's a pseudohaiku? It's the poetry of pure indulgence, a three-liner without the constraint, the pretension or the 5-7-5 syllable form. This title presents a collection of 1600 pseudohaikus.

From the Howl-like opening rant about the militarism of the US to the satirical "History of Canada", this collection of poems interrogates nationalism and cultural identity on both sides of the 49th parallel and attempts to show that Auden was wrong: poetry can make things happen.

Alice Charles has just moved to Montreal to go to McGill University. Shes never had a boyfriend and doesnt know how to do laundry. She joins the Film Society and hangs out in the library. She drifts away from boring Bethany, her best friend from high school, and starts to trail after Allegra, the caffeine-addicted, dish-throwing artist in the dorm room next to hers. And, most of all, she thinks about how shes still a virgin and how shell never figure it all out.And then she meets Nellcott Ragland, a 23-year-old who works at Basement Records and wears black eyeliner, and he asks her on a date.Alice tries to hide out in the Film Society office. She spies on Nellcott at the record store. She gets advice from Walker, her filmmaking, womanizing friend from Toronto. But sooner or later her parents are going to visit and watch her cry. She wont admit it to them, but Nellcott has become her darling.

A collection of musical writings. It features nine complete works, including the chamber opera "Night-blooming Cereus", the poetry/music collage (and Governor General's Award winner) "Twelve Letters to a Small Town", "the Canada Dot", "Canada Dash" trilogy and operas "Shivaree", "Taptoo!" and "Serinette".

Artist and writer Steve Reinke is best known for his video work. This titles features videos that comprises of original and found footage (from home movies, training films, and porn flicks), that are typically diaristic, often philosophical, and even elegaic. It contains Reinke's scripts from 1996 onwards, along with illustrative stills.

Sequestered on a street in a dry Calgary suburb, our heroine, the House, finds herself embroiled in a stalled love affair with an elusive and alluring Oxfordshire riverbank. In a series of self-contained poems both prosy and lyrical, this work follows this curious and engaging affair, which mysteriously coincides with a slow and gradual flood.

A book of micropoetic and linguistic koans.

Can a breakup break you apart?In Self-Titled, Geoffrey Brown stares into a mirror and writes what he sees, what he thinks, what he feels. The result? A self-portrait that's at once comic and psychotic, a complex consciousness captured in crystalline prose. Memories, manias, miasmas Brown morphs the machinery of his mind into an utterly original entity, equal parts diary, criminal confession, sex manual and mash note, as he contemplates a breakup.The novel splits into two parts; in 'First,' our slacker hero analyzes the minutiae of the relationship, trying to understand what he did, why it went wrong, and whether she'll come back. In 'Second' he knows she's not coming back, and he gets angry, flagellating himself with a whip of wordplay and remorse.Self-Titled is a singular achievement with universal appeal: who hasn't squinted into a mirror and said, 'What the hell is happening here?'? If Gertrude Stein's autobiography was Everybody's Autobiography, then Brown's self-portrait is everybody's self-portrait.Guest edited for the press by Derek McCormack.

David spends his days as an underworked copy writer for an ad agency and his nights lost in old war movies, fantasizing about his strange teenage cousin and revisiting his father's suicide.His dreary life is upended when he finds himself at the mysterious Chaos Farm, a lavish wilderness retreat populated by those seeking to right their lives' imbalances through New Age games and rites of necromancy. In a paranormal experiment gone awry, they inadvertently raise a mysterious bloodthirsty creature that may be a) the Devil, b) David's deceased father, c) George C. Scott as General George S. Patton in the movie Patton, or d) all, or any, of the aforementioned. Carnage ensues, leading David through a woozy landscape of churning highways, deserted shopping malls and small towns, lured backward through the chasms of memory and nostalgia by the monster's coaxing squeals and forward toward an uncertain, hallucinatory future.Here, Lolita meets Maldoror meets 50s pulp horror comics. Safety of War is a hellride of exploded symbolism and beery misadventures, murders and tragedies, laughs, puzzles and meditations on valour and sacrifice in a world short on true heroes.