Bøger udgivet af Coach House Books

What is the best way to tell a story? This anthology features a collection of essays by writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killianon who write on the theme of narration. It also includes forty experimental writers who describe their engagement with language, storytelling, and the world.

Features Canadian poetry.

'Birrell has a grand eye for the small detail that is the hallmark of a well-made story.' -- The Toronto StarKleptomaniacs, convicts, roof-walkers and homicidal hippies: populated as they are with lives both ordinary and extraordinary, Heather Birrell's stories pull at the sinews of the strange until the strangeness shapes itself into something familiar. At the same time, they mould the day-to-day into something new and wholly unexpected. Oldrick must come to terms with his ex-girlfriend's new lover and a belligerent barista in the midst of a smelly garbage strike. Young Misha learns about the complexities of grownup love when his mother is bitten by a stingray. Home-schooled Rational gets a tutor and learns that his 'hunker in the bunker' family isn't quite what he thought it was, and bus-bound Marion, in love with a married man, finds solace in conversation with a convict. The stories in I know you are but what am I? are like snow domes perfect little self-contained worlds that you can hold in your hand, turn upside down, shake until the meaning settles in a hundred different ways. Here are children and adults, men and women, all struggling to define themselves, all searching for ways to belong. This is a lucid, dextrous collection that marks the ascension of a writer to watch.Heather Birrell's stories have been shortlisted for both the Western and National Magazine Awards and have appeared in numerous Canadian literary journals. A frequent book reviewer and winner of the Journey Prize, she also works as a high school teacher and a creative writing instructor.

Toronto's CN Tower has fallen into the lake. The city is crowded with refugees from the US. Michael and Ruth Racco's dad has, in a rash of road rage, perpetrated the Backhoe Massacre. And, in the middle of it all, little Jimmy Hardcastle has, in the fountain of a suburban mall, walked on water. As helicopters chop the air over Toronto and a paranoid America slides into fascism, kids from south of the border collide with kids from north of the border and, over lattes, ruminate on new possibilities. Your Secrets Sleep With Me is a frenetic, ruthlessly hilarious critique of power and politics. Brilliant, absurd, incisive and fun, this caffeinated novel will take you on a doomed search for the place where you end and everything else begins. But you will not be alone. Shhh. Don't worry. Your secrets sleep with us.

Features poetry that's a lot like art - its meaning comes from what it looks like instead of the order of the words. This work presents concrete poetry, that is playful, sincere, explorative, intelligent, and human. It also presents visual puns and word puzzles.

Contemporary Canadian poetry got you down? This book of poems operates within the constraints of what the author terms 'synaptic syntax' - poetry that performs the very nature of neuronal activity from the point of view of a mood-enhanced Human Comedy, which, with a quick turn of phrase, or missing neurotransmitter, could become Human Tragedy.

Explores the language of certain influential aspects of early to mid-twentieth-century popular culture. This title presents a playful book of poetry with a serious trigger finger.

Beckett meets Betty Boop in this trilogy of monologues by Canadian cult heroine Pochsy, a nasty, vapid, utterly charming vixen. In Pochsy's Lips, she's in the hospital, convinced she's sick because she's got a squid where her heart should be. In Oh Baby, she's at the Last Resort, on holiday from her job packing mercury. And in Citizen Pochsy, our little minx is in the waiting room at an audit from hell. In The Pochsy Plays, Hines remodels and melds traditions like stand-up, absurdism, clowning and neo-cabaret to create some of the most original and cutting satire to hit the stage and, now, the page. Walk a mile in her distressed calfskin boots as the dark and ditzy Pochsy garbles ad slogans, self-help mantras and desperate grabs at meaning into a postmodern pastiche that is hilarious and harrowing, sweet and bitter at the same time. With extensive photos and musical scores, and an introduction by Darren O'Donnell.

Features three one-act monologues, with three very monstrous women. This title includes: "A Visitation by St Teresa of Avila upon Constable Margaret Chance", "The Susan Smith Tapes", and "Dead Teenagers".

In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem's lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away. A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters weren't so easily distracted by the noir-ishly handsome chief inspector, the seductive female veterinarian and the dashing anthropology professor studying the Winter Garden's gorge. The Winter Gardeners spend a summer of sultry afternoons nursing Rob, languidly drinking cocktails and trying to picture Nude Descending Staircase in their supposedly Cubist garden. Soon, however, they find themselves in a court room, where their family's values are on trial in a case reminiscent of that of Oscar Wilde.

Features poems that thrash against the matrix of their own referential nature using a series of linguistic echoes that reference writers like the 'maternal' Virginia Woolf or the 'paternal' Leonard Cohen. This work includes poems that are painterly, splintered, and majestic.

Through the disquieting absence of the letters characters n and b, and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, this book confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences.

A story that rockets back and forth between the past and present, and the consecutive anecdotes start to coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts, and we begin to see how the different atoms - the characters - of this particular molecule are interdependent.

pppeeeaaaccceee, is a vast, imaginative and mesmerizing glide through Life and Power. The play is set in Ephemeral; three people firmly floating chat in O'Donnell's inimitable rapid-fire style about the revolution. Which revolution? Good question. A gently aggressive meditation, pppeeeaaaccceee examines our being, asks us what we're doing and reminds us that there are monsters in here.Peace. Say it slow, stretch it out, make it last forever.

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back. A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in "e;search of a narrative, a narrative in search of an author."e; Brossard's first novel, and a key work in Canadian postmodernism. Turn of a Pang (Sold-out in French): Quebec's 1943 Conscription Crisis and the 1970 War Measures Act weave together to form the texture of a woman's life. French Kiss: a celebration of the energy of women and language in the face of the male authorities of Montreal politics and the physical authority of the printed (and bound) word.The Blue Books collects these three long-out-of-print, groundbreaking Brossard titles, in their original Coach House Press English translations (A Book by Larry Shouldice, Turn of a Pang and French Kiss by the acclaimed Patricia Claxton). Don't be blue: these Brossard classics are back!

Quill pen, linotype, computer: does how you write affect what you write? This book spurns the sentence and woos the phrase, the image and the language of printing, weaving fragments together to address the question of how publishing and printing affect writing.

Tells a tale of love that features a lonely Indian elephant, newly arrived at the Calgary Zoo from Holland, with a penchant for moonlight escapes, and the wooden Maytag Man statue on Calgary's 9th Street, with his sad eyes, his oaken thighs, his aloofness.

An autobiography that tells the tales of George Bowering, one of Canada's Grand Prix writers, and Ryan Knighton, a young writer entering the race. It tells of their friendship, families, friends and loves.

A collection of poetry that documents the sorts of interruptions that plague the lives of artists and writers. It weaves together the imagery of searching and the vagaries of language into a whole cloth. It reflects the dynamic between the known and the unknown.

A collection of poems that move through the world opened by Prince Henry the Navigator's epoch-shifting push to open a sea route around Africa to the Spice Isles.

On the afternoon that two tonnes of explosives are set to dismember Toronto's Metropolitan Library, poet Henry Black hides himself away in his favourite wing; when his mangled body is uncovered, there's a book lodged in his chest.Jay Post, a hapless filmmaker, is hired to chronicle the life, death and writings of the poet. In the process of making his documentary, Jay must try to unravel the threads of Henry's labyrinthine, suicide-obsessed mind with only the poems as tools; he must also contend with two of Henry's sometimes lovers, Luisa, a Mexican violinist, and Dee, a feminist writer now living on a farm in the Annapolis Valley and writing a novel about Catherine the Great.The Dying Poem will take you through stories within stories in search of the mystery behind Henry's artful suicide. And, in the end, the crossing of paths and the difficulty of speaking about the dead tell us something about the making of art and what art makes of us.

Jay Millar's second collection of poems looks at the world of mushrooms through a kaleidoscope ofperspectives and styles, ranging from innovative and constraint-based writing to visual and concrete poetry. This book makes a unique contribution to the poetry of science and nature; if mushrooms have a language that is spoken to us or through us as hallucinogenic experiences, Millar has managed to tap into that language and refine it into potent poetic form.'As readers, ' says Millar, 'we witness that which occurs on and above the surface of language. Meanwhile, the fungal threads themselves, lying beneath or between the letters, faithfully connect each piece of the whole to all of the others in a particular order forever unknown to the reader.' "Mycological Studies" is an uncanny book, one that suggests that the divides between the sentient and the unconscious are frequently bridged in subtle and mysterious ways.

The heart, writes Margaret Christakos, is 'a public organ of private damage.' The poems in "Excessive Love Prostheses" confess, rather than deride, the complexities of contemporary desire, describing a subject that is both public and private, physical and virtual."Excessive Love Prostheses" takes the confessional lyric poem and runs it through Kathy Acker's Cuisinart. Christakos shapes a sensory surfeitry of pornography, cautionary nursery rhymes, mothering, bisexuality and the paradoxes of feminism into poignant analogies for contemporary obsessions and ailments; here are the voices of construction workers, staple sorters, obstetricians, video technicians and others, shattered and sorted by a practiced writerly hand. The result is a near-ecstatic tribute to the hyper-embodied intelligence of a new millennial subject.

Minor earthquakes every day; that's what they say. Lucy feels the tremors like a needle sensitized to respond to the slightest movement. She feels the push, the blind thrust of the earth's elastic body, pushing out, pulling in, behaving unpredictably. She lies awake at night, staring into the darkness, thinking of the tectonic plates moving against one another, building up tension, until something has to give.On an isolated island in Lake Ontario live twins Lucy and Levi and their father, Daniel. While Daniel desperately mourns for his dead wife, Levi and Lucy grow up ever more entwined in their enchanted childhood of fairy tales and rhymes.But when a fissure in the fragile cocoon of the family explodes into a chasm, each of the three is hurled in a different direction. Soon, there emerges a geographical triangle Vancouver, Montreal, the island that also maps out the terrain of love and the territory of family.Part Egyptian myth, part Alice in Wonderland, How the Blessed Live is an ethereally quiet, unexpected debut from a novelist to be watched.

The Mood Embosser, Louis Cabri's first book of poetry, presents a series of impressions of 1990s social history as it is manifested in the lingering traces of everyday life. In order to address a wide variety of social structures and their attendant moods, these poems deploy a clutch of poetic forms: columns, long poems, the page as a 'field' of interrelated micro-poems, and series all jostle for space between the covers.In The Mood Embosser, Louis Cabri writes toward chance's margin - the home of the things we don't know - with a pointed humour that pokes and prods among the detritus of culture.

Karen Mac Cormack's "At Issue" is a sequel of sorts to "Fit to Print" (also from Coach House Books), her collaborative poetic examination of the newspaper with British poet Alan Halsey. In "At Issue, " Mac Cormack examines the format and contents of the lifestyle magazine.Utilizing the vocabulary and spelling found in "Vogue" (both British and American versions), "Self" (a health/fitness magazine geared to female readership) and "Prevention" (another health magazine), the poems in "At Issue "reflect and refract the experience of reading these magazines. (Mac Cormack notes that an interesting - if frightening - fact is that there are fewer typos in "Vogue" than in most scholarly books published in North America.) As an alternative to the 'mined' creativity of the magazine poems, Mac Cormack also includes a number of texts from other sources.