Bøger udgivet af Coach House Books

A Progressive Traditionalist traces iconic designer John M. Lyle's attempts to pave the way for a uniquely Canadian architecture.

To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early 1960s, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, it sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.Shifting focus between the limits of the microscope and the limits of the telescope, Matthew Tierney gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe, one that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.

This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice.Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi.Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.Expressway exposes the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. Sina Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we've allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt, and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome each decision can make or unmake us.

A New York Times 100 Notable Book and longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip collects occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turning vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

Invited to a quiet Swiss chteau by the enigmatic Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann, Anne begins to slowly write a novel in a language that is not hers, a language that makes meaning foreign and keeps her alert to the world and its fiery horizon.Will the strange intoxication that takes hold of her and her characters sculptor Charles; his sister Kim, about to leave for the far north; and Laure Ravin, a lawyer obsessed with the Patriot Act allow her to break through the darkness of the world?Fences in Breathing, first published and critically lauded in French as La capture du sombre, and now brought into English by the celebrated translator Susanne de Lotbinire-Harwood, is a disquieting, dexterous and defiant missive, another triumph by one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.

The Winnipeg of Guy Maddin, the world's foremost cineaste planant, is far from the Winnipeg you'll find in tourist brochures.

Dr. Thoughtless Actions, a young geneticist, awakes one morning to find a cardboard box secured to his head. Unable to wrench it off, he attempts suicide, not only failing but also, unbeknowst to himself, cloning himself, creating Dr. Wishful Thinking. The two losers fall in love, fall in science, and fail to make a baby. Their conversation, an intricately woven semantic circus, traverses boxedness, love, and the more ridiculous areas of metaphysical speculation. Through a series of rapid exchanges, verbal games, and musical numbers, they discover that all their thoughts come from God, all their words come from the devil, and their desire for love is a habit acquired from the cinema. Sound familiar? Dont be so hard on yourself.[boxhead]: a bedtime story for your brain.

Biology is not Drees thing. Equally heinous are English, Social Studies, her sister and mother, not to mention Edmonton in general. Toronto is where she belongs specifically the upcoming Renegade Craft Fair where, finally, her crafts will be appreciated.Escape is imminent: on her 15th birthday, she will get the special fund her father promised, and the day after that shell be on Westjet Flight 233 to Toronto. Instead, her dad has a fatal heart attack, and all she finds are clues leading to the ominous Alberta Psychiatric Hospital where her parents once worked. As Dree tries to unearth a mystery, and to knit herself a passing mark in science, she keeps searching for the money, and for a way to grieve her father.Told in a fresh, frank voice, The Mitochondrial Curiosities of Marcels 1 to 19 is a wry, adventurous, unflinching look at the trials of teenage life.Instructions for renegade crafts included.

The trend of fettering Toronto's water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the city's surface water. This book examines the ever-changing interplay between nature and culture, and calls into question the city's past, present and future engagement with water.

A spiraling poem about the pathology of forgetting, a poetic narrative of credible absurdity and dazzling interest.

With cameos by jackalopes, Glenn Gould, homemade spaceships, and Carl Linnaeus, these poems are remarkable for their technical agility and their restless inventiveness. Theres an elegance here that matches Dodds impulse to challenge the reader with fresh metaphor and astonishing phrasing; the formal ambitions of many of the poems in Crabwise to the Hounds are balanced by an inclination towards wordplay and a bright musicality. Humorous at times, yet always handled with consummate craft, these poems invoke historical figures like Hiram Bingham and Ho Chi Minh even as they traverse a poetic landscape that includes telephone-game-style translations, interpretive dance poems on historic paintings and carnivalesque jaunts into a natural world overrun with mules, Alsatians, lions, and motorcycle-sized-deer.

A collection of poems that looks at our primal appetite for attachment through the modern norms of codependency and co-existence, understanding that the postmodern digital era has created an atmosphere where the vulnerability and tenderness of the individual is both profanely exposed and brazenly reinvented in the arrival of virtual identity.

Haven is fiercely protective of her little brother, Chase, spiriting him away when their fathers temper is about to flare yet again. She hides the bread away so hell have something for lunch, and she teaches him to hide himself. But when thats no longer enough to keep him safe, she steals the car and takes them both away to their aunt, Mary, who tries her best to love and nurture them.They try to redeem their harrowing childhood in different ways: Haven, lost and damaged, goes to medical school and teachers college, and marries young, hoping to find meaning through her daughter, April. Chase battles his demons through cathartic but doomed performance art. And, always, they try to keep one another afloat.Chase and Haven is a haunting story inventively told and deeply felt of suffering and love, made of thousands of small impressionist facets that refract the quiet spectrum of the beauty and the detritus of two entwined lives.

Auden flees the small town of Capreol for Toronto, bewildered, HIV positive, and in search of an entirely new personality. He falls in love with orgy maestro Wrik, mainly because the old Auden would never even have talked to him. And through Wrik, he meets Steve Reinke, his new best friend.Steve and heres where it gets confusing is, in real life as well as in The Steve Machine, a renowned video artist, someone who makes television for one person at a time, small-screen excursions designed to cure arthritis or night blindness.Despite being a virtuoso with video, however, Steve is not so good with love. He falls for a football star, and, with his medium-is-the-message videotapes, is able to slow down the other players so his beau can run past them all at normal speed. Though the team wins, Steve does not, and the jock dumps him.Then theres the chess whiz, followed soon after by hustlers and tattoo artists, and and then Jody, whos got a mouth so big and red that Steve is overcome with lust. Truth is, its a mouth used to settling scores, only Steve doesnt catch this. Blinded by passion, our fictional Steve contracts HIV, then sets to work building a videotape that will relieve him, and the millions of others afflicted, of their illness. On the way, he stars in a reality TV show, decides to wear only white paper suits, and meets childhood idol Yoko Ono.Auden accompanies Steve in this quest that is at once a plague narrative, a love story, a reflection on media technology, and a joy to read. As an added bonus, this volume has been written both as a regular hold-in-your-hand novel with a beginning, middle, and end (though not necessarily in that order), and as a machine designed to replace the voice of the inner monologue with something (or someone) far more soothing and satisfying. Like the videotapes of Steve Reinke, the book itself is a machine. The Steve Machine.

Features twenty-seven artists who discuss about how they get fringe movies done and why it matters.

When a young scholar finds Eternal Hydra, a long-lost, legendary and encyclopedic novel by an obscure Irish writer, she brings the manuscript to an esteemed publisher, hoping to secure an international audience for the book. But Vivian's obsession with the dead author, who has materialized in her life, is challenged by the work of a contemporary historical novelist, and she's forced to face confounding questions about authorship, racism, and ethical behavior.Weaving between modern-day New York, 1930s Paris and New Orleans in the years following the Civil War, Eternal Hydra is a postmodern look at the making of a modernist masterpiece.

Everyone falls in love with his or her therapist at least a little. But what happens when the therapist not only loves you back but also acts upon it? This is the poetic account of the true story of a patient/psychiatrist relationship gone horribly wrong.

Her acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in Jen Currins new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark cunning wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new and more personal territory. In a style that regularly pushes lifes barely hidden strangeness into the light, Currins poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life.

Eugenia Ledoux wakes one morning to a note on the kitchen table: Gone to save the world. Sorry. Yours, Sheb Woolly Ledoux. Asshole. Eugenia is nine years old, a synaesthesiac and a tightrope walker. She adores her father and his lunatic charms; she loves that he takes her fishing in the middle of the night and calls her Stunt. Sheb has always promised hell one day take her to the moonscape of northern Ontario, where astronauts train; instead he writes a note, blows up a shoulder-pad factory, and leaves. His heartbroken daughter is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged former ingenue Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. After a fake funeral for Sheb, Mink vanishes too. Eugenia and Immaculata, left alone, double in age overnight. Immaculata becomes a swan-like giantess, and soon finds her calling caring for Leopold, a diseased and irresistible malcontent down the street. Eugenia, however, stays the same: dark and diminutive, and bereft. She finds herself a bicycle and sets off to track down her father, encountering an astronaut and a waitress named Cupid along the way.Stunt is the first novel by one of Canadas most acclaimed playwrights. Like synaesthetic Eugenia, your senses will be addled as Deys words take on colours, tastes, and smells, somehow coming to mean more than you thought they did; they depict, with compassionate hilarity and luminous heartbreak, the love between a girl and her father.

In the sixties, architecture fell in love with concrete. Fashion has since shifted and concrete buildings have fallen out of favor and into disrepair. But they represent an exciting era of faith in architecture and technical innovation. This work acts as a guidebook to the city's extensive concrete heritage.

Exploring Southeast-Asian Canadian contributions to independent film and video, this collection, originating in the work of the acclaimed Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, highlights the screen as a site for the reflection, projection, and reimagination of identities and communities.

Isolated brings together two inventive, disturbing plays by one of Canadas most intriguing dramatic voices.In Recovery, people around the world are addicted to a mysterious substance. Large recovery centres are set up, promising refuge, treatment and healing to millions of addicts. But all is not what it seems. Following three residents of a facility in Antarctica, McArthur delivers a quirky and unsettling play that reveals the fear and isolation of the oppressed individual, and the consequences of a medicalized society.In Get Away, David finds two beautiful teenagers when he escapes to an isolated cabin where he hopes to cure his unusually persistent listlessness. Sensing that they might need protecting and may be crucial to his survival he invites them in, but the roles of predator and prey become unclear as the three become dangerously intertwined. Both fantastical and horrifying, Get Away provides a resonating look at the destructive nature of longing and our desperate need for love.

"Walk thrice where thieves are hanged. Iron your own shirt." With the prisms of varied vocabularies refracting detail and language, the author illuminates the intricacies of communication. She invokes the vocabulary of the institution - the airport, the hospital.

Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpseys Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy.Where Timon of Athens meets Shania Twain, that's where you'll find Sitcom. Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself in demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O offering, along the way, a sincere contemplation of mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore. In between, you'll find Auden, Arthur Carlson, oper, Girls Gone Wild and the lead from Suddenly Susan's turn as a creative writing student.Unembarrassed by its literary allusions or its hi-lo hybridity, Sitcoms strategic and encompassing voice is prepared for each comedic disaster and is, somehow, always ready for next weeks episode.

bpNichol was one of Canada's most innovative, eclectic, entertaining and enigmatic poets, making startling interventions in the development of poetry and influencing both his own and subsequent generations of writers. This book presents key texts from the broad spectrum of Nichol's work, including both classic favorites and more obscure treasures.

Isabel Norris has never left the ice. Her father was a hockey legend who died before she was born, and her grandparents have raised her in his skates.When Iz leaves her grandmother behind to play for the Winnipeg University Scarlets, she struggles to fit in on this team of hard-hitting, tough-talking women with a penchant for buffets, beer bongs and raunchy humour and a fierce loyalty to one another and to their sport. But in their raucous midst, Iz can't quite find her own place in the game.As she moves between the rowdy hilarity of the Scarlets' dressing room and quiet, lyrical contemplations, Iz tries to navigate the ways loss plays out on the ice. Based largely on author Cara Hedley's three seasons on the University of Manitoba Bison, Twenty Miles celebrates women's hockey and offers an uncompromising look at the ways in which the sport both haunts and redeems the women who play it.

Brian Lembeck Pulpy takes life slow and steady. He likes his office job, and he likes his gentle, figurine-collecting boss, Al. He even likes the bitter receptionist, though hes the only one who does. He likes his wife, Midge, too, and their ice-dancing lessons. Midge works as a candle-party hostess she quit her office job when Als dog ate her pet pigeon and Al promised Pulpy a promotion.But when Al retires and the tyrannical Dan takes over, the promotion vanishes. And then Dans oversexed wife, Beatrice, takes a shine to Pulpy, and Dan starts to think Midge is one hot tamale. Soon, the receptionist is smitten with Pulpy, Midge cant get rid of Dan and Beatrice, and Pulpys job is in jeopardy. For once, Pulpy just might have to take a stand.

Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays collects three works by Amiel Gladstone, introducing a wide range of fascinating characters and a formidable new voice in Canadian drama.In The Wedding Pool, three single friends in unsatisfactory jobs decide to place a bet on who will marry first. The friends waitress and wannabe dancer Sylvia, rock critic Miles and inventory manager Dave open a joint account to which they each contribute $50 a month, the final sum to be collected by the first to tie the knot. But when Miles starts dating the bank teller who opens their account, the friends realize much more is at stake and are forced to consider their individual fears and failings.In Lenas Car, a woman whose marriage has stalled reflects on how it got to that point, harkening back to her youth, when she was just a Young Girl in a Small Town Looking for Trouble. Picking over the memories of her adolescence, she attempts to figure out why she ended up in a disintegrating relationship and just when her life became like everyone else's.Hippies and Bolsheviks set in 1970s British Columbia, a hotbed of hippie idealism, is a comedy based on the big ideas of the long-haired revolution. Star stumbles home from a Led Zeppelin concert with a draft dodger. A bizarre love triangle develops the next morning as Allan (Green Tree), a defector from the same commune Star fled, shows up on her doorstep. As The Establishment gains more ground, three dropouts struggle to hold on to their ideals.

Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and plain language collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption.Deeply inflected by the polyvocality and encoded rhetorics of the screen, Human Resources is perched at the limits of language, irreverently making and breaking meaning. Navigating the crumbling boundaries among page, screen, reader, engine, writer and database, Human Resources investigates wasting words and words as waste and the creative potential of salvage.

The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning.Nicole Brossard, one of the worlds foremost literary innovators, is known for her experiments with language and her groundbreaking treatment of desire and gender. This dextrous translation by the award-winning poets and translators Erin Moure (Little Theatres) and Robert Majzels (Apikoros Sleuth) brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossards remarkable syntax and sensuality.