DC Books,Canada – förlag

Young, impressionable, twenty-year-old Walter Taylor flees his suburban home in search of freedom and adventure and stumbles into more than he bargained for. Set in a chaotic bee-farm at the height of the 1960s, home to a bohemian, European-born artist and his mistresses, "The Beekeeper" is filled with allusion, irony, and high humour, yet sets in stark relief the fund of violence and ignorance that underlay the romantic dreams of the 1960s. Henderson has written a hilarious satirical portrait of the last generation's counter-culture movement, as well as an original and thought-provoking assessment that what produced this rebellion was to a large measure transplanted European ideas originating not only in the last century but beyond.

Beautifully shaped and with language full of sensuous intimations, here is the latest volume of poems by Steve Luxton. From the tensile short lyrics of "Hermit Crab Song" to the loosely sashaying rhythms of "Morning After: At the Dacha". Luxton's sustained vision compels and fascinates. As G V Downes comments in Canadian Literature, Luxton is both original and aware, a poet "who sees with precision" the Canadian landscape. Like the being in the title poem "Iridium", the reader is urged for a moment to relinquish the grotesque world of appearances to find shapes that sound, touch, and endure.

This is a sexy romp packed with mouth-watering descriptions of food, endless supplies of ouzo, gags, and absurd collisions. In this fictional debut by the well-known food-writer, pure laine Quebec locks horns with moneyed Westmount when coquettish, street-wise Arletty Daoust-Tremblay dazzles, then dumps, pampered scion and fledgling experimental filmmaker Ari ePennyloafersi McLeod. But their mothers, in odd alliance, have other ideas. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the loversi fathers throw punches and speechify. Romantic comedy meets political satire. Love In The Age Of Confusion is a tour de force in which opposites attract, myth tussles with myth, and delightful, even delicious explosions go off. Will the politically confounded young lovers reconcile? You bet your kefi (that is Greek for joie de vivre) they will!

The thirteen stories in "The Tree of Youth" have a richly exotic, sensuous allure: the landscape shifts from cosmopolitan Canada to beautiful Barbados. They also explore, with understated brilliance, the elation and defeat men and women everywhere experience when they yearn for love and a better life. Here is an unblinking vision of the sexual exploits of Bajans, young and old, one that restores the redeeming values of children, family, and art.

This anthology includes daring and often thrilling new writing from some of the 21st century's best prose and poetry writers, such as: David Wevill, Sina Queyras, Raymond Hsu, Robert Minhinnick, Annie Freud, Bill Bissett, Patrick Chapman, Meredith Quartermain, Jason Camlot, Liane Strauss, Todd Colby, Jennifer K Dick, John Hartley Williams, Louise Bak, Hal Sirowitz, Adeena Karasick, Mike Marqusee, Kavita Joshi, Stan Rogal, Tammy Armstrong, Richard Peabody, Jenna Butler, Ali Riley, Jon Paul Fiorentino, David Prater, J R Carpenter, David McGimpsey -- plus many more.

James Richardson Forman was born in 1822 at Halifax, and returned from Scotland in 1854 to oversee the construction of the Nova Scotia Railway, the first publicly owned railway in the British Empire. But did he become a victim of Nova Scotia's venal politics? He had been appointed to his post at the request of Reformer Joseph Howe, but was dismissed from office in 1858 by James W. Johnston, who became Conservative premier of the province in 1857. Two years after he left for a brilliant career in Scotland, it was discovered that most of the reasons for his dismissal were the fault of his second-in-command, who was also Johnston's nephew! The book examines the unfair treatment Forman received at the hands of his Nova Scotia countrymen, and asks the question if it could have been Forman, and not Sandford Fleming, who would later (in 1867 to 1876) have built Canada's Intercolonial Railway from Nova Scotia to Quebec City, had he been allowed to stay on the project.

When Donald Rumsfeld briefed his press secretary on how to deal with the media, he said: Begin with an illogical premise and proceed perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion They [the media] do it all the time. Kathryn Mocklers new collection of poems applies Rumsfelds advice to powerful poetic ends. Deeply interested in American politics and the absurdity of our mediated relation to the political sphere, the beautiful and entertaining narrative poems in The Saddest Place on Earth follow absurd premises to their most logical conclusions. Here, God appears on Oprah, Hurt Feelings and Anger rent a cottage together on Lake Huron for a week in August, and the saddest place on earth is discovered in a Chinese restaurant at the end of a strip-mall. Kathryn Mocklers approach to language and the world results in an extremely engaging, moving and often hilarious poetics of deep disorientation.

An illustrated history of the electrified railway tunnel and station complex still serving Montreal. This story had its start in the pre-World War I railway building boom, when Canadian Northern Railway set out to provide Canadians with competition to the Canadian Pacific and Grand Trunk railways. Since those competitors had already established entries into Montreal from the east, west, and south, CNoR decided that entering downtown from the north, even though a four-mile tunnel through Mount Royal would be required. This book describes the building of CNoR's huge complex that became today's Central Station, and the site for downtown Montreal's massive complex: Place Ville Marie, Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Place Bonaventure, CN headquarters, and other large office buildings. The clean-running electric locomotives hauled trainloads of commuters to the CNoR's 'Model City' development and other suburbs to Montreal's north-west, with change-overs made to steam locomotives (later diesels) to take inter-city trains to Ottawa, Toronto, and the western provinces.

Gillian Sze takes a random walk through the art museum and finds the drama of life framed in a series precisely rendered and moving artefact poems. Working from Jeanette Winterson's idea of a "constant exchange of emotion" between the artist, the painting, and the writer, Sze's ekphrastic verse is unrelenting in its commitment to action, so that each poem sparked by a picture comes to follow its own impetus, the origin of which is always a deeply felt encounter, whether familial, erotic, or strange. Vacillating deftly between the suspended space-time of a museum exhibit and the charged urgency of the lives she imagines via the art she describes, the result is a collection at once stirring and arresting, tender and coolly true.

This anthology is indispensable to anyone desiring a fuller knowledge of the lives and sentiments of this founding Canadian community. The book includes a critical and historical introduction, introductory and explanatory notes to individual selections, and bibliographic materials for the informed study of Irish-Canadian writing. The work fills an important and neglected niche for the study of Irish-Canadian literature, and opens new fields for the study both of the Irish diaspora and of Canadian literature in general.

Of Water and Rock derives its power from the basic human need for connectedness and belonging. When Torontonian Edward Hamblin steps off the plane in Barbados, in the winter of 1969, he crosses more than the tarmac at Seawell Airport. As he navigates the island's racial and cultural boundaries, he leaves behind an empty life of comfort and discovers a vibrant world of simple beauty, an undiscovered family, and reconciliation with the memory of a long dead father. Powerful converging themes give the novel an emotional strength: Edward Hamblin's immesion into the post-colonial culture of Barbados; his unresolved animosity towards his long dead Barbadian father who deserted his family when he was young; the poor black peasant farmer, Sissy Braithwaite, and her unrequited love for an abandoned daughter; the wealthy white Mary Collymore's disconnected life of privilege and racial intolerance. After Sissy's death, when Edward discovers his Great Aunt's diary, the apparently disconnected threads are drawn together. As well as revealing the true relationships between the protagonists, Edward hears his father's voice, comes to understand and pity the man that he has for so long despised, and resolves to unite his newly discovered family in a way his father never could.

From faraway hotel rooms to quiet rides in the country, from Perfect Strangers to late-night infomercials, from a Mickey Mouse alarm clock to an all-too-familiar snooze button, and from cheese fries and 3 a.m. Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Cheetos to Pepto-Bismol, Greg Santos's poems detail, essentially, what all we Gen Y-ers must sadly recognise -- or, perhaps, proudly claim -- as the sobering truths that daily remind us, whether we like it or not, that we are growing up.

With wit and sensitivity, these tales portray moments of suffering, confusion, and discovery and introduce the reader to worlds as widely various as Japanese kite-making, bees, daycare, alcohol, and motorcycle maintenance. Abrays stories push full-on into the world of obsessions. A new vacuum cleaner becomes a pawn in a just-ended relationship. Riding-a-motorbike becomes the way brothers bond over their troubled relationship with their father. A wise naturalist takes the reader on a comic tour of an animal-filled mall, and a bee infestation in a kitchen forces three urban apartment-sharing youths to suddenly confront nature and their own changing relationship.

Western Canadian writer, Shelley A. Leedahl exposes the emotionally electric lives of men, women, and children with grit, humour, and tenderness. Familial and romantic relationships turn strange or go altogether awry, wild idiosyncrasies develop, and characters navigate their personal joys, ironies, and crashing disasters with courage and grace. These finely crafted contemporary stories resonate with emotion, reject sentimentality, and, like life itself, are impossible to predict. Listen, Honey is an entertaining, thoughtful, and downright sexy book.

Long before the current rise of eco-poetry, Steve Luxton was writing powerful and exquisitely crafted poems about and set in nature. An avid fisherman, canoeist and hiker, he has explored and recorded in memorable detail the region around his home in Quebec. This important collection brings together for the first time Luxtons best nature poems written over the last 35 years and includes new and previously unpublished work. Influenced by well-known fellow poets and Eastern Townshippers, F. R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, and D.G. Jones, Luxton has developed a mature and authoritative voice uniquely his own. Rich in language and metaphor, these poems dazzle at times with their depth and dissolve the barrier between Man and Nature. With a true and finely honed poetic gift, Luxton vividly portrays the natural worlds green particulars-what the Zen Buddhists term The Ten Thousand Things. Unsentimentally Post pastoral and also post Romantic, Luxton employs his eyes, ears, heart, and mind, with non-appropriating eloquence.

With surgical precision and understated humour, Kenneth Radu once again demonstrates his remarkable ability to portray ordinary people in sometimes extraordinary circumstances. Whether its the story of an old woman who has given birth, or a professor grieving over the death of his child, or a porn shop owner fighting off the financial predations of his brother, or a wheel-chair bound woman terrified by a voyeur, these stories collectively dramatize the conflict between personal wishes and the hard facts of reality. As the title story suggests, what we dream or think about ourselves may well be pulled down to earth, sometimes with a thud, by the gravitational energy of emotion, relationships, unexpected events, and inescapable truth. As in his previous collection, Sex in Russia, the stories in Earthbound, are all are imbued with Radus subtle irony, deft descriptions, acute insight, and compassion for his characters.

In present day Montreal, a young woman by the name of Percy vanishes from the streets. The woman's parents -- her father, a famous musician, and her mother, a witch -- are frantic. Soon after the woman's disappearance strange phenomena sweep the globe: snow and ice fall of season in record amounts, blanketing whole countries. World-wide crop failures are announced, droughts become widespread, and then the worst happens: daylight fails to appear... What follows is the epic tale of Percy's voyage through the Underworld, whose rules of existence are as unfathomable as the mysterious red flowers that suddenly blanket its fields. As daylight touches the dark realm, Percy unwittingly becomes the permanent guest of the Underworld's charismatic lord Pluto. And when her best friend Simon, a descendent of a long line of shamans, descends in an effort to save her, the three embark on a life and death race to figure out what - or who - has upset the balance between the two worlds before it's too late... Wonder-filled, imaginative, and compelling, L E Sterling's sophomore novel immerses readers in a magical world where existence itself is ordered by the tenuous balance between light and dark, and the story-filled pages of one remarkable book.

The tale begins in a small village in Turkey where the protagonist, Jefferson Cooper, finds himself (despite himself). He has no idea why he is there, nor who he is. An apparent victim of some sort of selective amnesia, with a suitcase full of money and demonstrably a shady past, he sets out on a voyage of self-discovery. He travels to Istanbul, Mumbai, and Kerala, meeting all manner of people who seem to know him so much better than he knows himself. Along the way, he falls in love with a slender, ethereal person who keeps reappearing just when he seems on the brink of total desperation. It is Miryam who leads him to a realization of who he is and to his long-sought redemption.

The disasters of 9/11 trigger a Cataclysm that is unleashed every so many cycles. It can only be averted by the selfless act of the Elect, a trio of exceptional humans who are guided by Milton, a being known as an Elder. The three, all Barbadians, are David Rayside, Marsha Durant and Franck Hurley. And it is their time: to save the world before the deadliest characters of their legends and myths - the baccou, the steel donkey, la djablès, and the heart man - destroy it All their lives, the Elect have had their abilities: David, the power of flight; Marsha, incredible strength; and Franck, super speed. With great power may come great responsibility, yet the choice to act or not remains theirs. Milton, like his adversary, Mackie (short for Machiavelli), is an Elder who can inform, not influence, the course of events. Are the Elect mature enough to decide what's best for humanity? The longer they take to agree to Milton's plan, which he can't reveal until they are all on board, the more their world is overrun with Caribbean folklore creatures Set in Bridgetown and Montreal ('where much of the Diaspora live'), And Sometimes They Fly questions notions of the heroic. Where do heroes - a region's but also a culture's heroes - come from? George Woodcock once noted that, unlike Americans or the British, 'Canadians do not like heroes, and so they do not have them.' Humanity is in trouble if this is also true about Barbadians.

Christmas, 1864, in the last years of the civil war, a twenty-year-old Irish Canadian, Eoin O'Donoghue, is newly hired as the personal secretary to the prospective head of the embryonic Irish Republican Army in New York, William R Roberts. Appalled that the mayhem he sees around him is also being planned for his own country, Eoin offers his services to Gilbert McMicken, head of Canada's secret police. So begins the trajectory of what Eoin himself calls, self-disparagingly, his 'Judas informantcy' ... Against a backdrop of fusion and collapse, 600,000 Americans dead, one nation, Canada, about to be created, another to its south in disarray, Irish militants plan northward raids to win a 'New Ireland' on the continent (its capital, Sherbrooke, QC), to split Ireland itself off from Great Britain, and to avenge reverse, cross-border Southern terror hatched in Montreal and approved by Jefferson Davis -- murder and bank robberies in St Albans, Vermont, a form of germ warfare (yellow fever spread by trunks of black vomit encrusted clothing), Confederate Robert Kennedy's almost successful plan to fire-bomb New York City, and the shooting of Abraham Lincoln. Under assumed names, safely housed in the Moffat Mansion on Union Square (with a sunburst flag on the roof, lavishly furnished in mahogany and green, centre of the Irish Republic in exile), live the secret, illegitimate twin daughters of James Stephens, Fenian leader in Europe. Who will capture Eoin O'Donoghue's allegiance -- his employer, radical New York businessman and Fenian William R Roberts (later US ambassador to Chile), Deirdre Hopper (Stephens), accomplished painter and musician and daughter of the leader in Dublin, or Canadian spy-master Gilbert McMicken, who regularly insists his protégé provide 'less poetry and more police work.' ...Two spirits also stalk the book, one Edmund Spencer, author of the Faerie Queene and the Sheriff of Cork, who celebrated the flowers of Ireland and contemplated mass starvation of the Irish as an instrument of Elizabethan power. The other is Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Irish revolutionary, poet, journalist, Father of Confederation, the only federal politician in Canada ever to have been assassinated (by Fenian separatists in 1868), almost three years to the day after Lincoln's death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Art or authority, union or secession, integrity or 'informantcy', rapine and war or love and the peaceable kingdom -- Eoin O'Donoghue, reluctant patriot and spy, is torn by these choices.

The poems in McAuleys All I Can Say for Sure range from personal archaeology and elegiac fictions of free translations to grammar wordplay for the initiated to a compassionately ironic look at the passing of life to rewired material extensions of our inner and outer spaces. McAuleys meditations upon the details of quotidian life and historical personae are rendered with the syntactical precision of a linguist and the metaphorical density of a riddler.

Dispirited by his performance review, Will Gough sets out to redeem himself by updating his companys quality control procedures, while casting a hopeful eye toward other career opportunities. Despite his best intentions, his work troubles follow him home -- to his wife and two sons, where empty yogurt containers are half-sacred, technology a source of childhood wonder, and the business of the world bumps against the quiet walls that protect the rhythms of family life. It's difficult to pull off a portrait of a nice guy in ordinary circumstances, going through the stress of daily living and tensions surrounding job and career opportunities, and he does it very well in simple, understated prose. No sensationalism or alien beings or suicidal desperation or academic angst or terrorist attacks or other assorted rampages and violations: just a life without earthshaking incident, but subtly humourous and convincing.

The title of Why Cats Hate Birds very much reflects the collections themes. Are we trapped by our nature? And what is our understanding of nature? What is black and white, straight and gay, reality and fantasy, Canadian and Barbadian? The stories in Why Cats Hate Birds are Armstrongs way of saying that such distinctions are not natural but of our own construction. The work spans the length of Armstrongs writing career. The earliest, Flying in Gods Face, which inspired his novel Of Water and Rock, is set in the 1960s, though the majority take place in a today familiar to us all. Three stories in particular are linked by the character Charles Blackette: Kingdom of Fools, Invention and Blood is Thick. They explore Blackettes life as a black man who battles his notion of self. But, at heart, all the stories in Why Cats Hate Birds, perceptive, resonant, emotionally honest, are an attempt to break those silos that separate us, and make us realize that other peoples stories are our stories.

Stuart Rosss eighth collection of poems delivers a gallery of emotionally charged poetry experiments along with a series of philosophical meditations on the aesthetically contrived and sometimes downright quirky poetic processes that were followed to generate the poems in this book. A Hamburger in a Gallery is deeply engaged in demonstrating how art happens, especially through a poets immediate aesthetic engagement with other works of art. Comprised of poems written after the lines and language of other artists works, during sessions of listening to other poets reading their poems, or constructed from the parts and pieces of other artists words, A Hamburger in a Gallery provides a distinctive experience of the relationship between the finished poem and the process that informed its creation. Blurring the boundaries between creative writing and creative reading, Ross has once again created an utterly original, accessible, moving, and avant-garde classic.

When G. Brandon Sisnett dies at his computer a mild spring day in March, he leaves behind two unfinished works in his Montreal home. One, a political tract typical of the kind of rant the reclusive writer was famous for, the other an unexpected box of short fiction none of his publishers was aware existed. At first read a seemingly random collection of . . . fragments and miscellanea, it soon becomes clear the stories contain a mystery surrounding the sad death of the Barbadian-born authors four-year-old daughter, his retreat from society, and the recurring name of Fairield. An amazing book, Sandifords newest collection is an intimate, insightful look at how we all strive to live with the memory of love and loss.

Excitement Tax uses a series of tonally various prose sonnets to trace the deeply uneasy relationship of a grown-up person and his imaginary friend, Walter Weaselbird. The pair crash through thickets of erudition in search of candy. Often they find candy.

Its 2008. Blue Hills is a haunted place. Katie fights to reclaim her life from the grip of a profound psychological crisis, tracing back a maternal thread through a stumbled-upon and uncertain family history at the nearby, now-abandoned prairie mental asylum. As Katie seeks to rehabilitate the present by understanding the past, her fate becomes imaginatively intertwined with that of her great-grandmother Kate Wake, an enigmatic independent-minded artist with a remarkable story of her own. In returning to a scene of loss, this elegant variation on the Eurydice -- Orpheus myth reconsiders, with a fresh, unsentimental vision, the roles of trauma, madness, creativity and memory in relation to art and literary form. Sharply realized and fortified by a fierce, poetic grace, Kate Wake testifies to the timeless, urgent power of art and music with a delicately experimental, multi-genre story that unfolds its narrative mystery to reveal a shocking core.

In Acting My Age, the opening section of the collection, the poet Steve Luxton navigates retirement. With unflagging wit, he suspects he is viewed, if at all, as a curiosity or even sidewalk obstacle by hurry-by younger generations.... Growing older involves losses but also gains: a flourishing bond with wife and friends, and the acquisition of wisdom. In the second, The Dying Meteorologist, from which the collections title derives, Luxton writes of the winter-long bout with cancer of a close friend. In this 22-poem cycle, he movingly records conversations, walks, drives and last days. These pieces celebrate life and friendship, under imponderable and fateful skies.

Nearly Terminal resonates with a sense of foreboding at what may be seen as the social collapse of the individual self in a society that is being whitened out. Incorporating and intertwining aspects of the personal love relationship with a sense of a self under scrutiny, by itself and an imagined Other, the focus becomes one of loss, solitude, and the existential sense of being in a vast universe that is defined by traces of life increasingly lived as forms of abstraction within a virtual, disembodied reality. With a younger audience in mind, with poetic diction that is not afraid to be bold and experimental in its statements and claims, and with a delicate use of techniques evoking lacunae and erasure to convey the unanswerability of some basic existential questions, Eleni Zisimatos presents a bleak and uncertain view of the world.