Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd. – förlag

What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story, "All This Was a Long Time Ago," is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders'' Award for fiction from The Malahat Review, and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, Joyland, Forget Magazine and the Rusty Toque.Rader''s command of tension is masterful in these dark, off-kilter stories that are largely set in the context of the working/labour class in and around the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC. They alternate between exploring the history of severe labour struggles in the area over a century ago, and the present-day experiences of people sliding through transitional, ambiguous moments in their relationships and sexuality. The juxtaposition of the two time periods seems to hint at the echoes of the harsh, violent legacy of the earlier age and its power struggles that continue to resonate in contemporary life.In What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, we are witness to the controversial shooting death of infamous union activist Albert "Ginger" Goodwin by a police constable in 1918; to the squalor of tent cities erected on the Royston Bay mudflats during the Great Vancouver Coal Strike of 1912-14; to two boys’ experimentation with sexual violence at the end of a secluded logging road; and to clarity and companionship found in a small cabin by the sea as a son cares for his dying father—a rough man who abandoned him when he was eight. In Rader''s artful tales of grit and mystery, danger never feels far away.

In her lyrical memoir The Death of Small Creatures, Trisha Cull lays bare her struggles with bulimia, bipolar disorder and substance abuse. Interspersing snatches of conversations, letters, blog entries and clinical notes with intimate poetic narrative, Cull evokes an accessible experience of mental illness.In The Death of Small Creatures, Cull strives to cope with her hopelessness. She finds comfort in the company of her two pet rabbits until one of them dies as a result of her lethargy. She numbs herself with alcohol. She validates her self-worth by seeking the love of men—any and all men—and three relationships significantly impact her life: her marriage to Leigh, a much older man; her unrequited love for Dr. P, her therapist; and her healthier relationship with Richard, an American she meets through her blog. She tries drugs—Neo Citran, Ativan, Wellbutrin, crack, crystal meth—and after two hospitalizations, she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy.Haunting and expressive, this immersive memoir explores love in all its facets—needy, obsessive, healthy, self-directed—and plunges the reader headlong into the intense and immediate experience of mental illness.

Debut talent Raoul Fernandes’s first offering is Transmitter and Receiver, a masterful and carefully depicted exploration of one’s relationships with oneself, friends, memories, strangers and technology.The three parts of this collection are variations building on a theme—at times lonely, sometimes adoring, but always honest. Wider areas of contemplation—the difficulty of communication, the ever-changing symbolism of language and the nature of human interaction in the age of machines—are explored through colloquial scenes of the everyday: someone eats a burger in a car parked by the river (“Grand Theft Auto: Dead Pixels”), a song plays on the radio as a man contemplates suicide (“Car Game”), and a janitor works silently once everyone else has gone (“After Hours at the Centre For Dialogue”).Forthright and effortlessly lyrical, Fernandes builds each poem out of candor and insight, an addictive mix that reads like a favorite story and glitters with concealed meaning. Rather than drawing lines between isolation and connection, past and present, metaphor and reality, Transmitter and Receiver offers loneliness and longing hand-in-hand with affection and understanding: “The last assembly instruction is always you reading this. A machine / that rarely functions, but could never without you.”

Hastings–Sunrise is a love letter to a fleeting place and time. Bren Simmers’s second collection captures her old East Vancouver neighbourhood in the midst of upheaval. As it is colonized by tides of matching plaid and diners serving pulled-pork pancakes, condo developments replace the small businesses and cheap rentals that once gave the area its charm.Much like opening a set of nesting dolls, leafing through the collection exposes further layers of depth and intimacy. Within the context of cultural change, Simmers explores the meaning to be found in everyday things: the making of a home, the life built from daily routines. At the same time, she reveals the dissonance that can occur between personal and large-scale change: “Twitter feed of melting sea ice, / colony collapse / while we picnic under pink ribbons, / kiss again like we mean it.”Throughout the collection, the poet’s eye unfailingly lights on the perfect details to evoke a scene: “On Mr. Donair’s spit, / the earth rotates. Papal smoke emits / from Polonia Sausage, semis shunt / downtown.” Visual poems forming maps of Christmas lights and autumn colours further bring the Hastings–Sunrise neighbourhood to life, illustrating the interweaving of human and natural spaces and locating “home” in between.Like a tree clothed in multicoloured yarn or a miniature house filled with free books, Hastings–Sunrise is a gift to readers, beautiful in its simplicity.

Sheryda Warrener’s second poetry collection touches on the illusion of remaining grounded and a sense of belonging. A retired cosmonaut returns from a record-breaking 438 days in space and attempts to re-immerse himself in the world. One speaker considers reinvention from the top floor of the World’s Tallest building; another, our complicated future from Reykjavik, post-eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. Confessions and aspirations suspend in air. Ghosts float in and out; inheritance and connection are called into question. Morrissey, Cindy Sherman, and Pancho Barnes make cameo appearances. Influence and personal lineage are traced back to the Vikings, demoted Pluto, artists frequenting a Parisian bar. One speaker confides: “Yes, she’s longing to be elsewhere. Just past the sun deck there’s something invisible worth having.” In Floating is Everything, a resolution lies nearly always out of reach.

With humour and humanity, Surviving City Hall reveals the workings of the municipal world based on author Donna Macdonald''s nineteen years as a city councillor. Wrestling with ground squirrels, dealing with dogs and grappling with the Three Bears of Governance, Macdonald offers an insider''s view into how things work at city hall in a call to citizens in communities of all shapes and sizes.From the table where council members make decisions—to lock out city workers, detoxify a workplace issue, permit high density development and ban dogs downtown—to the richness of community life, including meetings, memorials, meat banquets and rallies for the protection of endangered animals, this book is a big-hearted take on small-town politics.It''s also a reflection on leadership and on democracy, and how we could do both better. Macdonald ponders women''s participation in local governance, why it''s critical and what the barriers are that can dissuade women from engaging more fully in the governance of their communities.

In this debut poetry collection by award-winning author Kim Fu, incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence illuminate small scenes of domestic life and the banal tragedies of modern love and modern death.A sharp edge of humour slices through Fu''s poetry, drawing attention to the distance between contemporary existence and the basic facts of life: “In the classrooms of tomorrow, starved youth will be asked to imagine a culture that kept thin pamphlets of poetry pinned to a metal box full of food, who honoured their gods of plenty by describing ingredients in lush language."Alternating between incisive wit and dark beauty, Fu brings the rich symbolism of fairy tales to bear on our image-obsessed age. From “The Unicorn Princess": “She applies gold spray paint to her horn each morning, / hoping to imitate the brass tusks / on the unicorns skewered to the carousel, / their brittle, painted smiles, harnesses / embedded in their backs and shellacked to high gloss." These poems are utterly of-the-moment, capturing the rage, irony and isolation of the era we live in.

This debut poetry collection from Lisa Bird-Wilson reflects on the legacy of the residential school system: the fragmentation of families and histories, with blows that resonate through the generations.Inspired by family and archival sources, Bird-Wilson assembles scraps of a history torn apart by colonial violence. The collection takes its name from the federal government''s complex organizational structure of residential schools archives, which are divided into “black files" and “red files." In vignettes as clear as glass beads, her poems offer affection to generations of children whose presence within the historic record is ghostlike, anonymous and ephemeral.The collection also explores the larger political context driving the mechanisms that tore apart families and cultures, including the Sixties Scoop. It depicts moments of resistance, both personal and political, as well as official attempts at reconciliation: “I can hold in the palm of my right hand / all that I have left: one story-gift from an uncle, / a father''s surname, treaty card, Cree accent echo, metal bits, grit— / and I will still have room to cock a fist."The Red Files concludes with a fierce hopefulness, embracing the various types of love that can begin to heal the traumas inflicted by a legacy of violence.

From the monk who sets himself on fire in a crowded intersection of Saigon (“the familiar corded tendons of his hands, become / a bracken of ashes, a carbon twine of burnt”), to the salmon run in British Columbia (“The salmon word / for home is glacierdust and once-tall trees unlimbed, / a taste, no matter where, they know”), Johnson writes of topics varied and eclectic, unified by a focus on moments both declining and revenant.Startling and haunting, the poems delve into the ways in which these moments are transformative, beautiful and unexpected. Being eaten by a lion is a gift rather than a loss, an opportunity for grace: “Instead, focus on your life, / its crimson liquor he grows drunk on. / Notice the way the red highlights his face, / how the snub nose is softened, the lips made / fuller; notice his deft musculature, his rapture.”Lyrical and rich with visceral imagery, How to Be Eaten by a Lion lingers, exploring the world with an eye for detail and an ear for music.

Twenty years ago Nevin Sample walked into a small bank in Deep Cove, robbed a teller at gunpoint and fled into the forest of Cates Park. After a lengthy pursuit, he hid behind a stump at the edge of a small clearing. The police called to him. He raised the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.Nevin had a magnetism, an understated complexity: there were those who loved him, resented him, found him gregarious. To Joe Denham, he was an old, close friend. Regeneration Machine is a 100-stanza, 9,000-word letter-in-verse to Nevin’s ghost—a requiem, elegy, lament; a sort of flailing attempt to make sense of the nonsensically violent way that a non-violent, caring, intelligent young man chose to end his life.

Digsite draws on Nicholson’s experience working in the Alberta oil sands and arboreal forest, taking an archaeological lens to its subject, and in this way, reimagines tens of thousands of years of human existence. These poems grow from a schism between the current place of living and the ones in which we are pulled back to, in particular, the places we no longer occupy.Nicholson’s language draws on his archaeological and fieldwork background as he burrows and grinds the places we have lost, consistently underpinned by the grief that must accompany such a fervent exploration. In these discoveries, Nicholson presents us with the material remains of our own abandonment, of loss and acceptance, and ultimately leaves us with more questions than when we began.

If I Were In A Cage I’d Reach Out For You is a collection that travels through both time and place, liminally occupying the chasm between Canadiana and Americana mythologies. These poems dwell in surreal pockets of the everyday warped landscapes of modern cities and flood into the murky basin of the intimate.Amidst the comings and goings, there’s a sincere desire to connect to others, an essential need to reach out, to redraft the narratives that make kinship radical and near. These poems are love letters to the uncomfortable, the unfathomable, and the altered geographies that define our own misshapen understandings of the world."With a depth of feeling for places and their connecting joys and aches, these are beautifully written poems, vivid as the morning paper, bracing as moonshine." —David McGimpsey, author of Sitcom and Asbestos Heights

Raw and honest, Bearskin Diary gives voice to a generation of First Nations women who have always been silenced, at a time when movements like Idle No More call for a national inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Carol Daniels adds an important perspective to the Canadian literary landscape.Taken from the arms of her mother as soon as she was born, Sandy was only one of over twenty thousand Aboriginal children scooped up by the federal government between the 1960s and 1980s. Sandy was adopted by a Ukrainian family and grew up as the only First Nations child in a town of white people. Ostracized by everyone around her and tired of being different, at the early age of five she tried to scrub the brown off her skin. But she was never sent back into the foster system, and for that she considers herself lucky.From this tragic period in her personal life and in Canadian history, Sandy does not emerge unscathed, but she emerges strong—finding her way by embracing the First Nations culture that the Sixties Scoop had tried to deny. Those very roots allow Sandy to overcome the discriminations that she suffers every day from her co-workers, from strangers and sometimes even from herself.

The power of water is the power of blood, flood and drought. Water keeps it real, keeps us real. Forgetting this, we turn the earth into a toxic dump. Remembering this, we unfurl the future as perpetual possibility.Water is also the strength of subtlety, quietly making its way through your body. perpetual is both a gift and a warning from water. Through drawings and graphic essays by artist Cindy Mochizuki and writer Rita Wong, the book visits some key sites where people have sabotaged themselves by desecrating water: the Pacific Ocean, the tar sands leaking into the Athabasca River, the historical salmon streams buried in sewers under Vancouver’s streets, pressing to be daylighted...perpetual draws strength from the rivers that still flow wild, like the Fraser River, and from friendships made along the way in journeys with and for water. The book is a response to Dorothy Christian’s call to protect sacred waters. Humble and holy, water shows us a way to make peace and ethics, if we have the heart and spirit to learn.

Cycling with the Dragon is a personal investigation of family,love, culture, self, and the helpless feeling of "smallness." Elaine Woo''s poems take the form of the words that they speak: she forms an "o" for the buoy that is a child''s safety-raft (found in the solitude of a notebook and Harriet the Spy), and weaves a poem about fearing snakes and dreams into a descending slither.Woo’s poems weave meaning with form, writing in a pastiche of diverse poetic voices who are small by virtue of age or status (be they women, children, ethnic minorities or the creatures of nature). And like tenacious seeds they break through to reach the sun, to face an abusive parent, bullies, the pain of shyness, envy, or racism.

For Your Safety Please Hold On is a truly remarkable first poetry collection from debut talent Kayla Czaga. Her poems are already making waves—several from this collection have received award attention, including: The Fiddlehead''s 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Malahat Review''s 2012 Far Horizon''s Award for Poetry and an Editor''s Choice Award in ARC Poetry Magazine''s 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. They have also been shortlisted for The New Quarterly''s 2013 Occasional Verse Contest, longlisted for CBC''s 2013 Canada Writes Poetry Contest and have appeared in literary publications across North America.The poems in For Your Safety Please Hold On move in thematic focus from family, to girlhood, to adulthood, each permeated by Czaga''s lively voice and quick-witted, playful language. They test the line between honest humour and bitter reality in a sophisticated, incisive manner that tugs at the gut and feels true.The linguistic hopscotch of Czaga''s poems about girlhood is often beautifully juxtaposed with feelings of menace or a first taste of smothering expectations—"She sits. She sips her bright pink fingers. / She slips into smart short haircuts, yes, / she does so, and does herself up just so." While her pin prick meditations on contemporary adulthood suggest a yearning for personal meaning and purpose on a larger scale—"I still wander, sometimes, / my coat closing the world out of my body, with pockets / full of garbage, with my slender steady want. I still / make the bed and at bedtime unmake it."The irrepressible energy of the poems in For Your Safety Please Hold On, paired with their complex balancing act between light and dark, humour and melancholy, innocence and danger, make this collection an extraordinary first offering.

Mayor Snow is about both the abdication and acceptances of responsibilities and inheritance: be they civic, personal, poetic. It begins with speaker-less evocations of corrupt and oppressive political atmospheres and ends with first-person narrative tales of domestic life in Al Purdy’s refurbished A-frame. All of these poems work in a shadow, be they forebears, tabloids, cultural markers or government watchdogs.In the opening and closing sequences, narrative devices act as smokescreens to abstract illustrations of power, with the central sequence reflecting on the subject of dislocation. Parody and paradox are closely intertwined throughout, with the authority of power disrupted through dark humour, unexpected images and the deep resonances existing in apparently innocuous things: a well-worn (and literally “powerless”) cabin, a baby daughter, a poem. The question of groundedness, whether literal, literary or familial, explores the terrain between the fearful and the familiar: “Go outside. / Listen to dogs howl. // How do we live / without power?”

Wigford is a small town in rural Southwestern Ontario, home to a cast of recurring characters: Buzz, a drunk-driving father of two; his wife, who should have married Bert Walmsley instead; Happy Henry, a devout, socially inept apostle who loves to play the organ; Elmer, a stroke survivor.Wigford Rememberies tells this community''s stories through an impressionistic series of vignettes. The language is inventive, innovative and exciting, and whether describing mucking out the pig barn—“there in the dust and the sweet smells of grain and straw and the heavy brown odour of shit so strong it makes you sneeze"—or helping a drunk articulate how to manipulate God''s forgiveness—“‘if I gave my heart to Jesus—right there on my deathbed the minute before I died—he''d forgive everything an I''d go up into Heaven and be saved just as much as the other guy who never did nothin'' wrong at all with no difference?''"—Harness wields words with an eye for detail, musicality and style.Visceral, reflective and lyrical, Wigford Rememberies is a poetic evocation of mood and epiphanic realizations, and will resonate with anyone who has ever confronted suffering, love or the unknowable.

The Duende of Tetherball fearlessly ransacks the scrutinizing role of the past on the present; the interactions and accountabilities of ourselves and other species; the challenges and pleasures of getting older and forever striving to balance our most cherished and often incomprehensible relationships both with the world and each other.Bowling strives to account for and address our human need to resolve the tension between personal freedom and a world burdened by increasing homogenization and centralized control by adopting an industry of personal fortitude and thoughtful redress. He seeks to remember and to remember again the lessons polished over a lifetime: “Fifteen, scared but still apt / to toss “damn thee black / thou cream-faced loon” / in PE class at the rippling back / of some hoop or net-bound jock, / I was learning – too soon – / the only lesson that counts: / how to be alone.”

"The Woods is the cure-all to Perfect Island Getaway nostalgia. It''s a story of everyday domestic survival, peopled by both loveable eccentrics and possibly murdersome cranks, foregrounding the little-known history of violence on Protection Island. Amber McMillan''s writing balances an eye for the unusual and resiliently beautiful with a sympathy for the frailties common to all her islanders." —Kevin Chong, author of Baroque-a-Nova, Neil Young Nation and Beauty Plus Pity*The Woods: A Year on Protection Island is a book of non-fiction stories that probes and witnesses the unique and sometimes unsettling atmosphere of small town-island life in the Georgia Strait. The measure of one’s success here doesn’t rely on status or income, but on the skillful handling of neighbours, the resourcefulness for survival, and the adaptation to both the rigorous outdoors of the Pacific Northwest and equally challenging human community of need, trade, and negotiated civility.These are stories of the people and families who sought refuge here, for different reasons and with different outcomes: Keith, a cross-dressing retired sea captain who can’t overcome the death of his wife; Steve, the contractor who escapes his deaf wife and the silence of his domestic life by perfecting his physical property, using only the loudest of electric chainsaws and lawnmowers from morning until dusk; Cris, the seventy-six-year-old library curator who has recently discovered scotch whiskey and sex again after twenty-five years; and of various other transplants making their way through the murky terrain of living on an island.Like no other community on Earth, this small place is packed with secret corners, eerie histories and a whispering darkness. This is the complicated convergence of human capacities: from homicides (both in the same house, unrelated and years apart) to some of the greatest gestures of generosity, social reform and equality. This is the place of the close-up encounter of who we are stripped of distractions and escapist entertainment; who we are in the woods.

Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada’s most recognized poets. The first part of the book, “Dangerous Sound,” contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. “Muskrat Woman,” the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, “Ghost Dance,” raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield’s poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From “Killer,” Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: “I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you.”

Christian McPherson’s debut novel The Cube People pokes fun at government cubicle culture through the life and times of a struggling computer programmer/novelist wannabe. McPherson surrounds his protagonist, Colin MacDonald, with a cast of screwball characters while he toils away at his government job, struggles with fertility and dreams of becoming a published writer. Recycled air, bad lighting and bizarre environmental office policies by day; scheduled love-making sessions and rejection letters by night, push MacDonald to try to write his way out of his cyclical life story. Part tragedy, part comedy—with a bit of horror thrown in for fun—McPherson cooks up a boiling plot and a memorable anti-hero.

Some people win games. Some achieve success. But when it comes right down to it, most people don’t. Failure is a guest no one invites, yet it shows up almost everywhere. The gifts it brings are easy to overlook.The Uninvited Guest is a whirlwind ride featuring Romanian hockey superstars growing up in Montreal, Danish prostitutes working in Sweden, Russian mobsters, the perils of parking in Penitanguishene, and how not to die if you want to make it home on time.Most of all, it’s the story of Stan Cooper, hockey timekeeper/custodian-turned-trophy-keeper; Tony, a young Italian Canadian man and new Cup keeper; and Dragos Petrescu, the first Romanian-born hockey player to win the Stanley Cup. Over a period of 50 years, the lives of the three men weave in and out of each other, with themes of love, hate, family, jealousy and ultimately, forgiveness.

Richard Trench finds himself with no arms and no legs, reduced to a torso in the trunk of a car. There is a reason. It all makes sense. The point is there somewhere . . .Imperfections elucidates the private lives of supermodels and circus freaks, sheiks and designer dominatrixes and the metamorphosis of the body chic. These are lives where the importance of vehicular mephitis-cide, a charity lobster boil for burn victims, a grilled-cheese sandwich with the face of the Virgin Mary toasted on it and a prophecy about the uncanny deaths of the voice-actors for Tigger and Piglet, can not be overlooked.Set in the world of glittering photo shoots in exotic locations, extreme visions of beauty and raucous fashion shows, Imperfections is a genre-bending novel that sits solidly in the foggy area between fact and fiction.

What''s left of us when we''re gone? In When I Was Young and In My Prime, a young woman watches her grandparents begin to decline. As she sorts through the couple''s belongings, she reflects on the untold stories and unsung bonds that make up our lives. Meanwhile, modern urban life places strains on her own marriage and on her sense of what, ultimately, we owe each other.Weaving together voices, diary entries, poems, conversations and lists, When I Was Young and In My Prime cuts to the heart of our search for intimacy and family, for what makes life meaningful and love real. The result is a smart, moving novel about personal and cultural decline, dignity and work, the urban and the rural, the old and the new, and the search for something ageless.

Joe Denham’s debut novel The Year of Broken Glass follows struggling crab fisherman Francis “Ferris” Wichbaun’s journey across the Pacific Ocean to deliver a legendary glass fishing float to an enigmatic, high-paying collector. Against a backdrop of worldwide seismic devastation, Ferris is forced to confront increasing concern for his two families—his wife Anna and their son Willow, and his girlfriend Jin Su and their baby daughter Emily—as well as pervasive feelings of disappointment and disillusionment. In the midst of his contemplation, he becomes entangled in both a romantic affair with his travelling companion and an ancient legend that seems to offer the possibility of redemption.Denham’s poetic background is evident in the novel’s entrancing imagery and thematic complexity, yet in his transition to prose he has also succeeded in crafting a unique, unpredictable plot and intriguing, sincerely rendered characters. Haunted by environmental degradation and human suffering, Denham affixes the carefree Wedding Guest in all of us with his glittering prose and weaves a story that is both sobering and compelling.

Jay Ruzesky recalls a childhood of snow caves, literary ambitions, and a fascination with polar exploration that was ignited by the genes he shares with famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. As a boy, Ruzesky was captivated by Amundsen''s diaries: an Antarctic exploration aboard Belgica when Amundsen was a twenty-five-year-old mate bent on earning his stripes; his historic navigation of the Northwest Passage from 1903 to 1906 where he intentionally froze in with his ship Gjoa over the winters to drift with the pack ice; and his triumph onboard his ship Fram to be the first to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911.

Building on the success of the Journey Prize-shortlisted title story, the stories of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? present an updated and whimsical new take on what it means to be Canadian. Lau alludes to the personal and political histories of a number of young Asian Canadian characters to explain their unique perspectives of the world, artfully fusing pure delusion and abstract perception with heartbreaking reality.Correspondingly, the book’s title refers to an interview with Chinese basketball star Yao Ming, who when asked about the Shanghai Sharks, the team that shaped his formative sporting years, responded, “How does a single blade of grass thank the sun?” Lau’s stories feature the children and grandchildren of immigrants, transnational adoptees and multiracial adults who came of age in the 1990s—all struggling to find a place in the Western world and using the only language they know to express their hopes, fears and expectations.