Long admired for his books of poetry, most recently China Blues and Dancing in the Dark, David Donnell’s poems continue to surprise and amaze us with their cool jazz of spontaneity and imaginative logic. A sensual and intellectual feast, Sometimes a Great Notion is a deconstruction of the contemporary artist’s life; it’s also a tough, compassionate look at the future of the future and our philosophy of love. Culinary adventures and geography juxtapose with Japane...

Winner of the Governor General’s Award, this collection of Donnell’s best poetry pulses with the realities of home, street, and working life. His ironic wit and lyrical passages make for a fantastic read complete with his signature deadpan style and post-modern sophistication. “Making it in the City,” “Lakes,” and “The True Story of Pat Garrett” are but a few of the titles included in this eclectic compilation.

An eclectic collection of poetry and fiction, Dancing in the Dark tackles themes of music, culture, philosophy, love, literature, and beauty. In a series of pieces that are deeply personal though not autobiographical, Donnell evokes both high and low culture, in one moment recognizing the impossibility of desire, but acknowledging his work’s connection to “The Boss,” Bruce Springsteen, in another. He evokes music and the objects of everyday life with clarity and grace.

Winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, China Blues explores the urban pastoral through poetry and fiction. Donnell's protagonist wanders Toronto, recalling his small-town Ontario boyhood and commenting on a range of contrasting subjects, from pop culture to war.

In this collection of poetry, Donnell examines his past and childhood memories in narrative confessions. The poems offer perspectives about city life, including the stresses and ironic staples of urban living.

The former U.S. Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these "a lternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny " essays ( The New York Times).From an early age, Donald Hall dedicated his life to the written word. In his long and celebrated career, he was an accomplished poet, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and children's author. Now, in the "unknown, unanticipated galaxy" of very old age, his ...

With an introduction by Lisa Robertson"There is no there there" Gertrude Stein's famous phrase about the Oakland she grew up in, applies to the Oliver, BC of George Bowering's youth. What is to be found there, as Stein demonstrated, are objects, and rooms, and food.George Bowering's newest book delights in the thing-iness of memory. Understanding himself as an object among objects, Bowering conjures up the sights, tastes, and touches of a world othe...

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era—among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George S. Kaufman, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, Mike Nichols, Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme, Calvin Trillin, Geo...

George Bowering was born in Penticton, where his great-grandfather Willis Brinson lived, and Bowering has never been all that far from the Okanagan Valley in his heart and imagination. Early in the twenty-first century, he was made a permanent citizen of Oliver. Bowering has family up and down the Valley, and he goes there as often as he can. He has been asked during his many visits to Okanagan bookstores over the years to publish a collection of his writing about the Valley.Wr...

In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris, his “first real book of poems,” as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press’s twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press’s all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, “I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail.” After “what seemed like a...

A sprawling collection of essays about the subcultures of the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, the revolutionary journalist and novelistWhen Tom Wolfe smashed his way onto the literary scene in 1965 with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he transformed reporting in American popular culture. For his next project, Wolfe traveled from La Jolla to London in search of new lifestyles. The result is The Pump House Gang (published simultaneously with ...

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for PoetryDavid McGimpsey's fifth collection of poems takes to new levels the melding of the deeply personal and the culturally popular that drove his acclaimed book Sitcom (nominated for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) – this is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committed liar.Written in part as an homage to the poetic idols of his youth, John Berryman and Robert Lowell,