Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce's words, "For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them." Blindfold investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is magnified in our minds. In a series of thematically linked poems, Asfour draws the metaphor of the blindfold across the eyes of sighted citizens who are impaired by estrangement, emotiona...

Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce's words, "For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them." Blindfold investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is magnified in our minds. In a series of thematically linked poems, Asfour draws the metaphor of the blindfold across the eyes of sighted citizens who are impaired by estrangement, emotiona...

An anthology that refracts the experience of writers, new and established, who have been part of Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside in some way. Their work reappropriates the coding of the area and recasts the neighborhood as a site of creative energy and human dignity.

A hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies. "Denied the leap and dash up the ice,what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monkand cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhereas they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apartin bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.But...

One of the Boston Globe's Best Sports Books of the Year: "Incisive, heartbreaking, important and even funny" (Jeremy Schaap, New York Times–bestselling author of Cinderella Man).The people of Brazil celebrated when it was announced that they were hosting the World Cup—the world's most-viewed athletic tournament—in 2014 and the 2016 Summer Olympics. But as the events were approaching, ordinary Brazilians were holding the country's biggest...

Blues singer, preacher, cultural critic, exile, Africadian, high modernist, spoken word artist, Canadian poet—these are but some of the voices of George Elliott Clarke. In a selection of Clarke’s best work from his early poetry to his most recent, Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke offers readers an impressive cross-section of those voices. Jon Paul Fiorentino’s introduction focuses on this polyphony, his influences—Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka, and the canon of l...

"Readers cannot but be provoked and stimulated by this splendidly iconoclastic and refreshing book."—Andrew Porter, New York Times Book ReviewThe Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes's acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultur...

A 'sonnet' is a structure of poetry that originated in Italy. The term sonnet is actually derives from the Italian word sonetto, which means 'little song' or 'little sound'. A Sicilian poet named Giacomo da Lentini is endorsed by many as its inventor. Sonnets are commonly 14 lines long and carry a distinct model of rhymes that varies from one culture to another.While I have concocted many different forms of poetry over the last twenty plus years I've been writing, for some reason I...

Shimmering with her unique style, sense, humour, vision and wit, Startle and Illuminate is a book of advice and reflections on writing by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields that is destined to become as valued and essential as Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.An essential work from one of Canada's finest writers, Startle and Illuminate ...

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearThe story of a kind of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don’t even think exists—from a leading national poverty expert who "defies convention." (The New York Times)Jessica Compton’s family of four would have no income if she didn’t donate plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter, Brianna, in Chicago, often have no...

IThese poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, where the act of living becomes more and more like watching a ?lm in which we play no role.

James Daniel Nelson first hit the streets as a teenager in 1992. He joined a clutch of runaways and misfits who camped out together in a squat under a Portland bridge. Within a few months the group -- they called themselves a "family" -- was arrested for a string of violent murders.While Nelson sat in prison, the society he had helped form grew into a national phenomenon. Street families spread to every city from New York to San Francisco, and to many small towns in between, bringi...