Mark Anthony Jarman is one of Canada’s most original and compelling writers of short fiction. My White Planet is his latest collection of fourteen new stories, many of which have previously won or been short-listed for literary magazine awards. Jarman’s use of language and metaphor is unique in the Canadian literary pantheon. With extraordinary linguistic energy, he pushes the boundaries of fiction and story-telling. Every sentence reverberates with subtle meaning and every readin...

With characters ranging from the desperate to the obsessive to the wildly comic, Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives employs dazzling linguistic verve and staggering metaphoric powers in every sentence. But Jarman doesn't just write about people, he puts us in their skin so that we feel their frailty and courage. No other contemporary Canadian short-story writer slices up the imaginative excitement, cultural hybridity, and Joycean play of language we see in 19 Knives. With one of the stories s...

“In this wonderful collection of essays, Mark Jarman explores with wit and passion the practice of poetry―of making it, of reading it, of living it. In his vivid analyses of works by Brooks, Boisseau, Donne, Herbert, Rukeyser and Twichell, among others, he explores how the poems and their authors negotiate time and mortality, faith and devotion. He also offers an intimate examination of his own gorgeous work and how it comes onto the page. A delight for readers and writers of poetry.”―Marg...

On August 22, 1922, near Macroom, County Cork, a single bullet from an unknown gunman killed Michael Collins, the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army. The day Collins was buried, businesses across Dublin shut down as thousands lined the streets to pay their respects. And on that day, Michael Lyons, a cooper from the Guinness factory taking advantage of the day off, drowned quietly in Dublin's Royal Canal.In Ireland's Eye, Mark Anthony Jarman uses this confluenc...

A pantoum about a child touching the smallpox-scarred face of an aunt; a dialogue between Jesus and Pilate in the form of a nursery rhyme; Joseph and Mary sleeping on the Sphinx's stone paw: these are some of the experiences brought before us in The Heronry.Mark Jarman is the author of ten poetry collections. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Winner of the The Poets' Prize (1990)Yet, these are ultimately poems of survival. Jarman explores the redemptive power of the imagination and the ways in which we transform experience into stories we tell about our lives. His characters vividly express the will to cling to existence and understand it as they pursue the meaning of family, home, identity, and love. Invented memories resurrect a forgotten past, opening doors of possibility and adding a strange richnes...

40 Below is Edmonton's winter anthology. 70 pieces of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction about or inspired by winter in Edmonton. Contributors include Alice Major, Thomas Trofimuk, Jennifer Quist, Michael Hingston, Jessica Kluthe, Diana Davidson, and many many more. This book truly has something for everyone, whether you're warm-blooded or cold-blooded, a snow bird or new Canadian. Enjoy this one of a kind collection and let this frozen city tell you its story. "I've never read ...

A writer returns to Nova Scotia, and finding it almost unrecognizable, sets out to capture the essence of his ancestral province--a place as strange and wild as anywhere on the continent.John DeMont visits places as diverse as a Buddhist abbey; the first free black settlement outside Africa; an island that harbours pirate treasure; and a backwoods barndance where the music of 18th-century Scotland lives on. He visits tuna smugglers and moonshiners; the brooding painter Alex Colvill...

Days into Flatspin is Ken Babstock's extraordinary second collection and it reveals a poet in full flight, fearless and technically brilliant.Diving into and then beyond what is seen or the coma of looking as one poem calls it, Babstock veers into the inner core of things, animals, and places through portals that exist all around us -- clothing, banisters, marshes, locks, wounds. And these are always entry points, always a means by which to go forward and further into, for...

In her second collection of poetry, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine-grained and crude. With her unique and engaging voice that mixes pop culture, archaic mysticism, and inventiveness with lyric forms, these poems play with reality and fantasy, distorting perception, and are universal and personal at once.

The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather’s letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he’s still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, an...