As rich and complex as The Sopranos or The Wire, Mad Men demands a critical look at its narrative and characters as representative of both the period it depicts and of our memories and assumptions of the period. Mad Men, Women, and Children: Essays on Gender and Generation, edited by Heather Marcovitch and Nancy Batty, focuses on women and children, two groups that are not only identified together in this period (women characters in this show are often treated as coddled children and the c...

Shortlisted for the 2002 Pat Lowther Award Foreign Homes, Joan Crate's second book of poems, explores domesticity and dislocation, where what was thought to be home becomes alien, and where the alien is, piece by piece, made into home -- often in such simple, physical acts as laying a table, or driving a highway, or reassembling a torn photograph. In Crate's careful hands, the knife that cuts the vegetables for dinner can transform the blade-edge of a distant war. Her migratory poems slip ...

A diverse group of seven writers comes together to create seven tender scenes about their hopes for the future."The seven of us, a diverse group of elders, have endured, loved, lost and celebrated life in our own ways. Now, we decided, we would write a production for the stage, voicing our different experiences and what we came to realize are similar concerns about the future of our families, our planet, its peoples and its incredible network of flora and fauna."

Shortlisted for the 2002 Pat Lowther Award Foreign Homes, Joan Crate's second book of poems, explores domesticity and dislocation, where what was thought to be home becomes alien, and where the alien is, piece by piece, made into home -- often in such simple, physical acts as laying a table, or driving a highway, or reassembling a torn photograph. In Crate's careful hands, the knife that cuts the vegetables for dinner can transform the blade-edge of a distant war. Her migratory poems slip ...

Joan Crate's much-anticipated third book of poetry is equal parts revision and reverie, offering a mid-life view of childhood influences and expectations that is stirring, startling, and wise. Deliciously invoking the iconic figure of Snow White, subUrban Legends considers what lies beyond youth and the trite promises of "happily ever after," transporting readers to a land of complexity and nuance from which few cultural officiados report.

In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.

Written in his mother’s unique voice, John Leigh Walters pushes the boundaries of memoir in A Very Capable Life, the extraordinary journey of a seemingly ordinary woman.Zarah Petri was a child when her family left Hungary to establish a new life in Canada in the 1920s. With courage and innovation, Zarah and her family survived the Depression?even if it meant breaking the law to do so. In celebrating Zarah Petri, A Very Capable Life pays homage to all “ordinary” women of the early twentieth...

When Elizabeth Thiessen embarks on an expedition to study the cave murals of Baja California, Mexico, she is catapulted onto a mythical, existential journey into the unknown. Within days of landing in the Baja, Elizabeth discovers that her daughter, Patricia—posted in Afghanistan with the Canadian armed forces—is taken hostage by the Taliban. Elizabeth struggles with her decision to remain on assignment, her extreme anxiety over her daughter’s kidnapping, and the recollections it prompts o...

Nearing death, an old man laments his poor choice of a wife, and has orchestrated a situation where he will see his childhood love one last time. From these circumstances emerges Stella, a woman who grapples with her family ghosts as they reach across the generations.

Imagine a new life. Maxine Carter suddenly finds herself searching for a fresh start—a way around her own gnawing fear of an untimely death and a wasted life. What she discovers is her neighbour’s nine-year-old son, Kyle. As Maxine becomes the boy’s constant companion and as Kyle deals with his parents’ increasing absence and with life as an outsider in a new city, he slowly manages to reinvent Maxine’s real and imaginative life. Smart, funny, and poignant, Claire Wilkshire’s impressive de...

What It Feels Like for a Girl is a series of poems following the intense friendship between two teenagers as they explore pop icons, pornography, and the big, strange world of sex. They soon learn just how complicated sexuality is--and how confusing desire can be.What It Feels Like for a Girl is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its “lessons” for the young woman who has never experienced sex in ...

Marilyn Dumont's Metis heritage offers her challenges that few of us welcome. Here she turns them to opportunities: in a voice that is fierce, direct, and true, she explores and transcends the multiple boundaries imposed by society on the self. She mocks, with exasperation and sly humour, the banal exploitation of Indianness, more-Indian-than-thou oneupmanship, and white condescension and ignorance. She celebrates the person, clearly observing, who defines her own life. These are Indian po...