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...

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.

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.

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.

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 this charming departure from Lake Wobegon, bestselling author Garrison Keillor tells a hilarious and heartwarming tale of ambition, success and failure, and the virtues of real love. Aspiring writer Larry Wyler leads a quiet, decent life with his do-gooder wife, Iris, in St. Paul, Minnesota, but he wants more. When his literary debut becomes a hit, he departs for a Manhattan apartment, a job at the New Yorker, and three- martini lunches with the great editor, William Shawn....

John Tollefson, a son of Lake Wobegon, has moved East to manage a radio station at a college for academically challenged children of financially gifted parents in upstate New York. Having achieved this pleasant perch, John has a brilliant idea for a restaurant specializing in fresh sweet corn. And he falls in love with an historian named Alida Freeman, hard at work on a book about a nineteenth-century Norwegian naturopath, an acquaintance of Lincoln, Thoreau, Whitman, and Susan B. Anthony....

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...