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Talonbooks
Fall 2015
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Talonbooks Awards and Prizes, Recent Highlights 2015 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award: Morris Panych, The Shoplifters (Winner) BC Book Prize, Poetry: Cecily Nicholson, From the Poplars (Finalist)
Contents 1 4 5 11 16
Non-fiction Fiction Poetry Drama Sales Representation, Ordering, and Trade Terms
2014 BC Book Prize, Poetry: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Winner) BC Book Prize, Non-Fiction: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Finalist) Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Third Prize winner) City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner) George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Winner) Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Finalist) Governor General’s Literary Award, Translation: Michel Marc Bouchard, Christina, The Girl King, translated by LInda Gaboriau (Finalist)
Talonbooks 278 East 1st Avenue Vancouver, BC V5T 1A6 phone: (604) 444-4889 toll-free: (888) 445-4176 fax: (604) 444-4119 info@talonbooks.com www.talonbooks.com
GST is not included in Canadian prices quoted in this catalogue. GST # R88535-3235 All information in this catalogue is subject to change without notice.
Governor General’s Literary Award, Translation: Michel Nadeau, And Slowly Beauty, translated by Maureen Labonté (Finalist) Lambda Literary Award, Drama: Michel Marc Bouchard, Tom at the Farm, translated by Linda Gaboriau (Winner) Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award: bill bissett (Winner)
Talonbooks
2013 BC Book Prize, Poetry: Colin Browne, The Properties (Finalist) ReLit Award, Fiction: Garry Thomas Morse, Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (Finalist) Sunburst Award: Martine Desjardins, Maleficium, translated by Fred A. Reed and David Homel (Winner)
On the cover: E.J. Hughes, Okanagan Lake (1959) Courtesy Heffel Fine Art Auction House
2012 BC Book Prize: Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Finalist) Lambda Literary Award, Lesbian Memoir: Jane Rule, Taking My Life (Finalist)
2011 Alcuin Book Design Award: Stan Douglas, ed., Vancouver Anthology BC Book Prize, Poetry: Ken Belford, Decompositions (Finalist) BC Book Prize, Poetry: George Bowering, My Darling Nellie Grey (Finalist) BC Book Prize, Poetry: Stephen Collis, On the Material (Winner) Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry: Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Finalist) Lambda Literary Award, Drama: Bryden MacDonald, With Bated Breath (Finalist) Robert Merritt Legacy Award: Wendy Lill (Winner)
Talonbooks gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
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Talonbooks New Releases 1
Writing the Okanagan george bowering
George Bowering is a major Canadian literary figure and one of the most prolific writers in the country: more than eighty books to date, not including editions he has edited or contributed to, or his thirty-three chapbooks. He is a twotime winner of the Governor General’s Award and has been shortlisted for the Griffin Prize for Poetry, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and B.C.’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. In November 2002 he was appointed Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate. That same month he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2004 he was awarded the Order of British Columbia. In 2011 he received the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and the UBC Alumni Achievement Award. He is a respected poet, novelist, essayist, critic, teacher, historian, editor, and tireless supporter of fellow writers.
ISBN 978-0-88922-941-9 Literary: Collections 6 × 9; 320 pp; Trade paper $24.95 CAN / $24.95 US October
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. Writing the Okanagan draws on forty books Bowering has published since 1960 – poetry, fiction, history, and some forms he may have invented. Selections from Delsing (1961) and Sticks & Stones (1962) are here, as is “Driving to Kelowna” from The Silver Wire (1966). Other Okanagan towns, among them Rock Creek, Peachland, Vernon, Kamloops, Princeton, and Osoyoos, inspire selections from work published through the 1970s and on to 2013. Fairview, the old mining site near Oliver, is the focus of an excerpt from Caprice (1987, 2010), one volume in Bowering’s trilogy of historical novels. “Desert Elm” takes as its two main subjects the Okanagan Valley and his father, who, as Bowering did, grew up there. With the addition of some previously unpublished works, the reader will find the wonder of the Okanagan here, in both prose and poetry.
“Bowering is both highly skilled in the formal aspects of poetry and perfectly accessible to the average reader … A delightful collection that may inspire readers to seek out Bowering’s earlier work.” – Booklist “One of Canada’s most original writers.”
– Calgary Herald
“A lyricism that is spring-sweet and without boast or threat … Bowering has poured all his considerable power into one vessel, and he must be read.” – Globe and Mail
Please visit www.talonbooks.com for a complete list of George Bowering’s available books.
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2 Talonbooks New Releases
The United States of Wind Travels in America
daniel canty Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei
Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.
Daniel Canty was born in the suburb of Lachine, Quebec, and now lives in Montreal. His works circulate freely between literature and publishing, film and theatre, contemporary art and design. He is the author of a novel, Wigrum (La Peuplade, 2011; Talonbooks, 2013) and a history of automata in American literature, Êtres artificiels (Liber, 1997). He has devised three award-winning collaborative books: Cité selon (Le Quartanier, 2006), on the city; La Table des Matières (Le Quartanier, 2007), on eating; and Le Livre de Chevet (Le Quartanier, 2009), on sleeping. He has also translated books of poetry by Stephanie Bolster, Erin Moure, Michael Ondaatje, and Charles Simic. His recent exhibition, Bucky Ball (Artexte, 2014), constructed a memory theatre out of the ghost of Buckminster Fuller and the phantom landscape of Expo 67. Canty studied literature and the philosophy of science in Montreal, publishing in Vancouver, and film in New York and Montreal. He teaches dramatic writing at L’École nationale de théâtre du Canada and event design at Université du Québec à Montréal. In 2014, he completed a six-month residency at the Studio du Québec in London. His website is danielcanty.com.
ISBN 978-0-88922-942-6; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-943-3 Non-fiction: Autobiography / Travel writing 5 × 8.5; 160 pp; Trade paper $14.95 CAN / $14.95 US September
Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnightblue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure leads him and artist driver Patrick Beaulieu from the plains of the Midwest up to Chicago, the Windy City, into the wind tunnel linking the Great Lakes, through the cities of lost industry of the Rust Belt, only to veer off into Amish pastoralia, and to the forests of Pennsylvania, Civil War land, where fracking is stirring up the ghosts of the first oil rush. Canty creates a gentle road book, a melancholy blue guide written in an airy, associative prose, where images coalesce and dissipate, carried away through the outer and inner American landscape. The book, mixing the tropes of road narrative, poetic fabulation, and philosophical memoir, reaches towards images on the horizon of memory, to find out where they come from, while coming to the foreordained realization that, wherever memory may lead us, its images will be long gone when we get there and most probably were never even there at all. The book’s through-line is about this emotional reality of images, the ways in which they take hold upon us and carry us back to the deep narrative of self. Clocking in at 160 pages, most readers don’t realize that the adventure spans only ten days, and that The United States of Wind is, in a very real way, a journey through a fold in time.
“I read this book as an essay, a method of thought. Canty doesn’t propose as much a theory of wind as a map of reflections on what emptiness holds, on what the imperceptible space between us occupies … The true object of this book’s love, or quest, is not a weather phenomenon, but rather something more akin to the American soul.” – Valérie Lefbvre-Faucher, Revue Liberté
Daniel Canty’s Wigrum is also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks Fiction Backlist 3
Studies in Description Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
carl peters
Difficult writing has its way of illuminating the part of the world that counts. One such difficult text is Gertrude Stein’s highly experimental Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms – long considered the single most groundbreaking literary work of twentieth-century art, literary criticism, and art history. One hundred years since publication, Carl Peters offers a sustained reading of the 1914 edition, responding to the eccentric sounds and rhythms of this long prose-poem with annotations that bring understanding, in particular, to the composition’s syntax, which is noted for its defiance of conventional norms; for example: Carl Peters is a critical theorist and curator and author of two previous literary analyses of poetics and avant-garde art. He edited a major collection of bpNichol’s comics from 1960 to 1980, published as bpNichol Comics (2002). textual vishyuns (2011), his critical study of bill bissett’s poetry and visual art, analyzes this Canadian poet’s contributions to Modernist thought and vision. Peters is currently embarked on a study of modernist cinema, specifically the works and praxis of French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard.
ISBN 978-0-88922-961-7 Non-fiction: Literary Criticism 5.5 × 8.5; 160 pp; Trade paper $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US November
ROAST POTATOES. Roast potatoes for. [Annotation] Grounded. Such annotations demonstrate that an apprehension of Stein’s whole art comes from the project and praxis of reading the work literally, actually. “Read her with her for less,” she asserts. “Translate more than translate the authority.” In Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Peters demonstrates ways in which Stein’s thought questions everything, underlining reasons that her work has long served as the wellspring for generations of experimental poets, inspiring Language movement poets such as bill bissett, bpNichol, and George Bowering, and novelists such as William Gass, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway. The Modernist work Tender Buttons can be used to show how in the early twentieth century Stein and others helped us discover a different world in our midst, a moment of the Modern.
Carl Peters’s bpNichol Comics and textual vishyuns are also available from Talonbooks.
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4 Talonbooks New Releases
Tales of the Emperor jack winter
Born in Canada, Jack Winter attended McGill University followed by the University of Toronto for a PhD in English literature. He has since held many university teaching positions across Canada in English literature, modern theatre, and creative writing. From 1961 to 1967 Winter was resident playwright at Toronto Workshop Productions (Toronto, Ontario), where he wrote five stage plays: Before Compiègne, The Mechanic, The Death of Woyzeck, Hey Rube! and The Golem of Venice. During his second tenure (1974–76) as resident playwright at Toronto Workshop Productions, he wrote four more stage plays: Letters from the Earth, Ten Lost Years, You Can’t Get Here from There, and Summer Seventy-Six (or Olympics ‘76). His many awards and recognition for his work include the Toronto Telegram Theatre Award for the Best New Canadian Play, Canadian Film Award (Genie) for Best Documentary Film, Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject, Visiting Writer’s Fellowship of the Eastern Arts Association, and Arts Council of Great Britain Creative Writing Fellowship.
ISBN 978-0-88922-944-0; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-945-7 Fiction: Historical 5 × 8.5; 224 pp; Trade paper $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US November
Tales of the Emperor is based on the life of Qin Shi Huang (circa 260–210 BCE), the “First Emperor” – he who unified China, gave it his name, built the Great Wall, entombed an army of terra cotta soldiers, authored legalism, erased history, insinuated governance, and established paranoia as a national characteristic. His dynasty did not outlive him but his influence permeates the present and, there is ample indication, will dominate the future. The literary method of Tales of the Emperor is derived from the first Chinese attempt at “writing history” – the famous Historical Records of Ssu-Ma Ch’ien. Like that Chinese classic, Tales of the Emperor is motivated by the desire to understand the past by entering it, mixing testimony with anecdote, interpretation with invention, biography with characterization, objective analysis with passionate self-interest. Birth to death, Tales of the Emperor tells the story of its central figure in a thematic rather than a chronologic narrative. In a mosaic of separate tales – some no more than fragments, others chapter-length – intersecting characters are presented, entwined, relinquished, among them a failed assassin, a wily adviser, an ironic architect, a castrated historian, an entire tribe of grave builders, and, of course, the wry, conflicted, everyday tyrant himself. The Emperor’s accomplishments are documented, his strivings are examined, and intimate tittle-tattle about him is indulged. There’s only one principal theme: you find the antiquity you look for, or, in the language of the book: “history is the study of the paintings of great events.” “Histories are written using histories, and canons are created, just as surely in the lives and works of performers and companies as in playwriting. Jack Winter’s own story fulfils all the requirements for canonization, and quite rightly. [His work] reminds us of the complexities of the artistic life … in particular, the powerful relationship between international, national, and local politics. But it also reminds us that all histories, any histories, are first of all personal.” – Stephen Johnson, Theatre Research in Canada
Jack Winter’s My TWP Plays: A Collection Including Ten Lost Years is also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 5
Scree The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991
f r e d wa h Edited and introduced by Jeff Derksen
Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his “writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local.” Most of Wah’s early work is out of print. This collection allows readers to (re)discover this groundbreaking work. The volume contains: Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1939 and grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. After graduate work with Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s, founding the writing program at David Thompson University Centre (DTUC). A pioneer of online publishing, Wah has mentored a generation of some of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Waiting for Saskatchewan received the Governor General’s Award, and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a bio-fiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café, won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize. Wah was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013. Jeff Derksen is a founding member of Vancouver’s writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing. His poetry and critical writing on art, urbanism, and text have been published in Europe and North America.
ISBN 978-0-88922-947-1 Poetry 6 × 9; 592 pp; Hardcover $45.00 CAN / $45.00 US October
Lardeau (1965) Mountain (1967) Among (1972) Tree (1972) Earth (1974) Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975) Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980) Owner’s Manual (1981) Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981) Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982) Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985) Rooftops (1988) So Far (1991) The collection has been organized according to a chronology of composition (rather than a chronology of original publication): this reveals new connections and thematic trajectories in the body of work as a whole, and makes the book an eminently “teachable” volume. The book includes full-colour facsimiles of two early books, Earth and Tree, reproduced to show the "hands-on" object-based aspect of chapbook publishing.
Fred Wah’s Is a Door, Selected Poems: Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek, and Sentenced to Light are also available from Talonbooks.
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6 Talonbooks New Releases
Peacock Blue The Collected Poems
phyllis webb Edited by John Hulcoop
Phyllis Webb was born in 1927 in Victoria, BC. She was educated at the University of British Columbia and McGill. The first major publication of her poetry was in Trio (1954), which included poetry by Eli Mandel and Gael Turnbull. For many years she worked as a writer and broadcaster for the CBC, where she created the radio program Ideas in 1965 and was its executive producer from 1967 to 1969. Webb served as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta from 1980 to 1981 and taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and the Banff Centre. She is a lifetime member of the League of Canadian Poets and currently resides on Salt Spring Island, BC. John F. Hulcoop received a BA and PhD from University College London. He emigrated to Canada in 1956 and taught in the English department at the University of British Columbia. Initially a nineteenth-century scholar, Hulcoop has published works on Robert Browning, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Truman Capote, and Virginia Woolf. A longtime critic of Phyllis Webb’s work, he edited and wrote the introduction to her Selected Poems 1954–65 (Talonbooks, 1971); he also wrote Phyllis Webb and Her Works (ECW Press, 1990).
ISBN 978-0-88922-914-3 Poetry 6 × 9; 512 pp; Trade paper $29.95 CAN / $29.95 US September
When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s Bowl was Webb’s fifth volume of poetry. Three more followed and then she fell silent, turning from literature to abstract painting. Peacock Blue compiles in a single volume all of Webb’s published, unpublished, and uncollected works from a writing career that spanned fifty years. It offers readers the opportunity to relish the arc of Webb’s entire poetic oeuvre, from the modernist lyricism of her early works, to the groundbreaking volume, Naked Poems (1965), in which Webb created for herself a new minimalist language; from Wilson’s Bowl to what Douglas Barbour calls “Webb’s loving and subversive engagement with the ghazal” in Water and Light (1984); and finally to the postmodernist prose poems of Hanging Fire (1990). The concluding section of Peacock Blue contains almost fifty poems, some of which have never been published before. It also includes brilliant but forgotten poems and poetic surprises. Brenda Carr has suggested that one of Webb’s later essays, “Message Machine” (1990), “initiates a re-reading of her poetics and practice … Against her anxiety that she is a passive ‘message machine’ for masculinist culture.” However, as Carr points out, “Webb posits another possibility – ‘crossdressing.’ She theorizes her mimicry of the male persona as analogous to a ‘masquerade’ or ‘street theatre’ and in so doing reconstructs even her earlier poems as a performative space in which agency is possible.” The truth of Carr’s insight becomes increasingly apparent to anyone who undertakes to read through Webb’s entire poetic output, gathered together, at last, in Peacock Blue.
Phyllis Webb’s Hanging Fire and Selected Poems: The Vision Tree are also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 7
Prairie Harbour g a r ry t h o m a s m o r s e
Garry Thomas Morse’s poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnets in Transversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden’s poetic prose in Streams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer in After Jack, and an exploration of his mother’s Kwakwaka’wakw native ancestry in Discovery Passages, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Discovery Passages was also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC’s 8th Fire. Morse’s books of fiction include his collection Death in Vancouver, and the three books in The Chaos! Quincunx series: Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (2013 ReLit Award finalist), Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour (2014 ReLit Award finalist), and Minor Expectations, all published by Talonbooks. Morse is a casual commentator for Jacket2 and his work continues to appear in a variety of publications and is studied at various Canadian universities, including the University of British Columbia. He currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
ISBN 978-0-88922-940-2 Poetry 6 × 9.5; 176 pp; Trade paper $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US September
In this contrapuntal follow-up to Governor General’s Award finalist Discovery Passages, Garry Thomas Morse traces multiple lines of his mixed ancestry. These include the nomadic “pre-historical” movements of Wakashan speakers who were later to form various West Coast First Nations; the schismatic mindset of Jedidiah Morse, the “father of American geography” ;and eternal struggles of European Jewish relations, artists, and close friends against perennial anti-Semitism. Set around the vigilantly maintained border/lines that mark the relatively “unsung” decline of natural prairie life, this unromantic “wrecklogue” radiates outward from a new real-estate development in Regina, Saskatchewan. The first section, “Company Romance,” is a sequence of sardonic “heritage minute” poems that examine the intensely aggressive capitalist aspects of colonization that drove the fur trade in Manitoba and deeply influenced our contemporary sense of cultural and national identity. They also draw parallels between the shift in nomadic hunter/warrior culture to our own transformation as global consumers. The second part, “Prairie Harbour,” a long poem in twenty-four parts, takes the form of postexilic elegies that transcend the dominant tradition of Canadian prairie poetry, infusing it with epical echoes of poets John Clare, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams. The work reaches its stride in a hearing of the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Gustave Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which includes a French horn of warning for the “have-not” province. The finale offers aesthetic fragmentation of Stephane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and “The Untroubled Mind,” a poem by Saskatchewan-born abstract expressionist Agnes Martin, salvaging space for an inner landscape and a “harbour” for the mind. “This ingenious masterpiece is Morse code ransacking Brit Lit up to Dylan Thomas, but from the vantage point of Canuck redoubts, such as Fort Garry … Fugitive reader, get thee into this epic!” – George Elliott Clarke
Garry Thomas Morse’s After Jack, Death in Vancouver, Discovery Passages, Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus, Minor Expectations, and Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour are also available from Talonbooks.
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8 Talonbooks New Releases
Cosmophilia rahat kurd
Rahat Kurd was a finalist in the 2014 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize and named Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category of the 2013 Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Awards. Her essays have appeared in The Walrus and Maisonneuve magazines. She is a poet and a prose writer at work on a memoir about the making of Muslim culture in North America. Her work has been nominated for National Magazine Awards in the categories of Poetry and Personal Journalism (2011) and shortlisted for a CBC Literary Award (2007). She is the author of Reading Rights: A Woman’s Guide to the Law in Canada (Quarry Press, 1999).
ISBN 978-0-88922-946-4 Poetry 6 × 9; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US October
Cosmophilia means “love of ornament.” These poems might be thought of as elaborations – deliberate acts of imagination – that ornament the objects or events that inspired their creation, by emphasizing their complexity. The central poems are drawn from the poet’s memories of time spent with her family in Kashmir and, in particular, from contemplations of traditional Kashmiri handicrafts. Other poems in this collection draw on multiple cultural and artistic sources, family history, and Islamic imagery and language, and are elaborations on the author’s reflections on living and walking in Vancouver through the end of a marriage. The poet’s lyrical, emotionally powerful, narrative style engages cultural complexity by weaving traditional religious and political language and imagery into contemporary contexts. Some poems explore ideas of how the body refracts from historical trauma, including division of the state of Kashmir during the 1949 parition of Indian and Pakistan, as well as the loss of Arabic and non-Arabic scripts in Urdu and the consequent removal of language and memory embodied in language. Additionally there is a foregrounding of thematically interlinked schisms between religion and secularism, and the tension of navigating through these polarities as a person living within diaspora. Further areas that contribute to torquing the language are the emergence of secular modernism within the context of Muslim cultural and familial space. Cosmophilia represents and discovers the modern Muslim woman’s experience in Kashmir as well as urban North America, a setting both alienating and stimulating.
Talonbooks New Releases 9
Impeccable Regret judith fitzgerald Introduction by Thomas Dilworth
Judith Fitzgerald is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry as well as two bestselling biographies, Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy (Dundurn, 2001) and Building a Mystery: The Story of Sarah McLachlan and Lilith Fair (Quarry, 1997). Rapturous Chronicles (Mercury, 1991) was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry; her epyllion, River (ECW, 1995), was both shortlisted for the Trillium Award and honoured with the James McMaster Poetry Prize; and her collection of ghazals and sonnets, Twenty-Six Ways Out of This World (Oberon Press, 1999), was named one of the six best poetry collections of the year published in English (Globe and Mail’s Top 100). Given Names: New and Selected Poems (Black Moss Press, 1985) was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and won a Writers’ Choice Award. Thomas Dilworth is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and specializes in Modern Literature and Romantic Poetry. He is the author of multiple volumes of literary criticism, one of which, The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, won the British Council Prize in the Humanities.
ISBN 978-0-88922-949-5 Poetry 6 × 9; 80 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US October
Impeccable Regret travels terrain demonstrating that, as a result of the so-called postmodern impulses driving poetic discourse, culture has replaced nature as humanity’s defining context; that, within the paradigm of the twenty-worst century, the recollection of natural environments seems anachronistic or oxymoronic. The poems in this collection respond to the questions: What happens when natural phenomena no longer provide solace and comfort? And how do we define both “self” and “other” in postmodern terms when the basis for such assessments fails on a grand scale? To these ends, the poems concern themselves with the power of politics and the politics of power, both as they surround and confound the individual; both “I” and “you” in these poems transcend the local in order to undertake the divagation of truths with regard to the way in which, when two (or more) individuals are brought (or thrust) together, the dynamics of power and the political demand that one or more people dominate the others. Taking a stance far from the confessional mode, the work examines elements of our interior/exterior values while concurrently demonstrating how evaluation and devaluation control the work’s central question: how does one remain true to a common valuing of humanistic principles when the world, such as it is and isn’t, presses so insistently against each or all of us? Where do we turn when we wish to “disconnect”? Why does impeccable regret become so difficult to achieve, maintain, and sustain (or thrive beyond mere survival)? In the words of Arthur Miller, “all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
Praise for past work: “A truly excellent poet, I don’t think there’s anybody in [Canada] that probably has the originality [Fitzgerald’s] voice possesses. She is not only the most intelligent poet in Canada, she’s also able to take language to new heights and is sensitive to language and all the nuances associated with it. She’s one of the greats; and, by that, I mean, THE GREATS.” – Alistair MacLeod
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10 Talonbooks New Releases
Rom Com dina del bucchia + d a n i e l z o m pa r e l l i
Dina Del Bucchia is the author of Coping with Emotions and Otters (Talonbooks, 2013) and Blind Items (Insomniac Press, 2014). She guest edited the Humour issue of Poetry Is Dead magazine and is an artistic director of the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series. Her story “Under the ‘I’” was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Dina co-hosts the podcast Can’t Lit with Daniel Zomparelli. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives in Vancouver. Daniel Zomparelli is editor-in-chief of Poetry Is Dead magazine, a semi-annual publication devoted to poetry in Canada with a strong emphasis on the West Coast. He is a co-podcaster at Can’t Lit, a monthly webcast on all things Canadian and literature. His first book of poems, Davie Street Translations (2012), was published by Talonbooks. Current endeavours include After You, a series of interconnected poems that span North America.
At precisely the cultural moment you were hoping for, a dream team of smart, sexy, brunette, West Coast poets of Italian descent has passionately co-authored an intelligent collection of poetry that both celebrates and capsizes the romantic comedy. From the origin of the genre (It Happened One Night) to its contemporary expressions (Love Actually), the poems in Rom Com trace the attempt to deconstruct as well as engage in dialogue with romantic comedy films and the pop culture, celebrities, and tropes that have come to be associated with them. These irreverent, playful, weird, and comedic poems come in a variety of forms, fully engaging in pop culture, without a judgmental tone. They see your frumpy expectations and raise you issues of sexuality, consent, sexism, homophobia, race, and class. They explore the highs and lows of romantic relationships and the expectations and realities of love, tackling real emotional worlds through the lens of film. Two cool people wrote it. Dina Del Bucchia, the fashionable and voluptuous, is a woman on the go, brazenly hosting literary events and tweeting about otters and award shows. Daniel Zomparelli, the handsome and dashing, is a young, gay man-about-Vancouver who somehow also quietly edits (in chief) a semi-annual poetry journal. (Ship them all you want, fools.) How to tell if you are compatible with this book: Are you equally versed in literature and pop culture? Are you a film-savvy fan of contemporary poetry? Are you an academic with interest in literature and cultural studies? Are you in general a cool, sad person? This book might just be the sassy best friend you’ve wanted.
Praise for Dina Del Bucchia’s Coping with Emotions and Otters: “A poetic piss-take on the self-help genre.” – Malvern Book Reviews Praise for Daniel Zomparelli’s Davie Street Translations: “Arresting and hard to put down … utterly charming and disarming.” – Georgia Straight
ISBN 978-0-88922-960-0 Poetry 5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US October
Dina Del Bucchia’s Coping with Emotions and Otters and Daniel Zomparelli’s Davie Street Translations are also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 11
Cerulean Blue d r e w h ay d e n t ay l o r
Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor, hailed by the Montreal Gazette as one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists, writes for the screen as well as the stage and contributes regularly to North American Native periodicals and national newspapers. His plays have garnered many prestigious awards, and his beguiling and perceptive storytelling style has enthralled audiences in Canada, the United States, and Germany. Although based near Toronto, Taylor has travelled extensively throughout North America, honouring requests to read from his work and attend arts festivals, workshops, and productions of his plays. One of his most established bodies of work includes what he calls the Blues Quartet, an ongoing, outrageous, and often farcical examination of Native and non-Native stereotypes. Among Taylor’s many awards are the Canada Council Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Theatre (2009); the Governor General’s Award for Drama, Nominee (2006) In a World Created by a Drunken God; the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, Nominee (2005); James Buller Aboriginal Theatre Award for Playwright of the Year (1997) Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth; and the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, Small Theatre Division (1996) Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth.
ISBN 978-0-88922-952-5; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-953-2 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 144 pp; Trade paper $18.95 CAN / $18.95 US September
Cerulean Blue is a comedic play about a struggling blues band invited to participate in a benefit concert for a First Nation community in conflict with governmental authorities. Upon arriving, the band discovers the entire lineup of musical acts has cancelled and they’re left trapped behind barricades. Complicating the matter, there is conflict within the band and the sudden appearance of an old girlfriend makes the event even more perilous. This play is an homage to fast-moving farces while also addressing Aboriginal issues. Cerulean Blue deals with relationships, perceptions, politics, and what to do when you discover you’ve been dating your first cousin. Add a few spoonfuls of original blues music, and you’ve got a fun-filled evening. The play was written for a large ensemble cast, which makes it ideal for musical theatre departments in high schools and colleges – every student can play a part. An original musical score by Andrew Clemens will be available for download from Talonbooks.com. Cast of ten women and ten men.
“An off-the-chart comedy … Not only was the acting on point, but the musical talent was as well … I walked away smiling from ear to ear … an amazing show that gave me goosebumps, warmed my heart, and left me laughing right until the very end … There were moments when I felt as though I was disturbing the cast by laughing so hard in the front row. I had to cover my face with my program to calm myself down … The musical performances were on the same level as the fantastic acting: impeccable. Each member of the band played their own instruments and sang their own vocals live. It was a great combination of theatre and music. I got to enjoy a great production as well as a killer concert.” – Ryerson Folio
Please visit www.talonbooks.com for a complete list of Drew Hayden Taylor’s available books.
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12 Talonbooks New Releases
The Divine A Play for Sarah Bernhardt
michel marc bouchard Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Quebec playwright Michel Marc Bouchard emerged on the professional theatre scene in 1985. Since then he has written twenty-five plays and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including, in June 2012, the prestigious National Order of Quebec for his contribution to Quebec culture, and, in 2005, the Order of Canada. He has also received le Prix Littéraire du Journal de Montréal, Prix du Cercle des critiques de l’Outaouais, the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award, and the Chalmers Award for Outstanding New Play. Translated into nine languages, Bouchard’s bold, visionary works have represented Canada at major festivals around the world. Linda Gaboriau is an award-winning literary translator based in Montreal. Her translations of plays by Quebec’s most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad. In her work as a literary manager and dramaturge, she has directed numerous translation residencies and international exchange projects. She was the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Gaboriau has twice won the Governor General’s Award for Translation.
ISBN 978-0-88922-958-7; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-959-4 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US September
Quebec City, 1908. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. As part of her long career, Bernhardt – known to her loyal fans as “The Divine” – visited Canada several times between 1880 and 1917, most often visiting Montreal, but once – just once – alighting in Quebec City. It is this singular historic visit, about which little is known, that Bouchard takes as the backdrop for his play, exploring conservative and progressive veins in competition through turn-of-the-century North America, with a focus on Quebec, that province on the verge of great change. Michaud, the son of the province’s minister of finance, is a theatre lover. Talbot, on the other hand has arrived at the seminary on the very day of Bernhardt’s arrival in town, he comes from a family struggling with poverty and clearly has more pressing concerns. The two are ordered to deliver a letter from the Archbishop forbidding Bernhardt to appear on stage at any point during her one and only visit to Quebec City, on the grounds that she has decided to perform a play in which Adrienne Lecovreur “sings the praises of adulterous love” and “ridicules a man of the cloth portrayed as a plotting habitué of Parisian salons.” And so the stage is set for a battle for the hearts and minds of Quebeckers through these two seminarians: the powerful Catholic Church on one side, and the power of the divine Sarah Bernhardt – and the world of the theatre – on the other. The Divine was commissioned for the 2015 Shaw Festival in honour of George Bernard Shaw and everyone who loves the theatre, and in memory of Sarah Bernhardt, “the woman who dares to say everything that should be left unsaid.” Cast of five women and eight men.
Michel Marc Bouchard’s Christina, The Girl King, The Coronation Voyage, Down Dangerous Passes Road, The Madonna Painter, The Tale of Teeka, Tom at the Farm, and Written on Water are also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 13
Jabber m a rc u s yo u s s e f Foreword by Dennis Foon
Writer and performer Marcus Youssef is the associate artistic producer at Vancouver’s NeWorld Theatre. A graduate of both the National Theatre School (Acting, 1992) and the University of British Columbia (MFA, 2002), Youssef is a regular contributor of drama, commentary, and documentary to numerous programs on the CBC network. He also writes regularly for publications such as Vancouver Magazine, Georgia Straight, Ricepaper, and This Magazine. For many years, Youssef has also dedicated himself to numerous community-based advocacy programs that aim at using writing and/or theatre as a tool for procuring political and social change. He co-founded CRANK magazine with Matt Hern and Rich Lawley as well as the Reclaiming Project – a nationally recognized, immigrantcentred oral history program – with Mercedes Baines. Dennis Foon is a Detroit-born playwright, novelist, producer, and screenwriter. He was the founder and artistic director, from 1974 to 1986, of Vancouver’s Green Thumb Theatre, a company that soon evolved into a cutting edge theatre with an award-winning repertory of plays about the reality of young people and the dilemmas they face.
ISBN 978-0-88922-950-1; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-951-8 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 96 pp; Trade paper $16.95 CAN / $16.95 US October
Like many outgoing young women, Fatima feels rebellious against parents she sees as strict. It just so happens that she is Egyptian-born and wears a hijab. When anti-Muslim graffiti appears on the walls of her school, Fatima transfers to a new school. The guidance counsellor there, Mr. E., does his best to help Fatima fit in, but despite his advice she starts an unlikely friendship with Jorah, who has a reputation for anger issues. Maybe, just maybe, Fatima and Jorah start to, like, like each other … As their mutual attraction grows, the lines Fatima and Jorah cross as they grow closer become the subject of an intense exploration of boundaries – personal boundaries, cultural boundaries, and inherited religious and political boundaries. Fatima and Jorah discover that appearances matter; they’ve been exposed for their whole lives to images that begin to colour their relationship: images of the Middle East, the working class, and how teenage boys and teenage girls behave. Put all these reactive factors together in the social laboratory that is a high school and observe: is there a solution for Fatima and Jorah? High school, like no other social space, throws together people of all histories and backgrounds, and young people must decide what they believe in and how far they are willing to go to defend their beliefs. Inside a veritable pressure cooker, they negotiate cross-cultural respect and mutual understanding. Jabber does its part to challenge appearances – and the judgments people make based on those appearances.
“Smartly probes the lives of high schoolers struggling with peer expectations and identity problems. As they attempt to navigate the minefield that is the high school hallway, they are warned repeatedly that actions have consequences.” – Winnipeg Free Press “Not afraid to deal with difficult subject matter such as discrimination, domestic abuse, sexuality, and the danger of online sharing on social media.” – Charlebois Post Review
Marcus Youssef’s Adrift, The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings, A Line in the Sand, and Winners and Losers are also available from Talonbooks.
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14 Talonbooks New Releases
Moss Park and Tough! The Bobby and Tina Plays
g e o rg e f . wa l k e r Foreword by Patrick McDonald
Canada’s top playwright takes on teen pregnancy in two comic dramas for young people. Moss Park
George F. Walker has been one of Canada’s most prolific and popular playwrights since his career in theatre began in the early 1970s. Since that time, he has written more than twenty plays and has created screenplays for several awardwinning Canadian television series, including Due South, The Newsroom, This Is Wonderland, and The Line, as well as for the film Niagara Motel (based on three plays from his Suburban Motel series). Part Kafka, part Lewis Carroll, Walker’s distinctive, gritty, fast-paced comedies satirize the selfishness, greed, and aggression of contemporary urban culture. Awards and honours include appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada (2005); National Theatre School Gascon-Thomas Award (2002); two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Drama (for Criminals in Love and Nothing Sacred); five Dora Mavor Moore Awards; and eight Chalmers Canadian Play Awards. Patrick McDonald is artistic director of Green Thumb Theatre, where he has directed more than seventy-five productions and overseen the commissioning and development of more than fifty new plays for children, teens, and young adults.
ISBN 978-0-88922-954-9; E-ISBN 978-0-88922-955-6 Drama 6 × 9; 192 pp; Trade paper $19.95 CAN / $19.95 US November
It’s been twenty years since the debut of Tough!, but only two years have passed in the lives of Tina and Bobby, the main characters. Of course the poverty trap, which grips them both, is ageless. In Moss Park, Bobby and Tina aren’t married, or even living together, but they have a young child, and another is on the way – a fact Bobby learns from Tina early in the play. Bobby wants Tina to take him back – he’s always wanted that – but she has serious doubts about his ability to hold down a job. In this fast-paced dark comedy, Bobby’s plans for big money collide with Tina’s dreams of home, sweet home, and we root for them even as we are exasperated by them. Funny, touching, and raw, Moss Park finds hope in unlikely places. Cast of one man and one woman. Tough! In Tough! young Tina summons her nineteen-year-old boyfriend Bobby to a tattered city playground. She’s got something to tell him, and she’s brought her tough-talking pal, Jill, along as backup. Bobby doesn’t know what he’s walking into. In fact, he’s been planning to break up but the stakes quickly skyrocket when Tina reveals that she’s pregnant. With its sharply drawn young characters, Tough! has been a nearly continuous success in Canada since its premiere in 1993, especially as programming for younger audiences. Tough! has played to packed houses in Victoria, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Toronto. It has been translated into six languages and is regularly performed in theatres all over the world. Cast of one man and two women.
George F. Walker’s And So it Goes, The East End Plays (Parts 1 and 2), Heaven, King of Thieves, The Power Plays, Somewhere Else, and Suburban Motel are also available from Talonbooks.
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Talonbooks New Releases 15
Sila c h a n ta l b i lo d e au
The first play in The Arctic Cycle
Chantal Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal. She serves as the artistic director of The Arctic Cycle – an organization created to support the writing of eight plays about the impact of climate change on the eight countries in the Arctic Circle – and is the founder of the blog Artists and Climate Change. Her plays have been produced and/or developed at theatres and universities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Italy, and Norway, and presented at sustainability, policy, and scientific conferences. She was awarded the Woodward International Playwriting Prize, and First Prize in the Earth Matters on Stage Ecodrama Festival and the Uprising National Playwriting Competition. She is the recipient of a Jerome Travel and Study Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and has been in residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Banff Centre, and the National Theatre School of Canada.
In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages (English, French, and Inuktitut). There is more afoot in the Arctic than one might think. On Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, eight characters – including a climatologist, an Inuit activist and her son, and two polar bears – find their values challenged as they grapple with a rapidly changing environment and world. Sila captures the fragility of life and the interconnectedness of lives, both human and animal, and reveals in gleaming tones that telling the stories of everyday challenges – especially raising children and maintaining family ties – is always more powerful than reciting facts and figures. Our changing climate will have a significant impact on how we organize ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Arctic, where warming temperatures are displacing entire ecosystems. The Arctic Cycle – eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic – poignantly addresses this issue. Sila is the first play of The Arctic Cycle. With its large-as-life polar bear puppets, the play is evocative and mesmerizing, beautifully blurring the boundaries between folklore and science.
“This production of Sila is true to its name – it will enable each audience member to take a deep breath and to think about his or her role in the earth’s ecology.” – Open Media Boston “Is it possible to write a play about global warming that isn't talking heads but a dramatic story that draws us in and makes for engaging theater? The French Canadian playwright Chantal Bilodeau has proven it's more than possible with her deeply moving play Sila.” – Arlington Wicked Local
ISBN 978-0-88922-956-3 Drama 5.5 × 8.5; 128 pp; Trade paper $17.95 CAN / $17.95 US November
Chantal Bilodeau’s translations of Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre and Kafka’s Hat are also available from Talonbooks.
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16 Talonbooks Sales Representation, Ordering, and Trade Terms
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Talonbooks Sales Representation, Ordering, and Trade Terms 13
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