Other books that might interest you

• 

  The Sky is a Sky in the Sky

  Stuart Ross

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  CBC BOOKS' "CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2024"Imagining a vast blue expanse of what a poem might be 
  The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes. It contains new entries in Ross’s ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more. In an era of thematic poetry and conceptual poetry books, this collection is a celebration of possibilities and miscellany. 
   
  "Stuart Ross doesn’t hold back, happily for us. In letting his poems go where they want to go, sometimes by leaps and bounds, he reminds us that poetic rules are meant to be broken and that the results, in the hands of a skillful poet, can be moving, or amusing, or subversive, or exhilarating, or all of the above. His work brims with surprises. From start to finish, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a delightful and thoroughly engaging book." – Charles North, author of News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems/Selected Prose 
  "Here, we’re invited to gawk at horror and kick it in the pants, but also to notice the horror within us, because we all have it, and Ross doesn’t shy away from the odd and uncomfortable. He’s easy with sentiment, honest about grief, clear about death being our final destination, and behooves us mightily to enjoy it while we can. This book contains some of Ross’s greatest love songs for the dead as well as some sideways laments for the living – in these poems we can see ourselves and our friendships, our future losses, and present mysteries examined with no preference or perfunctory reverence. Each time I read Stuart Ross’s work I feel grateful, hopeful, reminded to lift my skeleton up and enjoy the abundant wonders the world holds." – Gillian Wigmore, author of Orient 
  "Stuart Ross is one of the most important poets to have found himself somehow on planet Earth, where readers have been rejoicing in his work for nearly six decades. He makes it seem easy: open your eyes, your ears, your heart; look into the world and write. However, to do so with such unflinching candour, many-layered humour, the deepest emotional intelligence, and rarest lyric acumen? No, you have to be Stuart Ross to bring all of everything to bear upon being alive in one’s time. To rejoice is also to mourn, of course, and these poems are afraid to do neither. Ross trusts poetry more than any of us, so poetry trusts him back: this book dazzles the very sunlight with what it knows, including of the estrangements of the self upon which poetry so often insists, and the fictitiousness of borders between the present and the past, dream and not-dream, hilarity and grief. Whoever you are, including the laws of physics, you will be startled and moved by The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky. At times a momentarily posthumous point of view propels the poems, but do not grieve (or do): the book is immortal." – Lisa Fishman, author of Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition

  Show book

• 

  Love On A Checklist - A Lesbian...

  Alyson Root

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Kelsey Peterson has one goal. To talk to Olivia Pritchard, the most beautiful woman she has ever seen. There’s only one problem with the plan! Kelsey is useless with women. So useless, in fact, that she tends to cause accidental bodily harm to herself when in the vicinity of an attractive female. Take her first meeting with Olivia, for example. Kelsey’s face meeting a pole because she was staring. Is she a lost cause? Well, Kelsey doesn’t think so. All she needs is a step-by-step method to reach her goals. Then she should be able to have at least a conversation with Olivia, right? As with all well-planned ideas, it goes to pot almost immediately. Still, Kelsey is nothing but persistent and positive. All she has to do is follow her checklist. Easy peasy!

  Show book

• 

  Bad Hobby - Poems

  Kathy Fagan

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”

  Show book

• 

  Blue Ink Tears - A Collection of...

  Roberto German

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In this bilingual poetry collection, Roberto Germán, shares writing across 20 years of his life. The poems tell stories of love, relationships, race, identity, and everyday living. These subjects divide the book into three parts. The poetic forms include free verse, rhyme, haiku and more, all relatable and real with vivid detail. As he explores what it's like to be a young man growing into his identity, the readers are invited into a rarely explored point of view with this level of imagery and sensorial writing: life through the young adult eyes of a Black Dominican-American, son of immigrants."Blue Ink Tears is a work of emotional beauty, historical awe, and nostalgic reminiscence. What you've compiled here is a collection of experiences, not just poems, that will make young readers think and dig deep." Tanya Manning-Yarde

  Show book

• 

  Siciliana - A Novel

  Carlo Treviso

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A family torn apart by conflict.An uprising of deadly magnitude.A nation altered forever.Inspired by actual events, Siciliana is the harrowing tale of a young woman’s courage in the face of unthinkable turmoil.In 1282 AD, the Kingdom of Sicily is under the rule of a tyrannical French king and subject to his brutal Angevin army. Daily acts of violence and persecution are commonplace in a once-prosperous realm.For twenty-year-old Aetna Vespiri, daughter of a revered Sicilian knight, survival has become second nature. As a child, she witnessed the destruction of her family’s vineyard by Angevin soldiers and spent the next decade learning the tenets of stiletto-blade combat.Years later in Palermo, as the evening bells toll for Vespers, Aetna fends off a nefarious sergeant and sparks an uprising against the Angevin occupation. Now, standing at the forefront of an accelerating people’s rebellion, Aetna finds herself fighting not only for a nation she believes in but also for the meaning of family. In her darkest hour, this dauntless Sicilian woman steps out of obscurity and into the pages of history.The legend of Siciliana is born.Set amid bustling Arab markets and brooding Norman fortresses, Siciliana will envelop readers in the sights, sounds, and dangers lurking around every corner of medieval Sicily.

  Show book

• 

  A Christmas Carol In Prose Ghost...

  Charles Dickens

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Charles Dickens' classic morality tale for Christmastide, first published in 1843. 
  Elderly miser Ebenezer Scrooge receives an unexpected visit from a series of otherworldly advisors... 
  Narrated by Robin Reads.

  Show book