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The Sentimentalists
Haunted by the horrific events he witnessed during the Vietnam War, Napoleon Haskell is exhausted from years spent battling his memories. As his health ultimately declines, his two daughters move him from his trailer in North Dakota to Casablanca, Ontario, to live with the father of a friend who was killed in action. It is to Casablanca, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town, that Napoleon's youngest daughter also retreats when her own life comes unhinged. Living with the two old men, she finds her father in the twilight of his life and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about him; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge.
Distillo
In her debut collection, Basma Kavanagh engages the natural world and seeks to explore our relationship to it. Hers is a poetics of description which subverts scientific observation and the authoritative language of nomenclature for mythopoetic ends. In the opening section ("Moisture"), precipitation is dissected and categorized, but ultimately the deluge of "rain making rain, /making rain" overwhelms controlled interrogation and undulating imagery saturates everything. Nomenclature reappears elsewhere in the book, attempting to anchor object poems about west-coast flora and fauna-salmon, elk, bear, bigleaf maple, bog myrtle-which otherwise drift toward the mythworld and gesture in the direction of the ethereal and the totemic. Understanding that language can be most precise when it harbours ambiguity and surprise, Kavanagh experiments with pattern poems and the layering of multiple voices in her attempt to express "a fullness /an absence /of self." This is a book which turns over rocks and looks under them in search of truth in its soft, damp hiding places, poems which instruct us to "[d]escend. Blend /your knowing with the breath of earth".
The Stone Canoe
This is a story about two stories and their travels through the written record. The written part begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when Silas T. Rand, a Baptist clergyman from Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, took as his task the translation of the Bible into Mi'kmaq-the language of the indigenous communities in the region. In the process of developing his vocabulary, Rand transcribed narratives from Mi'kmaq storytellers, and following his death, 87 of these stories were published in a book called Legends of the Micmacs. As his understanding of the language grew, Rand began to translate the stories as he heard them, and to record them in English. Until recently, it appeared that none of the earl...
Gaspereau Gloriatur: Poetry
After much debate, the editorial staff at Gaspereau Press rejected the idea of marking our tenth anniversary with commemorative trinkets, deciding instead to do what we do best-books! This spring we are releasing the first volume of our three-volume Gaspereau Gloriatur: Book of the Blessed Tenth Year. Volume one celebrates the very best poetry issued from our presses. Our editorial team has been sifting back through the catalogue, through full-length trade titles, limited editions, letterpress books, Devil's Whim chapbooks and broadsides. We've also collected some of the poems that have mischievously snuck into books of prose over the years. Since 1997, Gaspereau Press has published some of ...
White Salt Mountain
In this remarkable follow-up to Spar: Words in Place (Gaspereau Press, 2002), Peter Sanger explores the scope of words in time. Offering significant new material to the study of linguist Silas Rand and poet John Thompson, Sanger introduces Susan Barss and Florence Ayscough, notable but largely unsung contributors to Rand's and Thompson's work. With the same passion for reading and exploration, along with several of the neighbourhood landmarks, symbolic imagery and literary influences that first emerged in Spar, Sanger joins the lives and work of key authors and translators in Canada's literary history. Sanger's unique and far-sighted approach to words and time illuminates critical intersecti...
Smoke Proofs
Why do we accept shoddy books? This is the question at the heart of Smoke Proofs, a collection of six essays and one interview which takes a frank look at the state of the art of literary publishing, printing and book design in Canada. Ranging from the philosophical and the historical to the nuts and bolts of making books and getting them to market, Smoke Proofs argues for an approach to trade publishing which returns to its printerly roots, one in which the characteristics of various tools and techniques are considered alongside the broader implications of their use in the culture. Whether he's discussing ebooks, the de-professionalization of typography, the design of poetry books, the fetish for colour pictures on book covers, or our complicated relationship with the notion of 'beauty', Steeves continually points the reader back to his or her own responsibility for the preservation and use of that amazing, wily and robust cultural tool-the book.
Love and the Mess We're in
When Viv flies to Buenos Aires for a secret liaison with Clive, there is no ambiguity as to their intentions-adultery. But this is where conventionality terminates in Stephen Marche's new novel, Love and the Mess We're In, a work whose lyric richness and inventiveness skillfully embody the tumbles and turns of love in a postmodern age. Marche collaborates with award-winning typographer Andrew Steeves to create richly polyschematic book pages whose influences range from the interwoven texts, geometric shaping and pattern-making of Hebraic calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts and incunabular typography to the ordered tangle of a New York City subway map. Viv's husband, Tim, is Clive's best friend. A breakdown has landed Tim in a mental institution, seemingly beyond recovery. His collapse brings Viv and Clive together in their grief, at a loss to navigate the loneliness, guilt, lust and, perhaps, love which they discover in their unsettling and morally ambiguous new context. Love and the Mess We're In is an evocative, lithe story of love and redemption infused with Marche's wit, insight and telescopic emotional range.
With English Subtitles
With English Subtitles is Carmine Starnino at his most inventive. The poems in this collection are exceptionally focused, musical and inviting. Household objects, Italian relatives, Yukon landscapes, worst-case scenarios and relationships are pushed onto the page with new-found urgency and delight. Here for the first time, Starnino has set aside the restraint of his earlier work in favour of a bold swagger and forthright musicality. Starnino's fascination with old objects is translated into poems that combine history and close scrutiny with lively personification and corresponding sound. These poems capture the true energy and anima of supposedly inanimate items. The aged suitcase exudes an ...
