Ingram
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John Rottam is on a journey back in time and place. Fleeing a private stripping engagement turned violent, he reflects on a time in his life when he was burdened with a broken heart, self-doubt and a floundering dance career. A few clumsy steps in the corps de ballet of a prestigious Canadian ballet company sends John fleeing to join a psychotic and incompetent dance troupe in Quebec City, run by the bitter Madame Talegdi, who all but destroys his dream of a legitimate career. Stifled by the walls of Old Quebec, limited French, and dwindling finances, John seeks out the feathers and sequins of the Chez Moritz nightclub, for a last shot at doing a little of what he loves, on the condition that he strips as well as dances. John's fall from grace eventually lands him in a road house freak show, where he struggles to find love and a meaningful life amidst alcohol, deception, abuse and exploitation. When the show folds, John is forced to move on, confront his uncertain future and come to terms with his disturbing past.His final strip-tease becomes a haunting dance of desire, revulsion, insight and, ultimately, redemption. Strip is the unsettling, yet deeply inspiring, second novel from Andrew Binks.
undercurrent
The water belongs to itself. undercurrent reflects on the power and sacredness of water—largely underappreciated by too many—whether it be in the form of ocean currents, the headwaters of the Fraser River or fluids in the womb. Exploring a variety of poetic forms, anecdote, allusion and visual elements, this collection reminds humanity that we are water bodies, and we need and deserve better ways of honouring this.Poet Rita Wong approaches water through personal, cultural and political lenses. She humbles herself to water both physically and spiritually: “i will apprentice myself to creeks & tributaries, groundwater & glaciers / listen for the salty pulse within, the blood that recognizes marine ancestry.” She witnesses the contamination of First Nations homelands and sites, such as Gregoire Lake near Fort McMurray, AB: “though you look placid, peaceful dibenzothiophenes / you hold bitter, bitumized depths.” Wong points out that though capitalism and industry are supposed to improve our quality of life, they’re destroying the very things that give us life in the first place. Listening to and learning from water is key to a future of peace and creative potential.undercurrent emerges from the Downstream project, a multifaceted, creative collaboration that highlights the importance of art in understanding and addressing the cultural and political issues related to water. The project encourages public imagination to respect and value water, ecology and sustainability. Visit downstream.ecuad.ca.
Hastings-Sunrise
Hastings–Sunrise is a love letter to a fleeting place and time. Bren Simmers’s second collection captures her old East Vancouver neighbourhood in the midst of upheaval. As it is colonized by tides of matching plaid and diners serving pulled-pork pancakes, condo developments replace the small businesses and cheap rentals that once gave the area its charm.Much like opening a set of nesting dolls, leafing through the collection exposes further layers of depth and intimacy. Within the context of cultural change, Simmers explores the meaning to be found in everyday things: the making of a home, the life built from daily routines. At the same time, she reveals the dissonance that can occur between personal and large-scale change: “Twitter feed of melting sea ice, / colony collapse / while we picnic under pink ribbons, / kiss again like we mean it.”Throughout the collection, the poet’s eye unfailingly lights on the perfect details to evoke a scene: “On Mr. Donair’s spit, / the earth rotates. Papal smoke emits / from Polonia Sausage, semis shunt / downtown.” Visual poems forming maps of Christmas lights and autumn colours further bring the Hastings–Sunrise neighbourhood to life, illustrating the interweaving of human and natural spaces and locating “home” in between.Like a tree clothed in multicoloured yarn or a miniature house filled with free books, Hastings–Sunrise is a gift to readers, beautiful in its simplicity.
Transmitter and Receiver
Debut talent Raoul Fernandes’s first offering is Transmitter and Receiver, a masterful and carefully depicted exploration of one’s relationships with oneself, friends, memories, strangers and technology.The three parts of this collection are variations building on a theme—at times lonely, sometimes adoring, but always honest. Wider areas of contemplation—the difficulty of communication, the ever-changing symbolism of language and the nature of human interaction in the age of machines—are explored through colloquial scenes of the everyday: someone eats a burger in a car parked by the river (“Grand Theft Auto: Dead Pixels”), a song plays on the radio as a man contemplates suicide (“Car Game”), and a janitor works silently once everyone else has gone (“After Hours at the Centre For Dialogue”).Forthright and effortlessly lyrical, Fernandes builds each poem out of candor and insight, an addictive mix that reads like a favorite story and glitters with concealed meaning. Rather than drawing lines between isolation and connection, past and present, metaphor and reality, Transmitter and Receiver offers loneliness and longing hand-in-hand with affection and understanding: “The last assembly instruction is always you reading this. A machine / that rarely functions, but could never without you.”
Vancouver Blue
Wayne Cope has TV to blame for starting him on his long career as an officer of the Vancouver Police Department. He grew up watching gunslingers like James Arness and Richard Boone, inspiring him to join up even before he finished college—and his real-life working career has turned out to be more exciting than he could have hoped. In his years on the force from 1975 to 2006, Cope has seen practically everything on the ever-changing streets of Vancouver—he’s worked as a jailer and a traffic cop, talked people down from bridges, worked on dog squads, gone undercover in pursuit of serious criminals and worked the historical unsolved homicide unit. And behind each assignment, there’s a story, a joke or a revealing insight into the realities of police work. In Vancouver Blue, Cope shares pearls of wisdom and anecdotes inspired by his years on the force, describing some of the most outlandish costumes for undercover drug purchases, many different ways to total a brand-new motorbike, and the precise ratio of competent officers to idiots in any given squad. He also sheds light on the behind-the-scenes life of VPD officers and their off-duty antics. Cope also provides detailed accounts of some of his most fascinating cases, like the sensational Centrefold Murder and the infamous killing of the Stanley Park flamingoes. For those looking for even more insight into the mind of a detective, Cope has created a cipher with a theme inspired by the book, offering a reward of five Canadian Silver Maple Leaf coins to the first person to break the code.
Disaster in Paradise
On the morning of July 12, 2012, Mandy Bath left her picturesque home and garden in Johnson’s Landing, BC, for a day trip to nearby Kaslo. She had no forewarning of what the placid summer day would bring. But just over an hour later, a massive landslide tore into the community, destroying her home and killing four people: Valentine Webber, aged 60, and his daughters, 22-year-old Diana and 17-year-old Rachel, along with 64-year-old Petra Frehse. Returning the next day to search for her cat, Mandy narrowly avoided being buried beneath a second slide. Disaster in Paradise tells a story of survival, grief and recovery, as Mandy and the other residents of Johnson’s Landing gradually rebuild their community in the wake of the tragedy. Mandy eloquently details her own experience of trauma and healing, and weaves in the stories of other residents and volunteers in the rescue and recovery missions as the community bands together to collectively mourn their loss. The story is grounded by the author’s intimate knowledge of the Johnson’s Landing community, but also reflects the greater themes of loss, perseverance and bravery that arise in natural disasters everywhere.
Policing the Fringe
From the 1960s through the 1980s, RCMP Sergeant Charlie Scheideman spent much of his time patrolling the «dark corners of the Interior of British Columbia» where «the citizens would meet the modern criteria for redneck: if their veranda collapsed it would kill more than four dogs; they think 'harrass' is two words, and so on.» Such places weren't much fun to police but they were full of characters, many of whom make their way into Charlie's entertaining book, Policing the Fringe. We meet Walter and Wilbur, two Hixon hillbillies who went on a bender and decided it would be fun to stagger out onto the Cariboo Highway with a rifle and hold up passing cars, which worked well enough until they held up a motorhome from Alaska that turned out to be better armed than they were. We meet Petre, the hard-working hermit who was cheated out of his savings by three slick-talking mining promoters and waited to take his revenge—with an axe.With wry humour and a policeman's eye for relevant detail, Scheideman recounts events that range from the ridiculous to the horrific to the tragic. Once he stopped a car in the Fraser Canyon driven by three normally responsible American fishermen, who on this occasion were careening wildly from one guard rail to another. Their defence? They had failed to allow for the added kick of Canadian beer. His most searing memory was of waiting for the embers of a burned house to cool enough so he could retrieve the bodies of two small victims while in a nearby house, party-goers kept right on partying. One of the most revealing accounts ever written about policing in small-town Canada, this book bristles with unforgettable stories about the author's 27 years working on the RCMP's front lines. It will give readers new respect for the men and women who patrol Canada’s backroads—both because of the extremely taxing work they do and the good spirit with which they do it.
Heart & Soil
Writer, environmentalist and gardener Des Kennedy has gathered together his best, most outrageous and most contemplative articles and essays of the past decade into a book full of playful wit and insight.Kennedy recounts one newspaper’s April Fool’s Day prank that had men across the UK buying heather in order to propagate a poor-man’s Viagra, expands on his trials creating a sod sloped roof, admits he once wanted to write a stump-puller’s guide to the universe and contemplates the dark beauty—and rat feces smell—of a voodoo lily. The articles are tied together with Kennedy’s assertion that gardening is a revolutionary act of maintaining harmony with nature that intertwines the human spirit with the natural world.A book that will appeal to any who admire earth’s raw beauty, Heart and Soil is a collection from a respected Canadian who has dedicated his life to protecting and respecting the environment, cultivating his passion with a healthy sprinkling of humour.
Washita
Following the success of his award-winning memoir There is a Season (2004) and his bestselling novel Red Dog, Red Dog (2008), Patrick Lane felt his celebrated poetry career might be at an end and published his Collected Poems in 2011. But the process of revisiting his collected poetic works rekindled his first love and launched him on a new phase of poetry composition that resulted in this impressive and distinctive new book.Honest and self-aware, Washita evokes some of the most inexpressible experiences a human being can undergo: the loss of a parent, the breakdown of a body, the perversion of nature, the acquiring of wisdom. In «Hard-Rock,» a boy begins to understand that his father will die: «His lungs created elaborate cathedrals from quartz dust, / a crystal symphony playing Mahler under water.» In «Submission,» a speaker struggles with losing his sight, capable only of expressing himself through metaphor. But amid this darkness sparks an awareness of the artistry of the world: «Vete a la mierda, hijo de puta! / Hate is beautiful in Spanish.»As might be expected from a seventy-five-year-old poet, Washita is reflective in tone, exploring all facets of the poet’s own life as well as those others his has touched. Introducing a new style employing medium-length, end-stopped lines, terse diction and concrete imagery, Washita has a solidity and mastery that marks it as a new highlight in Lane’s distinguished career.
Albrecht Dürer and me
David Zieroth's Albrecht Dürer and me, an autobiographical travelogue spanning the author’s journeys through central Europe, explores the transformative effect of dislocation. Inspired by and responding to art and music, history and war, architecture and place, this collection unearths knowledge that can only be realized by leaving home.Throughout the book, the observant eye of a visitor witnesses the layering of history and the contemporary, and contemplates the juxtaposition of the practical aspects of travelling («noise») with emotional and spiritual evolution («‘Nude self-portrait’»). Responding to greats such as W.H. Auden, James Joyce and Albrecht Dürer, the speaker expresses how viewing foreign artwork or hearing unfamiliar music can spark a new awareness, not only of international culture, but of the expression of life and the human condition.The poems temper the high with the low, reflecting the many dualities of wanderlust. Stately homes are contrasted with war-scarred architecture, and sleepless nights, crowded trains and missed connections offset literature and symphony. «Berlin Album» reflects on the stains the past has left on modern-day Germany: «church bells at 6:00 p.m. / from spires on Borsigstrasse / pass an iron sound through rippled windows / so my body vibrates, and remembers / bullet holes in stone walls along the Spree.» «on first hearing Mahler’s Fifth» echoes that musical composition to mirror and evoke life’s song and «weeds grew while I was away» describes the shock of returning home with the expectation of stasis only to find that things have changed.Attentive, humble and expertly crafted, Albrecht Dürer and me is a travel diary rife with evocative image, sensory detail and eloquent reflection, narrated with an honest, mature voice.