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A

Alphabet Zen

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770231
Price: $16.95
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  Interview
Bing He

Rooted in Zen, Taoism and traditional Chinese poetry, influenced by modern Western movements such as Surrealism and Expressionism, this poetry collection reflects the author's transfigurations and redemptions of life's drabness with imagination, harmonizing oriental wisdom with metaphysical sensibilities.
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Another Way to Dance
Contemporary Asian Poetry from Canada and the United States

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661598
Price: $19.95
 
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Cyril Dabydeen

This anthology contains some of the most active and dynamic voices of contemporary poetry written by Americans and Canadians of Asian background. The poetry has a wide-ranging appeal reflecting place and time. Bold clear imagery and motifs depict a changing North American landscape of cultural and spiritual heterogeneity. Included are Canadians Joy Kogawa, Rienzi Crusz, Suniti Namjoshi, and Himani Bannerji, and Americans Arthur Sze, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Mura, Cathy Song.

 

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B
breathing for breadth

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770217 
Price: $16.95

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Salimah Valiani

The poems in this collection, in various sections, elaborate on the emotional experience of challenging and trying; explore the ways of accepting vulnerability, and drawing understanding from it; search for beauty in endurance; explore protest and resistance; and finally revolve around the idea of taking risk and learning and becoming through experiences larger than the self and beyond the personal.

 

“…a restlessness of spirit and mind . . . that shines through without succumbing to the usual romantic clichés.”

Ottawa Express

 

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C
Caribbean Blues and Love's Genealogy

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770507 
Price: $16.95

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Dannabang Kuwabong

In this new collection of poetry, Kuwabong shows a maturity of voice and a larger poetic vision to celebrate love—love for the people of the Caribbean and love between lovers.

In the first part of this collection the love that is celebrated emerges from a deep sense of historical reconnection with the poet’s African ancestors who were taken captive and sent to the Caribbean. But the focus is not on the brutality of their enslavement, though that is the guiding principle that informs the poetic voice. The poems perform a retrospective search for the roots that his African ancestors planted in the new world without romanticizing their struggles, defeats, and victories. Thus they recreate the continental African as a seeker of a poetic understanding of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean.

In the second part, Kuwabong takes the reader through a Prufrockian maze of relationships complicated by expectations and disappointments. The city of Hamilton, Ontario especially provides the social and physical landscapes that initiate the personae’s responses to love made tricky by the extreme challenges of the mundane. Though the poems silently scream with pain and disappointment, these moods are calmed by epiphanies of extreme tenderness that bind the relationships.

". . . these poems are rhythmical, full of life, meant to be read aloud."

Rabble.ca

 

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Consensual Genocide

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770293 
Price: $16.95

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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

This long-awaited first collection of poetry by queer Sri Lankan writer and spoken-word artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is full of the stories we’ve been waiting for. Tracing bloodlines from Sri Lanka’s civil wars to Brooklyn and Toronto streets, these fierce poems are full of heart and guts, telling raw truths about brown girl border crossings before and after 9/11, surviving abuse, mixed-race journeys and high femme rebellions. Consensual Genocide celebrates our survival and marks our rebel memories into history.

 

“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's words leap off the page–urgent, sumptuous writing that demands, and deserves, a wide audience. I'm listening.”
— Anna Camilleri, author of I Am a Red Dress,
editor Red Light and Brazen Femmes

 

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D
Dark Antonyms and Paradise
The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661680 
Price: $15.95

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Chelva Kanaganayakam

The poetry and prose of Rienzi Crusz are about many things—exile, identity, family, religion, politics, and racism—and this work is an attempt to demonstrate that the various facets are a result of a holistic vision that transcends narrow labels. Crusz is best known in Canada as a diasporic writer, committed to exploring the complexities of living between and among two worlds. This study goes beyond binary formulations to argue that while such markers are necessary, a full understanding of the poet's achievement requires that personal history, the political context of migration, poetic influences, and readership in Canada be taken into account. A carefully researched and definitive study, Dark Antonyms and Paradise offers an insightful reading of the work of a major Sri Lankan Canadian poet.

 

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G
Gabardine and Other Poems

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770149 
Price: $16.95

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Shyamal Bagchee

Written at locations as widely disparate as eastern India, northern Canada, western Bolivia, southern Ireland, and even the taxiway at Boston's Logan airport, these poems explore the broad reach of the English erotic idiom. These are poems about love—sometimes licit though often not—lust, and the language of desire. Not primarily concerned with displacement or diasporic experience, they nevertheless reveal a deracinate and dark-limbed Krishna sort of fellow—reminiscent of classical Sanskrit erotic poetry—flitting in and out of these pages.

 

"An unusual and sophisticated collection."
Dawn
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Gambolling with the Divine

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770118 
Price: $16.95

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Rienzi Crusz

In his tenth collection of poetry, Rienzi Crusz attempts to track and document his faltering human journey towards God and the Divine.  Reflecting a devotional tradition professionally Catholic as well as South Asian (bhakti), these poems are witness to a personal love of God and the frailty of the human loves.  Gambolling with the Divine is the Augustinian confessions retold with brilliantly vivid Sri Lankan and Canadian variations.

 

“Both an affirmation of life and a meditation on death, the collection embodies and enacts poetry as prayer, as hymn, as benediction.
   He has much in common with such poets as W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke and Irving Layton, embracing both the profane and the spiritual, the sexual and the sacred. Like William Blake, he recognizes that Everything that lives is Holy.
Gambolling with the Divine contains the doubts, thoughts and feelings of a poet at the height of his powers as he approaches death's harvest of white bones.
   As such, it's a love letter to the examined life, gracefully and eloquently confirming that Faith trumps the wounded soul.”

The Record
 

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H
Hemisphere of Love

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770125 
Price: $16.95

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Cyril Dabydeen

Hemisphere of Love reflects the author’s passion and honesty as he delves into the mystery of love and strives to bring order to human experience. In this collection a range of scenes and situations is carefully carved in words and couched in metaphor. Geographical and spiritual boundaries, shifting tonalities and moods carry the reader into Dabydeen’s complex universe.  Janus-faced, he continually looks forward and backward.

 

 “...skilled, crafted, layered, full of contrasts” —Books in Canada

 “A gifted Canadian poet.” —Toronto Star

 “Dabydeen's poetry has Stravinsky rhythms.”  —The Ottawa Citizen
 

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I
In a Boston Night

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770491 
Price: $16.95

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Sasenarine Persaud

From the very first piece in this collection, the title poem “In a Boston Night,” Sasenarine Persaud signals a return to the passionate and sensuous that informed much of his earlier work. Persaud, the poet as craftsman, is ever present in this collection, using a complex series of personas and “voices” moving back and forth in time and place. Boston, the focal point of this collection, is like a needle hole through which the poet deftly threads his reflections about places, events, and histories: a conflict between Anglo- and Franco-Canadians at a Brookline art exhibition; Georgetown and Mumbai; Tampa and Toronto; the “Boston Tea Party” as a symbol of resistance to American English, subtly underlined by the description of a Walcott reading in an overflowing university hall. This is a fine, multilayered collection of poems by an important and accomplished contemporary poet.
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Inheritance (Yerushe)

BILINGUAL POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770422 
Price: $29.95

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poetry by Peretz Markish

foreword by Elie Wiesel

translated by Mary Schulman

edited by Mary Schulman, Joan Braman, and David Weintraub

This collection brings together in English the work of one of the most gifted and remarkable Jewish poets of the Soviet Union, Peretz Markish. Suffused with a consciousness of suffering, homelessness, and inevitably, the Holocaust, these modernist poems are meditative, elegiac, and prophetic in tone, and touch on the themes of loss, loneliness, displacement, war, and the yearning for renewal. Inextricably bound up with Markish’s Eastern European Jewish identity, they are also intensely personal, modern, and universal.

This book includes both the English translation and the original Yiddish text.

"A spectacular example of Yiddish resilience."

— Jewish Book World

 

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M
Maples and the Stream
A Narrative Poem

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661819 
Price: $14.95

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Lien Chao

This long narrative poem in English and Chinese follows one woman's journey from China to Canada over four decades. In these pages the two languages sit side by side, mirroring each other, each telling a tale that alternates between confusion and despair and hopes and dreams. Lien Chao depicts the struggle of a generation in its persistent search for freedom and for free artistic expression.

 

"A fascinating and unique creation." David Helwig 

 

 

NOTE: Includes both the English and Mandarin texts

 

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The Matuschka Case

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770323 
Price: $16.95

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Fraser Sutherland

The poems in The Matuschka Case represent the core of Fraser Sutherland’s poetic preoccupations over several decades. They are enquiries into the nature of happiness, absent or present, deserved or undeserved. For Sutherland, happiness consists in the practice of art, and in often baffled attempts to understand the other. Rueful and sardonic, uncomfortable in his own white skin, he seeks the other in everything that is foreign and unfamiliar.

 

Those who think they know Sutherland's taste as a reviewer may wish to look more closely at these poems, which have something of the best of the jazzy, itinerant Beat in the earlier work and a surprisingly deft, if understated, cultural commentary in the latest.

—The Globe and Mail

 

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More than Skin Deep
Poetry in English and Chinese

BILINGUAL POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770187 
Price: $16.95

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Lien Chao

These poems, created both in English and Chinese, explore the experiences of Chinese and other Asian Canadians.

Using various poetic forms, lyric and narrative, Lien Chao presents us with experiences and reflections and confronts issues of identity, assimilation, and language. These issues occur in the very act of confronting the two very different languages—Chinese and English—with each other, so that that confrontation itself becomes a metaphor for adaptation and conflict of cultures in Canada.

NOTE: Includes both the English and Mandarin texts
 

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N
Night Artillery

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661901 
Price: $13.95
 
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Anurima Banerji

Passionate and subtly exotic, keenly aware of Persian mystical love concepts, and with a trained eye on Hindu mythology, these supple new poems explore the territories of love, the longings of the body, and the pains of loss and exile.

 


“... lyrics that are almost too posh, almost too sumptuous...hauntingly lovely.”
—Halifax Chronicle Herald

 

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No More Watno Dur

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661451 
Price: $11.95
 
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Sadhu Binning

Sadhu Binning's poetry gently provokes and evokes. He uses the tools of language, both Punjabi and English, to guide the reader through a private journey of public relevance. Rooted in a history of cultural and labour activism, this collection questions our notions of home, family and community. No More Watno Dur (Watno Dur means 'far away from the mother land') firmly establishes Binning as an essential poet who must be read in order to understand this continually unfolding experience of home and homeland in the Western world.

 

NOTE: Includes both the English and Punjabi texts

 

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P
Pappaji Wrote Poetry in a Language I Cannot Read

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661741 
Price: $13.95
 
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Rajinderpal S Pal

The poems in this book form a narrative whole that leaps between past and present, between childhood and adulthood, and between languages. Issues of cross-cultural politics and relationships are addressed, and loss across generations and migrations across continents. All of this is entwined with  the search for the poet-father and the attempt to come to terms with the past.

 

"These poems travel continents, move through emotional and political geographies of leaving and longing. From India to England to Canada, Rajinderpal S Pal searches for his poet father's legacy in language and body. Textured and sensuous, challenging in form and content, these poems invite us to hold them." —Roberta Rees

 

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Prairie Journey

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770170 
Price: $16.95
 
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Madeline Coopsammy

This collection is a sensory journey from a warm green equatorial island to the changing seasons of a Prairie landscape. These poems explore the effects of colonialism, ancestral memories, and immigration on the poet's journey from youth to maturity. The frantic push for first-world development, rapidly eroding the once-pristine landscape and simple way of life of a third-world island, and creating a new race of colonials, is passionately delineated. The book is sectioned as follows: Roots, Indian Sojourn, Prairie Seasons, and Autumnal Season.

 

"Poems which are well worth reading not only for their craft, but also for their honest content."

— Trinidad Express

 

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R
Red Lacquered Chopsticks

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770330 
Price: $16.95
 
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Betty Warrington-Kearsley

This first volume of poetry bridges the spaces between cultures. From detailed observation and personal experience, with honesty and clarity, these poems reflect upon the poet’s Asian and Western experiences. Ancient legends counterpoint modern observation; beauty and peace are offset by the raw reality of death and dying.
Erudite and referential in both cultures, these poems are also intelligent and accessible.

 

Full of verbal and visual felicities, this is an astonishing first collection
abounding with a gallery of familial and fabular figures.
A virtuoso debut!
Seymour Mayne, University of Ottawa

 

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River and Bridge

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661567 
Price: $11.95
 
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Meena Alexander

In this new collection we are privy to the full and variegated display of [Meena Alexander's] poetry.

 


“Meena Alexander is one of the finest Indian poets writing today.’’

Keki N. Daruwalla

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S
Shakti's Words
An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women's Poetry

POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661291 
Price: $12.95
 
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edited by Diane McGifford and Judith Kearns

Articulating a purely feminist consciousness; giving voice to Third World and immigrant concerns; decrying racism and bigotry; rebellious and subversive, sometimes simply lyrical or imagistic; invoking the real, magical, and mythical, old worlds and the new; analytical or synthetical; these poems reflect also a commitment to craft, the search for form, and individual style. They represent the new voices that are gradually changing the landscape of Canadian literature.

 

"Shakti's Words is a diverse collection, as personal as it is politicized."

Books in Canada

 

"This collection deserves a place in Canadian poetry courses across the country."

Canadian Literature

 

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Songs to a Moonstruck Lady
Women in Yiddish Poetry

BILINGUAL POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770262 
Price: $22.95 (Paperback)
 
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ISBN: 9781894770279
Price: $30.95 (Hardcover)
 
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Barnett Zumoff

In this volume, Barnett Zumoff has stepped into the breach by creating and presenting masterly translations of 85 Yiddish poems by the best of the women poets and 60 Yiddish poems about women by a broad range of the great male poets. Women play a major role in Yiddish poetry, both as brilliant creators and as beloved subjects of male poets: mothers, wives, daughters, lovers, and historical and legendary figures.

Readers previously unfamiliar with Yiddish literature will obtain a striking picture of a magnificent slice of world literature and will experience the emotional impact of great poetry. Those familiar with Yiddish literature will experience a revelation when they are exposed to the poetic creations of its women poets, whose work is far less well known that that of the male poets, but is equally brilliant.

This book includes both the English translation and the original Yiddish text.

“Songs to a Moonstruck Lady is a treasure. In Barnett Zumoff’s careful choices and supple translations voices long forgotten come startlingly alive once again, surprising and touching us. An invaluable collection.”
Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University

“Dr. Zumoff’s translation of love poetry in Yiddish has opened the door to humanism in Yiddish– especially because the poems are beautifully chosen and well translated.”
Dr. (Rabbi) Hertzberg, New York University
 

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W
Wanting in Arabic

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770002 
Price: $16.95
 
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Trish Salah

Wanting in Arabic
is a refusal of convenient silences, convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l’ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father’s language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood.


“Trish Salah's poetic sequence is not simply a narrative of gender change; it's a wandering, thoughtful text, one both fierce and tremulous.”

Erin Mouré

“...Salah’s writing bosoms up every damn dam in the literary waterway.”

—The Globe and Mail
 

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Wearing Glasses of Water

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770392
Price: $16.95
 
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Irene Marques

These evocative and complexly intriguing poems suggest a variety of modern issues. Combining the real with the imaginary, the logical with the intuitive, the mystical and the mythical, and both oral and written traditions, they bring together different geographical, temporal, and cultural spaces to explore spiritual alienation and the nature of being, and the power of language both to liberate and to oppress.
 

“‘Wearing glasses of water’ . . . refers to suffering and the very act of crying. This suffering comes across in different ways: the suffering of the poetic self, the loss of loved ones, the witnessing of exploitation of humans by humans, animals by humans . . .”  — from a statement by the author.
 
 
"Marques has a clear ability to turn a poem and make it her own."
ARC
 
"The essence of Marques's poetry is a peep into the compleximensions and psychological states of being, of creativeness and inventiveness with the Word, of themes and motifs of libidinal drives or instincts, of internal emotional conflicts where individual impulses and needs must be placed in ethical resolution with social or moral obligations."
African Journal of New Poetry
 
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Winter, the Unwelcome Visitor

POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770521 
Price: $16.95
 
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Shaista Justin

Winter, the unwelcome visitor
is a five-section poetic cycle amending the ordinary with the extraordinary. The work shows versatility in style and form and yet maintains poetic excellence: a careful balance of metaphor, imagery and thought. Always experimental, there is no one style that characterizes the book. From brief and academic, to wordy and effusive, the style shifts according to the subject. Unstintingly political, unforgivingly critical of commonly held ideas about the relationship of humans to the natural world and to each other, the relevance of this work to both a Canadian and an international audience is undeniable.

“Some of these poems are vivid evocations of South Africa’s Western Cape, and elegies of loss; others capture moments of longing and desire between lovers, as well as passages of bitterness.” —JM Coetzee
 
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