Products

Winner, 2023 Governor General's Literary Award
Winner, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

The Xanax Cowboy has a reputation like a rattlesnake. She might as well be a strike-anywhere match in a gasoline town. Her whiskey is mixed with vengeance like her mind is mixed with pills. The last doctor who told her she ain't nothin' is still spitting blood through a split lip.

Nine years in the making, award-winning poet Kevin Connolly’s new collection extends its author’s investigation of identity, authority, intention, and authenticity.

What is public poetry? In an age of tweets and trolls, what should it even try to be? Through revision, redaction, ventriloquism, homage, self-sabotage, and outright plunder, the poems in Connolly’s Xiphoid Process interrogate the alleged futility and alleged insight of mid-life. Are we who we are simply because we’d otherwise be nothing? Or are we (more hopefully) something parked, for a time, in time, trying to make something useful out of the experience? Walt Whitman, Tom Petty, Alec Baldwin, Doug Stanhope, Journey, Judd Nelson, Billy Ripken, Johnny Weissmuller, Don Felder, Lindsay Lohan, Shiprock, NM, the police blotter at Point Reyes Station, California, and the moons of Saturn are all poised to make their case in the poet’s latest deliberations.

This stunningly intimate collection of stories is an exquisite portrait of a Jewish community — the secular and religious families who inhabit it and the tensions that exist there — that illuminates the unexpected ways we remain connected during times of change.

When Uncle Isaac moves back from L.A. to help his sister, Elaine Levine, care for her suddenly motherless grandchildren, he finds himself embroiled in even more drama than he would like in their suburban neighbourhood. Meanwhile, a nanny miles from her own family in the Philippines, cares for a young boy who doesn’t fit in at school. A woman in mid-life contends with the task of cleaning out the house in which she grew up, while her teenage son struggles with why his dad moved out. And down the street, a mother and her two daughters prepare for a wedding and transitions they didn’t see coming.

Spanning fifteen years in the lives of a multi-generational family and their neighbours, this remarkable collection is an intimate portrait of a suburban Jewish community by a writer with a keen eye for detail, a gentle sense of humour, and an immense literary talent.