Coach House Books

From accomplished writer Ken Sparling comes a spare verse novel about a girl and a boy and the life they're writing together. But the girl wants a story and the boy wants a poem, and the furniture in the house is stuck in the middle. Meditative and magical, a book as complicated as the ways we love, This Poem Is a House is, in the end, about a girl's story sheltering a boy's poem, the way a house shelters the lives of the people who live in it.

Ken Sparling has written six novels, including Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (Knopf, 1996), commissioned by Gordon Lish. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

In tongues alternately vulnerable, defiant, resigned, and hopeful, The Inquisition Yours speaks to the atrocities of our time – war, environmental destruction, terrorism, cancer, and the erosion of personal rights – fashioning a tenuous bridge between the political and the personal.

Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates, and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender, and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Jenny Sampririsi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end.

Jenny Sampirisi is the managing editor of BookThug and co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing. She is the author of the novel is/was.

Invited to a quiet Swiss château by the enigmatic Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann, Anne begins to slowly write a novel in a language that is not hers, a language that makes meaning foreign and keeps her alert to the world and its fiery horizon.

Will the strange intoxication that takes hold of her and her characters – sculptor Charles; his sister Kim, about to leave for the far north; and Laure Ravin, a lawyer obsessed with the Patriot Act – allow her to break through the darkness of the world?

Fences in Breathing, first published and critically lauded in French as La capture du sombre, and now brought into English by the celebrated translator Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, is a disquieting, dexterous and defiant missive, another triumph by one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.

The Portuguese word saudade has no direct English translation. In its simplest sense, it describes a feeling of longing for something that is now gone, and may yet return, but in all likelihood can never be recaptured. In Saudade: The Possibilities of Place, traveller Anik See traces her attempts to reclaim this loss in a series of informal essays that take us from the salt plains of Wood Buffalo National Park and the mountains of British Columbia to the fishing ports of Sri Lanka and the rough roads of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Whether at a fishfry in the Northwest Territories, at the post-9/11 Canada-US border, on the ultimate road trip through Australia or at a summer carnival in Santiago de Cuba, See is on a continual quest for simplicity, interrogating the perceived distance between privilege and want. Quietly, insistently, these thoughtful essays ask what we might accomplish if we said no to entitlement; if, instead, we used our privilege to help us better understand human nature. By examining a multitude of landscapes, and by uncovering characters whose most important possession is the landscape around them, these essays examine what it takes for us to feel alive in a time when we can have everything, when our needs seem limitless. Throughout this psychogeographic diary, crowded with rituals of faith, death and renewal, See asks, again and again, 'How much will be enough?'

The twenty-one children of the Cardinal family have congregated to celebrate their father, who discovered the mine around which their now-desolate town was built. As the siblings run wild, we discover that Angèle, the only Cardinal with a penchant for happiness, is missing—although everyone pretends not to notice. Why the silence? What secrets does the mine hold?

Jocelyne Saucier is the author of several novels, including Il pleuvait des oiseaux, which won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie.

Rhonda Mullins was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for her translation of Saucier's And the Birds Rained Down.

We live in an "adultitarian" state, where the rules are based on very adult priorities and understandings of reality. Young people are disenfranchised and powerless; they understand they're subject to an authoritarian regime, whether they buy into it or not. But their unique perspectives also offer incredible potential for engagement and innovation.

Cultural planner and performance director Darren O'Donnell has been collaborating with children for years through his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex; their most well-known piece, Haircuts by Children (exactly what it sounds like) has been performed internationally. O'Donnell suggests that that working with children in the cultural industries in a manner that maintains a large space for their participation can be understood as a pilot for a vision of a very different role for young people in the world – one that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child considers a "new social contract."

Seen and Heard is a practical proposal for the inclusion of children in as many realms as possible, not only as an expression of their rights, but as a way to intervene in the world and to disrupt the stark economic inequalities perpetuated by the status quo. Deeply practical and wildly whimsical, Seen and Heard might actually make total sense.

Darren O'Donnell is an urban cultural planner, novelist, essayist, playwright, director, designer, performer, and the artistic director of the Mammalian Diving Reflex theater company. O'Donnell currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Drama

Penelope Douglas is an ex–forensic psychiatrist looking for a fresh start in a western boomtown grown three sizes too crazy. But then a television writer offs himself in her sleek bathroom and her oil-wife friend pronounces Penelope her baby's godmother. Will she be able to find heart in this wild and soulless landscape? Will she have to smudge her lipstick to "cowboy up"? Drama, a new play by the master of edgy dark humor, has all the answers.

Karen Hines is the author of Hello . . . Hello (A Romantic Satire) and The Pochsy Plays. A Second City alumna, Hines has appeared in numerous television and film productions and is the director of cult horror clowns Mump & Smoot.

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back.

A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in "search of a narrative, a narrative in search of an author." Brossard's first novel, and a key work in Canadian postmodernism. Turn of a Pang (Sold-out in French): Quebec's 1943 Conscription Crisis and the 1970 War Measures Act weave together to form the texture of a woman's life. French Kiss: a celebration of the energy of women and language in the face of the male authorities of Montreal politics and the physical authority of the printed (and bound) word.

The Blue Books collects these three long-out-of-print, groundbreaking Brossard titles, in their original Coach House Press English translations (A Book by Larry Shouldice, Turn of a Pang and French Kiss by the acclaimed Patricia Claxton). Don't be blue: these Brossard classics are back!

Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption.

Deeply inflected by the polyvocality and encoded rhetorics of the screen, Human Resources is perched at the limits of language, irreverently making and breaking meaning. Navigating the crumbling boundaries among page, screen, reader, engine, writer and database, Human Resources investigates wasting words and words as waste – and the creative potential of salvage.

It’s a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It’s 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way. Miss Mary Barfoot runs a school for secretaries with her young lover, Miss Rhoda Nunn. But when the Misses Madden – spinsters Virginia and Alice and beautiful young Monica – arrive, along with the attractive Dr. Everard Barfoot, things can never be the same.

Age of Arousal is a lavish, sexy, frenetic ensemble piece about the forbidden and gloriously liberated self – genre-busting, rule-bending, and ambitiously original.

Praise for Sean Dixon:

“Energetic. . . . Full of sound and fury.”—Kirkus Review

“Reminiscent of the kind of irrepressibly mischievous and literary novels that John Barth used to write. Call it populist poindexterism.”—Quill & Quire

It all started with a black rose and a rich young man. And a house with a creek running through it. And then there she was, Kip Flynn, standing beside her boyfriend's dead body and agreeing to take a large sum of money from the young man's father to keep quiet. As if she could have done anything else, being so scared and grief-stricken and maybe pregnant.

But that's not the end of it. You see, there's some kind of connection between Kip and this rich developer's son that keeps them tight in one another's orbit. So when Kip awakens from her grief, intent on revenge, they find themselves pursuing one another with a ferocity they can barely understand, one that spirals outward, with subway accidents and arson and drainpipes and backhoe wars, to envelop roommates, two guilty fathers, a window-cleaner or two, landlords, family secrets, a Vietnamese gangster, a stand-up bass player and an activist tour guide. And concluding in the subterranean heart of Toronto itself, which, like Kip, is torn between vengefulness and growth.

Sean Dixon is a novelist, playwright, and banjo player. He's the author of the novel The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal; two novels for young readers, The Feathered Cloak and The Winter Drey; and several plays, including those collected in AWOL: Three Plays for Theatre SKAM.

In Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake, they rage against despair, they speak against death and wrestle with the fateful spirits of Armageddon to loosen their choke-hold on humanity. Perhaps we won't figure it out and the horizon is already on fire, and our best love will never be more than an approximation of regret, but grass still grows between the cement blocks of the sidewalk to 'grin of the wild.'

Shortlisted for the 2012 Furro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2012 W.O. Mitchell Award for Best Calgary Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2012 Georges Bugnet Award for Alberta Fiction

Longlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Praise for Suzette Mayr:

“Venous Hum never fails to impress. Brash, macabre, and irreverent, it’s the kind of story you want to hear from a latter-day Scheherazade: so intoxicating you crave more.”—Vancouver Sun

A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him.

His parents are devastated. His secret boyfriend's girlfriend is relieved. His unicorn- and virginity-obsessed classmate, Faraday, is shattered; she wishes she had made friends with him that time she sold him an Iced Cappuccino at Tim Hortons. His English teacher, mid-divorce and mid-menopause, wishes she could remember the dead student's name, that she could care more about her students than her ex's new girlfriend. Who happens to be her cousin. The school guidance counselor, Walter, feels guilty—maybe he should have made an effort when the kid asked for help. Max, the principal, is worried about how it will reflect on the school. And Walter, who's secretly been in a relationship with Max for years, thinks that's a little callous. He's also tired of Max's obsession with some sci-fi show on TV. And Max wishes Walter would lose some weight and remember to use a coaster.

And then Max meets a drag queen named Crepe Suzette. And everything changes.

Suzette Mayr is the author of three previous novels: Moon Honey, The Widows, and Venous Hum. The Widows was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region, and has been translated into German. Moon Honey was shortlisted for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book. Suzette Mayr lives and works in Calgary, Alberta.

'Derry specializes in the most delightfully self-unaware characters. These are delicious portrayals of delusion.' – Uptown

'Derry's cohort of misanthropic, sexually repressed anti-heroes possesses a spooky ability to get under your skin.' – Prairie Fire

'Arrestingly witty.' – Vue Weekly

The return of a former lover saps a retired librarian’s faith in punctuation; a judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy; and the glories of market analysis prove as deceptive as human connection when Trevor Spates’ visit to a stripper goes awry. Meanwhile, poor Tim Pine must face his coprophobia in a most public and lamentable office misadventure.

Sentimental Exorcisms is a collection of tragicomic satire, latter-day-Victorian collisions of Nabokov and Proust. The men in these long short stories have grand designs and petty fears, or modest designs and grand fears. Desires, scapegoats, idylls, and obtrusive egos: the golden calves they can’t quite bear to kill. With their ramparts crumbling around them, each mounts an exuberant defence in a vacuum of self-absorption.

David Derry lives in Toronto. Having been seduced by farming, boat-building, and chauffeuring, and having flirted with academia, he more recently discovered the insular pleasure of drafting and amending contracts, where we find him today, working as a legal assistant. Sentimental Exorcisms is his first book.

The word "magyarázni" (pronounced MAUDE-yar-az-knee) means "to explain" in Hungarian, but translates literally as "make it Hungarian." This faux-Hungarian language primer, written in direct address, invites readers to experience what it's like to be "made Hungarian" by growing up with a parent who immigrated to North America as a refugee. In forty-five folk-art visual poems each paired with a written poem, Hajnoczky reveals the beauty and tension of first-generation cultural identity.

Helen Hajnoczky's first book of poetry was Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising (Snare, 2010). Her work has appeared in poetry anthologies, magazines, and chapbooks. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.

These four plays – White Mice, Who Shot Jacques Lacan?, Radio Rooster Says That's Bad and Over – written by Darren O'Donnell for his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, will challenge your politics, your ontology and everything you hold to be safe, stable and sacrosanct.

It’s 1606 and Europe is at war over God. At the behest of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, Venice’s four strongest men are charged with transporting a holy painting — Albrecht Dürer's The Brotherhood of the Rosary — across the Alps to Prague. In the small Alpine village of Pusterwald, they are set upon by Protestant zealots; their escape is attributed to a miracle.

The strongmen and their captain are summoned to an inquiry, led by the magistrate of Venice and the cardinal archbishop of Milan, to determine whether something divine did indeed occur. Each man's recounting adds a layer of colour to the canvas.

Through this vividly painted mystery, inspired by true events, Sean Dixon challenges the role of faith at the dawn of the Age of Reason.

Sean Dixon is a playwright, novelist, and actor. His plays are collected in AWOL: Three Plays for Theatre SKAM. Sean's novels are The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal and The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn.

When a mad dentist steals people's teeth, Miss Lamp comes to town.

Miss Lamp, a young and savvy lawyer, is holed up in Room 32 of the Peachland Hotel, waiting for a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and reviewing the case of Delano, the teeth-stealing dentist everybody loves to hate.

Meanwhile, the narrator takes us on a tour of Miss Lamp's memories, stories of her family, the adventures of those who knock on her door. There's Miss Lamp's mother, Abby, and her mean grandmother. There's the supremely lovable Paper Boy, abused by Delano and in love with a younger Miss Lamp. There's naive Room Service Boy, on the hunt for the perfect tomato soup to accompany Miss Lamp's grilled cheese; at the grocery store he meets the assertive Banana Tray Hair – could it be love?

These characters' stories weave together into a tangle - like moths to a light, they all kaleidoscope back to our Miss Lamp in her floral hotel room. She invites you in to smell the flowers, to walk in someone else's shoes, to eat a peach, to watch a magpie pick for gold.

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work 'so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.

Everything was about to change. In less than forty-eight hours guy'd be taking the stage in
Vancouver, owning an audience meant for some all-hype-no-talent young-money rapper, spitting next-level truths that'd have A&Rs scrapping for him coast to coast. He'd ink some paper and drop an album on the world it didn't even know it had been waiting for. All with game and swag to spare.

This was the edge, the almost there, and we knew it.

Chinksta rap is all the rage in small-town Alberta. And the king of Chinksta is King Kwong, high-schooler Run's older brother. Run isn't a fan of Kwong's music—or personality, really. But when Kwong goes missing the night before his crowning performance and his mom gets wounded in crossfire, Run finds himself, with his sidekick, Ali, in the middle of a violent battle between rival Chinese rap gangs, on the run from his crush's behemoth brother, and rethinking his feelings about his family and their history, his hatred of "rice-rap," and what it means to be Asian.

With imaginAsian and a flair for the rap lyric, Jon Chan Simpson mashes up the (graphicless) graphic novel and the second-generation-immigrant narrative to forge a bold new vision of what the novel can be.

Jonathan Chan Simpson grew up in Red Deer, Alberta, and lives in Toronto, Ontario. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto's MA creative writing program, and his work has been featured in Ricepaper magazine.

Touch to Affliction is a text of ruins: ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body, of the barbarism of the twentieth century. At once lament, accusation and elegy, this work articulates the crumbling of buildings, the evisceration of language, the inhumanity that arises from patrie.

Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Górecki, Simone Weil. In the end, this work considers what we are left with – indeed, what is left of us – as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.

Touch to Affliction is political but never polemical. It lives at the interstices of thought and the unnameable. It is a book for our times.

In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision—factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools—would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control.

Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites—from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors' own mobile devices—providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.

Tim Maly is a regular contributor to Wired, the Atlantic, and Urban Omnivore and is a 2014 fellow at Harvard University's Metalab.

Emily Horne is the designer and photographer of the webcomic A Softer World.

Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards)

If Lisa Robertson were to collide with David Lynch in a dark alley, the result would be a lot like The Politics of Knives. From shattered narratives to surrealistic fantasies, the poems in The Politics of Knives bridge that gap between the conventional and the experimental, combining the intellectual with the visceral. The complicity of language in violence, and the production of stories as both a defensive and offensive gesture, trouble the stability of these poetic sequences that dwell in the borderland between speaking and screaming.

She made hyphens and made me use them.
From her back she pulled brackets. Saying:
"These in your throat and these around your neck."

Jonathan Ball teaches English, film, and writing at two universities in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Ex Machina and Clockfire, which was shortlisted for a Manitoba Book Award.

Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today's cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo, and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know "you" is you? Can you wake him to move his arm? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers.

Ben Ladouceur is a writer originally from Ottawa, now based in Toronto. His work has been featured in The Best Canadian Poetry 2013, and he was awarded the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2013.

"Sina Queyras is a poet to read and reckon with."—Lambda Literary Review

MxT, or "Memory x Time," is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over in their hands, by invoking other poets, by appropriating science, by studying the history of elegy. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.

All the gods know is destinations. I have raised
A glass, my eye, your hook. Let's face it the world
Is a shrinking place and hungry: too much grief
To feed. I float away from you on hard

Covers. I step out on the stacked hours. Words
If they were soil how I would throw them back into the
Compost pile and wait for spring. Those "this is how
It is," speeches appear and later diamonds soft as bullets.

I went to the library looking to scaffold my thoughts.
Sure, now you say Lucretius. Intelligence is so often
Hindsight. Outside Holly Golightly's townhouse
There are taxis. The end of me, or you, is of no concern.

Frederick Seidel anoints me with the head of his penis.
It is soft as a chamois and spreads like egg across my scalp.

Sina Queyras is the author of the Lambda Award–winning Lemon Hound, Expressway (shortlisted for the Governor General's Award), and the novel Autobiography of Childhood (shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award). She often writes for the Poetry Foundation and runs the online journal Lemon Hound (Lemonhound.com).