Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete

A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-clas...

Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism

How British Romantic writers reimagined sexual enjoyment and invented psychoanalysis in the process.

Rush of Wingspan

Along woodland trails and on the shores of essential bodies of water, these intimate poems by Eleonore Schönmaier reveal beauty and loss in equal measure.

Milton's Leveller God

David Williams advances a progressive and democratic interpretation of Milton's epics to show they are more relevant than ever. He traces echoes between Milton's texts and Leveller writings that advocated for popular rule, extended suffrage, and religious tolerance, arguing that Milton's God is s...

The Danger Model

Evocative poems about art, illness, identity, and the paradoxes of authenticity.

Bitter in the Belly

Bitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. In his most personal book, Vincent moves from stark innocence through awful events and losses, to something like acceptance ...

Fresh Strange Music

A new approach to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art through the music of her poetry and its social and political implications.

A Lovely Gutting

Salvaging beauty from grief's wreckage in the towns and wilds of post-cod Newfoundland.

Reimagining Illness

Reimagining Illness analyzes works by eighteenth-century British women writers alongside contemporaneous medical texts to argue that the circulation of medical knowledge in this period was not determined only by scientific rationalism and male expertise but rather shaped in part by women’s accoun...

New Songs for Orpheus

In New Songs for Orpheus, John Reibetanz updates Ovid’s poetry. His words showed him to be a person of deep empathy for natural, animal, and human worlds, and Reibetanz posits that Ovid would be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them in the past two thousand years.

Bridestones

The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.

Earth Words

In Earth Words, John Reibetanz breaks bread with three earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles, moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through the nineteenth century of Henry Thor...

Unbound

Inspired by mystical traditions, birdwatching, tree planting, ethics, neuropsychology, and quantum physics, Gabrielle McIntire's poems draw us in with their passionate attention to what it means to be human in a still-wondrous natural environment. Unbound stirs us to re-evaluate our place amidst ...

Ancestral Recall

A comparative modernist study of the connections between Irish and Japanese literature, opening up uncharted avenues of cross-cultural exchange.

Devouring Time

Exploring the way filmmakers who adapt Shakespeare’s plays are fuelled by nostalgia.

Rail

Lyrical, meditative poems that span time and continents with insight and musicality.

The Birth of New Criticism

A groundbreaking account of the origins of the twentieth century's most influential method for studying poetry.

The Blue Mountains and Other Gaelic Stories from Cape Breton

John Shaw has been documenting Cape Breton's Gaelic traditions since the 1960s. In The Blue Mountains and Other Gaelic Stories from Cape Breton he presents thirty tales recorded between 1964 and 1989. The collection includes popular tales such as The Dragon Slayer, hero-tales of Fionn Mac Cumhail...

Nuclear Family

Jean Van Loon’s father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada’s Cold War intelligence service. Rooted in memory and history, Loon carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and th...

A House in Memory

A collection of unpublished poems by a distinguished poet and novelist.

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

In Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dyst...

The Winter Count

Challenging the "official story" about the role of First Nations in the 1885 Rebellion and the medical commission that sealed Louis Riel’s fate.

Wavelengths of Your Song

Intuitive environmentalism from the Canadian North is carried forth into creative global adventuring.

Wet Apples, White Blood

In Wet Apples, White Blood, nursing, as a constant creative act dependent on the baby's demand, is a trope for the creative process and for questions of biology, psychology, and spirituality.

Some Dance

Some Dance is a meditation on stories, the intersection of stories, of things made up, of things imagined, and of things perhaps lived.

Archibald Lampman

How Archibald Lampman articulated the Canadian response to nature and introduced radical politics into the nation's literary salon.

Beyond Intimacy

Beyond Intimacy explores the relationship between art and justice through an analysis of works by three Mexican poets: Abigael Bohórquez, Myriam Moscona, and Gloria Gervitz. Establishing lyricism as an invitation to social dialogue, the book recognizes poetry’s potential for justice through the r...

Of Lost Cities

In Of Lost Cities Nizar Hermes explores the poetic representation of the Maghribī city and sheds light on the Maghribī manipulation of the classical Arabic (sub)genres of city elegy and nostalgia for one’s homeland.

On High

Poems on the hunt for something to believe in.

Batten Down

These are poems of Dorothy and the Witch in Oz, of cinematic mythologies and fractured fairy tales, inviting us to witness acts of grim revenge and reconsider the folkloric forests lodged in our collective minds.

Mosaic Orpheus

Maturing reflections on a changing world.

Without Beginning or End

Without Beginning or End is Jacqueline Bourque’s final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Deeply inspired by her Acadian upbringing along the ocean shores of New Brunswick, these are poems populated by aerialists, painters, and the spirit of Charle...

To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss

A powerful reappraisal of radicalism in the life and work of William Morris.

Ripping down half the trees

One out of every twenty students in the adult education classes Evan J teaches in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, dies every year; the surviving students are often afflicted by severe racism, poverty, addictions, and violence. Ripping down half the trees engages with these struggles, offering a catalogue...

Rags of Night in Our Mouths

Rags of Night in Our Mouths is an exploration of human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability, and a vibrant hymn to the sustaining forces of wilderness, creativity, and compassion. Margo Wheaton constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty as ...

aboutness

Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, aboutness is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, ...

Empties

The varied meanings of empties coalesce in vivid and timely poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.”

Small Theatres

Marshalling minimalist and objectivist techniques and a relentless attention to the fissures running through every moment of our lives, Small Theatres gives shape to a reality constantly on the verge of collapse.

A Different Wolf

A critical, poetic celebration of Alfred Hitchcock's life and work.

Canada to Ireland

Canada to Ireland explores the poetry and prose of twelve Irish writers and nationalists in Canada between 1788 and 1900. The book demonstrates that Canadian cultural nationalism left its mark on both countries. Contemporary decolonization movements in Canada and cultural exchanges between Irelan...

Take the Compass

A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey – through cities and their outskirts, to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into childhood, and into our perilous collective futu...

David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel

An engaging study of one of the most popular contemporary British novelists.

The Night Chorus

Poems that give voice and agency to marginal figures in rural places and cityscapes.

Psychedelic Prophets

Letters between the men who coined the term "psychedelic" and opened doors to a different way of thinking about human consciousness.

Ganymede's Dog

A collection of prose poems that mingles tales from the classical past with contemporary sexuality and timeless dogs.

movingparts

In Edward Carson’s provocative new work, the poetic moving parts of movingparts confront and breathe new life into what’s true and what’s not in Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Crow, as well as the shifting, often fragmentary ground between what’s said and what’s not about identity and intimacy in ...

Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature

A comprehensive and nuanced analysis of how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English Renaissance literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.

The Complete Poems of George Whalley

The poems of a Canadian modernist best known for his investigations into poetic process.

Short Histories of Light

Vivid, haunting, and rhythmical, these poems illuminate the struggles of mental illness and uncover the sinister side of religion.

SCAR/CITY

SCAR/CITY steps outside binary conversations and poetically interrogates a system that results in depravity and scarcity leaving us homeless literally and metaphorically. These poems walk streets and take snapshots of the impact financialization of our homes has on our sense of community and belo...

Palilalia

Don't you know that mine too was the ventriloquist's thrown voice, and that what I spoke was a stirred echo?

North American Gaels

A groundbreaking exploration of the literature and folklore of North America's Irish and Scottish Gaelic-speaking diaspora since the eighteenth century. North American Gaels shines new light on the ways Irish and Scottish Gaels have left an enduring mark through speech, story, and song.

Around 1945

How novels expanded human and legal rights in the age of the atomic bomb.

Water Quality

In lush and vivid poems, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool that simmers through a family’s veins, wate...

The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields

Carol Shields received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. Yet she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. This collection includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging...

Cast from Bells

Subtle and surprising poems connecting the use of bells in wartime with shifts in the nature of affection.

Murmuration

In a photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation and, for perhaps a singular moment, assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-chang...

Blindfold

Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce's words, "For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them." Blindfold investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is...

Trio

One woman. Two lovers. It's a complicated dance.

whereabouts

In this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereabouts powerfully charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the po...

Tablature

Dazzling poems about landscape, music, and the course of love that go straight to the heart.

Vlarf

In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and ...

Dreamcraft

Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries. Moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from “the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang” to “the push of lawn grass / under foot,” Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his...

Check

Poems about confirmation bias: expect it to be true, it's true.

act normal

These poems are inquisitive, desiring to evade the grasp of the normative, as endured by those institutionalized by, and through, the concept of normalcy. act normal invites readers to re-orient from the normative task of assuming the safety of consensual interpretation, while risking, cherishing...

Orchid Heart Elegies

What happens when someone we loves dies? Orchid Heart Elegies explores the fragmentation of loss. In luminous poems that echo the Duino Elegies, Zoe Landale – like an edgy, modern-day Rilke – takes the reader to a place of amazement and explores the fragmentation of loss.

hook

Poems based on witnessed and lived experience that bridge literary and activist worlds.

Grotesque Tenderness

Resonant poems that find beauty in intimate failures and regrets.

Dust Blown Side of the Journey

Global migrations and music create a symphonic journey where nature ignites wildfires and love fully lived.

The swailing

Firmly rooted in frostbitten, fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness.

Race Riots

From Black Mischief to The Buddha of Suburbia, twentieth-century British fiction is rife with racial humour. Challenging the common reluctance to take such comedy seriously, Michael Ross shows how humour directed at ethnic "others" exposes deep-seated national attitudes. Race Riots explores the d...

D.H. Lawrence and Attachment

Using concepts from attachment theory, D.H. Lawrence and Attachment presents innovative readings of Lawrence’s fiction. Ronald Granofsky teases out hidden patterns in Lawrence’s work, deepening our understanding of his fictional characters and revealing new significance to key thematic concerns l...

Side Effects May Include Strangers

Poetry that explores the beauty of themes often considered undesirable - pain, disability, and the aging body.

Look Here Look Away Look Again

To look is to fill our thoughts and consciousness with an experience of the other.

The Selected Essays of Sean O'Faolain

The first collection of essays by one of the most important public intellectuals in Ireland.

twofold

The form of the diptych shapes language and meaning, symmetry and difference. Edward Carson’s twofold delivers a liminal gathering of short diptych poems exploring themes of love, relationships, myth, art, language, math, physics, geometry, and artificial intelligence, framed within Ovidian and H...

On Wings of Moonlight

Elliot R. Wolfson is the author of several critical books on medieval Jewish mysticism. On Wings of Moonlight focuses on the poetic nature of Wolfson's works through an exploration of his poems, many of which appear in Pathwings: Philosophic and Poetic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time and ...

The World as Event

Since the death of Dylan Thomas in 1953, British poetry has been influenced largely by two contrasting poets -- Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes -- each attracting partisan admirers and imitators and each, by this time, granted deserved prominence in the mainstream of English poetic tradition.

Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists

Using a wide range of scholarly evidence to support his argument that most poets of the first Canadian Modernist generation were strongly influenced by the ideas and practice of literary Aestheticism, Brian Trehearne provides new readings of Canadian poets such as Robert Finch, John Glassco, W.W....

As Though Life Mattered

In Montreal in the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of radical young writers Leo Kennedy, Frank Scott, A.M. Klein, and A.J.M. Smith transformed Canadian poetry with enthusiasm, talent, and the creation of a modern alternative press.

Stranger Gods

In Stranger Gods Roger Clark offers an ambitious and wide-ranging study of Salman Rushdie's seven published novels, with a special focus on his earliest, Grimus, and his most powerful and provocative, Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses. Clark shows how Rushdie employs cosmology, m...

Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics

Elizabeth Sauer brings a new perspective to Milton scholarship through her examination of the relative status and authority of the multiple narrative voices in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. She argues that Milton's epics accommodate a variety of interpretive voices, episodes, and dramatic ...

The Polliticke Courtier

Michael Dixon applies rhetorical theory to The Faerie Queene, highlighting the importance of rhetoric and locating the inventio, or organizing principle, of Spenser's epic narrative in the conception of justice. He demonstrates how Spenser adapts classical rhetoric to the poetics of romance-epic ...

The Mystic Leeway

Who is Frances Gregg? In her youth she was a poet in her own right, a friend of Ezra Pound, and an intimate of Hilda Doolittle and John Cowper Powys. In our literary history, particularly the history of Modernism, she has been a mysterious presence. Now, with this publication for the first time o...

Particles

"There's a gap between where / an electron is and where it might be / and that's the only real work-place. / You occupy that office of possibility." Where are you in that space between the electron and the galaxy, and how do you find yourself there? Particles asks this question and answers it by ...

Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's Clarissa

Gordon Fulton provides a fascinating new study of styles in Samuel Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa, connecting the style the characters deploy in their speech and letters with their positions in society. Fulton argues that the novel is a critical examination of the relationship between languag...

We All Begin in a Little Magazine

When Arc began publishing in 1978, it had one aim: to publish the best work by Canada's new and established poets. Celebrating Arc's first two decades, We All Begin in a Little Magazine testifies to how fully the editors realized their aspirations. It provides a rich cross section of Canada's poe...

Jewish Presences in English Literature

In a collection of insightful critical essays, Derek Cohen, Deborah Heller, and the contributing authors explore the different ways in which writers of English literature have amplified, varied, or denied this archetypical perception.

The Thin Smoke of the Heart

It is that sort of morning for the heart; the living are giving the dead an honest test. A man has walked out to be alone with the earth. A man of his age, he equates time with grief most days, but now he has decided to wait. In the silence, where do his raised eyes fit? --from Vow

Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse

Research concerning Joseph Brodsky has emphasized two aspects of his work - his poetry and philosophy as an exile from the Soviet Union. The resulting scholarship has presented him as a fundamentally dissident author with little or no positive connection to the social and literary environments in...

The History of Emily Montague

Frequently called the first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague, presents subversive views on traditional subjects like love and marriage and introduces such unique Canadian themes as the relationships between the Québecois and their British con

What Really Matters

Home resonates in this collection. Heart longs for the Prince Edward Island birthplace left behind, memory building like early frost on fresh laundry. But there is another sense of home for this poet of the Irish diaspora, deep down in legacies of poetry and family lore, bred-in-the-bone, read in...

A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder

With its curious mixture of adventure, natural history and satire this early Canadian novel has become a landmark work of fantasy and science fiction.

The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar

The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar is a utopian novel in two parts. In this scholarly edition, G.E. Bentley, Jr, places George Cumberland's late eighteenth-century work among the earliest historical novels in English and identifies it as a rare example of the "Romantic novel." He shows that whi...

Honest Sins

Originally cruel, manipulative, and self-serving, during the eighteenth century the Restoration rake evolved into a more cheerful sinner: the good-natured libertine. While Tom Jones was Henry Fielding's most complete embodiment of this new ideal, Tiffany Potter shows that the revised Georgian lib...

The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture

Romantic Aversions

Romanticism is often regarded as a turning point in literary history, the time when writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced the common legacy of poets and sought to create a new literature. Yet despite their emphasis on originality, genius, and spontaneity, the first-generation Romanti...

Germany as Model and Monster

In Germany as Model and Monster Gisela Argyle details allusions in English novels to German social, cultural, and political life. Such allusions serve as criticism of English life and of English conventions of fiction. Beginning her study with Thomas Carlyle's "Germanizing" efforts in the 1830s a...

Before We Had Words

Words across a Ouija Board: Memory is the mother of the Muses, said the Greeks. What we write are shadows of recollections, fictions growing out of other fictions. But now these words grow out of memory failing, as where and when blanch slowly to perhaps. The two who sheltered from the sudden dow...

In Search of Paradise

In Search of Paradise is the story of an Italian family which, having lived for generations in an isolated mountain town in Abruzzi, Italy, is forced by World War II and economic hardship to pull up roots and re-establish in Canada. Presented as a series