You don’t need to scroll vaporwave or Frutiger Aero memes on Instagram to get that retro feeling! We’ve got you covered with some choice picks from our backlist, all in stock on our website! Pack these books and a Walkman for your next summer beach trip, and relax like it’s 1997 (or 2010)!
The songs in this collection are odes, addresses and apostrophes, to household fixtures, human emotions, shades of light, seasons, stretches of land, departures, sounds and solitude. Working with the most associative details, Zwicky has whittled encounters with her subjects down to their integral and resounding notes. A single light shining from a house in the winter is the bathtub’s call to its tired owner. Dew on the grass is the long note of calm in a hurried departure. Every presence contains absence, every pause embodies continuation, every house has “one chink open to the wind.” These are songs to the negative space around solid shapes. Wild grape, nuthatch and August are in part defined by the time around their existence. Bath, laundry and grate have a life both for and beyond their owner, and it is upon these tensions that the poet’s fondness develops.
Whylah Falls is a mythic community in the heart of Black Nova Scotia, populated with larger-than-life characters: lovers, murderers and muses. George Elliott Clarke’s sensuous narrative sings with the rhythm of blues and gospel, spinning a complex, absorbing tale of unrequited love, earthy wisdom, devouring corruption and racial injustice. This is a rare and beautiful collection of poetry, as much in demand twenty years after its publication as it was when first released. It has inspired an acclaimed CBC-Radio drama, a popular stage play, and a feature film, One Heart Broken Into Song.
A poetic travelogue, Gillian Sze’s Peeling Rambutan meditates upon the rifts between immigrant parents and their Canadian-born children and the struggle of overlapping values which sometimes arises when we view the complexity of our heritage through the lens of the present. Rooted in Sze’s first experience of Asia, these poems mingle the familiar spaces of her childhood home in Winnipeg with impressions of the distant villages of her parents’ origins. The result is a complex exploration of the relationship between identity, place, and history. Landscape and language prove unstable, inhabited by ghosts and other echoes of passing time which leave indelible impressions on the poet: A market in Hong Kong seems reminiscent of Montreal; the spirit of her great-grandmother shows up on a commercial street in China, then in Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver. The mundane—a bite of fruit, a boy selling raisins, the floured hands of a baker—takes on a contemplative cast. In such a world, a traveller is never wholly certain whether she is discovering an unexplored world or descending into memory, but Sze’s lyrically-driven poems navigate confidently, mapping new terrain while remaining sensitive to the claims of the past.
The ocean has never had a biographer quite like Sue Goyette. Living in the port city of Halifax, Goyette’s days are bounded by the substantial fact of the North Atlantic, both by its physical presence and by its metaphoric connotations. And like many of life’s overwhelming facts, our awareness of the ocean’s importance and impact waxes and wanes as the ocean sometimes lurks in the background, sometimes imposes itself upon us, yet always, steadily, is. This collection is not your standard “Oh, Ocean!” versifying. Goyette plunges in and swims well outside the buoys to craft a sort of alternate, apocryphal account of our relationship with the ocean. In these linked poems, Goyette’s offbeat cast of archetypes (fog merchants, lifeguards, poets, carpenters, mothers, daughters) pronounce absurd explanations to both common and uncommon occurrences in a tone that is part cautionary tale, part creation myth and part urban legend: how fog was responsible for marriages, and for in-laws; why running, suburbs and chairs were invented; what happens when you smoke the exhaust from a pride of children pretending to be lions. All the while, the anthropomorphized ocean nibbles hungrily at the shoreline of our understanding, refusing to explain its moods and winning every staring contest. “I wrote these poems,” comments Goyette, “because I know very little about the ocean and yet rely on it like a mirror, a compass.” In Ocean, Goyette demonstrates how a spirited, playful and richly mythopoetic engagement with the world can actually strengthen our grasp on its bigger truths.
The stories in The Watermelon Social are as compassionate as they are pointed. When winter leeches into summer and your neighbourhood just doesn’t look like the ones on TV, it’s hard to hit your stride. McCluskey chalks the line that separates comfort and resentment, and locates that core of clichéd dreams and paralyzing insecurity in all of us. With deadpan humour, imaginative comparisons and the odd cosmic leap, The Watermelon Social gambols through the April slush.
This post first appeared in our Substack newsletter.
