This spring's selection of poetry.
By Bert Almon
Spring 2015
In Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination, Jan Beveridge explores the stories, characters, settings, and themes that have preceded and often inspired the tales we know today.
By Mélanie Grondin
Enter Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide, Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier’s masterful investigation into the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing. Originally published in French in 2013, this fascinating, carefully constructed volume has been translated with precision and grace by Debbie Blythe in time for April’s centennial.
By Sarah Woolf
There is no shortage of writing on the events surrounding the conquest of Canada by the British Empire during the Seven Years’ War. Roch Carrier’s Montcalm and Wolfe: Two Men Who Forever Changed the Course of Canadian History, originally published in French, is a recent contribution to the genre, focusing on the lives of the two military leaders whose armies clashed during the siege of Quebec City in 1759.
By Joël Pedneault
Women, as Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America describes, have been practising architecture for decades. If women still struggle in “a profession that traditionally functioned more like a gentlemen’s club,” one can only imagine what it was like in the late 1800s – the period in which this story unfolds.
By Branka Petrovic
For its complexity, rigour, and insight, Brian Massumi’s work tends to engender sheepish admiration from grad students and scholars alike. His name is ubiquitous in several branches of the academy – among them philosophy, communication studies, and affect theory. Although his influence within the humanities runs deep, he’s not read with anything near the same enthusiasm outside. His work is dense, self-referential, and erudite; his most recent book, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, is no exception.
By Liam Mayes
Like a magic wand, Dubé’s poetic pen mesmerizes with sumptuous metaphors while beauty mingles seductively with recklessness and wreckage. Dubé’s sixth book, an addition to his already noteworthy contributions to gay literature, serves up stories that are often surreal, sometimes supernatural, and never static.
By Kimberly Bourgeois
ublished in French as Pourquoi Bologne, Alain Farah’s book, impeccably translated by Lazer Lederhendler, reconstructs a mental breakdown in short disconnected chapters that shift topic and time period, occasionally descending into hallucinatory paranoiac episodes.
By Rob Sherren
Marianne Ackerman, Montreal novelist (Jump, Matters of Hart, and Piers’ Desire), journalist, and playwright, now moves into satire with the novella “Holy Fools,” the first part of Holy Fools + 2 Stories.
By Timothy Niedermann
Author Michael Blair weaves a tale of duplicity that would do a professional con artist proud.
By Jim Napier
The third English-language instalment of Shigeru Mizuki’s gargantuan manga history of Japan’s Showa era (the period from 1926 to 1989, defined by the reign of Emperor Hirohito) is the best yet. This sprawling series gradually deepens its gripping narrative as new layers and perspectives are added to a story that is relatively unknown to most Westerners.
By Frederik Byrn Køhlert
For a woman who has devoted the last forty years to discussing national politics on air and in print, Hébert seems surprisingly dispassionate. The Morning After, her fascinating new book about the 1995 Quebec referendum, contains not a whisper of her own political views.
By Claire Holden Rothman