Books published by Biblioasis

Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Award for PoetryWinner of the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for PoetryIn My Shoes are Killing Me, poet Robyn Sarah reflects on the passing of time, the fleetingness of dreams, and the bittersweet pleasure of thinking on the "e;hazardous . . . treasurehouse"e; that is the past. Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collection from one of Canada's most well-regarded poets.Robyn Sarah is the author of nine previous collections. Ten of her poems have appeared on The Writer's Almanac, and her work has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005), and The Bedford Introduction to Literature (2001).

Sanger is a domestic Dante navigating the dark woods of mid-life in his third collection of lyrical poetry.

An classic ghost story by E.F. Benson is revived in this illustrated Christmas edition by inimitable cartoonist Seth.

Lyric poetry that is light without being frivolous, for people who are more punk than prog. This is poetry that doesn't try too hard to be important, instead revelling in its utter lack of importance and celebrating man's right to clown around - often his only defense against a cruelly stacked deck.

Spanning forty years and ten previously published collections, Wherever We Mean to Be is the first substantial selection of Robyn Sarah's poems since 1992. Chosen by the author, the 97 poems in this new volume highlight the versatility of a poet who moves easily between free verse, traditional forms, and prose poems. Familiar favorites are here, along with lesser-known poems that collectively round out a retrospective of the themes and concerns that have characterized this poet's work from the start.Warm, direct, and intimate, accessible even at their most enigmatic, seemingly effortless in their musicality, the poems are a meditation on the passage of time, transience, and mortality. Natural and seasonal cycles are a backdrop to human hopes and longings, to the mystery and grace to be found in ordinary moments, and the pleasures, sorrows, and puzzlements of being human in the world.

Seth's illustrated re-imagining of A.M. Burrage's ghostly masterpiece is a shocking Christmas treat.

Designed and illustrated by Seth, this reissue breathes new life into a work many consider Dickens' best ghost story.

"e;Powerful ... full of dark nostalgia."e;Nathan EnglanderThe LifeboatAll night in his lifeboat my father sangto keep the voices of the other menwho cried in the wreckage from reaching him,he sang what he knew of the requiem,of the hit parade and the bits of hymns,he sang until he would never sing again,scalding his raw throat with sea-wateruntil his ribs heaved, until the saltwept from his eyes on dry land,flecked at his lips in his squalling rages,streaked the sheets in his night sweatsas night after night the reassembled shipscattered its parts on the shore of his bed,and the lifeboat eased him out againto drown each night among singing men.Inspired by a shipwreck endured by her father during the Second World War, and by his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and eventual suicide, Inheritance is a powerful poetic debut by the winner of the 2013 Boston Review Fiction Contest and The Malahat Review Far Horizons Award.

The winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award explores the extremes of joy and sorrow in a formally diverse collection.

"e;I shall settle for the paradise of what I see this rectangle of twelve lines a window."e;

A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR 2012“Glover is a master of narrative structure.”—Wall Street JournalIn the tradition of E.M. Forster, John Gardner, and James Wood, Douglas Glover has produced a book on writing at once erudite, anecdotal, instructive, and amusing. Attack of the Copula Spiders represents the accumulated wisdom of a remarkable literary career: novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and mentor, Glover has for decades been asking the vital questions. How does the way we read influence the way we write? What do craft books fail to teach aspiring writers about theme, about plot and subplot, about constructing point of view? How can we maintain drama on the level of the sentence—and explain drama in the sentences of others? What is the relationship of form and art? How do you make words live?Whether his subject is Alice Munro, Cervantes, or the creative writing classroom, Glover’s take is frank and fresh, demonstrating again and again that graceful writers must first be strong readers. This collection is a call-to-arms for all lovers of English, and Attack of the Copula Spiders our best defense against the assaults of a post-literate age.Douglas Glover is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction. He is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.Praise for Douglas Glover"e;So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into ... the author's poetic grace."e; - The New Yorker"e;Glover invents his own assembly of critical approaches and theories that is eclectic, personal, scholarly, and smart ... a direction for future literary criticism to take."e; - The Denver Quarterly"e;A ribald, raunchy wit with a talent for searing self-investigation."e; - The Globe and Mail"e;Knotty, intelligent, often raucously funny."e; - Maclean's"e;Passionately intricate."e; - The Chicago Tribune"e;Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless."e; - Kirkus Reviews

The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfathers letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all hes still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, and asking in his quiet way how he might reconcile two such transient worlds with each other.The Least Important Man is the second collection from Gerald Lampert Prize-winning poet Alex Boyd: sober, self-sacrificing, and handsome, its a book for those who want poetry to reassert its dignity and authority in everyday life.Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications 2007) and the winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

The three sequences of Groundwork comprise a sophisticated reworking of European myth on the order of Yeatss The Tower. The first is situated by an archaeological dig in modern-day Tunisia, the second by the Garden of Eden, the third by the waters and islands of Homers Odyssey. Together they form a devastating critique of contemporary aesthetics.Few poets today are versed in the archetypes that inform the European tradition, and even fewer can manipulate them with the grace of Amanda Jernigan. With rivers of exquisite prosody and a panoramic intellectual scope, her Groundwork has recharted the poetic landscape and by doing so, has changed it forever.

David Hickeys second collection builds upon the myriad strengths of his first. In a specimen book of songs, stories, and covenants, Hickeys subjects range from art and astronomy to snowflakes and suburbia. These poems "e;take their time / Covering the roadside trees in forms of their careful willing . . . gesturing down to earth, unveiling new shapes / for all that they find.David Hickey is a past recipient of the Milton Acorn Prize, the Ralph Gustafson Prize for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His work has appeared in magazines and journals across Canada and the United States.

A BOSTON GLOBE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2011The poems in this collection inhabit several countries or no country at all, but many are concerned with boundaries: between words and silence, one person and another, today and tomorrow, freedom and fear. Although the poems rarely employ traditional forms of rhyme and repetition, their sound is the engine that propels them, while invented visual shapes intensify the experience of reading. All of these experiments are concerned with how art works, what it requires of us, and what it gives back. As the cow in a gallery tells the viewer: "e;Feed me, please, / your possibilities, / and I will fatten you."e;

Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, the latest collection by Bosnian expat Goran Simic, is as much a departure as it is a continuance. In this book, we find the world-renowned poet visiting familiar themes in fresh ways.

Diverse in subject, style and mood and rich in contrasts - from the lyrical to the rhetorical, from the public and collective to the personal and private - the poems in Pause for Breath are a meditation on the times and on time itself, sounding the human condition at a moment of world-change.

The poems in Zachariah Wellss second collection range from childhood to dimly foreseen events in the future; they idle on all three of Canadas coasts, travel the open road, take walks in the city and pause on the banks of country streams and ponds.

In his sixties, Yeats published the half-dozen poems that drew Crazy Jane out from his imagination to act as a profane voice against the strictures of the Church and the mores of his age. Wayne Clifford, in his sixties, after a lifetime of wondering why Yeats offered so little explanation of Jane's human presence absorb his own imagination, has let Jane free to speak once more. In Jane Again, we learn why Jane is crazy, if indeed she is, what part her Jack has played in her passion, how she understands the nature of the divine, and who she insists herself to be in this world almost large enough to hold her. Wayne Clifford's Jane Again is bawdy, irreverent and humorous; it is also loving, moving and beautiful, and should help to cement Clifford's reputation as one of the most inventive versifiers to come out of Canada in years.

The Pangborn Defence, a departure from Sibum's previous verse, will be something of a surprise for those who have followed his career. Poems written as letters to personages both real and imagined, there are political undertones to many rarely seen in Sibum's ouevre. But there is still the same attention to detail, the same craftsmanship, humour, love and originality.

A collection of 99 Canadian sonnets from the 19th Century to the present.

Here Come the Moonbathers, is more dark, difficult and tragic than Patricia Youngs earlier work. The poems in this collection have wild freedom, exploring the themes of love, longing and loss with grace, playfulness, and occasionally anger. There's a surreal edge to these poems, a personal, political and ecological vision, an incantatory vernacular and rhythm that makes these poems unforgettable.

Bringing together Eric Ormsby's entire poetic oeuvre thus far, including a healthy selection of previously unpublished poems, Time's Covenant is timeless, by one of America's best poets. Essential reading.

Written between one January and the next, A Thaw Foretold is a passionate exploration of themes that are as timeless and recurrent as the seasons. In language that is both precisely vivid and particular, embracing both colloquial directness and formal elegance, the poems confront the elementals of love and loss, mortality and remembrance.

A RADIO FRANCE-CULTURE/TLRAMA BEST WORK OF FICTIONBY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 CAMES PRIZEAND THE WINNER OF THE 2014 NEUSTADT PRIZEQuite unlike anything else I have read from Africa."e;"e;Doris LessingBy meshing the richness of African beliefs . . . into the Western framework of the novel, he creates a mysterious and surreal epic.Henning MankellMwanito was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears.Mwanito has been living in a former big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. Hes been told that the rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, that they wait for an apology from God. In the place his father calls Jezoosalem, Mwanito has been told that crying and praying are the same thing. Both, it seems, are forbidden.The eighth novel by the internationally bestselling Mia Couto, The Tuner of Silences is the story of Mwanitos struggle to reconstruct a family history that his father is unable to discuss. With the young womans arrival in Jezoosalem, however, the silence of the past quickly breaks down, and both his fathers story and the world are heard once more.The Tuner of Silences has been published to acclaim in more than half a dozen countries. Now in its first English translation, this story of an African boy's quest for the truth endures as a magical, humanizing confrontation between one child and the legacy of war.PRAISE FOR MIA COUTOOn almost every page we sense Coutos delight in those places where language slips officialdoms asphyxiating grasp.The New York Times"e;Even in translation, his prose is suffused with striking images.The Washington PostPRAISE FOR DAVID BROOKSHAW"e;David Brookshaw dexterously renders the novel's often colloquial, pithy Portuguese into lively English. Brookshaw's task is made more exacting by the particular quality of Couto's brilliance.The New York Times