Frances Shelley Wees

Set in and around post-war Toronto, I Am Not Guilty first appeared in a condensed form in the February 1954 Ladies’ Home Journal.

That same year, it was published in full by Doubleday as M’Lord, I Am Not Guilty. This Ricochet Books edition marks the first new edition since 1967.

Helen Graham has been acquitted in the murder of her wealthy husband, Alberta oil baron Steven Graham, but the eyes of the public continue to view her with suspicion. Worried for her future, and that of her young son, she sets out to find the true killer. The trail leads to the apartment of another woman—and revelations about her dead husband’s secret life—then continues to a growing bedroom community in suburban Toronto. What the widow doesn’t realize is that she is not alone in her pursuit of the murderer or how ready that murderer is to kill again.

Medrie Purdham

Medrie Purdham's Little Housewolf delves deeply into the world of domestic miniatures, a realm where thimbles, baby teeth, push pins, keyholes, teacups, and wedding rings become meticulously realized scale models of one’s terrors and joys. Purdham uses the fine-grained signatures of her poetry—close observation, exact detail, precise sounds—not only to examine childhood and its fascination with size and scale, but also to measure herself against the larger, untamed landscapes she feels increasingly alienated from (“It is all anachronism, / grasses vintage wild"). Marked by bold emotion and arresting imagery, Little Housewolf is a brilliant debut.

Richard Sanger

“Richard Sanger’s new book begins with father and son depart­ing on the mythic early morning quest and then plunges us into the dirty realism of the rink. There are skittish pucks, ancient Sherwoods, inappropriate mums, elaborate excuses for losers (and Leafs), the rink as blank slate or the genetic showcase kids can’t escape. The key theme is the way we use stories to explain reality—including the games we lose—to ourselves, and our children.” — Linda Hutcheon

“Richard Sanger’s Fathers at Hockey is a brilliant and accurate evocation of the unique world dads and their kids enter when they find ice, outdoors or in. It’s all here, the bad coffee, aching cold, throat-catching moments of desperate hope and prayer.” — Roy Macgregor

“How does he encompass so much—from the numinous mystery of ice to a rink side chat with Umberto Eco—in a clutch of relaxed, mind-stretching, gut-punching poems about taking your kid to his games? I love this collection.” — Rick Salutin

“Fathers at Hockey shows Richard Sanger at the top of his game: formally inventive and various, eloquent, unsentimental, funny, unconventionally beautiful. Everything this reader looks for in poetry.” — Steven Heighton.

A Signal Editions Chapbook.

Kathy Dobson

Our March bundle features Kathy Dobson's two searing memoirs With a Closed Fist: Growing up in Canada's Toughest Neighbourhood and Punching and Kicking: Leaving Canada's Toughest Neighbourhood for $30 plus $6 flat rate shipping in Canada. These books recount the challenges of growing up in, and eventually leaving, Point Saint Charles, once an industrial working-class neighbourhood, now in the throes of gentrification.

Praise for Kathy Dobson's books:

"Dobson has enormous talent, and we all must be thankful that she did beat the odds and find her way through the maze of deprivation and violence to speak her truths in such a creative and telling book." – Pat Capponi, Globe and Mail

"It reads like fiction... younger Kathy's voice is strikingly believable: candid, scornful, funny" – Anna Leventhal, Montreal Review of Books

"Kathy Dobson vividly gives us a surprisingly clear glimpse through a child's eyes of what it is like to live in poverty. Her language rings true as it portrays lives of people struggling every day and night with the physical, economic, emotional and political assaults of poverty and its constant humiliations. This is a rare insider expose." – Linda Savory Gordon, Assoc. Professor, Dept. of Community Development and Social Work, Algoma University

"This is as authentic a description, language and all, of life in the Point during the 60s and 70s as it is possible to get. Poverty, hunger, love, abuse, ingenuity, survival, intelligence, language wars— they are all there; fierce optimism and laugh-out-loud humour carry the story along. That is the way it was. I know , I was there." – Nicolas Steinmetz, MD

"In a place between the profound and the profane, lives a raw, unapologetic, and funny voice of Kathy Dobson. In an honest and harrowing account of poverty, she tells a powerful story of resilience of a girl turned woman." – Merlyna Lim, Canada Research Chair, Carleton University