Michael Lista

The Scarborourgh takes place over three days in 1992: Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday—the weekend 15-year-old Kristin French was abducted and murdered by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. In poems both opulent and stricken, ravishing and unflinching, Michael Lista—nine, at the time—revisits those dates, haunted by the horrifying facts he now possesses. Inspired, in part, by Dante’s Inferno, Virgil's tale of Orpheus’ descent into the underworld for Eurydice, as well as the Bernardo trial itself—where the judge ruled that the gallery could hear the video tapes of the crimes, but not see them—Lista’s poems adhere to a single rule: you cannot gaze at the beloved you seek to rescue. The Scarborourgh is book about Bernardo that doesn’t show us Bernardo, a conceptual project that ignores its concept. Shiveringly bold, it is a major achievement.


Praise for Bloom:

"There aren't many Canadian books of poetry that are anticipated with quite so much excitement as Michael Lista's debut, which has been the talk of the town for some time. But the book outpaces the expectations even of those kindly disposed to it.”—Quill and Quire (which named Bloom a Book of the Year)

“Lista has here brought together potent ingredients, at once harmonious and dissonant, in a container with metal enough to withstand blasts from poems being split apart and reincarnated.”—The Globe and Mail

“A brilliant, erudite new voice on the Canadian poetry scene."—Montreal Gazette

Jean-Claude Germain

Jean-Claude Germain’s second volume of Montreal memoirs chronicles his coming of age: his draconian Jesuit education on the fringes of the city’s Red Light District, followed by his liberating discovery of the city’s fevered bohemian community in the dying days of the Duplessis regime and Quebec’s “grande noirceur.” Here, on the cusp between two worlds, we meet fire-breathing clerics intent on putting the fear of God into young souls, and writers, painters, theatre directors and performers, determined at all costs, and at great sacrifice, to transform the society in which they live. It is this creative ferment that instils in the young Jean-Claude a passion for and a belief in artistic endeavour that will sustain him through all the years that lie in wait.

Alan Hustak

If Frederick Scott is remembered at all today, it is as minor Victorian poet or as the father of his illustrious son F.R. Scott. However, Frederick Scott was almost 55 years old and the pastor of St. Matthews Anglican Church in Quebec City when he volunteered to go overseas to serve as senior chaplain with the 1st Canadian Infantry Division during the First World War. The depth of his faith was tested when he lost a son at the Battle of the Somme. Through a series of unpublished letters in the McCord Museum, author Alan Hustak tells the powerful and absorbing story of a man revered by the Canadian military for his remarkable ministry. One admiring private recalled, “No matter how thick the fight, he is always to be seen wherever the boys are. … to see men dying all around you, all dying for principle, it hardens a man, and at the same times softens him.’ His letters home from the front reveals how Scott discovered first-hand what fear really is, how to conquer it and how to inspire others.

Talya Rubin

St. Kilda is a barren, rocky archipelago 60 km off the west coast of Scotland. In 1930, harsh conditions led the islands’ remaining 36 inhabitants to relocate to the mainland. Left behind were seabirds and a population of feral sheep. In Leaving the Island, her first poetry collection, Talya Rubin enters the isolated lives of those last Kildareans, and probes the “desert places”—to use Frost’s phrase—in herself. Written during a series of extended trips abroad, including stays in Australia and Greece, Rubin’s poems return, again and again, to a psychological landscape where “mud and rock / and sea and salt and oily smell / of fish and fowl is all, all.” Rife with exacting wordplay and frank self-reckonings, Leaving the Island is a book about endings and what remains when we start over.