Richard Greene

Richard Greene's first collection since winning the 2010 Governor-General's Award for Poetry, take as their subject the rumors, misunderstandings and half-truths that often comprise our knowledge of others. With an astonishing gift for capturing states of feeling, Greene's new poems movingly reflect on the "presence and absence, glory and disarray" of our flawed life, moving from his mother's oil paintings to harrowing conditions at a corrections facility to recollections of a much-loved mentor. The capstone of the book is the magnificent title poem. Written in fluent, colloquial terza rima and set in sun-drenched Siena during the frenzied pageantry of Il Palio-the Italian city's bi-annual horse race-it is a brilliant, beautifully realized achievement that consolidates Greene's reputation as an emerging master of narrative verse.

Shulamis Yelin

A writer’s lifelong battle with mental illness.


Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin is a weaving of the Montreal writer’s stories and selected diary excerpts and family photographs revealing a far-reaching creative personality who is haunted from the age of ten by the “moods taking over”.

This book poignantly illuminates the dramatic duality of a public and private literary and emotional life through published and unpublished stories of an idyllic Montreal Jewish childhood contrasted with deeply troubled and often shocking diary entries that document the author’s lifelong battle with mental illness.

Yelin’s insightful yet light and humorous stories have been cherished by generations of children and adults for their universal appeal. The journal entries that she maintained for most of her 90 years document the abuse, paranoia, self-loathing, doubt and devastating depression of Yelin’s true emotional state. These concurrent lenses reveal the profound struggles and suffering of a fascinating and highly gifted woman who transcended her ongoing deep-seated emotional agony to create a significant literary legacy.

The many threads of this multi-layered book have been woven together though the collaboration of Yelin’s daughter, Gilah Yelin Hirsch and Yelin’s first stories’ editor, Nancy Marrelli.

Elaine Kalman Naves

In the winter of 1868 a name Montreal society associated with art, good breeding, and culture became fodder for scandal mongers. The Notman name, synonymous with fine photography, was suddenly making headlines featuring the words "abortion" and "suicide."
A dozen years earlier, two brothers fled their native Scotland . They were attracted to Montreal by its reputation for making the fortunes of go-getting Scotsmen. One was destined for fame, the other for notoriety.
William Notman, the older brother, eventually owned the largest photography business in North America. His subjects ranged from royalty, Governors General, and the Fathers of Confederation to Sitting Bull and Harriet Beecher Stowe. His studio immortalized the faces and baronial mansions of the merchant princes of Montreal's legendary Golden Square Mile-the Molsons, Redpaths, Allans, and Van Hornes.
By contrast, Robert, the younger brother, was drawn into a drama which shook up Montreal's polite society. After he seduced the beautiful and ambitious Margaret Galbraith, a student at the McGill Normal School, he arranged an abortion for her with an up-and-coming young doctor who soon after committed suicide.
The subsequent trial of Robert Notman became cause-célèbre in the newly minted Dominion of Canada in 1868. Portrait of a Scandal depicts a society that distanced itself from sexual misconduct, while it lapped up its every detail.

Includes 20 William Notman photographs.

Jason Guriel

Satisfying Clicking Sound is a book that’s never afraid to make a show of itself. In his third collection, Jason Guriel gives us a quick-thinking colloquial style that segues deftly from deadpan wit to deep emotion. Like the hard-to-master knuckleball he celebrates as “less spun / than blown / out onto the air, / its course unknown,” Guriel’s poetry is equal parts art, talent, luck, and mystery. Consistently rewarding, Satisfying Clicking Sound is a quicksilver performance from one of Canadian poetry’s most distinctive new voices.