Véhicule Press

Antonyms for Daughter

Jenny Boychuk

Antonyms for Daughter, Jenny Boychuk’s poetry debut, addresses a harrowing subject: the loss of the poet’s mother to addiction. Deploying a range of forms and techniques astonishing in a first collection, Boychuk creates unsparing scenes of their complicated life together. Poem after poem attempts to wring clarity from memories ripe with trauma and love, as Boychuk questions whether it is possible for a child to ever extricate herself from an abusive parent—to become, as it were, a living “antonym” of a painful family legacy. A booklength loss-lyric of vivid beauty, Antonyms for Daughter is a singular example of grief transformed into art.

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Whiteout

George Elliott Clarke

In Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness, his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke’s range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, “Africadian” community whose last home was razed in 1970.

For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”

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The Strangest Dream

Merrily Weisbord

Lauded as the most eloquent book about Canadian communists and written like drama, The Strangest Dream animates the history and life of militants from the 1930's to the 1956 Khruschev revelations about Stalin.

Published originally in 1983, this Third Edition contains a new preface by the author, additional photographs, and previously unpublished letters.

An antidote to recurrent anti-communist vitriol, The Strangest Dream evokes not only the struggle "to make a better world," but the warmth, generosity, songs, theatre, art, and exhilaration of party members for whom comradeship meant a way of life. Merrily Weisbord's research and contacts unearth historical documents and rare testimonies, including that of Canada's only communist MP, and of the accused in the Cold War spy trials.

The Strangest Dream is witness to the heyday and legacy of Canadian communists’ courage and social conscience, and to the forces that destroyed their dreams.

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A House Without Spirits

David Homel

When Paul is hired to write a monograph of the Montreal photographer John Marchuk, he assumes he’ll be able to turn over the eccentric project in a matter of weeks. Little does he know that over the next few months his visits with Marchuk, in a house stuffed with boxes stacked floor to ceiling with his life’s archive, will expose an emptiness in his own home.

In A House Without Spirits, Homel delivers some of his most memorable characters to date—reclusive artists, disaffected life partners, wandering ghosts, cult-affiliated nuns—in a contemporary Montreal noir that reveals how much we learn about ourselves when we begin to ask questions of others.

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Saving the City

Daniel Sanger

The rise to power of one of Canada’s most progressive municipal movements in recent memory.

When it was dreamed up in the early 2000s by a transportation bureaucrat with a quixotic dream of bringing tramways back to the streets of Montreal, few expected Projet Montréal to go anywhere. But a decade and a half later, the party was a grassroots powerhouse with an ambitious agenda that had taken power at city hall—after dumping its founder, barely surviving a divisive leadership campaign and earning the ire of motorists across Quebec.

Projet Montréal aspired to transform Montreal into a green, human-scale city with few, if any equal in North America. Equal parts reportage, oral history and memoir, Saving the City chronicles what the party did right, where it failed, and where it’s headed. Written from the perspective of someone who worked for Projet Montréal’s administration for almost a decade, Daniel Sanger’s book draws on dozens of interviews with other actors in the party and on the municipal scene, past and present.

A highly readable history of Montreal municipal politics over the past 30 years, Saving the City will also discuss issues of interest to city-dwellers across Canada. Are political parties at the municipal level a good thing? Is Montreal’s borough system a model for other big cities? What are the best ways to control urban car use? What is the optimum width for a sidewalk? The best kind of street tree? And why free parking is a terrible idea.

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