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

Bronwyn Chester

By following the trail of 50 trees, Bronwyn Chester presents a new perspective on the island of Montreal and offers a sense of belonging to an ancient forest, in its modern form. She goes beyond the traits defining each tree and interprets the tree's story. Each story is complemented with an illustration by Jean-Luc Trudel of the tree being discussed. The Island of Montreal has its own unique ecosystem. Insulated all around by the St. Lawrence River and the Rivière des Prairies, the island is slightly warmer than the surrounding territory, allowing species such as the giant cottonwood poplars to thrive all along the shoreline, and exotic species, such as the black walnut, tulip tree and dawn redwood to compliment the wide variety of native trees.

Bronwyn Chester wrote the weekly column Island of Trees for the Montreal Gazette and this book is an expansion of those columns. Grouped by territory, the trees selected will provide Montrealers and visitors the opportunity to not only better know and appreciate Montreal's trees, but will also lead them to little known places and histories of their island. These are stories that anchor us in time and space. Old trees connect us to the past as witnesses of bygone eras.

George Ellenbogen

In poet George Ellenbogen's exquisitely-written memoir, the discoveries ripple outward. What surfaces-the markers of his parents' navigation in a new world and his own childhood and adolescent experiences in the 1940s and 50s-extend to us all. They become part of the universal map in which we recognize our own quirky courses into childhood, adolescence, adulthood.
Stone in My Shoe is the author's discovery of how Montreal's immigrant neighbourhood-a tight-knit community– with extended families that had its own shops, institutions, and daily Yiddish newspapers, sustained him and his family, and sustained thousands.

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.