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.

Rosalind M. Pepall

The unexpected turns and obsessions of a curator's job.

This is a collection of stories about art works--whether an oil portrait, a wilderness explorer's sketchbook or a Tiffany lamp--and how the author fell under their spell. Few people are aware of the work, the emotion, and the obsessions of a curator's job. Exhibitions come and go; they are forgotten after a few years, but they live on in the curator's memory.

In these fifteen essays we encounter artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, a rootless baroness, the design craze for aluminum, small Japanese boxes called kogos, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice, and Moscovites who love Goldfinger.

Pepall’s stories sparkle with clarity and leave one with a sense that art is an amazing, worthwhile, occasionally mysterious human activity.

Archival black and white photographs and colour plates—including Edwin Holgate’s Ludivine, one of the most beloved and recognizable Canadian portraits ever painted—make this book a must-have for art lovers, students, academics, museum-goers and readers interested in the role art plays in the creation of our lives.

A three-book bundle by three inspiring, incisive women. For only $30 (plus tax and $5 flat rate shipping) you'll receive:

Aphelia by Mikella Nicol, translated by Lesley Trites

"Nicol’s writing is unflinching as she explores the rigours of twenty-first- century early adulthood. This short volume overflows with sex, alcohol, and alienation." - Jeff Miller, Montreal Review of Books

The Goddess of Fireflies by Geneviève Petterson, translated by Neil Smith - 2015 Archambault Prize winner

"A melange of blasé toughness and menacing vulnerability, Catherine and her story will resonate deeply with those of us who grew up in the 90s of Cobain, cocaine, and 18-hole Doc Martens..." – Anna Leventhal, author of Sweet Affliction

Sit How You Want by Robin Richardson - 2019 Trillium Book Award winner

"Richardson proclaims that now is the hour of independence and bravura... Her poems are rambunctious but bleak in outlook. Hints of danger are everywhere." - Nicholas Bradley, Canadian Literature

Sadiqa de Meijer

Maternal love and duty disrupted by illness.

The Outer Wards, Sadiqa de Meijer’s new collection, explores questions of maternal love and duty—and the powerlessness that comes with the disruption of that role through illness. “I was awake. / The hour was wrong,” de Meijer writes, and her poems track, in visceral and tender detail, the distraction, exhaustion, exhilaration, and fear of child-rearing through crisis. For de Meijer, the experience was also a crisis of language, and the struggle to find new terms for her state. Addressed, in part, to a child she calls “my grievous spectacle, / my dearest unpossessable,” The Outer Wards is everywhere marked by a joy in words—their quick-fire turns, sumptuous sounds, and nursery-rhyme seductions.