Nyla Matuk

The poems included in Resisting Canada address, among other things, Indigenous agency, cultural belonging, environmental anxieties, and racial privilege. These poems ask us to judge and resist a statecraft that refuses to acknowledge past and present wrongs. Think of Resisting Canada as a poetic letter to Canada’s politicians and leaders.

Resisting Canada gathers together 28 poets for a conversation bigger than poetic trends. Its organizing principle is Canada—the Canada that established residential schools; the Canada grappling with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the Canada that has been visible in its welcome of Syrian refugees, yet the not-always-tolerant place where the children of those refugees will grow up; the Canada eager to re-establish its global leadership on the environment while struggling to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty on resource-rich land and enabling further colonization of that land. In the face of global conflicts due to climate change, scarcity, mass migrations, and the rise of xenophobic populisms, Canada still works with a surface understanding of its democratic values—both at their noblest and most deceptive.

The poets:
Jordan Abel
James Arthur
Marie Annharte Baker
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Wayde Compton
Beth Cuthand
Rosanna Deerchild
Marilyn Dumont
Marvin FrancisLouise
Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer
Jim Johnstone
El Jones
Christine Leclerc
Canisia Lubrin
Lee Maracle
Sachiko Murakami
Arleen Paré
Michael Prior
Shane Rhodes
Janet Rogers
Armand Garnet Ruffo
Ingrid Ruthig
Gregory A. Scofield
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Karen Solie
Moez Surani
Derek Webster
Rita Wong

Sherry Simon

Reflections on the art of literary translation.

Translators connect languages and landscapes, sparking conversations that enlarge our imagination. In Canada, where translation has had an especially important role to play, the nature of the connections has changed. These wide-ranging essays, by Canada’s most prominent translators, chart a journey that begins with the sharp divides of English and French in the 1970s and then confronts the much more complex explosion of identities today. Engaging with the politics of meaning but also with the creative role of the translator, these beautifully-written reflections illuminate a practice that is today finally receiving due recognition.

Contributors include Wayne Grady, Rhonda Mullins, Michelle Hartman, Erin Moure, Barbara Godard, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Linda Gaboriau, Sheila Fischman, Kathy Mezei, Philip Stratford, Louise von Flotow, Ray Ellenwood, Betty Bednarski, William Findlay, David Homel, Jane Brierley, Katia Grubisic.

Culture in Transit was originally published in 1995. This edition, with a new introduction by Sherry Simon, has been revised, and expanded to include four new contributors to reflect changes in the translation scene over the last decades.

Rosalind 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.

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.