Porcupine's Quill
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Kivioq's Journey and Other Revelations in the Donald Forster Sculpture Park at the Art Gallery of Guelph
Price:
CA$24.95
ISBN: 9780889844704
Pub Date: January 2024
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
A photographic tour through the variety of artworks that populate the Art Gallery of Guelph's storied sculpture garden.
Fordmates
Price:
CA$18.95
ISBN: 9780889844643
Pub Date: September 2023
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Fordmates explores, with humour and poignancy, the basic conflict that exists between the demands of mass production technology and the all-too-human instincts, needs, and aspirations of the workers who serve on the assembly line.
Poems for a Phantom Lover
Price:
CA$19.95
ISBN: 9780889844681
Pub Date: August 2023
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
In Poems for a Phantom Lover, Jennifer Dickson creates a `reliquary for a famished heart,' a celebration through text and image of the figurative power and emotional resonance of historic gardens.
Morse Code for Romantics
Price:
CA$19.95
ISBN: 9780889844568
Pub Date: March 2023
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Wretched, reckless and haunted by the past, the men and women in Anne Baldo's Morse Code for Romantics try to restart their sputtering hearts, seeking to turn their pain into pearls through connection, understanding and hope.
James Reaney on the Grid
Price:
CA$28.95
ISBN: 9780889844520
Pub Date: March 2023
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
`Set up a trellis for flowering plants to climb all over: it's there but unseen, supporting all that floral leaf-green beauty.'
In James Reaney on the Grid, Stan Dragland examines an artist fiercely loyal to his artistic practice, deploying the metaphor of the grid to explore the inherited literary patterns and archetypes underpinning works of London poet, playwright and educator James Reaney. With extensive references to Reaney's considerable oeuvre (from early publications such as A Suit of Nettles and The Box Social to what is arguably his master work, The Donnellys), and to an eclectic collection of theorists, artists and contemporaries whose ideas inform and respond to Reaney's, Dragland seeks to reveal not only what Reaney's work is about but also what it does. In so doing, he takes readers by the hand in a surprisingly personal ramble through the processes and productions of one of Southern Ontario's most influential writers.
Granted
Poems of Metaphor
Price:
CA$16.95
ISBN: 9780889844544
Pub Date: December 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Metaphor is the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things not seen. It is a building block, not a tower or its view. It is a gift impossible to guess, and not to be opened until you do. Metaphor is coinage dropped so that others might decipher us.
The poems in Jeffery Donaldson's Granted serve as a sort of Metaphor 101, an education in the making of metaphor, its motives and its meaning. But more than that, these poems represent a study of being?and of becoming. They make relations, correspondences, attachments, and in so doing, they investigate the gaps between identity and imagination, truth and perception, love and faith. As Donaldson reminds us, when it comes to metaphor, distance makes no difference: it `breathes / in impossible spots, pairs that can't be, / and finds in them untold possibilities.'
The Essential Eugene McNamara
Price:
CA$14.95
ISBN: 9780889844605
Pub Date: November 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Eugene McNamara's poetry ponders the textures and contradictions of his adopted city: Windsor, Ontario. Most comfortable in small, non-eloquent, delinquent, unpopular and wayward places, McNamara's poems display abiding empathy with the inhabitants of these locales, conveying raw emotion through deceptively simple lines in which `voices cry wait / we didn't want this / and the wind slams the words / around the corners of the empty / buildings down the empty / streets.' The result is a selection offering poems of humility and grace that empathize rather than intellectualize.
The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada's most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible and affordable. The Essential Eugene McNamara is the twenty-fourth volume in this increasingly popular series.
Out of the Dark
Price:
CA$21.95
ISBN: 9780889844445
Pub Date: September 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
The exacting art of wood engraving is defined by presence and absence, shadow and light, black and white. An arduous yet rewarding art form, it requires an artistic eye and a dedication to technique in order to imbue each image with its own visual narrative.
Wood engraver Wesley W. Bates, the artist behind the acclaimed book The Point of the Graver, demonstrates the power and precision of the form in his new collection Out of the Dark. Bates brings to bear decades of experience, deftly wielding his graver to coax vibrant and lifelike images from solid blocks of endgrain wood. In so doing, he frees each likeness not only from the blocks that hold them captive but also from the reaches of his prodigious imagination.
With a wide variety of engravings in Bates's unmistakable style, and accompanying texts to bring the reader into the artist's studio, Out of the Dark is a...
Took You So Long
Price:
CA$18.95
ISBN: 9780889844469
Pub Date: August 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Often out of sight and certainly out of mind, the characters in Took You So Long inhabit the unknown neglected landscape of non-urban Ontario.
A morel-seeking gastronome falls into a gopher hole and must await rescue by her milquetoast neighbour. A donation bin picker is on the hunt for her next great find-and husband number four-despite cohabitating with three of her exes. A lonely widower discovers that his robotic full-service companion makes him lonelier than ever. A son's hunting trip with his father forces him to confront the terrible truth of physical decline.
Compassionate, honest and propelled by forceful emotion, Matthews's stories ask us to question who we are, where we belong, and how we move on in the face of adversity.
The Razor's Edge
Price:
CA$18.95
ISBN: 9780889844506
Pub Date: May 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
A collection of linked short stories that hopscotches between time and space to explore the haunting hunger that reaches beyond the physical and into the spiritual-for love, for understanding and for truth.
Rank Songbirds
Price:
CA$16.95
ISBN: 9780889844483
Pub Date: March 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
`Tonight / I'll serenade you / With kisses / Modestly dressed...'
In Rank Songbirds, Leon Rooke deploys his considerable wit and his signature whimsy to explore the joys and the burdens, the hilarities and the anxieties of modern life.
These are poems that revel in a piercing look at foibles, saucy verbal sparring and the possibilities of artistic expression while recognizing the fallibility of humanity, with its voracious appetites, its complicit silences, its convoluted politics. And though it may be that `Those angels serenading us through / Hazardous night were rank songbirds chirping away / Mindless of hawks zooming overhead,' these poems remind us that today isn't last week's curse, that freedom is getting the high notes right and that, in a pinch, one might `apply love's bandage to the shattered heart / This minute pooling blood about your feet.'
Artful Flight
Essays and Reviews 1985-2019
Price:
CA$24.95
ISBN: 9780889848795
Pub Date: February 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Susan Glickman muses that thoughtful literary criticism is not merely about `duelling with words, however full of flourishes and feints'. Rather it `means-or ought to mean-to evaluate something dispassionately, seeing not only its faults but its virtues.' In Artful Flight, she does just that, writing respectfully but uncompromisingly about artistic topics both ostensibly familiar (such as considerations of writers like Northrop Frye, Don Coles, Erín Moure and Bronwen Wallace) and delightfully arcane (such as the etymological evolution of contranyms in Shakespeare and beyond).
With keen intelligence and droll wit, Glickman explores a variety of artistic concerns, from the expectations of literary genre, the formalist hurdles of poetry and the tyranny of modern opinion to the magical history of the violin and the pleasure of creating visual art later in life. Her approach is unabashedly her own: feminist, supportive and drawing on a wide range of cultural and literary references.
These well-reasoned essays...
The Essential John Glassco
Price:
CA$14.95
ISBN: 9780889844421
Pub Date: January 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Despite his reputation as Canada's dandy-poet and his approach to writing as `a challenge best overcome by panache', John Glassco's poems demonstrate a seemingly incongruous preoccupation with rural life and an intense interest in decline, dilapidation and despair. Plagued by chronic self-doubt and the fear of wasting literary effort, Glassco explored, through his poems, `graveyards minding their business', buildings `long in standing, longer still in falling', and the toil of `hope battered into habit, and a habit / Running to weariness'. The result is a selection of work that features syntactic daring, a somewhat anachronistic pleasure in constructedness and a compulsion to turn feelings of unsuitability into art.
The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada's most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible and affordable. The Essential John Glassco is the twenty-third volume in the increasingly popular series.
Let Go
Price:
CA$26.95
ISBN: 9780889844391
Pub Date: October 2021
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
A lost job.
A cardboard box.
A raging blizzard.
After being fired from his job, a veteran ad man is escorted from the office, carrying a cardboard box packed with mementos of his career. He steps out into a blinding blizzard, burdened by the weight of his collection.
Each object tells a story, and as he navigates the city and makes his way home, he indulges in memories from his past: former colleagues, an award-winning campaign, a lost love. But faced with the demands of the present-and the very real danger of the snow-bound city streets-he must decide whether to hold on to the objects of his past, or to let go in the hopes of surviving the night.
The bold, honest linocuts in Mark Huebner's Let Go form an evocative narrative that distills over twenty years of memories into a single night of intense struggle against nature both meteorological and human.
Midland
Price:
CA$19.95
ISBN: 9780889848832
Pub Date: July 2021
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
There's a rhythm inside things ...
It is the spring of 1987 and the blackflies are thick in the air. Twenty-year-old Rory Fleck-runner, bassist, ex-boyfriend, baby of the family-joins a tree-planting brigade in Northern Ontario, camping out in a pup tent and whiling away the evenings writing letters to his dead brother.
Haunted by dreams and plagued by gruesome visions from the past, Rory goes in search of the rhythm-in planting and in life-that leads to the mindless trance tree planters call `Freak Zero'. He takes comfort in a meaningful mix-tape titled VOYAGER 1 (ten songs, one for each full year his older brother, Mike, has been gone) and he develops a camaraderie with his fellows in the camp: timid, meticulous planter Eddie; gruff, Shakespeare-spouting camp cook Jerry; and kind, vibrant, tempting Betina. But there are others whose motives are less than friendly. Crew boss Ty's rampant jealousy threatens Rory and Betina's...
Breaking Right
Price:
CA$18.95
ISBN: 9780889844360
Pub Date: April 2021
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Sports legends, UFOs, big cats on the prowl and other modern Midwestern mythologies take centre stage in the fantastical, folkloric and absurdist stories of D.A. Lockhart's Breaking Right.
A junkyard worker seeks fame, fortune and a feeling of belonging behind the wheel of a hot-rod emblazoned with a fire-breathing corgi. A hard-luck basketball scout, whose day-to-day existence abides within the quietude between calamities, expects the worst when a foreboding creature known as the Mothman is spotted in Muncie. A pharmaceutical researcher is drawn into the orbit of an eccentric artist whose dramatic plan to `heal' the city of Indianapolis requires a car painted to resemble a possum and a shamanistic Etch-a-Sketch.
In these stories rooted in the everyday, fate, acts of God and good old-fashioned luck beget exceptional circumstances and once-in-a-lifetime occurrences in which shared mythologies have the power to bring people together-or tear them apart.
Kivioq's Journey and Other Revelations in the Donald Forster Sculpture Park at the Art Gallery of Guelph
CA$24.95
ISBN: 9780889844704
Pub Date: January 2024
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
A photographic tour through the variety of artworks that populate the Art Gallery of Guelph's storied sculpture garden.
Fordmates
CA$18.95
ISBN: 9780889844643
Pub Date: September 2023
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Fordmates explores, with humour and poignancy, the basic conflict that exists between the demands of mass production technology and the all-too-human instincts, needs, and aspirations of the workers who serve on the assembly line.
Poems for a Phantom Lover
CA$19.95
ISBN: 9780889844681
Pub Date: August 2023
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
In Poems for a Phantom Lover, Jennifer Dickson creates a `reliquary for a famished heart,' a celebration through text and image of the figurative power and emotional resonance of historic gardens.
Morse Code for Romantics
CA$19.95
ISBN: 9780889844568
Pub Date: March 2023
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Wretched, reckless and haunted by the past, the men and women in Anne Baldo's Morse Code for Romantics try to restart their sputtering hearts, seeking to turn their pain into pearls through connection, understanding and hope.
James Reaney on the Grid
CA$28.95
ISBN: 9780889844520
Pub Date: March 2023
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
`Set up a trellis for flowering plants to climb all over: it's there but unseen, supporting all that floral leaf-green beauty.'
In James Reaney on the Grid, Stan Dragland examines an artist fiercely loyal to his artistic practice, deploying the metaphor of the grid to explore the inherited literary patterns and archetypes underpinning works of London poet, playwright and educator James Reaney. With extensive references to Reaney's considerable oeuvre (from early publications such as A Suit of Nettles and The Box Social to what is arguably his master work, The Donnellys), and to an eclectic collection of theorists, artists and contemporaries whose ideas inform and respond to Reaney's, Dragland seeks to reveal not only what Reaney's work is about but also what it does. In so doing, he takes readers by the hand in a surprisingly personal ramble through the processes and productions of one of Southern Ontario's most influential writers.
Granted
Poems of Metaphor
CA$16.95
ISBN: 9780889844544
Pub Date: December 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Metaphor is the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things not seen. It is a building block, not a tower or its view. It is a gift impossible to guess, and not to be opened until you do. Metaphor is coinage dropped so that others might decipher us.
The poems in Jeffery Donaldson's Granted serve as a sort of Metaphor 101, an education in the making of metaphor, its motives and its meaning. But more than that, these poems represent a study of being?and of becoming. They make relations, correspondences, attachments, and in so doing, they investigate the gaps between identity and imagination, truth and perception, love and faith. As Donaldson reminds us, when it comes to metaphor, distance makes no difference: it `breathes / in impossible spots, pairs that can't be, / and finds in them untold possibilities.'
The Essential Eugene McNamara
CA$14.95
ISBN: 9780889844605
Pub Date: November 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Eugene McNamara's poetry ponders the textures and contradictions of his adopted city: Windsor, Ontario. Most comfortable in small, non-eloquent, delinquent, unpopular and wayward places, McNamara's poems display abiding empathy with the inhabitants of these locales, conveying raw emotion through deceptively simple lines in which `voices cry wait / we didn't want this / and the wind slams the words / around the corners of the empty / buildings down the empty / streets.' The result is a selection offering poems of humility and grace that empathize rather than intellectualize.
The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada's most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible and affordable. The Essential Eugene McNamara is the twenty-fourth volume in this increasingly popular series.
Out of the Dark
CA$21.95
ISBN: 9780889844445
Pub Date: September 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
The exacting art of wood engraving is defined by presence and absence, shadow and light, black and white. An arduous yet rewarding art form, it requires an artistic eye and a dedication to technique in order to imbue each image with its own visual narrative.
Wood engraver Wesley W. Bates, the artist behind the acclaimed book The Point of the Graver, demonstrates the power and precision of the form in his new collection Out of the Dark. Bates brings to bear decades of experience, deftly wielding his graver to coax vibrant and lifelike images from solid blocks of endgrain wood. In so doing, he frees each likeness not only from the blocks that hold them captive but also from the reaches of his prodigious imagination.
With a wide variety of engravings in Bates's unmistakable style, and accompanying texts to bring the reader into the artist's studio, Out of the Dark is a...
Took You So Long
CA$18.95
ISBN: 9780889844469
Pub Date: August 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Often out of sight and certainly out of mind, the characters in Took You So Long inhabit the unknown neglected landscape of non-urban Ontario.
A morel-seeking gastronome falls into a gopher hole and must await rescue by her milquetoast neighbour. A donation bin picker is on the hunt for her next great find-and husband number four-despite cohabitating with three of her exes. A lonely widower discovers that his robotic full-service companion makes him lonelier than ever. A son's hunting trip with his father forces him to confront the terrible truth of physical decline.
Compassionate, honest and propelled by forceful emotion, Matthews's stories ask us to question who we are, where we belong, and how we move on in the face of adversity.
The Razor's Edge
CA$18.95
ISBN: 9780889844506
Pub Date: May 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
A collection of linked short stories that hopscotches between time and space to explore the haunting hunger that reaches beyond the physical and into the spiritual-for love, for understanding and for truth.
Rank Songbirds
CA$16.95
ISBN: 9780889844483
Pub Date: March 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
`Tonight / I'll serenade you / With kisses / Modestly dressed...'
In Rank Songbirds, Leon Rooke deploys his considerable wit and his signature whimsy to explore the joys and the burdens, the hilarities and the anxieties of modern life.
These are poems that revel in a piercing look at foibles, saucy verbal sparring and the possibilities of artistic expression while recognizing the fallibility of humanity, with its voracious appetites, its complicit silences, its convoluted politics. And though it may be that `Those angels serenading us through / Hazardous night were rank songbirds chirping away / Mindless of hawks zooming overhead,' these poems remind us that today isn't last week's curse, that freedom is getting the high notes right and that, in a pinch, one might `apply love's bandage to the shattered heart / This minute pooling blood about your feet.'
Artful Flight
Essays and Reviews 1985-2019
CA$24.95
ISBN: 9780889848795
Pub Date: February 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Susan Glickman muses that thoughtful literary criticism is not merely about `duelling with words, however full of flourishes and feints'. Rather it `means-or ought to mean-to evaluate something dispassionately, seeing not only its faults but its virtues.' In Artful Flight, she does just that, writing respectfully but uncompromisingly about artistic topics both ostensibly familiar (such as considerations of writers like Northrop Frye, Don Coles, Erín Moure and Bronwen Wallace) and delightfully arcane (such as the etymological evolution of contranyms in Shakespeare and beyond).
With keen intelligence and droll wit, Glickman explores a variety of artistic concerns, from the expectations of literary genre, the formalist hurdles of poetry and the tyranny of modern opinion to the magical history of the violin and the pleasure of creating visual art later in life. Her approach is unabashedly her own: feminist, supportive and drawing on a wide range of cultural and literary references.
These well-reasoned essays...
The Essential John Glassco
CA$14.95
ISBN: 9780889844421
Pub Date: January 2022
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Despite his reputation as Canada's dandy-poet and his approach to writing as `a challenge best overcome by panache', John Glassco's poems demonstrate a seemingly incongruous preoccupation with rural life and an intense interest in decline, dilapidation and despair. Plagued by chronic self-doubt and the fear of wasting literary effort, Glassco explored, through his poems, `graveyards minding their business', buildings `long in standing, longer still in falling', and the toil of `hope battered into habit, and a habit / Running to weariness'. The result is a selection of work that features syntactic daring, a somewhat anachronistic pleasure in constructedness and a compulsion to turn feelings of unsuitability into art.
The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada's most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible and affordable. The Essential John Glassco is the twenty-third volume in the increasingly popular series.
Let Go
CA$26.95
ISBN: 9780889844391
Pub Date: October 2021
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
A lost job.
A cardboard box.
A raging blizzard.
After being fired from his job, a veteran ad man is escorted from the office, carrying a cardboard box packed with mementos of his career. He steps out into a blinding blizzard, burdened by the weight of his collection.
Each object tells a story, and as he navigates the city and makes his way home, he indulges in memories from his past: former colleagues, an award-winning campaign, a lost love. But faced with the demands of the present-and the very real danger of the snow-bound city streets-he must decide whether to hold on to the objects of his past, or to let go in the hopes of surviving the night.
The bold, honest linocuts in Mark Huebner's Let Go form an evocative narrative that distills over twenty years of memories into a single night of intense struggle against nature both meteorological and human.
Midland
CA$19.95
ISBN: 9780889848832
Pub Date: July 2021
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
There's a rhythm inside things ...
It is the spring of 1987 and the blackflies are thick in the air. Twenty-year-old Rory Fleck-runner, bassist, ex-boyfriend, baby of the family-joins a tree-planting brigade in Northern Ontario, camping out in a pup tent and whiling away the evenings writing letters to his dead brother.
Haunted by dreams and plagued by gruesome visions from the past, Rory goes in search of the rhythm-in planting and in life-that leads to the mindless trance tree planters call `Freak Zero'. He takes comfort in a meaningful mix-tape titled VOYAGER 1 (ten songs, one for each full year his older brother, Mike, has been gone) and he develops a camaraderie with his fellows in the camp: timid, meticulous planter Eddie; gruff, Shakespeare-spouting camp cook Jerry; and kind, vibrant, tempting Betina. But there are others whose motives are less than friendly. Crew boss Ty's rampant jealousy threatens Rory and Betina's...
Breaking Right
CA$18.95
ISBN: 9780889844360
Pub Date: April 2021
Imprint: Porcupine's Quill
Sports legends, UFOs, big cats on the prowl and other modern Midwestern mythologies take centre stage in the fantastical, folkloric and absurdist stories of D.A. Lockhart's Breaking Right.
A junkyard worker seeks fame, fortune and a feeling of belonging behind the wheel of a hot-rod emblazoned with a fire-breathing corgi. A hard-luck basketball scout, whose day-to-day existence abides within the quietude between calamities, expects the worst when a foreboding creature known as the Mothman is spotted in Muncie. A pharmaceutical researcher is drawn into the orbit of an eccentric artist whose dramatic plan to `heal' the city of Indianapolis requires a car painted to resemble a possum and a shamanistic Etch-a-Sketch.
In these stories rooted in the everyday, fate, acts of God and good old-fashioned luck beget exceptional circumstances and once-in-a-lifetime occurrences in which shared mythologies have the power to bring people together-or tear them apart.