Join us on April 21 for the first of our Spring 2013 launches at the wonderful Supermarket Toronto. Featuring new voices, loud words, good company, and awesome food – sweet potato chips, anyone? The line-up includes: Veena Gokhale, Erika Rummel, Keith Garebian, Vivian Demuth, Chava Rosenfarb (Goldie Morgentaler), Richard Gambino, Denise Desautels (Alisa Belanger)
Warm up from this chilly winter weather with delicious lattes and by listening to this wonderful line-up of writers!
HEAD GAMES by Erika Rummel: A Latino bar in Toronto, 1978. The men can’t take their eyes off Lisa, but there is something about her that scares them off. She is a little too intense, a little too needy. Don, a realtor with a murky South American past, is unfazed. He listens patiently when Lisa tells him she is looking for her father, a wealthy man living in Argentina. Or so she says. Determined to find her roots, Lisa goes to Argentina. It’s a journey born of longing for love and the desperate need for something solid to hold on to.
MOON ON WILD GRASSES by Keith Garebian: With illustrations by the author, this book shows the unsuspected scope of a very concise, precise poetic form. Keith Garebian’s haiku encompass a wide range of themes in a vividly elegant style that combines the pictorial with the passionate, erotic or reflective. Nature, empirical experience, the self, love, death, and grief are captured with a perceptive, sensitive eye.
EXILE AT LAST by Chava Rosenfarb, edited by Goldie Morgentaler: Most of the poems presented here are from Rosenfarb’s last book of poetry, Aroys fun gan-eydn (Out of Paradise, 1965). The ghetto poems are from the volume Di balade fun nekhtikn vald (The Ballad of Yesterday’s Forest). The poems have been arranged so that they follow roughly the chronology of Rosenfarb’s life, beginning with the poems she wrote in the Lodz ghetto as a young girl and moving to the more mature poems of her years in Canada.
BOMBAY WALI by Veena Gokhale: Twelve stories that provide startling glimpses of contemporary life in Bombay, and elsewhere. A wealthy business woman compelled by the desire to hurt her best friend; an old woman in a Tokyo apartment seeking the touch of a baby’s hand; a woman reflecting on violence as a riot rages outside her home. Tales about friendship and repulsion, family ties and freedom; violence, public and private; ambition and uncertainty, alienation and acceptance, growing up and growing old.
FIREWATCHER by Vivian Demuth: From the vast expanse of the boreal forest, Vivian Demuth shows both an exquisite eye for detail and a profound concern for the larger environmental picture. Her lively poems show that, to an engaged observer with an accomplished literary imagination, the mountain forest is a complex, animated bio-community – resonating with beauty and sentient beings, large, small, and mysterious. Mixing elements of realism and magical realism, humour and protest, and traditional and experimental forms, this volume offers a unique contribution to Canadian eco-poetry.
THINGS THAT FALL by Denise Desautels, translated by Alisa Belanger: In French, Tombeau de Lou. At its origin, the death of the childhood friend, the chosen sister, swept away by a sudden cancer. She was fifty-three. Like the poet. The one who remains, the survivor, the inconsolable woman. That’s the anecdote. In this literary tomb of eleven songs, the need to attempt a utopian reconciliation: embrace all at once the immensity of the emptiness, the chaos, our fragile humanity, and our ardent desire for resistance.
CAMERADO and THE TRIAL OF PIUS XII by Richard Gambino: Camerado is a play presenting the very dramatic life and compelling thoughts of Walt Whitman, who remains the foremost American poet of the greatness possible in the human spirit, and in the spirit of a vital democracy. The next, Pius XII, depicts the trial during his reign as pope, from 1939 to 1958, testing how a moral and religious leader, in his case of the largest Christian church on earth, should lead in the midst of World War II, the Cold War, and horrible mass crimes against humanity.