Frank Carlson Library

Ed Dyck finds that you cannot say "piss" on the radio in Saskatoon. There wasn't very much radio promotion of his book. That's a shame. Everybody should know about the cat Jack and the world Dyck compacts around him in 15 "sonnets."

Anxious, twitchy, urgent poems-a collection that's at once sardonic and "chronically wishful." Reckon, Steve McOrmond's first book of poems since his acclaimed 2010 collection The Good News about Armageddon, hones in on those fugitive moments when the parts of ourselves that have not been entirely subsumed by consumer capitalism escape their cages and come out to play-a photographer's lifelong desire to collect snowflakes, an adolescent's game of...

Year Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along song lines as though following passages of Koto music. In Brian Henderson's poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed by awareness of the paradoxes at the heart of language, that language wants you for itself, and that what is named, falls. Whether focusing on the...

The story of inventor Elijah McCoy, whose name became a byword for quality, as in "the real McCoy." The play explains why we've never heard of him and reclaims a fascinating man's life from undeserved obscurity. Elijah McCoy, born in Canada to runaway American slaves, showed so much promise in school that he won a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at Edinburgh University. McCoy moved to the US, where no one believed a black man could be...

In her second collection of poetry, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine-grained and crude. With her unique and engaging voice that mixes pop culture, archaic mysticism, and inventiveness with lyric forms, these poems play with reality and fantasy, distorting perception, and are universal and personal at once.

Decline of the Animal Kingdom investigates modern constructs of domesticity, freedom, wilderness, and artificiality to paint a portrait of what it means to be human, animal, or both in a society saturated with dog boutiques, trophy hunting, retro taxidermy, and eco-tourism. With brief forays into Algonquin Park and the heart of the 1980s jungle, the book largely draws its energy from the urban landscape, where the animals that interact with the environment...

Poems that occupy the difficult territory of contemporary crisis with great candour and trenchant wit. Steve McOrmond's unflinching take on contemporary life, with its saturnine candour and ironic focus, may remind readers of the anti-poetry of Europeans like Zbigniew Herbert: intense, humanistic and deeply sceptical of inflationary gestures or stagy rhetoric. Shedding illusions, but equally refusing the consolations of despair, McOrmond's well-tempered...

Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes, the new collection of poetry from Giller Prize–longlisted writer Jennifer LoveGrove, attempts to make sense of a difficult and unsettling world, where one need not look much further than their own communities to witness acts of trauma and absurdity. Here, we're haunted by the ghosts of alienation, trauma, delusion, and fear that the past decade has instilled in us, and bear witness to moments of extreme crisis-in...

Someday is a powerful new play by award-winning playwright Drew Hayden Taylor. The story in Someday, though told through fictional characters and full of Taylor's distinctive wit and humour, is based on the real-life tragedies suffered by many Native Canadian families. Anne Wabung's daughter was taken away by children's aid workers, when the girl was only a toddler. It is Christmastime 35 years later, and Anne's yearning to see her now-grown daughter...

Two old friends become puppeteers, each performing with the same beloved folk characters, Franz and Schnitzel. Fipsi, ambitious and naive, aligns herself with the rule government, the Common Good. Carl, headstrong and outspoken, is forced underground as his satirical shows parody the censorship and oppression of the Common Good.