Over the past few decades, a group of writers we might call the Thinking and Singing poets have stood at the forefront of poetry in Canada. These five poets – Dennis Lee, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn – are major voices in an era of ecological devastation and spiritual unease. Their diverse, questioning work suggests new ways to confront some of the most pressing issues of our time. In vibrant prose, Mark Dickinson explores the relationship between the lives of these poets and their writing, examining their intersecting careers and friendships, and the ways they learned from and challenged one another. Canadian Primal uses an unconventional approach, blending biography with literary analysis and drawing from meetings and correspondence with each poet over many years to trace the people and events that inspired the creation of important texts. Dickinson tracks how each of the writers arrived at poetry as a way of being, and at the heart of their poetics he finds both a musical intelligence and the crucial importance of the land. Canadian Primal is literary biography reconceived as an adventure of the mind, body, and spirit. Ebullient, intelligent, and eminently readable, it reminds us that we can live on the earth in a different way, true to the defining experiences of our lives, surrounded by meaning and presence beyond our imagining.

Wayne Gisslen’s Professional Cooking for Canadian Chefs has helped train hundreds of thousands of professional chefs—with clear, in-depth instruction on the critical cooking theories and techniques successful chefs need to meet the demands of the professional kitchen. Now, with 1,200 recipes and more information than ever before, this beautifully revised and updated edition helps culinary students and aspiring chefs gain the tools and confidence they need to succeed as they build their careers in the field today.

Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse of US movie culture. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens examines how prerecorded video reframes the premises and promises of motion picture spectatorship. But instead of offering a history of video technology or reception, Caetlin Benson-Allott analyzes how the movies themselves understand and represent the symbiosis of platform and spectator. Through case studies and close readings that blend industry history with apparatus theory, psychoanalysis with platform studies, and production history with postmodern philosophy, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens unearths a genealogy of post-cinematic spectatorship in horror movies, thrillers, and other exploitation genres. From Night of the Living Dead (1968) through Paranormal Activity (2009), these movies pursue their spectator from one platform to another, adapting to suit new exhibition norms and cultural concerns in the evolution of the video subject.

As Julia Harrison's first summer of living in Ontario approached, she became aware of the culture of the cottage. Friends talked of nothing but languid afternoons on the dock, but Harrison marveled at the investment of money and labour that the idyllic escapes demanded. Curious about the rich and passionate meaning these places seemed to hold, she studied cottagers in the Haliburton region over the course of seven years. Thoughtfully and engagingly written, A Timeless Place considers the family cottage as a place where memories are treasured, national identity is celebrated, spiritual balance is restored, and a few dark secrets are kept.

This unique and innovative book fuses journalism with both psychology and biology to create a new scaffolding where primal literacy is the guiding force to covering high-risk environments. When humans are in high-stress situations, their perceptions of reality can be easily deceived and manipulated. What is safe, moral, truthful, and brave can be distorted, unless the journalist has a strong core in primal literacy. This text remedies this oversight by showing the mechanisms of primal literacy and survival instincts to create a powerful and reliable scaffolding with internal, external, and ecological validity. Readers are shown how to cover dangerous events using journalism and evolutionary psychology to avoid falling for propaganda or bringing further danger to the reporter and news consumer; however, these methods can easily be applied to any situation in times of both war and peace.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish writers played a key role in transatlantic cultural conversations – among Canada, Britain, France, America, and Indigenous nations – that shaped Canadian nationalism. Nationalism in Ireland was likewise influenced by the literary works of Irish migrants and visitors to Canada. Canada to Ireland explores the poetry and prose of twelve Irish writers and nationalists in Canada between 1788 and 1900, including Thomas Moore, Adam Kidd, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, James McCarroll, Nicholas Flood Davin, and Isabella Valancy Crawford. Many of these writers were involved in Irish political causes, including those of the Patriots, the United Irish, Emancipation, Repeal, and Young Ireland, and their work explores the similar ways in which nationalists in Ireland and Indigenous and settler communities in Canada retained their cultural identities and sought autonomy from Britain. Initially writing for an audience in Ireland, they highlighted features of the landscape and culture that they regarded as distinctively Canadian and that were later invoked as powerful unifying symbols by Canadian nationalists. Michele Holmgren shows how these Irish writers and movements are essential to understanding the tenor of early Canadian literary nationalism and political debates concerning Confederation, imperial unity, and western expansion. Canada to Ireland convincingly demonstrates that Canadian cultural nationalism left its mark on both countries. Contemporary decolonization movements in Canada and current cultural exchanges between Ireland and Indigenous peoples make this a timely and relevant study.

A growing number of literary historians and critics now recognize the contemporary long poem as a distinctively Canadian genre. This collection of essays leads the reader to a deeper understanding of Canadian literary cultures in terms of their local intimacies and idiosyncrasies as well as in their national contexts. Published in English.