The Porcupine's Quill

Re-visit the life of history’s most notorious lover, from childhood to Casanova’s daring escape from the State Inquisition’s prison. Using eighteenth-century poetic conventions that Casanova himself would have cherished, Kildare Dobbs infuses this renegade’s legacy with a modern, witty and very hilarious bite.

2011—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

2011—ReLit Awards, Poetry,
Long-listed

Mystery Stories is inhabited by absence: dead friends, past childhoods and ex-lovers. Others, stunned, are left behind to navigate the pitfalls of memory, while trying to make sense of lives built by people who are no longer there. This collection is an intricate addition to Helwig’s already large canon of rich, thoughtful stories populated by densely real people.

2011—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

2011—ReLit Awards, Short Fiction,
Long-listed

Kaleidoscope is the first in a series of ten volumes to be published over the next ten years as a complement to an online hypermedia edition of the Collected Works of P. K. Page. Listed chronologically by date of composition, the poetry in Kaleidoscope is fluid, wondrous and technically exquisite, drawing on subjects great and small, and it offers a comprehensive look at one of Canada’s most beloved and brilliant poets.

2011—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Commended

Complete Physical will appeal to physicians and patients alike, which includes most of the multitude. Doctors can read the book and sympathize with its complaints; patients can read it and know the mind of their doctor better.

2011—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Runner-up

2011—Trillium Prize,
Shortlisted

A wilful young woman revels in the surprisingly-inclusive communal aspects of life in the punk / anarchist counterculture as it was practised in the hardscrabble underbelly of Sault Ste Marie on the cusp of the 21st century.

2011—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

A new edition of James Reaney’s classic long poem which has been described, variously, as ‘the toughest and funniest, most literary and most serious long poem in English-Canadian literature’ (Germaine Warkentin) and conversely as ‘whimsical self-indulgence’ (W. J. Keith). A Suit of Nettles won the Governor General’s award for poetry in 1958.

2011—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

A look at the early aspirations and fears of a young woman who would become the renowned Canadian artist Joyce Wieland. A very fascinating personal story unfolds in a series of diaries, kalideiscopic streams-of-consciousness and sketches, of a self-developing individuality and of the philosophical literacy of one of Canada’s great artistic innovators.

2011—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

2011—Alcuin Award for Excellence in Book Design,
Commended

In the Book of Hours, award-winning wood engraver George A. Walker creates a modern-day, secular devotional that captures in narrative imagery what is too devastating for words: the individual moments of innocence and routine life that ended with the onslaught of 9/11.

2011—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

Little Comrades tells the story of a girl growing up in a dysfunctional left-wing family in the Canadian West during the Depression, then moving, alone with her mother, to New York City during America’s fervently anti-Communist postwar years. With wit and honesty, Laurie Lewis describes an unusual childhood and an adventurous adolescence.

2011—Globe Top 100,
Commended

2012—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted