Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

2023 LAMPMAN AWARD WINNER!

But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves

By Conyer Clayton

But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, Conyer Clayton’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is a collection of prose poems that employs surrealism, humour, and body horror to cope with CPTSD, assault, loss, fear, and the memories of it all.

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Catastrophe Theories

By Mari-Lou Rowley

The poems in Catastrophe Theories reflect an increasingly unstable, surreal, and catastrophic world. Written over the past decade, the poems in Mari-Lou Rowley’s oracular work capture the zeitgeist of the moment. A world where human folly and frailty compete with corpocracy and technological determinism against the stubborn magnificence of the natural world.

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Czech Techno

By Mark Jarman

From the author of 19 Knives and My White Planet comes a brilliant suite of stories built around music and travel. The five stories that comprise Czech Techno are replete with the sizzle and jump we have come to expect from a Mark Jarman story. And matters of the heart are never far away, weaving through these tales like a knife blade through sand.

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Winner — Gerald Lampert Award

Float and Scurry

By Heather Birrell

The poems in this book are playful, hallucinatory, and often funny. They explore the far-fetchedness and perseverance of love between friends and family members, the importance of libraries and locked mental health wards, and ways to live with meaning in the face of a looming apocalypse.
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Finalist, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

Fontainebleau (stories)

By Madeline Sonik

In this collection of linked stories—part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery—magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations.

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Fool's Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver's Official Town Fool

By Jesse Donaldson

On April 1, 1968, a tall, bespectacled, thirty-five-year-old former social worker named Joachim Foikis received $3,500 from the Canada Council for the Arts in order to finance a unique, self-imposed mission unseen since Elizabethan England: reinvent the vanished tradition of “Town Fool.”

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Glorious Birds: A Celebratory Homage to Harold and Maude

By Heidi Greco

Cinematic film, the art form that came into its own in the 20th Century, is not only familiar to all of us, but is likely the form that lodges most clearly in memory. Like music — and the music employed in a film — scenes come back, often carrying emotion as well as remembrance. One such film is Harold and Maude

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The Headless Man

By Peter Dubé

In this gothic, picaresque narrative, laced with horror and humour, Montreal surrealist Peter Dubé addresses his concern with queer challenges to identity and sexual boundaries, exploring questions about insider and outsider, what constitutes the “normal” and what is relegated to the realm of the “monstrous.”
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Hearts Amok

By Kevin Spenst

In language that twists together hobo slang and flights of troubadourish diction, Hearts Amok scrutinizes the history of the love sonnet in Surrey, England and simultaneously celebrates the tickings and tollings of one love-struck heart in Surrey, British Columbia.

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Heroines Revisited

By Lincoln Clarkes

Heroines Revisited is a follow-up volume to the original Heroines: Photographs by Lincoln Clarkes that was released by Anvil in 2002. This new edition features over 200 portraits accompanied by three new critical essays that contextualize the five-year photo project and the controversial body of work, as well as an interview with the artist.

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