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In 1993 Mary Kiyooka sat with her son Roy Kiyooka, one of Canada's most important avant-garde painters, and a tape recorder and in her native Japanese shared her memories with him -- her childhood in Japan, her arrival as a married woman in Canada, and her family's experience in Alberta during the Japanese internment period. ... Read more

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A harrowing pathology of the soul, Mad Shadows centres on a family group: Patrice, the beautiful and narcissistic son; his ugly and malicious sister, Isabelle-Marie; and Louise, their vain and uncomprehending mother. These characters inhabit an amoral universe where beauty reflects no truth and love is an empty delusion. Each character is ultimately annihilated by their own obsessions.

Acclaimed and reviled when it exploded on the Quebec literary scene in 1959, Mad Shadows initiated a new era in Quebec fiction.


From the Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Blais' first book - dark, cynical, and beautiful
This is a very short novel, but very good.I can only read the english version, from the translation all i can say is she has a simple style, never too verbose, yet each word is perfectly and simply chosen to precisedly add mood to each scene.A great intro to her writing.

Better in french
This book is beautifully written. The symbolism in this book is deeper than i have ever read before. It is a very sombre novel with so much to get out. If you can read french then definitely pick this up in french because you will find all of the symbolism in this book to be at a much deeper level. this book was meant for french and unfortunately it does tend to lose some of its meaning and qaulity but it is still just as great of a story. i definitely reccomend this book. it is a great achievment of a great author. The novel seems even more interesting and intriguing when you know that she wrote it in only 13 days. it's a must!!! KH, 16 ... Read more

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What does it mean to tell a story from a woman’s point of view? How have Canadian anglophone and francophone writers translated feminist literary theory into practice?

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Seven poets of diverse region, gender, sexual orientation, race, and generation. Seven poets linked by experiment and opposition. Robert Kroetsch discusses postmodernism's history, Fred Wah talks about ethnic hybridity, and Dionne Brand muses on postcolonial struggle and community. Erin Mouré encourages "excessiveness" while Daphne Marlatt speaks of "salvaging". On writing, poetics, and culture, Marie Annharte Baker and Jeff Derksen share their personal perspectives and experiences. Poets Talk brings new insights to the value of inspiration, imagination, and poetic re-invention. ... Read more

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Wish They Were Here
What a terrific book, and one that should be more widely known on this side of the border, for even though all the poets and both the interviewers are Canadians born and bred, the questions they address are ones that we need to listen to, and very few of us here in the USA are bothering with their construction or phenomenological coming into being.The two interviewers sometimes act as a tag team, and at other times (like Charlie's Angels) split up for more effective coverage and/or investigation.For example, on her own Susan Rudy interviews Fred Wah, perhaps because her partner, Pauling Butling, is married to Wah and maybe wouldn't be unbiassed or something?Although Rudy also shares a certain I don't know, easy familiarity with Wah that makes reading their interview sort of like listening to close country cousins kibbitz.

The book begins with a very intense interrogation of Robert Kroetsch, the venerable postmodernist about whom Rudy has written a whole volume already.Kroetsch notes that some people think he's gone too far (outside of grammar) in his "Poem for My Dead Sister," but Butling seems to scoff at such a notion, instead egging him on to prove that his work is any more difficult than, say, Gertrude Stein's.He is forced to quote individual lines from his poem and insist on their opacity, while Rudy and Butlingmurmur in the background about "Yes, you certainly make it incomprehensible in the reading, or first reading," and a certain skepticism pours through, especially in regards to Kroetsch's gender values, which are mystifying.Good work all around!I don't think that Kroetsch IS indeed as well known in the USA as the editors state in their preface to this interview, despite his having taught at Binghamton for decades.But then again, I'm o expert.

Their interview with Daphne Marlatt is equally focussed: this time they examine Marlatt's book SALVAGE, in which she digs up some of her own work and re-writes it, teasing out the threads of lesbian identity and politics that an earlier discretion or unknowing led her to obfuscate.They seem in general admiring of Marlatt's progress, although they leap at her use of the neologism "Stanzagraph."PAULINE: "What do you mean by stanzagraph?"Good question, for Marlatt was trying to let it slip by as though everyone in the world knew what a stanzagraph is.To me, it's one of those words that didn't need to be, but as Marlatt describes why she came to use it, my sympathies grew as her discourse became more intimate.Maybe that's the secret of all good interviews, they let the person come out more, the figure behind the poem.Though this is exactly what Erin Moure dislikes about interviews, as she admits, and throughout her interview she seems panicky, as though losing part of her heteronymity through having to sit still for an hour while Butling and Rudy try to pin her down.

Pauline Butling's talk with Jeff Derksen ends so abruptly I wondered if one or the other of them had to run out to put money in a parking meter.Also, it is ironic that apparently the University of Alberta couldn't afford a proof-reader to clear up some of the spelling in the book, ironic especially when the black poet Dionne Brand reproves Butling and Rudy (and all white critics and poets) for not knowing enough about black American writers, including Gayl Jones, and then the book misspells Jones' name, as though to underline the point.

But all in all a splendid edition and one longs, not for a sequel, but for a whole encylopedia of Butling and Rudy just talking about anything. ... Read more

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In this graceful, haunting, and evocative novel, the Gulf War becomes a touch-stone for Suzanne's meditation on her mother's life in World War II. Taken is a tribute to women whose lives have been taken over, or even taken, by war. In the end, out of the wreckage of grief and power, love and light-however changed-endure. ... Read more

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Winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poery Prize
Finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award


“You remember — what is it you remember? / the feel of home, that moment of coming into your body. . . ”

So begins Daphne Marlatt’s haunting and multi-layered long poem, which reads with all the urgency and depth of a novel. Set in present-day and 1950s Vancouver, The Given begins with the news of a mother’s death, then opens up to become an intricate tapestry of lives, as Marlatt deftly interweaves the past with the present, replicating the arc of memory itself, while questing for — and questioning — the meaning of home and identity. Circling around the narrator’s mother — theatrical, troubled, imprisoned in the small existence of a 1950s housewife, and a persistent presence in the lives of others — The Given is a ceremony performed for her, and for all “those who have left, who go on burning in us.” In luminous, deeply resonant fragments, Marlatt resoundingly answers the drive to live with deep attention in a now that is, for all of us, “tangled in the past.” ... Read more

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Ana Historic is the story of Mrs. Richards, a woman of no history, who appears briefly in 1873 in the civic archives of Vancouver. It is also the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with the possibilities of Mrs. Richards's life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

new poetic challenges
There is a suppression of history, arguably the personal narrative is wiped from the slate and factual ideas and events tend to be unrevealing.Daphne Marlatt focuses on the suppression of women's histories as Ana Historic explores history and narration.
Novels should raise questions, as Ana Historic does successfully. Marlatt gives a voice to women by questioning the conventions and rules of writing.She mixes history by exploring different eras and making connections between the 1980's and 1870's with the characters Annie and Ana. The different historical voices of the novel bind these women together and the astounding poetics of Marlatt's own voice. Ana Historic is an enchanting meld of the poem and the novel.Marlatt's words flow into one another, even the form of the novel itself breaks conventions and takes a more poetic route to align the words on the page.She has a feminine approach to language and a soft pensive order to the way she writes.It's a challenging book that deserves a close read as the movement of time is sometimes difficult to follow.Dapne Marlatt takes the reader into a dark lost place and it's fascinating to go there with her.

Filling the Gaps - Placing Women Back Into Hisory
Ana Historic, in a nutshell: -is written in non-conventional prose, free of the common uses of character development, punctuation and linear plot movement -attempts to include the impossible- to write women into history-Daphne Marlatt uses evocative imagery and detail to portray small momentsof time that revolve and fold in on itself-forming a whole for the gap thatcannot be filled in "normal"patriarchical writing

an excelent, thought-provoking read
Ana, a Vancouver wife and mother, becomes obsessed with the character of Mrs. Richards, an early resident of Vancouver whose legacy consists only of a few unsatisfying references in a history book.Ana struggles to come toterms with the exclusion of women from traditional "history", andconverts this lack into a potential for endless imagination.As shereimaginves and rewrites Mrs. Richards' history, she comes to a new kind ofpersonal freedom and self-knowledge. Daphne Marlatt is primarily a writerof poetry, concequently the style in Ana Historic is lovely and poetic,although not too hard to follow.The book is thoughtful, but so compellingthat I found it impossible to put down. ... Read more

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early selected writings, prose & poetry ... Read more

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A collection of works by one of Canada's outstanding women writers. Marlatt uses a hybrid of literary forms -- prose poems, letters, diary entries, short-line poems, and travel books -- to produce captivating poetic narrative. ... Read more

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10 years of collaborative writing, poetry ... Read more

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A collection of poetry and photographs that reinvents the little village of Steveston, close to Vancouver, Canada -- a fishing village populated at one time by mostly Japanese fishermen and their wives.

Splendid b&w photographs of the Fraser River, the canneries and the people of Steveston ... Read more

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From one of Canada&#146s foremost poet/novelists and feminist critics&#151a collection of essays spanning over fifteen years&#46