Kathy Dobson

Our March bundle features Kathy Dobson's two searing memoirs With a Closed Fist: Growing up in Canada's Toughest Neighbourhood and Punching and Kicking: Leaving Canada's Toughest Neighbourhood for $30 plus $6 flat rate shipping in Canada. These books recount the challenges of growing up in, and eventually leaving, Point Saint Charles, once an industrial working-class neighbourhood, now in the throes of gentrification.

Praise for Kathy Dobson's books:

"Dobson has enormous talent, and we all must be thankful that she did beat the odds and find her way through the maze of deprivation and violence to speak her truths in such a creative and telling book." – Pat Capponi, Globe and Mail

"It reads like fiction... younger Kathy's voice is strikingly believable: candid, scornful, funny" – Anna Leventhal, Montreal Review of Books

"Kathy Dobson vividly gives us a surprisingly clear glimpse through a child's eyes of what it is like to live in poverty. Her language rings true as it portrays lives of people struggling every day and night with the physical, economic, emotional and political assaults of poverty and its constant humiliations. This is a rare insider expose." – Linda Savory Gordon, Assoc. Professor, Dept. of Community Development and Social Work, Algoma University

"This is as authentic a description, language and all, of life in the Point during the 60s and 70s as it is possible to get. Poverty, hunger, love, abuse, ingenuity, survival, intelligence, language wars— they are all there; fierce optimism and laugh-out-loud humour carry the story along. That is the way it was. I know , I was there." – Nicolas Steinmetz, MD

"In a place between the profound and the profane, lives a raw, unapologetic, and funny voice of Kathy Dobson. In an honest and harrowing account of poverty, she tells a powerful story of resilience of a girl turned woman." – Merlyna Lim, Canada Research Chair, Carleton University

Richard Sanger

“Richard Sanger’s new book begins with father and son depart­ing on the mythic early morning quest and then plunges us into the dirty realism of the rink. There are skittish pucks, ancient Sherwoods, inappropriate mums, elaborate excuses for losers (and Leafs), the rink as blank slate or the genetic showcase kids can’t escape. The key theme is the way we use stories to explain reality—including the games we lose—to ourselves, and our children.” — Linda Hutcheon

“Richard Sanger’s Fathers at Hockey is a brilliant and accurate evocation of the unique world dads and their kids enter when they find ice, outdoors or in. It’s all here, the bad coffee, aching cold, throat-catching moments of desperate hope and prayer.” — Roy Macgregor

“How does he encompass so much—from the numinous mystery of ice to a rink side chat with Umberto Eco—in a clutch of relaxed, mind-stretching, gut-punching poems about taking your kid to his games? I love this collection.” — Rick Salutin

“Fathers at Hockey shows Richard Sanger at the top of his game: formally inventive and various, eloquent, unsentimental, funny, unconventionally beautiful. Everything this reader looks for in poetry.” — Steven Heighton.

A Signal Editions Chapbook.

Join us in celebrating the legacy of great Black writing from Montreal with books by Tawhida Tanya Evanson and Kaie Kellough.
For $30, plus $6 shipping within Canada, you'll receive:

Book of Wings by Tawhida Tanya Evanson

"Tawhida Tanya Evanson's first novel is a stunning testament to how the grief of heartbreak can bring us back to who we are." - Sheniz Janmohamed, Quill & Quire

Dominoes at the Crossroads by Kaie Kellough

Winner, 2020 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction; Finalist, Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal 2020; Longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

"This is more than a book of linked short stories with Black Canadians as its subject. Dominoes at the Crossroads articulates how Black history is not marginal to Canada's story, but central to it – encoded in its history, and therefore its future too." - Jade Colbert, Globe and Mail

Alexie Morin

A much-celebrated auto-fictional feminist memoir, finally available in English.

In this frank and unforgettable book, celebrated Québécois writer Alexie Morin becomes the subject of her own story as she places a childhood friendship under a microscope. An autobiographical novel set in a small industrial town in Quebec during the 1990s, Open Your Heart recounts the story of a difficult friendship between two girls brought together by illness and operations suffered at a young age. One girl suffers from severe strabismus, while the other was born blue. The first, defiant, feels that something is wrong with her, while the second is an angelic child loved by all. One becomes a writer, and the other dies at eighteen, during an operation that should have saved her life.

In this debut novel, Morin stakes out an exceptional pursuit for truth in these old memories as she grapples with death, love, bonding and solitude.