Véhicule Press

Mother Muse

Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison’s first poetry collection to be published in Canada in over nine years, Mother Muse heralds the return of a major voice. The poems in Goodison’s new book move boldly and range widely; here are praise songs alongside laments; autobiography shares pages with the collective past. In her exquisitely lyrical evocations of Jamaican lore and tradition, Goodison has always shown another side of history. While celebrating a wide cross-section of women—from Mahalia Jackson to Sandra Bland—Mother Muse focuses on two under-regarded “mothers” in Jamaican music: Sister Mary Ignatius, who nurtured many of Jamaica's most gifted musicians, and celebrated dancer Anita “Margarita” Mahfood. These important figures lead a collection of formidable scope and intelligence, one that seamlessly blends the personal and the political.

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Durable Goods

James Pollock

Durable Goods is a book of sharply imagined poems about everyday technology. James Pollock calls to surprising life everything from microwaves to kettles, sprinklers to umbrellas, with a precision both unerring and effortless. By conjuring the essential spirit of each object, the poet reveals the tools and appliances that surround us as both sympathetic reflections of ourselves—our fear, love, rage, hope and grief—and strange beings with inner lives of their own. “It knows how much pressure you’ve been under,” Pollock writes, of the barometer, “that you could use a change of atmosphere.” Read together, these poems immerse us in an imagined world with the power to make us see our own in a new way. Suffused with dazzling wordplay, razor wit, and rippling sonic effects, the poems richly reward being read aloud. For Pollock, the most durable good is language itself.

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Hallelujah Time

Virginia Konchan

Hallelujah Time, Virgina Konchan’s third full-length poetry collection—and the first to appear in Canada—delivers up poetry that is unlike anything being written today. Specializing in fast-moving monologues that track the vagaries and divagations of a mind in action, Konchan cuts our most hallowed cultural institutions and constructions down to size. She bracingly confronts the contemporary need to constantly adjust our masks to appease impossible standards, and our desperate fear of having our true selves be seen and understood. Hallelujah Time embraces a dazzling mix of idioms, registers, and tones in poems that compress everything they know into aphoristic, hard-boiled insights as arresting as they are witty, theatrical as they are sincere. “My human desire,” Konchan writes, “is simple: / to live on the perpetual cusp / of extremity.”

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Antonyms for Daughter

Jenny Boychuk

Antonyms for Daughter, Jenny Boychuk’s poetry debut, addresses a harrowing subject: the loss of the poet’s mother to addiction. Deploying a range of forms and techniques astonishing in a first collection, Boychuk creates unsparing scenes of their complicated life together. Poem after poem attempts to wring clarity from memories ripe with trauma and love, as Boychuk questions whether it is possible for a child to ever extricate herself from an abusive parent—to become, as it were, a living “antonym” of a painful family legacy. A booklength loss-lyric of vivid beauty, Antonyms for Daughter is a singular example of grief transformed into art.

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The Strangest Dream

Merrily Weisbord

Lauded as the most eloquent book about Canadian communists and written like drama, The Strangest Dream animates the history and life of militants from the 1930's to the 1956 Khruschev revelations about Stalin.

Published originally in 1983, this Third Edition contains a new preface by the author, additional photographs, and previously unpublished letters.

An antidote to recurrent anti-communist vitriol, The Strangest Dream evokes not only the struggle "to make a better world," but the warmth, generosity, songs, theatre, art, and exhilaration of party members for whom comradeship meant a way of life. Merrily Weisbord's research and contacts unearth historical documents and rare testimonies, including that of Canada's only communist MP, and of the accused in the Cold War spy trials.

The Strangest Dream is witness to the heyday and legacy of Canadian communists’ courage and social conscience, and to the forces that destroyed their dreams.

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