In search of a big picture at the end of the singular world

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

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The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

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A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

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This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

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For the sake of the large romantic gesture

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Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

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No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

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Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

That’s one for the rice bag!

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Destroying books for the greater good.

Mary Meigs and her friend Lise Weil, editor of Beyond Recall, met regularly to do freewriting together. For each exercise they chose a line or phrase from the work of a poet they both admired; then, inspired by that "prompt," both women wrote for five or ten minutes, recording whatever came to mind (and hand).

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

Michael Hayward reviews the autobiography of Jim Rimmer, a “high priest” of type design and private-press printing.

Roger Deakin's Wildwood is a heady romp through the world’s forests and their entangled histories. Reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Michael Hayward reviews The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III, a collection of discussions with the leading dramatists, poets and novelists of the past fifty years.

Leah Rae reviews The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland: "Finally, a comprehensive collection of fair-to-middlin’ verse for the multilingual."

Michael Hayward reviews John Berger’s From A to X, a tale of anger, displacement and resistance.

Michael Hayward reviews Anik See’s Saudade, a collection of essays to plunge you deep into the meanings of travel and place.

Michael Hayward reviews Edward Lear in Albania, an account of the author's travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848.

Eve Corbel reviews The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble, a novel that takes place on land but is all about the sea.

Thad McIlroy reviews The Reaper by Steven Dunne.

Malcolm Gladwell uses statistical analyses to prove that location and timing are everything in Outliers: The Story of Success, reviewed by Lily Gontard.

A peek inside Roger Deakin’s living, breathing farmhouse in the waning years of his life in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Thad McIlroy reviews Slumdog Millionaire, a 2009 film by Danny Boyle.

Carrie Villeneuve reviews a new album from an East Vancouver band that appeals to music fans of all ages.

“Adopt a reading pseudonym” is but one piece of advice offered in The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu, reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

Michael Hayward reviews Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, a scholarly but entertaining history of France’s emergence in the modern era.

This edge-of-your-seat film follows a Spanish chef on his quest to win the prestigious cooking competition, the Bocuse D’Or. Review by Leah Rae.

Even the healthiest reader can uncover the fatal illness within thanks to The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You: A Guide to Self-Diagnosis for Hypochondriacs, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Stephen Osborne reviews Kahn & Engelmann, a German novel by Hans Eichner hailed as a masterpiece in Europe.

Jennesia Pedri reviews Gonzalo Riedel's wonderfully disastrous short story collection, Behaving This Way Is All I Have Left.

Thad McIlroy reads Kilodney Does Shakespeare and Other Stories by Lorette Luzajic, the only book that discusses Crad Kilodney’s life and writing.

Michal Kozlowski reviews Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic, twenty-nine (very) short stories set in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s.

Daniel Zomparelli reviews Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry edited by Mona Fertig and Harold Rhenisch (Mother Tongue).

Todd Coyne reviews Black: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau, a book that "charts a European social history of the most symbolic and evocative colour on earth."

Michael Hayward reviews Beat Generation by Jack Kerouac, a three-act play he wrote but never produced.

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.