Featuring:
Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity by Gary Barwin
The Great Outer Dark by David Neil Lee
The War as I Saw It: In Rhodesia, Now Zimbabwe, Through the Eyes of a Black Boy by George Makonese Matuvi
Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging by Mariam Pirbhai
Burn Diary by Joshua Chris Bouchard
Please help us welcome these fabulous new books into the world on November 30, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. at Mills Hardware, 95 King St. E, Hamilton.
About The Books
Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity by Gary Barwin
Award-winning author Gary Barwin has written poems, novels and books for children. He’s composed music, created multimedia art and performed around the world. Now he has turned his talented pen to essays. In Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity Barwin thinks deeply about big ideas: story and identity; art and death; how we communicate and why we dream. From his childhood home in Ireland to his long-time home in Hamilton, Barwin shares the thoughts that keep him up at night (literally) and the ideas that keep him creating. Filled with witty asides, wise stories and a generosity of spirit that is unmistakable, these are essays that readers will turn to again and again.
The Great Outer Dark by David Neil Lee
After his voyage across the galaxy, Nate Silva arrives home to find Hamilton in the grip of a monstrous triumvirate. The Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods has returned, with the human form of the shape-changing nightmare from the Medusa Deep as its leader. And closely guarded in a downtown tower a mind-devouring entity called Oracle lurks. The city is infested with invasive species that have slithered into our world during the Church’s occult ceremonies – many-legged dritches, bat-like thrals and the eerie, flying night-gaunts. Caught in the middle of this are Nate’s friends Megan and Mehri, who are leading the resistance with the Furies, along with a mysterious double agent, the enigmatic Dr. Eldritch and his Cosmic Wonder Circus. For the safety of everyone he loves, Nate and his friend H.P. Lovecraft hijack the antique airship Sorcerer for one last voyage, to free Earth from the Great Old Ones once and for all.
The War as I Saw It: In Rhodesia, Now Zimbabwe, Through the Eyes of a Black Boy by George Makonese Matuvi
In The War as I Saw It, George Makonese Matuvi invites us into the world of a young boy living through a war he doesn’t understand. As violence drives his family from their home in the mountains to the streets of Zimbabwe’s towns and then cities, the author shares his family’s story with honesty, composure and a touch of humour. Interspersed within this tale of flight, hardship and the eventual return to rebuild, Matuvi shares stories of his life as a child, from making soccer balls out of discarded plastic bags to the tales his father told around the fire at night, adding depth and joy to his portrait of a family struggling with displacement. The War as I Saw It is not a tragedy, though there were many tragedies during the war, it is a story of love, of strength in difficulty and of the ingenuity of one family as they cope with forces beyond their control.
Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging by Mariam Pirbhai
In Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging, scholar Mariam Pirbhai looks carefully at the pocket of land she has called home in Southern Ontario for the past seventeen years, which she notes is a milestone for her, and asks how long it takes to be rooted to a place? And what does that truly mean? Seeing the landscape around her with the layered experience of a childhood spent wandering the world, Pirbhai shares her efforts to create a garden and understand her new home. From the strange North American obsession with non-fruiting fruit trees to the naming conventions of plants that erase their heritage, she casts a sharp eye on the choices that have shaped our gardens, and our society. Pirbhai considers wildflowers and weeds, our obsession with lawns, the choices in our plant nurseries and even our Canadian dedication to the cottage with warmth and humour. The result is a delightful collection of essays that invites the reader to see the beautiful complexity of the land around us all in a new way.
Burn Diary by Joshua Chris Bouchard
In Burn Diary, Joshua Chris Bouchard’s debut collection, the reader is immersed in a dark and visceral world, which is both natural and deeply unnatural. Violence walks beside the reader, but so do moments of grace, whether it’s in the echo of a loon call in the evening, or the sight of a friend’s cancer scar and the gift of ice cream. These are unapologetic, gritty poems, which explore the impact of physical and emotional trauma in tightly stretched lines and propel the reader ever forward. There is courage here, and honesty, and energy, and a new, unforgettable, poetic voice.