Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens
Peops: Portraits & Stories of People
Phenotypes & Flag-Wavers
Jill Boettger
Poem For the Barn
Here is your rickety wooden poem. Here is your red, peeling paint poem, your weather-beaten and abused poem. Here is your hands-full-of-slivers poem, knuckle-broken and arthritic.
SUE GOYETTE
Fidelity
Three poems by Sue Goyette, excerpted from her book Penelope.
VIVEK SHRAYA
First Pluck
A young boy gets his first pair of tweezers after overhearing locker room conversations about body hair in this excerpt from God Loves Hair by Vivek Shraya.
Steven Heighton
Fireman's Carry
In this excerpt from Steven Heighton's new book, The Dead Are More Visible, a firefighter must decide what lives are worth saving in the heat of a four-alarm fire. The official line is that firefighters save people—but what about reptiles?
Five Stories, Nine Selves
That’s what matters to me, these stories, you kick them up in the dust and they get inside you.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Tom Walmsley
Kid Stuff
Moth fought his last fight in the basement of a church forty miles out of town. The crowd was polite and applauded after every round, but made hardly a sound while the punches were being thrown. None of the overhead lights were extinguished and there
King of the Lost & Found
BILL BISSETT
Kontest Carnage
langwage binds us 2gethr separatelee n parts n sharing almost replikating nevr reelee xact wun uv th biggest communal spells we ar all bound n unbound in
Krazy & Ignatz 1937
CARY FAGAN
Laughing Heir
"He listened to the message three times, then sent a text to Ciara begging off dinner without giving a reason."
RUSSELL F. HIRSCH
Lemke Overboard
A sleepwalking old man brings a community together in the waves of the sea.
Let’s Go Dancing
A poem from Randall Magg’s book about Terry Sawchuk, the legendary hockey goalie who got his start with the Detroit Red Wings.
Steven Heighton
Lost Diary
At first the sound was like a raw stropping of steel on steel although we had little such heavy stuff along...
ANAKANA SCHOFIELD
Malarky
"Naked men. At each other all the time, all day long. I can’t get it out of my head."
MICHAEL CRUMMEY
Making The Fish
Two motions with the knife, across the throat below the gills and along the bare length of the belly, like a Catholic crossing himself before a meal.
BILLEH NICKERSON
McPoems
Poems of memorable customers: the one who ordered a hundred cheeseburgers, the one who bought three meals a day at the drive-thru, the drunk one in a clown suit, and more.
Katie Addleman
Middle of Nowhere
“Thank god for you,” Polly said one day after work, as she and Ruth sat under the fluorescent lights of the town’s only bar. “You’re the only normal one here.”
JANNIE EDWARDS
Members
Honourable mention in the 8th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.
Stephen Smith
Men + Men
We have men on the slope and men on the ridge. In the gully, more men. Men on the main road wait for the men on the esker to move up onto the ridge so that they (the men on the road) can take their (the esker-men’s) place. Men hesitate and grumble. T
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Blood Memory
In the home for unwed mothers, as she waits for me to be born, one word in Cree is spoken over and again in her head—macitwawiskwesis, bad girl.
What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?
Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye
The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,
the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown
Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character
I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.
Mia + Eric
Future Perfect
New bylaws for civic spaces.
JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound
It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.
SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm
Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.
Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers
It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.
Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away
Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.
DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps
On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.
Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café
It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.
Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect
I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.
MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal
The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.
Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher
Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."
BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late
"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."
Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans
I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.
Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life
Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.
Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary
After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.
Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor
A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.
Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski
He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?
Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House
A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.
Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?
Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.
David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies
Mastery of the self
CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies
"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."
Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs
Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part
Jill Mandrake reviews George Bowering's Caprice, "a poetic eulogy for a shrinking literary landscape."
Helen Godolphin
Cruddy
Helen Godolphin reviews Lynda Barry's Cruddy, a novel deep within its own whacked-out world.
Patty Osborne
Eating Apples: Knowing Women's Lives
Patty Osborne reviews Eating Apples, an addictive collection of personal essays that gives glimpses into the lives of women.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Errata
Norbert Ruebsaat reviews George Bowering's Errata (1988).
Robert Everett-Green
Epileptic
Robert Everett-Green reviews David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic, a recount of the long search by David B.’s parents for a cure for his older brother’s seizures.
Jennesia Pedri
A Second Piece of Pi
Jennesia Pedri answers: why would one want to reread a novel that devotes 211 of its 354 pages to the 227 days that followed a shipwreck?
Blaine Kyllo
All Families are Psychotic
Blaine Kyllo calls All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland "a piece of sculpture: intricate, finely balanced, and threatening to tip should anyone get too close."
Norbert Ruebsaat
Autobiography of a Tattoo
Norbert Ruesbaat's Christmas book was Stan Persky’s Autobiography of a Tattoo. He read it twice, and then went back and read many parts a third time.
Patty Osborne
Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir
Patty Osborne reviews Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir by Marina Nemat.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Private Confessions
Norbert Ruebsaat reviews Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions and the screening at which he saw it.
Kris Rothstein
Grand Centaur Station: Unruly Living with the New Nomads of Central Asia
Nomadic culture is at the core of Larry Frolick’s Grand Centaur Station: Unruly Living with the New Nomads of Central Asia.
How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking
When Geist requested a copy of How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking by the new English kitchen queen Nigella Lawson (Knopf Canada) “for review purposes,” the distributor wrote back to say “fat chance.”
Patty Osborne
I'll Be Right Back
Writing on the Rock, which takes place on Denman Island, B.C., in early August, is now my favourite writers’ festival.
ARLEEN PARÉ
Invisible Lines
In Astrid van der Pol’s poetry collection, Invisible Lines (BuschekBooks), the past is the most hopeful, whereas each new future enters some form of sadness.
Lily Gontard
The Cripple and His Talismans
The protagonist of The Cripple and His Talismans by Anosh Irani (Raincoast) is a self-centred, self-absorbed, wealthy-but-have-chosen-to-live-among-the-crippled-and-poor-in-Bombay man.
Norbert Ruebsaat
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and in the film it is based on, turns notions about corporate responsibility and accountability into oxymorons.
Kris Rothstein
The Nervous Tourist
Bob Gaulke’s description of his travels in Salvador (a region of Brazil), in The Nervous Tourist, evokes the age of imperialism. This modest chapbook contains insightful, engaging and funny writing about the eye-opening experience of travel.
Stephen Osborne
Weave
Lisa Pasold’s poetry collection, Weave, reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian front and the shores of Lake Ontario.
Kevin Barefoot
Soccer in Sun and Shadow
Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Verso) collects his ruminations on the history and future of soccer, and consists of vignettes describing famous players, unlikely goals and every World Cup final since 1930.
Stephen Osborne
Snow Walker
Snow Walker, the film made from Farley Mowat’s book of stories, contains much cornball scripting, some wretched dialogue and a ponderous, bellowing soundtrack that equals the worst excesses of Cecil B DeMille’s Bible epics.
Stephen Osborne
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580, by Samuel Bawlf, completes the story of European adventure in the north of North America in the sixteenth century.
Jill Boettger
Field Guide to Stains: How to Identify and Remove Virtually Every Stain Known to Man
Did you know that you are more likely to encounter Worcestershire sauce stains in winter and that correction fluid stains are most common in April?
Stephen Osborne
Marie Tyrell
“I knew that I would dream that night of the city in flames, the brown-brick towers falling, caving in on themselves (in slow motion, great clouds of burning dust), proud lights flickering out, psssfft, all the messages going dark one by one."
Sam Macklin
Complete Peanuts
Each book in the ongoing Complete Peanuts series (Fantagraphics) is beautifully designed by the Canadian cartoonist Seth, and features two years of thoughtfully reproduced daily and Sunday newspaper cartoon strips.
Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.
Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage
When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.
Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions
Coming to harbour in a new world.
Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters
Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise
“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.
Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO
For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots
"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."
Stephen Henighan
Not Reading
What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.
Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking
Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.
Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions
Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far
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.
George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse
The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.
Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales
A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.
Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time
What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.
Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality
Must artists declare their moral integrity?
Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame
Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.
Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes
There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.
The dog turns his butt to the stinging spray and wind but my boyfriend and I face the water, watching the massive waves crash on the shore. We are drenched in seconds and we have to shout over the wind. It’s exhilarating.
Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices
Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.
Jill Boettger
Born in the Caul
According to legend and prophecy, this child would possess the second sight.
Edith Iglauer
Red Smile
When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.
Stephen Henighan
Writing Bohemia
Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?
Rachel Lebowitz
Cottonopolis
"A rookery of dead ends and curved lanes. Everywhere heaps of debris. Pigs rooting in eyes." Explore Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, in poem.
Stephen Osborne
Dancing with Dynamite
Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Real World Happiness
Norbert Ruebsaat learns that true happiness requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour” in Brian Fawcett's memoir, Human Happiness.
Edith Iglauer
Snowed In at the Sylvia
I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Ursula
She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.
Edith Iglauer
Wait, Save, Help
When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.
Edith Iglauer
My Lovely Bathtub
First published in Geist #30 and now in the 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition.
Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour
He is one of the strangest crea
Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman
A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...
Stephen Osborne
Stranger
Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.
Alberto Manguel
Final Answers
For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved
Stephen Henighan
Becoming French
For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.
Stephen Henighan
The BookNet Dictatorship
According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.
Jane Silcott
Lurching Man
One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Veronica Gaylie
The Guy Upstairs
Veronica Gaylie encounters Trevor Linden, the Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived, in economy class.
Veronica Gaylie
Memory Test
Does the individual have difficulty finding words, finishing sentences or naming people or things?
Manfred Buchheit
Burin Highway
From Mapping a Sense of Place: The Photographs of Manfred Buchheit, 1972-1995, an exhibition curated by Bruce Johnson for the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Jane Awde Goodwin
Dear Doctor
The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.
George Fetherling
Adventures in the Nib Trade
No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.