• Fitch & Smith Treasury Featuring Mabel Murple, Toes in My Nose, & There Were Monkeys in My Kitchen cover

    Fitch & Smith Treasury

    Created by: Sheree Fitch
    Artist: Sydney Smith
    Publisher: Nimbus Publishing

    A beautiful collector’s edition of three Sheree Fitch-tastic tales with illustrations from Hans Christian Andersen Award–winning illustrator Sydney Smith.

    • What if there was a purple planet with purple people on it?
    • I stuck my toes / In my nose / And I couldn’t get them out
    • There were monkeys in my kitchen / They were climbing / Up the walls

    In a lovely hardcover edition bursting with vibrant colour, The Fitch & Smith Treasury presents the time-tested, rollicking rhyming books from Canada’s Dr. Seuss and illustrated by Hans Christian Andersen Award–winning illustrator Sydney Smith, Mabel Murple, Toes in My Nose, and There Were Monkey’s in My Kitchen, to a whole new generation.

    $25.95
  • Believing the Line

    Publisher: Breton Books

    Painter Jack Seigel died penniless and forgotten. He comes alive again in Silverberg’s Believing the Line, this new book of poetry-and-art celebrating the paintings and drawings by Jack Siegel. Seigel was the quintessential single-minded artist: difficult, self-absorbed, and completely dedicated to his work. George Payerle has written that “Jack Siegel was a lonely man who drew a world of humanity, one moment at a time.” Mark Silverberg’s 65 poems, an image at a time, stand as poignant tribute to those Seigel moments.

    $18.00
  • Because We Love, We Cry

    Created by: Sheree Fitch
    Publisher: Nimbus Publishing

    During the global pandemic, Sheree Fitch shared what she calls “moments”—her first-burst warm-up writing exercises, on social media almost every day. Sometimes funny verse, other times lyrical prose or poetry, these daily missives were one way to negotiate the strange, unpredictable times. On April 20, immediately upon waking, as the full story of the tragedy in Portapique, Nova Scotia, was unfolding, Fitch thought of all affected, the painful day ahead, of what parents would say to their children. She thought about grieving when apart.

    These words moved through her immediately that day. Fitch shared “Because We Love, We Cry” on social media and it was embraced by Nova Scotians and those who love them across the country. It was read aloud in Canadian Parliament and during a provincial news conference about COVID-19, and by Fitch herself during a nationally broadcast vigil held for the twenty-two victims of the Portapique tragedy.

    After many requests, Nimbus and Sheree have come together to make the poem available in book form. Featuring colour line drawings and the full poem on heavy cardstock for safekeeping, as well as a pull-out postcard to send to loved ones near and far, Because We Love is a mantra, a prayer, a lament, a talisman, a paper rosary, a beating heart to keep close to your own.

    A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated annually to the families of victims.

    $17.95
  • Wild Green Light

    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    Wild Green Light is a collaboration that brings together the poetry of acclaimed author David Adams Richards and award-winning writer Margo Wheaton. Drawing upon a fiercely shared passion for the natural world—as well as a literary friendship that has spanned more than two decades—each of these New Brunswick-born writers pays powerful tribute to a rapidly disappearing rural way of life. Atmospheric and spare, these poems take us into a world of deep woods, abandoned fields, kitchen tables, and back roads.

    The book is divided into two sections, representing the unique voice and perspective of each author. Wheaton’s section consists of two elegant lyric poems, as well as a fifteen-part sequence written in a poetic form known as “ghazals.” Sorrowing and precise, the poems in this sequence survey the remains of her working-class childhood home, a once-thriving place, ravaged by family alcoholism and despair. Both celebratory and grieving, these poems grapple intensely with larger issues of working-class poverty, limited choices, and the chaotic legacy of addiction.

    The book’s opening section gathers together twenty lyric poems by Richards, each one steeped in his own direct, visceral experience of his beloved Miramichi. Bold, plain-spoken, and elegiac, these deeply felt poems explore the grand terrain of love and loss and are marked with the same purposefulness, acuity, and compassion that appear in Richards’ fiction.

    Alike and different, these two writers share a devotion to the physical landscapes of New Brunswick and call us to fiercely cherish the beauty of rural life and experience.

    $19.95
  • While Crossing the Field

    Created by: Deborah Banks
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    While Crossing the Field is Deborah Banks’s debut book of poetry. Her poems take us out onto the land where experiences in the natural world are filtered through the internal landscape of longing, presence, gratitude, and attentiveness. From the lowly spider to the vast expanse of the Atlantic below her house, the poet invites us to consider who we are when everything in our bustling world is removed and we are left with the greatest expanse of all: the Now and how it can inform our every breath.

    $19.95
  • Waiting for the Small Ship of Desire

    Created by: Allan Cooper
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    This latest collection of Cooper’s poetry includes some of his most personal poems, including revelations to him after the death of his mother and sharply etched emotional memories of childhood and grandparents. It includes other verse as well inspired by Robert Bly, John Keats, and the Urdu poet Ghalib, among others.

    Readers return to Allan Cooper’s poems to be reminded of the quiet power of nature and how it can shape our lives and provide sustenance, vision, and even salvation when necessary. Here are poems to be read slowly and cherished.

    $19.95
  • Doing Time Writing Workshops in Prison

    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    Poetry can address our most intimate, frightened, hopeful selves. Langille found this to be true as she introduced poems to men and women in prison and gave writing assignments based on the discussions these poems inspired. Over and over participants shared private moments of self-awareness. The support they gave each other and the stories they told were profound. This book puts to rest many of the myths we have about inmates. It confirms both that people cannot be reduced to their worst deeds and that creative expression has a central place in the process of rehabilitation. Most pointedly, Langille’s work reveals how, by failing the men and women behind bars, the prison system harms us all.

    Participants in these workshops were complicated people. As Bryan Stevenson, an attorney who fights for the wrongfully accused on death row, says, “People are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done … Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer.” Doing Time makes us rethink the myths we have about inmates and gives us insights into the force of trauma and the power of dignity. We get a glimpse of what goes on in a prison system and we learn, as Langille learned, from the men and women she worked with.

    $19.95
  • Fixing Broken Things

    Created by: Gregory M. Cook
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    George Elliott Clarke writes of Gregory Cook’s poetry, “… a poignant, elegiac tone haunts these lyrics, whether Cook speaks of love or nature or family. Any risk of sentimentality is cut by his usage of hard particulars.”

    Fixing Broken Things is Cook’s seventh book of poems. He has served as Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and as a member of the executive of The League of Canadian Poets. He was also a founder and first secretary the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (ACCESS).

    In Fixing Broken Things, Cook offers contemplative glances and lingering views on everyday life, as if observed through a window on the weather, landscape, and appearance or disappearance of things that matter. These observations act as mirrors that reflect the self and allow the merging of inner and outer worlds. The poet’s rewards are discoveries of self and other in the magic visions and sounds that arise in combinations of words, like bits of winter ice reflecting prisms of light, life, and vision.

    Moments from travel in Europe, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand appear here, as much at home as his life in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Fixing Broken Things harvests nature, memory, love, astonishment, as well as a life of altered consciousness.

    $19.95
  • Afraid of the Dark

    Created by: Guyleigh Johnson
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    Through prose and poetry, Guyleigh Johnson tells the story of sixteen-year-old Kahlua Thomas. With a hard life at home, on the streets, and in school she finds an escape during her grade ten history class through writing poetry. Hiding in the back of the class, she writes, passionately expressing and releasing emotions about identity, home, community, culture, and forgiveness. All Kahlua wants is freedom, whatever that really means.

    $19.95
  • Salt Fires

    Created by: Janet Barkhouse
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    Salt Fires is a volume of poems that embrace and reflect our human consciousness: our awareness, our blindness, our Shadow, our mythologies. They invite us to look at ourselves in ways that often are disconcerting, sometimes startling. Love of land infuses Salt Fires. Intimately inhabited and passionately shared, Nova Scotia’s farms, woods, and shores reveal themselves to be our Earth in microcosm.

    A suite of Sable Island poems closes the book and affirms this notion—Sable Island, a strip of sand in a vast ocean, impossible, yet somehow here, like our planet, rich in life and beauty. This is the work of a mature poet who examines moral blindness and human frailties by inhabiting the experiences of the poems’ speakers with vulnerability and honesty. Accessible, clear, and alive with music, the poems inform and incite.

    $19.95
  • Toward the Country of Light New and Selected Poems 1978-2018

    Created by: Allan Cooper
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    This collection brings together Allan Cooper’s best poems over the last forty years. He weaves visions of nature with insight into the workings of the human heart. Read them individually or read them as a single long, flowing and eloquent narrative. The meditative and compassionate observations will transport the reader from the chaos of everyday life into a healing realm of possibility.

    In Toward the Country of Light, the author offers open sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, small poems inspired by the Chinese and Japanese, and poems influenced by Robert Bly and Francis Ponge. As Cooper observes, “Over the years I’ve come to understand that the poem itself usually demands the form it takes and that language uses us for its own secret purposes.”

    $19.95
  • The Way We Hold On

    Created by: Abena Beloved Green
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    The Way We Hold On is Abena Beloved Green’s debut book of poetry. Her poems address cultural, social, and environmental issues, relationships, and reflect on everyday life as a small-town raised, semi-nomadic, first-generation Canadian. Here are poems about holding on and letting go—of ideas, opinions, beliefs, people, places, and things.

    $19.95
  • Signs of Life Images Formed from Words and Clay

    Created by: Gerri Frager
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    Gerri Frager has spent much of her life working in the care of critically ill infants and children and integrating the arts into patient care and education. Poetry and pottery have each been a sanctuary during tough times as has noticing the everyday beauty found in nature. In Signs of Life: Images formed from Words and Clay, the author merges these passions to create a most unique and insightful book. Each poem is accompanied by an image of pottery created by Frager, one reflected in and mirroring the other. Signs of Life is a powerful exploration into matters of loss and love through poetry and pottery and the life experiences of a medical professional who has dedicated her life to healing and comforting those she works with.

    $21.95
  • After Swissair

    Created by: Budge Wilson
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    On September 2, 1998, Swissair Flight 111 plunged into the sea near the mouth of St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia, killing all 229 on board. Thousands of people responded immediately: emergency personnel, fishermen, the military, divers, community searchers and RCMP officials. In the days, weeks and months after the crash, local residents and ordinary people supported the investigation in any way they could and, more critically, they also sought to comfort the families of the victims.

    In the face of this almost unimaginable event, many experienced enormous suffering and world views were changed forever for the survivors – both the friends and relatives of the victims as well as support teams and the local communities of St. Margaret’s Bay, Halifax and beyond. What carried so many of them through this tragedy was the astonishing generosity and kindness each group gave to the other. As Wilson writes, “We all needed the families as much as they needed us.”

    She wrote this collection of poems “in gratitude and in celebration of the thousands of men and women who suffered – and sometimes triumphed – during the months and years that followed the crash.” The poems reveal the depth of the impact the crash of Swissair 111 had on so many people.

    Over the past 17 years, Wilson has been informed and inspired by the families of the victims, workers on land and sea, observers, professionals and by the local residents she has interviewed. She wove together these experiences to create a poetic vision of the sea change that occurred because of what Nova Scotians saw, heard or imagined about people they had never met, revealing the wonder of the sheer courage and generosity of the human spirit.

    $19.95
  • What We’re Doing to Stay Afloat

    Created by: Karin Cope
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    We’re all at sea these days, no matter where we live. We make impossible pacts to guard against drowning, cobble together precarious rafts, patch our bailing buckets, and still the water pours in; we cannot hope to escape it.  Job loss, heartbreak, accident, cruelty, impotence, climate change, madness, death: every sort of weather conspires to keep us lost and insomniac, struggling to reach some sort of shore. What We’re Doing To Stay Afloat chronicles such watery conditions and offers poetry as one sort of kit containing tools fitted to the task of staying alive: humour, rage, hammer, buoy, radar, chart.  Here, melancholia and surrealism interleave, monologues become dialogues, want ads and Facebook posts are recycled into intimate domestic conversations, and ballads of human desperation alternate with accounts of the silliness, grace and violence of the natural world. Poetry alone won’t save us of course, but in flashes it here reveals where we are; it names, navigates, and gives us light to row by, perhaps long enough to sight an approach to the next harbour.  

    $19.95
  • The Mi’kmaq Anthology Volume 2 In Celebration of the Life of Rita Joe

    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    Theresa Meuse is the former chief of Bear River First Nation and has worked in various jobs with Mi’kmaq organizations. She is an educator and advisor and author of a children’s book, The Sharing Circle. Lesley Choyce is the publisher of Pottersfield Press, an English instructor in Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program and the author of several books.

    $21.95
  • The Mi’kmaq Anthology

    Created by: Lesley Choyce
    Editor: Rita Joe
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    A varied and spiritual collection of work by the Mi’kmaq writers of Atlantic Canada. Both young and old stories and storytellers combine talents to produce short stories, poetry, and personal essays.

    $21.95
  • Lush Dreams, Blue Exile

    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    These poems range from a personal evocation of Black Nova Scotian history to an intense, intimate response to world events in the last thirty years. All are “fugitive poems” evolving from 1979 to 1991.

    $9.95
  • Woman Talking Woman

    Created by: Maxine Tynes
    Publisher: Pottersfield Press

    Maxine Tynes is a poet who has lived all her life in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Her heritage goes back to the time of Black Loyalists in that province and Maxine has drawn heavily on that rich cultural past. Her writing is intense, personal, evocative and accessible in nature which earned her the titles of Milton Acorn People’s Poet of Canada for 1988. When her first book, Borrowed Beauty, was published by Pottersfield Press in 1987, it received rave reviews and sold out in a few months. Now in its third printing, Borrowed Beauty has provne to be a bestselling Canadian title, reaching far beyond the usual audience for poetry.

    Woman Talking Woman is a new and varied collection of poetry and fiction by this vibrant voice from Atlantic Canada.”Maxine Tynes is a woman/teacher/poet whose life is shaped by the pride and passion of her own strongly held beliefs and an absolute commitment to her personal politics.” Sharon Fraser, Atlantic Insight

    $9.95
  • Whispers of Mermaids and Wonderful Things Atlantic Canadian Poetry and Verse for Children

    Publisher: Nimbus Publishing

    From celebrated children’s poet and author Sheree Fitch and early childhood educator Anne Hunt comes a new paperback edition of the celebrated illustrated compendium of Atlantic Canadian poetry and verse for young readers. Spanning centuries, from Milton Acorn, Bliss Carman, and Rita Joe to Budge Wilson, Shauntay Grant, and Kathleen Winter, and a broad thematic scope—from soft lullabies and silly songs to poignant meditations on nature, loss, and love—over 100 poems from the region’s best are sure to delight educators, parents, and young readers. Whispers of Mermaids and Wonderful Things is a feast for the senses.

    $22.95
  • You Won’t Always Be This Sad A Book of Moments

    Created by: Sheree Fitch
    Publisher: Nimbus Publishing

    In the wake of her son’s unexpected death, author and storyteller Sheree Fitch wrote it all down, penning an honest, lyrical memoir with words to stir heart. You Won’t Always Be This Sad invites readers on a journey through grief towards hope, guided by the immeasurable depths of a mother’s love.

    $24.95
  • I Place You into the Fire Poems

    Created by: Rebecca Thomas
    Publisher: Nimbus Publishing

    In Mi’kmaw, three similarly shaped words have drastically different meanings: kesalul means “I love you”; kesa’lul means “I hurt you”; and ke’sa’lul means “I put you into the fire.” Spoken word artist Rebecca Thomas’ first poetry collection is at once a meditation on navigating life and love as a second-generation Residential School survivor, a lesson in unlearning, and a rallying cry for Indigenous justice, empathy, and equality.

    $18.95
  • Evangeline

    Publisher: Nimbus Publishing

    The epic poem Evangeline is a superb example of romantic poetry and a masterpiece of world literature. The publication of Evangeline represented a “milestone in the awakening of the collective consciousness of the Acadian people. By lifting Acadie out of the forgotten past, Longfellow honoured the courage and tenacity of the Acadians.” This new edition of the classic text includes a critical introduction from scholars Sally Ross and Barbara LeBlanc.

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American poet. Sally Ross and Barbara LeBlanc are both Acadian scholars and authors living and working in Nova Scotia.

    $9.95
  • Poetic Inquiries of Reflection and Renewal

    From migration, teaching, attending to the sick and dying, or navigating new relationships or identities, the poems in this collection are at once evocative and poignant and at times playful. This book offers insight into what is possible with the poetic voice.

    This book can be read from beginning to end or by reading non-sequentially among the contributions. The editors of this collection have brought together a diverse array of authors who use poetry as research, and who explore many ways in which poetry can bring the reader into deeper understandings of experiences or issues.

    $39.95
  • My island’s the house I sleep in at night

    Created by: Laurie Brinklow

    “Being an Islander means that you aren’t like everyone else.” Bounded by water, you can live your life with certainty knowing where your edges are. Drawn from interviews with artists from Newfoundland and Tasmania, these poems capture what it means to be an islander. To know every rock and tickle, “the sea your road /the whole in the sky /your light to travel by. In My island’s the house I sleep in at night, Brinklow weaves stories and images with her own poetic imaginings.

    $18.95
  • Bird Calls The Island Responds

    Created by: Jane Ledwell

    In 1854 British travel writer Isabella Lucy Bird visited Prince Edward Island for six weeks and published an account of her stay there that was both scathing and charming. “Paris may be the gayest city in the world,” she wrote, “and London the richest, but Charlottetown was the most gossiping.” “I never saw a community,” she continued,” in which people appear to hate each other so cordially.”

    Contemporary Island poet Jane Ledwell was both fascinated and exasperated by Bird’s haughty, privileged judgement and decided to “write back”–160 years later. The result is Bird Calls: The Island Responds.

    Bird Calls weaves the travel prose of Isabella Lucy Bird with Ledwell’s poems written in response, and delivers an intriguing conversation for the reader which contrasts PEI then and now, and showcases the talents of two accomplished writers, from very different generations.

    $14.95
  • Rudan Mi-bheanailteach is an Cothroman/ Intangible Possibilites

    Created by: Lewis MacKinnon

    LEWIS MACKINNON was born in Inverness, Cape Breton, to a Gaelic-speaking father and a French Acadian mother. He was raised in Antigonish County, on the Nova Scotia mainland. Educated in English, throughout his personal, academic and professional activities, Lewis has maintained an interest in his Gaelic roots. He is an accomplished singer as well as poet. His first collection Famhair agus dàin Ghàidhlig eile (Giant and other Gaelic poems) was published in 2008 (CBU Press). Since then he has been invited to numerous literary festivals internationally and, in 2011, was named Bard of the Royal National Mod (Mòd Nàiseanta Rìoghail) in Scotland, the first bard from outwith Scotland.

    $14.95
  • Clay Pots and Bones

    Created by: Lindsay Marshall

    The poetry of Clay Pots and Bones is Lindsay Marshall’s way of telling stories, of speaking with others about what things that matter to him. His heritage. His people. His life as a Mi’kmaw. For the reader, Clay Pots and Bones is a colourful journey from early days, when the People of the Dawn understood, interacted with and roamed the land freely, to the turbulent present and the uncertain future where Marshall envisions a rebirth of the Mi’kmaq. The poetry challenges and enlightens. It will, most certainly, entertain.

    $19.95
  • Famhair/Giant

    No contemporary work from a sole author of Gaelic poetry from the Nova Scotia perspective been published in this province – until now. Cultural identity, sense of place and expression are important elements in the work of any artist. This book of contemporary Nova Scotia Gaelic poetry spans the landscape of Gaelic Cape Breton, the eastern Nova Scotia mainland and indeed the broader collective consciousness of Nova Scotians within the confines of their own province and in the wider, diverse, multi-ethnic, North American reality.

    $15.95
  • A Stone for Andrew Dunphy Narrative Obituary Verse and Song in Northern Cape Breton Island

    Created by: Ronald Caplan
    Publisher: Breton Books

    This rare book is about community, caring and pioneer survival. It brings to life Andrew Dunphy— a man who roamed northern Cape Breton, carried the news, nursed his neighbours—and wrote magnificent obituary poems that told their stories, comforted them in disaster, and helped their communities survive. Over one hundred years later, Ronald Caplan captured this story in its final hours. Told with the words of those who knew Andrew Dunphy — A Stone for Andrew Dunphy reveals the robust rural life that flourished as the 20th century dawned.

    $17.95
  • The Blind Man’s Eyes

    Created by: Rita Joe
    Publisher: Breton Books

    With over 100 of her best poems plus George Elliott Clarke’s essay on the achievement of Rita Joe, The Blind Man’s Eyes confirms Joe’s place in Canadian literature.

    From a homeless child who led a blind beggar door-to-door, Rita Joe emerged as spokesperson for her nation and for the individual’s heart. Her much anthologized poems and rare autobiography have riveted her message to the Canadian conscience, revealing both the Mi’kmaq people and the universal artist’s heart of this Elder.

    $17.95