Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95In this, John Smith’s sixth book of poetry, Prince Edward Island’s inaugural Poet Laureate offers up a dialogue about “being,” in the intellectual context of modern times. He explores stages of being, as an individual, as one in relationship to others, and as a part of the earth and of the universe. The poet’s acquaintance with physics, algebra, and geometry collides with his own philosophical questionings, using language to bridge the ephemeral and the infinite. The poems are the distilled, heady musings of a writer whose poetic voice spans millennia.
Fixer-Upper
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Funnyman Lorne Elliott’s take on Island life. When Bruno MacIntyre decides to rent his ramshackle cottage to summer tourists, the wacky merriment begins. Lorne Elliott, comic master of mirth and mayhem, takes us to Savage Bay on the south shore of Prince Edward Island, where the hapless Bruno turns to his clever and caustic Aunt Tillie for help in securing tenants. First, the cottage, inherited with a bad reputation from Bruno’s ne’r-do-well father, must be renovated. Then, Bruno must duel with his aunt’s wry insults and sly plans, a sardonic would-be author, and two torrid tenants. Elliott’s celebrated gifts for sharp-witted repartee and vivid characterizations are in full force. So, too, are Elliott’s keen eye and ear for our fumbling aspirations, bittersweet banterings, self-deceptions, hard-won wisdom, surprising tenderness, and zany outcomes. The Fixer-Upper–the novella adaptation of his play, Tourist Trap–is classic Lorne Elliott, with a brash and cheeky Maritime flavour.
Her Teeth are Stones
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Each of Judy Gaudet’s poems is a path to somewhere resonant, redolent of memories and anticipations both bittersweet and beautiful. She traces the paths the mind and body takes purposefully, as well as those it happens onto, by chance or consequence. The poems light on home and history, travel afar, return again. They are marked by the toughness of wholly looking and experiencing and are leavened by wry humour and true gratitude for the beauty and magic that touch the earth’s days — and our human ones, tripping over the stones of her path. Her Teeth Are Stones is Judy Gaudet’s first full-length poetry book, following her chapbook Poems, you say.
Here and There
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Inspired by the places, people and sounds around his home town of Morell, Prince Edward Island, Roderick MacDonald pens lycrical poetry that nourishes his reflective nature. Especially inspired by the shore line, MacDonald evokes feelings and memories of Island days spent whiling away at the beach, breathing in the salty air and listening to the sound of the waves. He also writes evocatively about many aspects of the Island way of life throughout the seasons, from a rainy, spring day to a the experience of sharing pint of beer with a friend. The poetry of MacDonald’s collection Here and There will resonate with both Islanders and people who love P.E.I. It is the perfect companion to any bedside.
Here for the Music
$17.95Laurie Brinklow’s long-awaited first collection of poems beaches the reader on the shores of contemporary womanhood. Strewn with memories of the tumultuous journey through childhood to adulthood and the detritus of relationships chanced and abandoned, finally being “here” brings to devotion to daughters and friends and an Island place. Brinklow’s book contains the tidal pull of loss and renewal, departure and arrival that keeps a lover of islands so close to the edges of life and death. That’s the here. But what she is “here” for is both more magical and more pragmatic: the music. It’s the music of language and the dance of human relationships, the sex and love melodies that bewilder and beguile. Brinklow brings this music down to us where we live, with the earthy touch of the “angel-in-charge-of-things-as-they-really-are.”
Here for the Music
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Laurie Brinklow’s long-awaited first collection of poems beaches the reader on the shores of contemporary womanhood. Strewn with memories of the tumultuous journey through childhood to adulthood and the detritus of relationships chanced and abandoned, finally being “here” brings to devotion to daughters and friends and an Island place. Brinklow’s book contains the tidal pull of loss and renewal, departure and arrival that keeps a lover of islands so close to the edges of life and death. That’s the here. But what she is “here” for is both more magical and more pragmatic: the music. It’s the music of language and the dance of human relationships, the sex and love melodies that bewilder and beguile. Brinklow brings this music down to us where we live, with the earthy touch of the “angel-in-charge-of-things-as-they-really-are.”
House of Bears
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95When Luba Kassim reluctantly returns home to Northern Ontario, the strained relationship with her traditional Ukrainian mother only heightens her feelings of alienation and isolation. A family crisis reunites her extended family and reignites old rivalries and the pain of long-held family secrets. Slowly, Luba begins piecing together her family’s unspoken past, starting in the 1930s in Ukraine, followed by emigration to England and settlement in Canada. In the process, she uncovers some startling truths about her own identity, and learns that she and her mother have much more in common than she thinks.
How Boys Grow Up
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Sean Wiebe is an assistant professor of education at the University of Prince Edward Island. His recent research explores how poets have influenced teaching practice and are insightful theorists in understanding life’s complexities. He has edited two collections of poetry, The Last Red Smartie (1996) and A Nocturnal Reverie (1994), and has had his poetry published in several literary journals, including Standards: International Cultural Studies Journal, Cha: As Asian Literary Journal, Blue Skies Poetry, and Ascent Aspirations Magazine. He and his family live in Charlottetown.
Island Sketchbook
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95With characteristic warmth, generosity, and humour, Frank Ledwell seamlessly weaves personal memoir and communal folk wisdom into 60 prose sketches of Island characters, anecdotes, and traditions. The stories are based on real people or incidents; others are fictionalized, evoking the true, remembered landscape of Ledwell’s childhood at St. Peter’s Bay on the North Shore of Prince Edward Island, his experience as a student, teacher, and professor at St. Dunstan’s University, and his later life as a professor, husband, and parent in rural Queen’s County. The sketches also evoke the author’s love of people and place and mark his point of view as that of an inveterate Islander.
Jeopardy
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Richard Lemm’s new poetry collection, Jeopardy, opens with visits to Tasmania and Egypt. He takes readers to the infamous penal colony on the Tasman Peninsula, then imagines an alternate history in which convicts were sent to Prince Edward Island. Lemm explores his pre- and post-Revolution experiences teaching Egyptian students and encountering a great civilization wrestling with cross-currents of modernity and tradition. His poetic gaze then turns to the struggle of a couple living the ordeal of severe anorexia and the quest for healing.
In “The Sacred and the Profane” poems, he conjures myths and journeys —ancient and modern—to illuminate how we choose to live in the present: a Jewish surgeon’s pilgrimage to Assisi; Adam and Eve’s reflections on their fateful Edenic choice; the poet’s grandfather trading farm clothes for an army uniform and war in the Philippines; a resurrected L. M. Montgomery in a gift shop, surrounded by Anne of Green Gables merchandise. In the final section, Lemm evokes, with wit and urgency, our ecological reality and environmental crises: “The future is forever / now, is headlines scrolling / at glacial melt and animated pixel / speed into amnesia. While the Darwins / of tomorrow and their painstaking facts / watch from the crow’s nests, swaying above / our faith in charts, invincible hulls.”
Other poets have written of Lemm’s “passionate engagement with human nature, including his own,” of how he “masterfully blends his narrative poetic style with lyrical sweeps across time and space,” and of his “wit, his spilling love of life and his poetic magnetism.”
Killings at Little Rose
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95In a coastal village where what’s been buried doesn’t stay buried, what’s lost at sea doesn’t stay lost.
Sleuth Anne Brown finds herself in an eastern PEI fishing community, working undercover for the new owner of a seafood-processing plant plagued by vandalism, loss, and ill luck. The community around Little Rose Harbour has been shocked by the discovery of old, secret remains of a baby, and all their entangled secrets are coming to the surface.
On the cusp of a clandestine love affair and herself keeping secrets, Anne must sort through gossip, rumours, and lies—and dodge the menace of violence—to uncover the canker at the core of Little Rose.
But will she learn in time to prevent the mystery from becoming motive for murder?
Landmarks: An Anthology
Editor: Brent MacLainePublisher: Acorn Press$16.95Poetry by 50 of the Atlantic region’s finest poets
Last Tomato
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Jane Ledwell grew up in Prince Edward Island. She won first prize for both prose and poetry in the Atlantic Writing Awards in 2001, and has been published in journals such as blueSHIFT and anthologies such as Landmarks and A Bountiful Harvest. She lives and writes in Charlottetown.
Legends of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Acorn Press$10.95Long isolated from their fellow countrymen by the Strait of Northumberland, the inhabitants of Prince Edward Island developed personal characteristics and a way of life peculiarly their own. These stories depict Islanders and that way of life before modern transportation linked the Island Province with the mainland.
The book contains fifty-nine stories set against the background of the Garden of the Gulf before the turn of the century. Some of the legends are written in the Island dialect and any persons and places in the areas are mentioned by name. Legends of Prince Edward Island is the result of years spent in collecting the now almost forgotten folklore of pioneer days.
Long Reach Home
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Reaching back through a family full of stories and characters, from Newfoundland on her mother’s side to New Brunswick on her father’s, the poems in Long Reach Home are characteristically personal, warm, and accessible- by turns humorous, by turns enraged- but always engaged with the world, distilling simple pleasures and fundamental human struggles from everyday experience.
Maple Sugar Pie
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Maple Sugar Pie is the story of Hazel Whitford and her family’s past, Told through old black and white photographs, we see the events that caused deep fractures in her family and her estrangement from her husband and all but one of her living children.
We also see the story through the eyes of Hazel’s grandson Michael’s wife Jennifer, who live with the elderly Hazel for five years. After Hazel’s death Jen and Mike’s future on the farm, and the small business Jen has started, could be in jeopardy. Jen plans a reunion for the Canada Day long weekend hoping to reunite the family and to gain title to the farm. But will the estranged family want to return and will they be able to come to terms with the pain the events of the past have caused?
Mercy, Mercy A Novel
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Smart, sarcastic TV reporter Mercy Pepper struggles with feelings of guilt after her cameraman dies while on assignment with her. A news tape that he had hidden in his personal effects contains a secretly recorded conversation, and Mercy picks up the scent of corruption. She soon finds herself mired in the muck of provincial politics—the power brokers and the opportunists and those willing to go to extreme measures for a piece of the pie.
With a keen observer’s eye and sharp, sparkling wit, Stanton, a former news reporter, delivers a compelling crime/mystery story with a satisfying dash of romance.
Mind Over Mussels A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Nothing big ever happens in The Shores. Ceilidhs, yes. Killings, no.
That all changes when amateur sleuth, Hy McAllister trips over a body on the beach and tumbles head first into a murder case. Cottager Lance Lord, dressed like Jimi Hendrix, has had his head split open with an axe. As Hurricane Angus storms up the coast, Hy and Mountie Jane Jamieson vie against the elements to uncover the murderer in a village where almost everyone has something to hide.
