You're in Canada Now ...: A Memoir of Sorts

Description

Evocative and superbly rakish, You’re In Canada Now is a generous diagnosis of the often offbeat worlds of family, writing, travel, sex and death as interpreted through the real life adventures of Susan Musgrave. Equally at home recounting the lore of her outlaw husband Stephen Reid, or interpreting the arcane rituals of her teenage girls, Musgrave brings to her literary essays that same invigorating freshness for which she has become known in her fiction and poetry. In settings ranging from the aching solitude of the Queen Charlotte Islands to the sweaty intensity of bandido apartments in Panama, the reader will find Musgrave musing with her legendary wit and pastiche, while creating graffiti-like impressions of the writer’s essential take on those closest to her. One of Canada’s most publicized and popular writers, Susan Musgrave is a one-of-a-kind writer, and this is the reader’s chance to get up close and personal.

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Perfectly Secret: The Hidden Lives of Seven Teen Girls

Description

Seven essays from the heart.

"When I was sixteen years old I had secrets, all right. But my secrets were not exactly my own; they were the secrets of others." So writes Nan Germaine in Perfectly Secret, Susan Musgrave's fourth collection of essays written by women writers about their teenage lives.

Nan remembers the loneliness of enduring her parent's secret confessions: her mother's unhappiness and her father's infidelity. For Anita Rau Badami, a mad aunt was her hidden shame. Meanwhile, a drunken father meant Lorna Crozier could never invite her friends home. And Cathy Stonehouse, who lived her life in fragments, found her secret self threatened in a not-so-innocent game of Truth or Dare.

Heartfelt, disarmingly honest, at times painful, these essays eloquently capture the reality of adolescent life. Perfectly Secret is a testament to the axiom that life isn't always as it appears.

(200412)

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When the World Is Not Our Home

Description

When the World is Not Our Home includes nearly fifty poems by one of Canada’s most distinctive literary voices. Selected from titles published between 1985 and 2000, these poems illustrate an agile poet sifting the everyday through a fine mythical screen. They reveal a woman with multiple roles, and her emergence as a highly sought–after Canadian poet.

Known for her rebellious voice, Musgrave knots sensual with mischief, girlhood with ritual, and parental with horrific. Cacophonous imagery engages through an exquisite language and what it describes: family faltering into drug addiction, infidelity, and death.
Musgrave positions the reader in “the thin membrane between self and world”, and it is in this space that she provokes us with her gripping imagination.

“Musgrave approaches her subject in the manner of Salvador Dali — she distorts reality until it approximates her bizarre vision of the world. ” — The Globe and Mail

“Tapping into fears and subconscious yearnings has been Susan Musgrave’s trademark from her earliest work, Songs of the Sea Witch, where she found inspiration and direction in classical and aboriginal mythology. Now she is able to locate the mythic element anywhere, in a death, a ferry ride, a failed photographic expedition, even in reading someone else’s collected poems! ” — BC Bookworld

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Nerves Out Loud: Critical Moments in the Lives of Seven Teen Girls

Description

When something major occurs in your life, you are never the same again. In Nerves Out Loud, seven women writers share pivotal moments from their teen years, concentrating on an event or series of events that changed their lives and turned them in a new direction. By telling their stories passionately and fearlessly, these authors encourage young women everywhere to grab their youth and their sense of self and hold on tight as they examine who they are.

Told in each woman's unique voice, these stories are conveyed sometimes with humor and sometimes with terror, but each with a sense of urgency and honesty.

After the Flood - Melanie Little

Melanie's youth has been spent under the enormous pressures of competitive figure skating. When stress leads her to quit, she faces disappointment from her parents, a sense of failure within herself, and the deep emptiness that comes when something that has taken up your whole life is suddenly gone.

Fourteen Turns - Carellin Brooks

In a world of adults, Carellin is faced with a trade-off between a comfortable home and a foster father who bombards her with sexual advances. She struggles to keep both her body and her sense of self safe.

Will You Kiss Me? - Marnie Woodrow

Desperate to care about girly things, Marnie believes that her urge to kiss girls is strange and unusual. When her best friend hands her a note, Marnie realizes that she isn't alone and experiences the tremendous sense of freedom that comes from understanding and accepting oneself.

Home - Madeleine Thein

Caught in a clash of cultures and family disharmony, leaving is a reality in Madeleine's home. In the middle of the night, in anger, across the seas, one family member after another disappears, yet left at the center, strong and constant, her mother remains.

Nerves Out Loud - M.K. Quednau

Within the realities of domestic violence Marion summons the courage to survive tragedy and to find her voice through writing.

The Skinny One - Karen Rivers

Filled with a power that comes from denying herself, Karen wages an incredible, angry battle within as she tries to reach elusive and unrealistic goals that she has set for herself and her body.

Going Crazy, Wanna Come? - Susan Musgrave

With her trademark humor, Susan invites readers into her wild teen years on the run -- from school, to California, from a mental hospital. With the help of other writers she realizes she isn't crazy -- she's a poet.

(20011005)

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The House of All Sorts

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Origami Dove

Description

The first collection of new poems in more than a decade from one of Canada's most vibrant and original writers.

With her first major collection in ten years, Susan Musgrave displays a range of form and expression that may surprise even her most faithful readers. The quiet, lapidary elegies of “Obituary of Light” are set against the furious mischief of “Random Acts of Poetry,” where the lines move with the inventive energy of a natural storyteller, while “Heroines” wrests a harsh and haunting poetry from the language of the street.
 
Her alertness to the absurdity in even the most heartbreaking personal crises leavens the sorrow that speaks through so many of the poems. Sadness and levity interweave. The wilderness and the penitentiary reflect one another. There’s an underlying tenderness, though, whether she is writing about family, the dispossessed, her life on Haida Gwaii, or the vagaries of love. This is Susan Musgrave in full control of her powers, writing poetry that cuts right to the bone.

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