PORTALS: What mysteries…or horrors…await you on the other side?The lure of an open doorway is hard to resist. What lies beyond? Where will it take you—and how will you be transformed? Will it lead to paradise…or a living hell? You’ll never know, unless you have the courage to take that first step.In this anthology you will find sixteen stories of portals to exotic destinations, whether it’s a doorway in the desert that appears out of thin air, a fairy ring of mushrooms in t...

Kate Hall, environmental activist and educator, shares her philosophy of joy-filled living with people and the planet in mind.All the daily decisions we make about clothes, food, transport, sleep, stuff, wellbeing and relationships can be tweaked to benefit not only the environment, but also ourselves and others. Doing simple things differently and more sustainably can be freeing.Kate shows us how to embrace sustainable living in all facets of life. She sha...

Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry PrizeShortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry PrizeDescartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare thetricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nighting...

In this "tour de force of modern nature writing," a passionate naturalist explores what it's really like to be an animal—by living like them ( The Guardian, UK).In Being a Beast, Charles Foster tests the limits of our ability to walk in another's footsteps. He lives alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a sett in a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his nose rather than his eyes. He catches fish in his ...

In The Book of Marvels, award-winning poet Lorna Crozier offers a delightful series of prose meditations on household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as a kind of a literary detective, Crozier brings her rapt attention to the everyday things she explores, uncovering the mystery that lies at their essence. She offers tantalizing glimpses of the household's inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and na...

The acclaimed author's memoir of life with an African grey parrot offers "a thoughtful and generous celebration of minds and bodies different from our own" ( Times Literary Supplement, UK).For thirty years, Brian Brett shared his office and his life with Tuco, a remarkable parrot given to asking questions such as "Whaddya know?" and announcing "Party time!" when guests showed up at Brett's farm. Although Brett bought Tuco on a whim, he gradually realized t...

How many lenses does a dragonfly's eye have?Which is bigger, an eagle's eye or a human's?How many eyes does a scallop have?How do lizards keep their eyes wet?Animal eyes can be really strange and wonderful. How much do you know about the eyes of your animal friends? Find out more in this book.LearningIsland.com believes in the value of children practicing reading for 15 minutes every day. Our 15-Minute Books give children lots of fun, exciting choices t...

SWEET ROMANCE: Though Lady Luck had more spunk than skills, she was determined not only to restore the bungalow she found, but also replace the sign above the porch, that read, "Born To Lose." She promised herself, that one day, when it looked the part, she would change its name to "Lady Luck." It was what her daddy always called her. It fit too. Poor as her family was, it never stopped them from making the best out of her life. Ever since third grade—when rich kids on the hill made fun of...

Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetites--for food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry . . . Harrison has become their poet laureate.”--Salon.comIn Jim Harrison’s new book of poems, birds and humans converse, biographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of si...

In her elegant new collection, Alison Pick, a brilliant poet of sensuous moods, atmospheres, and dreams, explores the mystery concealed within the world we know and recognize. Always evocative, always alluring, her poems are not interested in mere events, but in the fabric inside the emotions that events can provoke. She writes of love, of leaving, of wandering, and of home — not necessarily in that order. With captivating language and shining imagery, her poems travel out through layers o...

Where It Hurts is a highly-charged collection of personal essays, haunted by loss, evoking turbulent physical and emotional Canadian landscapes. Sarah de Leeuw's creative non-fiction captures strange inconsistencies and aberrations of human behaviour, urging us to be observant and aware. The essays are wide in scope and exposing what—and who—goes missing.With staggering insight, Sarah de Leeuw reflects on missing geographies and people, including missing women, both those ...

A long poem that limns the incremental mourning of living with a person who has frontotemporal dementia. Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk -- to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould's second poetry collection, is a sequence of fragments written in dialogue with all of these meanings. Stitched together, these fragments form a poem that runs from the ranch land of Alberta into the hea...