It's the mid 1890s in Kamloops, British Columbia. Two men argue over a bottle of whisky and in the struggle Frank Spencer, an American outlaw-turned-farmhand, kills Pete Foster, a French-Canadian and fellow farmhand.Enter Caprice: a vision and a brain. Almost six feet tall, with flaming red hair and long legs, and toting a lethal bullwhip, she sets out to avenge her brother's murder. Travelling with her beloved black Spanish stallion, Caprice trails her brother's murderer to Mexico...

With an introduction by Lisa Robertson"There is no there there" Gertrude Stein's famous phrase about the Oakland she grew up in, applies to the Oliver, BC of George Bowering's youth. What is to be found there, as Stein demonstrated, are objects, and rooms, and food.George Bowering's newest book delights in the thing-iness of memory. Understanding himself as an object among objects, Bowering conjures up the sights, tastes, and touches of a world othe...

Cowboys and Indians, sometimes one and the same, occupy the rugged landscape of the late nineteenth-century British Columbia interior in George Bowering's Shoot! Meet the McLean Gang — brothers Allan, Charlie, and Archie — and their sidekick Alex Hare. Halfbreeds who grew up bitter outcasts, rejected by both white and Indian worlds, they roam the ranch country around Kamloops on a wild spree of cattle rustling, robbery, and mayhem. Until the day they go too far and kill two men in...

George Bowering has been provoking and inspiring writers and readers for half a century. While he may be better known for his poetry and fiction, the essay holds an equally important place in his work.Writing and Reading includes discussions of writers (ranging from Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro to Oana Avasilichioei and Robert Kroetsch), difficult poetry and close reading (from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Judith Fitzgerald and David Bromige), Vancouver's ...

A risqu autobiographical novel that fictionalizes the sexual adventures of the authors younger daysIn 2012, acclaimed writer George Bowering published Pinboy, a fictional memoir of his teenage sexual awakening. With No One, Bowering returns to play with form and fact in this autobiographical novel that continues the narrators journey in a quest story full of further sexual awakenings as that Pinboy becomes a man.A writer called alert, play...

First published in 1980 to high acclaim, Burning Water won a Governor General's Award for fiction that year. A rollicking chronicle of Captain Vancouver's search for the Northwest Passage, the book has over its career been mentioned in recommended lists of postmodern fiction, BC historical fiction, gay fiction and humour. This gives you some idea of the scope of what has been called Bowering's best novel."I have sometimes said, kidding but not really kidding," writes its a...

Hockey forms the backdrop of our lives. For many Canadians, the big moments — births, deaths, marriages, moves — are all mixed up with the wins and losses of our teams. The voices of Hockey Night in Canada sportscasters are our soundtrack, and visions of skates scraping across the ice lull us to sleep.George Bowering, Canada’s former poet laureate, is no different. Growing up in Oliver, BC, Bowering was entranced by the kids from Saskatchewan who skated and handled pucks a...

George Bowering: George Bowering is a novelist, poet, editor, professor, and historian; at age 80, has written more than 80 books, including poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and young-adult fiction. He was the first Poet Laureate of Canada, and has twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada.Charles Demers: Charles Demers is an author, stand-up comedian, and creative writing instructor at the University of British Columbia. His collection of essays, Vanco...

Bringing a seasoned and highly regarded Canadian voice to the travel writing tradition, George Bowering unveils a deep love of life, food, and all things Mexico. Drawing on his time spent as a foreigner in Latin America, Bowering traces his footsteps to linger on the joy found in the little things.Barefoot Gringo, set against a Mexican backdrop, ventures beyond travel and into engaging discussions of literature, politics, the art of aging gracefully and humorously, and, of...

Having written books in practically every genre, George Bowering is often introduced as someone who adores baseball, yet ironically he did not begin this book about the game until he was appointed Canada’s first Poet Laureate for 2002–04. This picaresque memoir of a road trip with his fiancée through the storied ballparks of a poet’s youthful dreams is built on the bargain of fiction—that the narration of someone else’s life requires the listener or reader to fill in the blanks of what we ...

Reissued as part of Anvil Press's Lost BC Literature seriesSet in Vancouver in the mid-1960s, Mirror on the Floor focuses on one summer in the life of UBC grad student Bob Small and his roommate, George Delsing.They spend their time carousing the downtown eastside and engaging in conversations with the old-timers—dockworkers, unemployed loggers, and retired seamen. They study, smoke cigarettes, endure tedious summer jobs, bombard one another with philosophical bant...

The first-ever collection of the major serial poems by Canada’s inaugural Parliamentory Poet Laureate, George Bowering, Taking Measures includes work from each of the last six decades, beginning with Bowering's engagement with process-based long poems in the 1960s and 1970s and moving through his continued exploration of the form in recent decades. Containing well-known Bowering texts, including Allophanes, Autobiology, Delayed Mercy, Genève, an...