Download or read book Seconds Out written by Alison Dean and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kicking ass and taking notes—what it’s like to be a woman in the ring. Alison Dean teaches English literature. She also punches people. Hard. But despite several amateur fights under her belt, she knows she will never be taken as seriously as a male boxer. “You punch like a girl” still isn’t a compliment — women aren’t supposed to choose to participate in violence. Her unique perspective as a 30-something university lecturer turned amateur fighter allows Dean to articulately and with great insight delve into the ways martial arts can change a person’s — and particularly a woman’s — relationship to their body and to the world around them, and at the same time considers the ways in which women might change martial arts. Combining historical research, anecdotal experience, and interviews with coaches and fighters, Seconds Out explores our culture’s relationship with violence, and particularly with violence practiced by women. "An important addition to women’s martial arts scholarship, Dean provides personal insight into the radical space women occupy in sport fighting. Seconds Out is a must-read for all fighters looking for mentors in the complicated world of martial arts." —L.A. Jennings, author of Mixed Martial Arts: A History from Ancient Fighting Sports to the UFC "Dean brings a fresh new female voice to the topic of combat sports." —Trevor Wittman, renowned MMA trainer, UFC analyst, and founder of ONX Sports "Trained in the discipline and art of both fighting and literature, Dean combines both with style. She honors the fighters, writers, and historians who have come before her and definitively ends the idea of women fighters as a novelty. Seconds Out is a must-read for anyone who feels the call of the bell and reverence for a good fight." —Sue Jaye Johnson

Download or read book Uncle written by Cheryl Thompson and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From martyr to insult, how “Uncle Tom” has influenced two centuries of racial politics. Jackie Robinson, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Christopher Darden have all been accused of being an Uncle Tom during their careers. How, why, and with what consequences for our society did Uncle Tom morph first into a servile old man and then to a racial epithet hurled at African American men deemed, by other Black people, to have betrayed their race? Uncle Tom, the eponymous figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a loyal Christian who died a martyr’s death. But soon after the best-selling novel appeared, theatre troupes across North America and Europe transformed Stowe’s story into minstrel shows featuring white men in blackface. In Uncle, Cheryl Thompson traces Tom’s journey from literary character to racial trope. She explores how Uncle Tom came to be and exposes the relentless reworking of Uncle Tom into a nostalgic, racial metaphor with the power to shape how we see Black men, a distortion visible in everything from Uncle Ben and Rastus The Cream of Wheat chef to Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Bill Cosby. In Donald Trump’s post-truth America, where nostalgia is used as a political tool to rewrite history, Uncle makes the case for why understanding the production of racial stereotypes matters more than ever before.

Download or read book Watch Your Head written by Kathryn Mockler and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest. In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action. Edited by Madhur Anand, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Dorner, Catherine Graham, Elena Johnson, Canisia Lubrin, Kim Mannix, Kathryn Mockler, June Pak, Sina Queyras, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Rasiqra Revulva, Yusuf Saadi, Sanchari Sur, and Jacqueline Valencia Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto.

Download or read book Anatomic written by Adam Dickinson and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author's body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our "petroculture" has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personalities. Structured like the hormones some of these synthetic chemicals mimic in our bodies, this sequence of poems links the author’s biographical details (diet, lifestyle, geography) with historical details (spills, poisonings, military applications) to show how permeable our bodies are to the environment. As Dickinson becomes obsessed with limiting the rampant contamination of his own biochemistry, he turns this chemical-microbial autobiography into an anxious plea for us to consider what we’re doing to our world -- and to our own bodies.

Download or read book 3 Summers written by Lisa Robertson and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recite your poem to your aunt. I threw myself to the ground. Where were you in the night? In a school among the pines. What was the meaning of the dream? Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell. "Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully."—The New York Times "Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture."— The Village Voice Lisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

Download or read book Drama written by Karen Hines and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Drama Penelope Douglas is an ex–forensic psychiatrist looking for a fresh start in a western boomtown grown three sizes too crazy. But then a television writer offs himself in her sleek bathroom and her oil-wife friend pronounces Penelope her baby's godmother. Will she be able to find heart in this wild and soulless landscape? Will she have to smudge her lipstick to "cowboy up"? Drama, a new play by the master of edgy dark humor, has all the answers. Karen Hines is the author of Hello . . . Hello (A Romantic Satire) and The Pochsy Plays. A Second City alumna, Hines has appeared in numerous television and film productions and is the director of cult horror clowns Mump & Smoot.

Download or read book Y written by Aaron Tucker and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The books, the loves, and the conscience of J. Robert Oppenheimer: a novel about the man who invented the atomic bomb.

Download or read book Ink Earl written by Susan Holbrook and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry Award ink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion. Starting with ad copy that extols the iconic Pink Pearl eraser, Holbrook erases and erases, revealing more and more. Rubbing out different words from this decidedly non-literary, noncanonical source text, she was left with the promise of “100 essays” and set about to find them. Among her discoveries are queer love poems, art projects, political commentary, lunch, songs, and entire extended families. The absurdity of the constraint lends itself to plenty of fun and funny, while reminding us of truths assiduously erased by normative forces. ink earl’s variations are testament in micro to the act of poiesis as not so much a building as an intrepid series of effacements; we rub away at the walls of language we’ve lived within in order to release both what’s been written over, and what we want to say now.

Download or read book Baseball written by George Bowering and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its remarkable design to its effervescent language, George Bowering's ode to the beautiful game is as original as it is funny, as bittersweet as it is playful. A long-out-of-print Coach House classic, originally published in 1967, Baseball weaves together mythology, autobiography, literary history and pop culture into an inimitable book-length poem that explores all the nuances of the sport. Here are all the greats: Mantle, DiMaggio, Maris, Williams and Manuel Louie, shortstop for the Wenatchee Chiefs, their exploits captured in passages of off-kilter, occasionally melancholy, lyricism. Gar Smith's enchanting and ingenious design has also been preserved; the book, complete with green velvet-flocked covers, is shaped like a pennant that, when unfolded, forms a diamond. A long-time utility player, Bowering (our Homer?) has written books in many different genres and was named Canada's first Poet Laureate. Baseball is a tantalizing glimpse of the writer at the beginning of his illustrious career; a real curveball of a book that will dazzle literature and sports fans alike.

Download or read book The Hundred Year House written by Rebecca Makkai and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of The Borrower returns with a dazzlingly original, mordantly witty novel about the secrets of an old-money family and their turn-of-the-century estate, Laurelfield. “Rebecca Makkai is a writer to watch, as sneakily ambitious as she is unpretentious." –Richard Russo Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents’ wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room. Violet’s portrait was known to terrify the artists who resided at the house from the 1920s to the 1950s, when it served as the Laurelfield Arts Colony—and this is exactly the period Zee’s husband, Doug, is interested in. An out-of-work academic whose only hope of a future position is securing a book deal, Doug is stalled on his biography of the poet Edwin Parfitt, once in residence at the colony. All he needs to get the book back on track—besides some motivation and self-esteem—is access to the colony records, rotting away in the attic for decades. But when Doug begins to poke around where he shouldn’t, he finds Gracie guards the files with a strange ferocity, raising questions about what she might be hiding. The secrets of the hundred-year house would turn everything Doug and Zee think they know about her family on its head—that is, if they were to ever uncover them. In this brilliantly conceived, ambitious, and deeply rewarding novel, Rebecca Makkai unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer. For readers of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle

Download or read book The Far Shore written by Adam Hammond and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The genius and artistry behind Superbrothers and the making of an indie video game, from inception to its highly anticipated launch. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was released in 2011 at the forefront of an exciting era of “indie games” – with the aesthetic of punk rock and the edge of modernist fiction, indie games pushed gaming into the realm of the avant-garde. Superbrothers (Craig D. Adams) was hailed as a visionary in the video game world. Now, his long-awaited follow-up, JETT: The Far Shore, has been released for Sony PlayStation and Epic Games Store. In the decade from inception to launch, Adams brought author Adam Hammond along for the ride, allowing unprecedented insight into the complicated genesis of Jett. The Far Shore offers a portrait of the enigmatic Adams and his team, the genius and artistry, the successes and setbacks, that went into building the world of JETT, in which you’re tasked with scouting a new home for a humanoid people after they’ve decimated their planet. To provide context, Hammond recounts the history of indie games and how their trajectory has followed that of independent art and literature. A riveting insider’s look at one of our most popular art forms.

Download or read book The Xenotext written by Christian Bök and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Download or read book Paper Houses written by Dominique Fortier and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emily Dickinson is as famous for being a recluse as she is for her poetry. In this stunning novel, we see her struggling to reconcile spirit and flesh, preferring letters and reflecting that the only way to have books and life is to live through one’s own writing. Dominique Fortier brings Dickinson vividly to life, as if reanimating a flower that had been pressed in a book, through her reflections on language and what it feels like to be home.

Download or read book Building Wealth One House at a Time Making it Big on Little Deals written by John Schaub and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2004-12-31 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strategies for creating real estate wealth by star ting small--and always making the right moves Nationally known real estate expert John Schaub learned his craft in the best way possible--on the job, and through every kind of market. Over three decades, he learned to bank consistent profits as he built an impressive real estate mini-empire. Building Wealth One House at a Time reveals how virtually anyone can accumulate one million dollars worth of houses debtfree and earn a steady cash flow for life. Unique in that it focuses on buying houses in good-quality neighborhoods, Schaub's nine-step program includes: Renting to long-term tenants, with financial incentives to pay on time Avoiding the temptation of bigger deals, which invariably include bigger problems A 10-year plan to pay off debt and own houses free and clear

Download or read book Invention written by James Dyson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-02 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dyson has become a byword for high performing products, technology, design and invention. Now, James Dyson, the inventor and entrepreneur who made it all happen, tells his remarkable and inspirational story in Invention: A Life. Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out ofmany failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. His products - including vacuum cleaners, hair dryers and hair stylers, and fans and purifiers - are not only revolutionary technologies, but design classics. This was a legacy of his time studying at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, when he was inspired by some of the most famous artists, designers and inventors of the era, as well as his engineering heroes such as Frank Whittle and Alec Issigonis. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome. Dyson has always looked to the future, even setting up his own university to help provide the next generation of engineers and designers. For, as he says, 'everything changes all the time, so experience is of little use'. Whether you are someone who has an idea for a better product, an aspiring entrepreneur, whether you appreciate great design or a page-turning read, Invention: A Life offers you inspiration, hope and much more.

Download or read book Because the Sun written by Sarah Burgoyne and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Camus’s Meursault and Thelma and Louise meet up under the blazing sun. Vexed by the ‘unremarkable star’ that ‘presses’ Camus’s Meursault to commit murder, Because the Sun considers the blazing sun as a material symbol of ambient violence – violence absorbed like heat and fired at the nearest victim. Likewise, as a friendship between women confronts gendered aggression in Thelma and Louise, the sun becomes the repository of pain, the high noon that pushes us through desert after desert. Because the Sun’s pastiche of voices embodies both stylistic and formal relentlessness by teasing out tonalities that blend and merge into each other, generating a blinding effect, like looking into the sun. “Breathless and death defying, the poems in Because the Sun are high-wire work. They sway above us in a blazing light of Burgoyne’s making. It is so rare that a book of poems is both a tuning fork for our minds as well as a balm for our bodies. But that is exactly what happens page after page in this blazing book.” —Michael Dickman, author of Days & Days “This beautiful work wraps Camus’s The Stranger in a poetics concerning erasure/+ hope. Out of the titular Sun’s burning punctum burst telling shards of what is erased by Camus’s remarkable construction of whiteness in-the-masculine: the dead ‘Arab,’ the female body’s interminable violations – but also its warming, even blinding capacity for consequential pleasures.” —Gail Scott, author of Heroine “Sarah Burgoyne begins with the sun and ends with flowers. In between is a complicated exploration of what it means to exist within a tradition that is Camus, Rimbaud, Blake. Taking her cue from Sara Ahmed, she notices how hard it is to challenge this tradition and yet that it matters to do it anyway.” —Juliana Spahr, author of That Winter the Wolf Came

Download or read book Cosmo written by Spencer Gordon and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 CBC Overlookie Bookie Award for Most Underrated Canadian Book "These stories read like collaborations between Stephen King and TMZ with Borges and Nabokov on the edits. Each short story sounds with the thunder of a novel. Enthralling, dark, gut-busting stuff!"—Jeff Parker Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal desert of the soul, an admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three thousand-word sentence in defense of his passion, an aging porn star dons a dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of a lifetime, and Leonard Cohen shills for Subway: these mercurial and wildly varied stories explode the conventions of short fiction. Spencer Gordon is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Cosmo (Coach House Books, 2012), the poetry collection Cruise Missile Liberals (forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in fall 2017), and three chapbooks. He is a co-founder of the ten-year-old literary magazine The Puritan, and his writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, and other forums. He works at a speakers bureau in Toronto.