Allophanes     George Bowering
Poetry     50 pp     4 1/4 x 8     0 88910 192 2 pb
    A serial poem which appears to be about aesthetics, baseball and Canadian literature. If you don't understand the story you'd better tell it. 'Allophanes is about language and art and people who instruct ... It is aphoristic, literary and ambivalent.' - Bob Lincoln, Quill & Quire

Between Crows and Indians     Roger Magini
Marc Plourde, Translator
Fiction     80 pp     4 1/4 x 8     0 88910 187 6 pb
Series: Coach House Quebec Translations
    A novel that contests the traditional linear narrative and its presumption of the singleness of truth. An exploration of first-person narratives that are roads forever converging, roads that lead to everything. The semi-boulevard and blind alley that is the text is simultaneously our world, the scrap-yard home of the narrator and the predicament of contemporary Quebec.
    Translator Marc Plourde recreates a text explicitly opposed to translation.
    'A linguistic speculation ... neither a novel nor poetry.' - The Journal of Canadian Fiction
    'Magini owes much to the continental, and specifically, French avant-garde and surrealist traditions.' - Robert Brandeis

Bill Jubobe     Bob Cobbing
Poetry     116 pp     6 x 6     0 88910 005 5 pb
    'Concrete poetry is for me a return to an emphasis on the physical structure of language - the sign made by the voice, and the symbol for that sign made on paper or in other material and visible form.' - Bob Cobbing
    'Everything about Cobbing's work in Bill Jubobe is new and refreshing. As Bob says in his poems 'lies like truth' / 'today new beauty comes within your grasp / those qualities which reveal sensibility of vision.' - Richard Truhlar, CV II 13

A Book     Nicole Brossard. Larry Shouldice, Translator
Fiction     99 pp     4 1/4 x 8     0 88910 186 8 pb
Series: Coach House Quebec Translations
    One of the most important postmodern developments in fiction is the abandonment of modernist attempts to disguise the fact that a novel is a book. This novel is a book; it centers on the ambiguities of lives that are both phenomenal and, through the act of being written, fictional. In both Beaulieu and Brossard, the rhythms of the sentence correspond to the rhythms of the reality depicted.

Camera in the Interior: 1858     Richard Huyda
H.L. Hime, Photographer
Visual     128 pp     10 3/4 x 9     0 88910 166 3 hb
Series: Early Canadian Photographers
    'This book, with its thoroughness of research, its exacting yet fluid style, and its excellence of design should serve as a model for future historical publications.' - The Royal Canadian Geographica1 Society
    '... presents to the reader a delightful picture of Hime the photographer shown against the background of his time.' - The Beaver
    '... illuminates land and life in the West in the period when Europeans were living in association with the native people, just before commercial agriculture and urbanization ...' - Books in Canada
    '... belongs in the libraries of readers who enjoy viewing Canada's early development.' - Early Canadian Life
    'Both Huyda and Coach House Press must be congratulated for making Hime's photographs accessible once again, and for creating a historical context in which they can be really understood.' - Afterimage
    '... fascinating to those interested in the history of photography in this country.' - The Canadian Historical Review
    'an important work for our overall understanding of both the history of photography and the roles it played ...' - Journal of the Photographic Historical Society of America

Clear Light     Michael Hollingsworth
Drama     96 pp     5 1/4 x 8 3/4     0 88910 189 2 pb
    A publication of the original script of the play that was closed by the morality squad after a short run at Toronto Free Theatre.
    Illustrated with photographs by Michel Lambeth.

Declining Gracefully     John Sandman
Fiction     109 pp     4 1/4 x 7 1/2     0 88910 199 x pb
    Declining Gracefully is John Sandman's fourth published novel, and is set in the vague Toronto netherworld of late nights and unsuccessful bars. Like all of Sandman's novels, it begins with a situation that gradually, through the novel, unravels into complete disaster and despair.
    Sylvia, the heroine of the novel, begins by looking for a good lay, and this quest evolves from the initial situation - where a futile attempt is mercifully interrupted by a phone call from the deserted wife - to the last - where she goes to sleep alone - in a series of funny but almost plausible incidents.
    On the way, Sandman turns the woman's movement, male sexuality, and the whole tangled and ridiculous set of rules by which people try to make contact with each other inside out. It is Sandman's gift to be able to make it unclear if this process is satire or just straight documentation, whether one should be laughing or moving to a place remote from civilization. - Matt Cohen

The Farm Show     Assembled by Ted Johns
Drama     107 pp     5 x 8 3/4     0 88910 188 4 pb
    'This is a record of our version of grassroots theatre. The idea was to take a group of actors out to a farming community and build a play of what we could see and learn. There is no story or 'plot' as such ... Nevertheless, we hope that you can see many stories woven into the themes of this play and that out of it will emerge a picture of a complex and living community.' - Paul Thompson
    'The Farm Show offers a generous, humanistic portrait of a rural community striving through hardship and toil toward dignity and continuity.' - Urjo Kareda
    Illustrated by Al Jones, Gary McKeehan and Robert Nasmith.

The Great Canadian Sonnet     David McFadden and Greg Curnoe
Fiction     394 pp     3 3/4 x 4 1/2     0 88910 180 9 pb
    Canadian hero Rick Wayne moves sideways to grapple with The Big Questions.
    'The text, independently of drawings, presents itself as a series of paradoxes and unanswered questions; in turn the drawings in themselves are often enigmatic. The juxtaposition of the two produces new paradoxes and enigmas, and from this wonderful disorder of meanings comes a joyful description of the ordinary, which turns out to be very funny, as well as very beautiful indeed.' - Pierre Théberge

The Martyrology Books III and IV     bpNichol. Jerry Ofo, Illustrator
Poetry     116 pp     5 1/2 x 8 3/4     0 88910 194 9 pb
    Here Nichol moves deeper into the language, and formal evolution accompanies the insistence of new contents. Jerry Ofo has once more provided his witty and moving drawings to run parallel with the texts.
    'bpNichol's writing is the most courageous body of work in literature today.' - Frank Davey, From There to Here
    'The Martyrology may yet become the sacred book of contemporary primitivism in Canada, its cryptic phrases providing the necessary definitions and prayer, and a theory as well for all Nichol's earlier efforts.' - Eli Mandel

Me?     Martin Kinch
Drama     72 pp     6 x 9     0 88910 174 4 pb
    A wild and provocative portrait of an artist: used, abused and confused. Originally produced by Toronto Free Theatre in 1973, Me? was an instant hit and was subsequently made into a feature film. 'A spell-binder ...' - Herbert Whittaker, Globe & Mail

The North Saskatchewan River Book     Wade Bell
Fiction     104 pp     5 1/4 x 8 1/4     0 88910 176 0 pb
    A serially connected topography of this writer's formative years in the Canadian west. Clear, devastatingly clear writing. The North Saskatchewan River Book is a disturbing, fetching, blackly comic, ribald and moving collection of 'documents,' realistic fictions and visions concerning the landscape through which the North Saskatchewan River runs.
    'It may be Bell's first book, but it can be judged against any recent book of prose as a successful collection of stylistically adventurous and varied fictions.' - Douglas Barbour

The Peter Stories     Gladys Hindmarch
Fiction     55 pp     7 x 7     0 88910 201 5 pb
    Based on the Old Mother Goose rhymes, they are both witty and disturbing, probing the darker areas of female/male relationships. 'What Gladys Hindmarch has going for her is a direct line to the primary images that move us, the very thing one does find in children's stories, myths and dreams. What she does in the writing is bring them up and out from their hiding places into the absolutely familiar light of our own cookie jars, back gardens, bedrooms and beer parlours. It is a lovely book to hold and read.' - Paul de Barros, Brick
    'It is the physical descriptions which startle and delight: Peter cutting into the big pumpkin, Peter dancing with his second wife. These are what are most memorable in the book.' - Rita West, Room of One's Own
    '... an astonishingly imaginative expansion of the nursery rhymes.' - David S. Scorgie, Edmonton Journal

A Soul Station in My Ear     Dwight Gardiner. Chuck Miller, Illustrator
Poetry     48 pp     8 x 8     0 88910 184 1 pb
    A bop meditation (Spicer out of Charlie Parker) that explores the intertwining nature of the two Great Invisibles - poetry and love - where they originate and where they lead. The book is also an exquisite visual experience.

The Story So Four     bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, Editors
Fiction     224 pp     5 3/8 x 8 3/4     0 88910 190 6 pb
Series: The Story So Far
    Steve McCaffery and bpNichol have edited the fourth in Coach House's controversial series of new short prose works and have included texts by George Bowering, Matt Cohen, John Bentley Mays, Gerald Lampert, Stan Dragland, Martin Vaughn-James, Eldon Garnet and others. An exciting, unexpected and stimulating collection.
    'The preferential push in this fourth Story So Far is for avowedly experimental writing which crosses over genre boundaries into poetry, historical narrative, graphics, concrete visual effects and bright one-liners seeded through some heavy prose....' - John Oughton, Quill & Quire

This is My Best     Ninety-one Poets
Poetry     144 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 200 7 pb
    An anthology of Canadian poetry by authors who were asked to submit 'only the best.'
    You won't find many of your favourite authors in this crowd. They are virtually all debutants, and there is no place for celebrities. This is the domain of the recondite, the angry, the naive, the banal, and yes, the unjustly neglected. We can view it as a sort of a party.

A Thousand Days in the Attic     Valerie Kent
Fiction     111 pp     4 1/2 x 7     0 88910 193 0 pb
    The tempestuous romance of an ordinary everyday young woman and her poet in shining armour. Will their searing descent into a turbulent depravity mark them? Can her consuming passion save them from becoming middle-aged and happy? An outrageously serious book.
    '... a highly spirited and entertaining surrealist fantasy ... and the whole is executed in a hilarious spirit of sexual exuberance.' - Elizabeth Brady, Canadian Literature

Turn of a Pang     Nicole Brossard. Patricia Claxton, Translator
Fiction     120 pp     4 1/4 x 8     0 88910 158 2 pb
Series: Coach House Quebec Translations
    Here composition is both the subject of the novel and a metaphor for the lives of its characters. Cherry composes herself in derivative images - the cheap red of cosmetics, the glossy red of escapist romance - in a futile search for the richness of relationship which the sexual pun of her name promises. In narrative technique this is one of the most semiotic of contemporary novels; the story is conveyed by a series of recurring signs and images - rust, networks, membranes, fingernails. Brossard's language is playful and punning - qualities strikingly preserved by Patricia Claxton's 'traduction'.