Quattro Books: 75 books

“ghosts of sinners dot this hill, it’s a short walk to the bottom” Mudtown was a working-class neighbourhood tightly wedged between once busy docks, factories and the escarpment along the east shore of Owen Sound Bay. It was regularly inundated with mud during spring rains. Beyond Mudtown, Rob...

Thambi Navaratnam is a young Tamil living with his mother and brother in Scarborough. He wholeheartedly intends to avoid the fate of his brother: arranged marriage. But it’s all anyone can talk about. Marriage…marriage…marriage. To add fuel to the fire, his father, who has been separated from...

"There is a shadow of a boy walking within me. His spirit is lightning fire. He will not be shackled. At birth, I was labeled a girl. My name is Jazz. Like the music, I am nature’s improvisation." When he is forced to leave his suburban home at age seventeen, Jazz – a transgender F2M...

These elegantly crafted works of social and psychological realism, counterpointed with expressionistic and surrealist textures, employ a language teeming with images, ideas and rhythms. This versatile book of travel poems, portraits, a long dramatic monologue, epistolary, and catalogue pieces will leave the reader emotionally and intellectually gratified.

The title Night Vision refers firstly to the night vision goggles that enable soldiers to see through the darkness in order to destroy and kill, and secondly to a vision of the political and ecological night that threatens humankind, but also to the faint possibility, grounded in personal relationships...

In Karen Connelly’s first collection of poetry since The Border Surrounds Us, the poet offers up a searing, complex portrayal of her troubled family. Refracted, augmented, drawn through various cities, streets and fields, over mountain ranges and foreign landscapes, this portrayal grows into an...

Something Small To Carry Home is an homage to the dead and the living, a family history, a celebration of life’s special occasions, and a meditation on poetry itself, its solace and significance through the poets who’ve nurtured and inspired the author.

syrinx and systole is a book of prose poems and lyrical poems which meditate,with a Buddhist orientation, on philosophical and religious themes such as the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world, and between spirituality and anatomy, and the nature of “voice” in birds and in ourselves, and on the power and limits of language.

In the tradition of Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes and The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano, this collection of short essays and “alternative versions” is a vivid, perhaps even shocking, reminder that language, self, and reality are based on social consensus, an unspoken agreement to...

Pin Pricks is a collection of deceptively simple poems and aphorisms, each of which expresses an understanding of what it means to be human in this high-tech, global age. The poems leap from urban first world concerns to third world struggles, from the solidly grounded to the surreal, from sombre...

Nevermore: A Book of Hours is a modern bestiary and a book of remembrance, a distillation of thirty years of research and meditation by author and poet David Day, an acknowledged authority on the extinction of species. In its conception and approach, Nevermore is unlike any other natural history....

Against God is the gripping, dark tale of a man searching for answers. What happens in the mind of a man when, all of a sudden, he loses all reason for living? When everything in his life collapses around him and he is left with nothing, wondering why fate has been so scornfully unremitting? This...

Set in Toronto’s seedy underbelly, The Green Hotel challenges our notions of ‘Toronto the good’. Rich in detail, the book engages us with gritty realism and a startling portrayal of a life steeped in sex, drugs and pyromania as a young man tries to cope with the anxiety of co-existing with a...

Through a dazzling variety of poetic forms and styles, this book restlessly explores such themes as identity, personal growth, love and friendship, Canadian landscape, climate change, visual art, and the roots of poetry itself, in moods of anxious and impassioned questioning, deep affection, dread,...