Coach House Books: 208 books

Since 2010, Toronto's headlines have been consumed by the outrageous personal foibles and government-slashing, anti-urbanist policies of Mayor Rob Ford. But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascendance as a mature global city. Some Great Idea...

Eighty-five years of art and history through the eyes of a woman who fled her family – as re-imagined by her granddaughter. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette never knew her mother’s mother. Curious to understand why her grandmother, Suzanne, a sometime painter and poet associated with Les Automatistes,...

'Teenage Head changed the face of music in this country. I would not be who I am today without their first record ... In 1979 they were the only band that mattered.’ – Hugh Dillon In the late 1970s and early 1980s, no Canadian band rocked harder, louder or to more hardcore fans than Hamilton,...

Need Machine clamours through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumour. Honest, irreverent and sharply indifferent, this book will hogtie you with awe.

Nights on Prose Mountain gathers all of beloved writer bpNichol's published fiction. Originally appearing between 1968 and 1983, and representing almost the entire arc of Nichol’s writing career, Nights on Prose Mountain is by turns heartbreaking, playful, and evocative. While Nichol’s poetry...

Winner of the 2009 ReLit Award! He saw it. Like one dead eye filmed over. Like a tunnel that would kill you. Like a star coming to explode you. He saw it. Closer and closer. It was morning. It was daylight. He shouldn't be thinking this. This was a nighttime thing. Stop. Stop. Stop thinking....

Now that we 'curate' even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture? ‘Curate’ is now a buzzword, applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows...

With an alternating sense of wonder and detachment, Jay Ritchie's first full-length collection of poetry grapples with death, disappointment, love, emails – the large and small subjects of daily life. His unflagging sense of humour and aphoristic delivery create a work that is personable yet elevated, witty, and honest.

The story of the growth and destruction of Toronto’s first 'priority neighbourhood.' From the 1840s until the Second World War, waves of newcomers who migrated to Toronto -- Irish, Jewish, Italian, African American and Chinese, among others -- landed in 'The Ward.' Crammed with rundown housing...

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly...

How do we build cities where we aren't just living within the same urban space, but living together? Greater Toronto is now home to a larger proportion of foreign-born residents than any other major global metropolis. Not surprisingly, city officials rarely miss an opportunity to tout the region’s...

Everybody loves the movies. But a movie about the colour blue, or an isolated mountain range, or a man grown so thin the world floats through his perfect transparency? 'You know what would be really great - to make a two-hour movie about Taylor Mead's ass,' remarked Andy Warhol, the most notorious...

Described by Variety as ‘Yukon Gothic,’ Claudia Dey’s acclaimed Trout Stanley is set in northern British Columbia, on the outskirts of a mining town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley. In this inhospitable setting live a pair of sisters, twins who are not identical in any way: Sugar,...

Whether misreading sixth–grade pedagogical materials or offering visual schematics for reading Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Jon Paul Fiorentino’s sixth poetry collection asks us to reconsider our engagement with received information — but does so with a wink during detention.