Mawenzi House: 55 books

de book of Mary is an epic poem in Jamaican Creole based on the Biblical story of Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The first book of a trilogy, Pamela Mordecai’s de book of Mary covers Mary’s life from her early years, through the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel and the birth of Yeshua, to...

These "subversive sonnets" overhaul the traditional sonnet form to address a range of subjects, from the tenderness of love to the terror of rape, punishment, torture, and murder. The poet's quest is to corral iambics into the demotic of Jamaican creoles as well as forms of English past and present....

These gracefully understated stories, set during and post apartheid, depict the lives of South African black women. But their calm surface is illusive, violence lurks just beneath the surface. Whether waiting for news of their husbands, forced to yield to “the man,” coping with poverty, suffering...

Five women gather every Friday night to discuss their writing lives. Isabel, returning home, where the writing circle are to meet, is attacked in her car at gunpoint and raped. But she manages to turn the gun on her attacker and shoot him. In coping with the killing, the disposal of the body, and...

Fifteen-year-old Munna lives with his Ma and sisters in a small town in India. Determined to end his family's misfortunes, he is lured into a dream job in the Middle East, only to be sold. He must work at the Sheikh's camel farm in the desert and train young boys as jockeys in camel races. The boys,...

Accomplished, sensitive, and often disturbing, these stories take us into the lives of modern Pakistanis—privileged and poor, gay, trans, and straight, men and women, in Karachi and Toronto. “Whisperings of the Devil” takes us into the mind of a mistreated maidservant’s boy who gets seduced...

These poignant stories finely depict the lives of immigrants, through the themes of family adjustment, loss, and starting afresh in a new place. Set in suburban Toronto, New Jersey, Texas, and India, they draw out the conflicts in three generations of Indians whose lives interconnect even as...

Bleeding Light is a collection of poems in ghazal form that traces the steps of a woman’s journey through night. She knows that in order to witness dawn, she has to travel through dusk first. Throughout her journey, she is caught between West and East, religion and heresy, love and anti-love, darkness...

Hera at last is a definitive edition that brings together the best from the published and new poetry of Rienzi Crusz, who has been called "arguably the best living Sri Lankan poet in English."* But Crusz is also very much a poet of exile, who speaks about ice in the northern outdors and...

Translated from French by Howard Scott Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes is a collection of great tenderness. It is especially a cry from the heart. As if the tenderness and poetry were dumbfounded before the eruption of a volcano. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine reveals herself as a poet and Innu...

The essays in this volume continue the examination, begun in Confluences 1, of the exciting new writing that has emerged in Canada in the past few decades. Employing a variety of approaches and addressing the many concerns engaging their author-subjects—memory, history, and concentric identities;...

Translated from French by Howard Scott   Assi Manifesto is a celebration of the Innu land in the tradition of Joséphine Bacon. This telluric power is reminiscent of Paul Chamberland’sTerre Québec. Natasha Kanapé’s challenge is to name her land, but also to reconcile...

It is the turbulent 1980s in apartheid South Africa, when even the ordinary life is full of danger and uncertainty. What will tomorrow bring? Tihelo, a thirteen-year-old girl, lives with her older sister Keitumetse and their mother Kgomotso. Kgomotso works as a maid for a white household in the city...