The damage, day...whatever.

Here are some of the titles I scooped up at Aqua Books this week, as we had several people come in with teetering pleasing stacks of lit.

Swing Low: A Life by Miriam Toews (Stoddart, 2000)

[After hearing someone talk about it so movingly. What does it mean to write from your father's point of view, I wonder...]

The Tristan Chord by Bettina von Kampen (Enfield and Wizenty, 2008)

[After having made a special trip to purchase Christina Penner's novel The Widows of Hamilton House at McNally's last week, both it and the Tristan Chord appeared at the store yesterday. Sigh...but also admiration. Local press Great Plains has done a great job with the cover design of this new imprint: bravo!]

In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand (Vintage Canada, 1997)

[I remember sitting in the downtown McNally's for Brand's afternoon book chat with the Writers' Festival a few years ago. I was mesmerized by Brand's suede pants. When we said hello after the event, she confessed that she was a trifle mesmerized by my suede shoes. It was a very suede encounter.]

The Wire-Thin Bride by Cornelia Hoogland (Turnstone Press, 1990)

[I'm actively seeking out pregnancy and mothering poems right now and Hoogland's first collection contains a good clutch.]

The Mother of all Toddler Books: An All-Canadian Guide to Your Child's Second and Third Years by Ann Douglas (Wiley, 2002)

The December 2000/January 2001 issue of Canadian Gardening devoted to botanical art.