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"Bad Habits is an outstanding new collection of poems by one of Canada's senior and most important poets and literary figures."--

In this poetry collection, the myriad aspects of exile and belonging are explored in ways both witty and moving. The voices of the outsider and the voices of those who believe they belong are juxtaposed in an impassioned dialogue that resists conclusion. The poems take on a presence of mind that is reinforced by the firsthand experiences the poet draws from of his own emotional experience of emigrating.

A father reflects on the rich life of his son, who died suddenly at twenty-six after living with schizophrenia. On the morning of Boxing Day 2009, the poet Fraser Sutherland and his wife found their son, Malcolm, dead in his bedroom in their house. He was twenty-six and had died from a seizure of unknown cause. Malcolm had been living with schizophrenia since the age of seventeen. Fraser’s respectful narration of Malcolm’s life — his happiness as well as his sufferings, his heroic efforts to calm his troubled mind, his readings, his writings, his experiments with religious thought — is a master writer’s attempt to give shape and dignity to his son’s life, to memorialize it as more than an illness. And in writing about his son’s life, Fraser creates his own self-effacing memoir — the memoir of a parent’s resilience through years of stressful care. Fraser Sutherland, one of Canada’s finest poetry critics and essayists, died shortly after completing this book. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AS IF is a poetry collection that describes ideas that may not correspond with reality but help us to interact with reality better. Fiction writers often say that they tell a higher truth, but poets like to pretend that what they write is sincere, direct truth-telling. However poems are also fictions, and deal with what might be. Poets behave as if the world matches their models. The poems in this collection play on tension between desire and disillusion, between actuality and fantasy. The real yields what might be: the actual becomes the imaginary.

When a Slovenian teenager sneaked into Austria in 1956, it was the start of an epic journey to Canada that almost ended before it started. First, young Ivan Letnik had to overcome cancer. Landing penniless the next year in Toronto, he worked his way up from golf-club dishwasher to greasy-spoon proprietor. Building on success, this non-stop worker bought the Normac, a former Detroit fire tug, and turned it into a floating restaurant on the barren Toronto waterfront. Restless for expansion he did not stop there. Twelve years later, he bought a Yugoslav cruise ship, the Jadran, and led a crew to sail it across the stormy North Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence Seaway, launching his second seafood venture at the foot of Yonge Street in Toronto. But in 1981 a city excursion ferry, veering off course, rammed and sank the Normac. It did not sink the man who called himself Captain John, though. Battling financial reverses, he kept dishing out clam chowder to boatloads of tourists when he was not hosting an annual dinner to feed the homeless. "The Man Who Stayed Afloat" tells his triumphant Canadian story.

Poetry. The poems in THE MATUSCHKA CASE represent the core of Fraser Sutherland's poetic preoccupations over several decades. They are enquiries into the nature of happiness, absent or present, deserved or undeserved. For Sutherland, happiness consists in the practice of art, and in often baffled attempts to understand the other. Rueful and sardonic, uncomfortable in his own white skin, he seeks the other in everything that is foreign and unfamiliar. In his ideal world, he would "drift into a bar /secretive and self-contained, my whole past /packed inside me like a bomb."

Edward Lacey was one of the rare North American writers who intimately knew the Third World in the latter twentieth century. A superb speaker and translator of multiple languages, Lacey was a gifted teacher in Mexico, Trinidad, Brazil, Thailand, and Indonesia. While he was a college student in the 1950s, his poems pioneered forthrightly gay themes. A remarkable Canadian poet, he is among the few who are known beyond our borders.