The Waking Comes Late

2016 Governor General's Literary Award Finalist 2017 Raymond Souster Award Finalist Governor General’s Literary Award finalist and bestselling author Steven Heighton returns with a collection of laments and celebrations that reflect on our struggle to believe in the future of a world that continues to disappoint us. The poet challenges the boundaries of sleep and even death in these meditations on what lies just beneath the surface of contemporary life. These are poems that trouble over the idea of failure even as they continually recommit to the present moment. This is fierce music performed in a minor key.

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book • A CBC Best Nonfiction Book of 2020 • A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book for 2020 “Combining his poetic sensibilities and storytelling skills with a documentarian’s eye, [Heighton] has created a wrenching narrative.”—2020 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the frontlines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother's native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY-—a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. In a town deserted by the tourists that had been its lifeblood, Heighton-—alongside the exhausted locals and under-equipped international aid workers—-found himself thrown into emergency roles for which he was woefully unqualified. From the brief reprieves of volunteer-refugee soccer matches to the riots of Camp Moria, Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind.

Richard Lemm grew up in cool 1960s Seattle, raised by alcoholic grandparents with a mad, absent mother and a mythic father who might or might not have died before he was born. To avoid the draft, he left the greatest country in the world and moved to Canada just as the Age of Aquarius was dawning. Now, having constructed a new and equally imagined identity, he uses his poet's sensibility to examine the familial myths and cultural privilege that shaped his youth -- the unsettled frontier, the golden age of the 1950s, the noble warrior, the little woman and the inexhaustible natural resources of the Pacific Northwest. This wry, poignant and insightful memoir looks at growing up in a family and country you didn't choose and coming of age in the country and with the people you did.

In 1871 off the coast of Greenland, 19 men, women, and children, cast adrift on an ice floe from their foundering ship, the Arctic explorer "Polaris," endured a six-month winter ordeal before finally being rescued the following spring. In "Afterlands," Heighton provocatively fills in the blanks of the documented history of this event.

Waking the Dictator is a study of federalism in late nineteenth century Veracruz State. It is also a politico-military analysis and an evaluation of social-revolutionary relations in the epoch of the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution. This study is the first modern, comprehensive, and analytical history of the Porfiriato and Mexican Revolution in Veracruz.

A collection of poems about love and loss. A common theme is overcoming the bitterness and grief that often accompany love with music and intellect. The book's second half consists of Heighton's versions of the work of some of the greatest Western poets, including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sappho, Catullus, Homer, and Rilke. Some strong language, some descriptions of sex and violence. 2004.

Poet-boxer Sevigne Torrins struggle to find his place in the world as he experiences a series of professional and sexual misadventures that take him from his youth on the shores of Lake Superior, to trendy Toronto, to Egypt.

Most people go through life chasing illusions of success, fame, wealth, happiness, and few things are more painful than the reality-revealing loss of an illusion. But if illusions are negative, why is the opposite, being disillusioned, also negative? In this essay based on his inaugural writer-in-residence lecture at Athabasca University, internationally acclaimed writer Steven Heighton mathematically evaluates the paradox of disillusionment and the negative aspects of hope. Drawing on writers such as Herman Melville, Leonard Cohen, Kate Chopin, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Heighton considers the influence of illusions on creativity, art, and society. This meditation on language and philosophy reveals the virtues of being disillusioned and, perhaps, the path to freedom.