For more than four decades, Canadian nationalist, publisher and best-selling author, Mel Hurtig, has been warning Canadians about the negative influences of the excessive corporate takeover of Canada, including the impacts of foreign ownership and so-called free-trade agreements. In this short but important book, Mel Hurtig turns his attention to the devastating impact that the Stephen Harper government has had on Canada, radically altering the democratic, social and economic fabric of the country. He shows how Stephen Harper's single-minded pursuit of big oil and the tar sands, at a time when the world must take dramatic action to arrest climate change, has inflicted enormous damage on our country and on our international reputation. He contends that Harper rose to power with an agenda so contrary to Canadian principles and values, that the only way he could pursue it was through a takeover of Canadian democracy. Mel Hurtig is the legendary Edmonton bookseller, publisher and creator of The Canadian Encyclopedia who became a political activist, then an author in 1991 with his huge bestseller The Betrayal of Canada. He is also the author of Pay the Rent or Feed the Kids, The Vanishing Country, Rushing to Armageddon and The Truth About Canada. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has received many honorary degrees and other honours. He lives in Vancouver.

Shortlisted for the ReLit Award (2008)I Cut My Finger is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures.Praise for I Cut My Finger:One of Eye's "Best Reviews of 2007""Taddle Creek Recommends" Pick (Summer 2007 issue)"... Now considered to be Canada's foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry ... Absurd, surprising, topical, surreal - his new work builds on the mythic significance and brilliance of several career-long metaphors and subjects." (The Globe and Mail)"It is surrealism at its best: written not to dispel the present but to reveal it." (Arc Poetry)"A damn-fine book in every sense of the word." (Taddle Creek)