Words and music

Zsolt Alapi, GrCert 85, lecturer in Concordia’s Department of Education, recently published Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (DC Books, $23.95).

The story follows Stephen and his manic obsession with a W. H. Auden poem and a Bruegel painting that lends its name to the book’s title. Once discharged from a pyschiactric ward, Stephen reflects on his past, his failed marriage and a potentially destructive passion for books.

Supported by the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, textile artist and sculptor Carole Baillargeon, BFA 86, MFA 96, published Ainsi...(Thus...), a bilingual monograph detailing her exhibition by the same name, from ideation to public presentation.

The publication describes Baillargeon’s work, her influences and the links to family heritage that are rooted in Quebec, humanity and personal histories.

Book requests can be made at carole-baillargeon.ca.

Introduction to Megavoltage X-Ray Dose Computation Algorithms (Routledge, $54.95), edited by Jerry Battista, BSc 71, examines how radiation treatment can be customized to individual cancer patients.

The handbook helps explain dose-calculation algorithms used in treatment planning software with a goal of helping to achieve a high-dose region over the disease site, while minimizing damage to nearby critical organs.

In her first collection of poetry, Drawing Daybreak (Guernica Editions, $20), Maria Caltabiano, BA 93, explores and shares her various emotions since losing her husband to cancer.

Part elegy, part celebration, Drawing Daybreak brings together the portraits of loss and introspection that accompany mourning with poems that speak to unfamiliar paths towards healing. 

Sleuth and artist Gerry Coneybear, along with her 20 cats, are at the centre of Louise Carson’s, BFA 79, latest book The Cat Possessed (Signature Editions, $16.95).

When a suspicious death takes place in a small town along the Ottawa River, Gerry begins to investigate. The whodunit is the fourth in Carson’s Maples Mystery series. 

Philip Dombowsky, BFA 84, MFA 95, chronicles the life of Canadian sculptor Walter Seymour Allward (1874 – 1955) — one of the foremost artists of his generation — in Walter S. Allward: Life and Work (Art Canada Institute, $40).

The digital book is the first significant critical study of the prolific sculptor most well-known for his Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France, vistited by 800,000 people each year. 

In 1970, David Homel escaped the American draft by moving to Paris. A hiking accident in Spain led to a traumatic journey of botched surgeries, addiction, loneliness and the constant pain that would define his life for years to come.

In his new memoir, Lunging into the Underbrush: A Life Lived Backward (Linda Leith Publishing, $21.95), Homel — a lecturer in Concordia’s Département d’études françaises — confronts body-image issues, performance anxiety, masculinity and the challenges of desire in a bid to stay in the game as long as possible. 

Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems 1968- 2018 (Guernica Editions, $25), is a selection of Laurence Hutchman’s, MA 79, memories over 50 years.

From his travels to Europe to turbulent times in 1970s Montreal, a long residence in New Brunswick and his return to Ontario, Hutchman explores the relationship between real and imaginative landscapes as he bears witness to his place and time. 

Radium Girl (Buckrider Books, $20), the new collection of 12 stories by Sofi Papamarko, GrDip 05, explores the boundaries of love, death, loneliness and justice.

Readers are introduced to a cast of unforgettable characters, with plots that twist and turn in unexpected ways, as Papamarko explores how human beings cope, break and triumph in the face of often unbearable circumstances. 

Simcha Paull Raphael, BA 72, MA 75, is the coeditor of Jewish End-of-Life Care in a Virtual Age: Our Traditions Reimagined (Albion-Andalus Books, $16.95).

The compilation of writings by chaplains, ethicists, rabbis and lay caregivers addresses the unprecedented challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic on death and mourning within the Jewish tradition, while offering direction for the unknown future of Jewish end-of-life care beyond the pandemic. 

Barbara Rudnicka, BEd 83, provides proofreading and editing in a newly published book, Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East (Baraka Books, $24.95), by political analyst Stephen Gowans.

The author challenges the argument that Israel controls U.S. foreign policy, tracing the development of the self-declared Jewish state to its birth as a European colony onward. 

In her upcoming poetry collection, Sensorial (Inanna Publications, $18.95), Carolyne Van Der Meer, MA 97, takes readers on a journey in sensory perception.

To be published in April 2022, Sensorial was written over several years during which the author drew on some of her own experiences, while also observing and interpreting her environment, often intentionally putting herself in awkward or uncomfortable situations to develop new perspectives.