New & Selected Poems
of Sarah Klassen

Lyrik Poetry Series 1
Sarah Klassen
Edited and with a new essay by Nathan Dueck

June 2024 | 232 pages | 8.5" x 5.75" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-13-6

Read the review in TRACES

Watch the livestream of the June 1 launch at McNally Robinson Booksellers

In this inaugural volume of the Lyrik Poetry Series, honouring Canada’s foremost Mennonite poets, CMU Press presents the finest work, past and present, of Manitoba’s wonderful Sarah Klassen, who has been publishing poetry since her award-winning first collection in 1988, Journey to Yalta. In a long and distinguished poetry career, Klassen has explored hope and suffering, language and its limits, movement and stillness—always inviting readers into her care. Including an introduction by editor Nathan Dueck and an afterword by the poet, this volume presents new and uncollected poems as well as a generous selection from Sarah Klassen’s eight books of poetry. Full of faith, curiosity, and surprise, these poems offer readers grace and insight at every turn.

Sarah Klassen was born in Manitoba in 1932. A Winnipeg English teacher for many years, she also taught in Lithuania and Ukraine. Her poetry has received two National Magazine Poetry Awards, one silver, one gold. In 2017 Sarah Klassen was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, and she has won a Word Guild Award, a Canadian Authors Association prize, and a High Plains book award. Her published work includes eight poetry collections and four books of fiction.

Lyrik series editor Nathan Dueck is the author of three collections of poetry, king’s(mère) (2003), he’ll (2014), and A Very Special Episode (2019). Raised in Manitoba, he did his BA and MA in English at the University of Manitoba, and in 2009 received his doctorate from the University of Calgary. He teaches English and Creative Writing at College of the Rockies in British Columbia. His next book is the creative memoir 1979-, to be published in fall 2024.

Whether it’s an exploration of Simone Weil’s "unearthly appetite," or trauma in her family’s past, Klassen gives us quotidian details to bring history alive in the present; she takes the sweep of large events, holding these events like seeds in her hand, and grows them into intimate moments of personal experience, hers and ours. Klassen uses imagery skillfully to open resonance within tight narratives, fusing not only past and present, but story with poetry. In these poems memory creates us as much as we create it.

– Patrick Friesen

Sarah Klassen's poems are absolutely riveting, breathtakingly beautiful, and, at the same time, deeply profound. I was left entranced, my spirit longing for something I couldn't name.

– Sandra Birdsell

Ice: Moments

Photographs by Klaus Hochheim

Essays by Sarah Hodges-Kolisnyk and David Babb
Foreword by Martha Hochheim

Regular price $60 | On sale for $40 until December 23, 2024 but ONLY at CommonWord

Watch the TALKING ABOUT ICE event at CMU (November 27, 2024)

June 2024 | 96 pages | 78 colour images |
cloth 11" x 12" | ISBN 978-1-987986-20-4
PHOTOGRAPHY / EARTH SCIENCE
A project with MHC Gallery

This is a collection of superb Arctic and Antarctic photographs exemplifying a unique intersection of art and science. These pictures represent the intimate viewpoint of an ice scientist who loved the frozen places few of us have visited. Klaus Hochheim’s work, both scientific and aesthetic, was rooted in his profound care for beautiful and threatened polar places. The loss of Dr. Hochheim, along with two others, in a fatal accident in 2013 continues to be deeply felt by his friends, students, and colleagues, and by his wife, three children, and other members of his family. In his scientific essay in this volume, colleague Dr. David Babb writes of “a great scientist who maintained his curiosity and excitement for science through a long career.”

Images copyright Martha Hochheim. No unauthorized reproduction, public exhibition or re-use is permitted.

New & Selected Poems
of John Weier
Lyrik Poetry Series 2

John Weier
Edited by Nathan Dueck

Essential voices from the Mennonite community
Coming in 2025 | 8.5" x 5.75" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-16-7

New & Selected Poems
of David Waltner-Toews
Lyrik Poetry Series 3

David Waltner-Toews
Edited by Nathan Dueck

Essential voices from the Mennonite community
Coming in 2025 | 8.5" x 5.75" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-17-4

Moonroads: Poems

Connie T. Braun

Coming in 2025 | 8" x 5.5" paper | $24.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-22-8

Connie Braun teaches creative writing, mentors undergraduate writers and editors, and has published two books of non-fiction and two poetry chapbooks. Much of her writing is grounded in the war-refugee and immigrant experience of World War II, resonant today in her explorations of memory and witness, the silences and language of trauma, the sites of geographical and spiritual displacement and belonging, and the pervasive paradoxes inherent in being human. Her poetry has been set to music, she is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and lives in Vancouver.

In Search of a Mennonite Imagination

Key Texts in Mennonite Literary Criticism
Edited by Robert Zacharias

Coming in 2025

• An anthology of the most important essays evaluating 150 years of writing about Mennonite literature in North America
• A detailed introduction by editor Robert Zacharias, York University
• A short introduction offering context for each essay, including bibliography for further reading and research

In Search of a Mennonite Imagination: Key Texts in Mennonite Literature Criticism brings the most significant essays in recent Mennonite literary criticism into conversation with a host of earlier work in the field.

On Mennonite/s Writing: selected essays

Hildi Froese Tiessen
edited and with an introductory essay by
Robert Zacharias

LITERARY CRITICISM | MENNONITE STUDIES
December 2023 | 318 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $34.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-12-9
Index, bibliography, 9 b&w photos

Watch the livestream of the June 1 2024 launch at McNally Robinson Booksellers 

Read the review in the August 1 2024 issue of Anabaptist World

In 1973 Hildi Froese Tiessen published one of the earliest essays about Rudy Wiebe's “Mennonite novels.” Over the next fifty years, Dr. Froese Tiessen would go on to author some eighty additional contributions to the field of Mennonite/s writing, including over sixty essays and book chapters, more than a dozen edited collections and special issues of journals, and a host of scholarly introductions, reviews, and encyclopedia articles. On Mennonite/s Writing is the first collection of Dr. Froese Tiessen’s work, gathering eighteen essays that reflect a half-century of critical engagement, including: field-defining encounters with the wider emergence of Mennonite literature across Canada and the United States; nuanced close readings of major literary figures such as Wiebe, Di Brandt, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf; a decade-long search for a “lost” novel; and late-career reflections on the changing nature of the field itself.

Edited and with an extended introduction from Dr. Robert Zacharias (York University), and including a wide-ranging and personal Afterword by Dr. Froese Tiessen herself, On Mennonite/s Writing is the definitive collection of work by a scholar widely recognized as the primary critical figure in contemporary Mennonite literary studies.

Hildi Froese Tiessen lives in Kitchener, Ontario. Raised in Manitoba, she earned her BA at University of Winnipeg and MA and PhD at University of Alberta. She taught English and Peace & Conflict Studies (1987–2012) at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, where she also served as academic dean. Before her retirement she was literary editor of Conrad Grebel Review and on the editorial board of Rhubarb magazine. She is the editor of Liars and Rascals (1989), an anthology of short fiction by Mennonite authors, and also 11 Encounters with Mennonite Fiction (2017). With Paul Tiessen, she is the editor of After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber (2006).

Editor Robert Zacharias teaches at Toronto’s York University. He is the author of Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism (2022) and Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature (2013); he is also the editor of After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (2015).

This remarkable collection maps the rise of 50 years of Mennonite/s writing in North America, while tracking the path one woman blazed to make a career of reading and writing critically, teaching, and the domestic labors of academic administration, conference organizing, editing and publishing. Thereby, Hildi Froese Tiessen shaped and named a field. Additionally, this book offers perspectives on multiculturalism, ethnic representation, minority literature, and the long crisis of a discipline called English, especially in Canada. Neither sociology nor theology, it also shines light on North American Mennonite experiences and cultural memories in the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, it makes me grateful for Hildi’s vision, focus, and determined work all these years—and for Robert Zacharias’s effort to gather, contextualize, and place these essays within reach. I cannot imagine “the land of Mennolit” without either of them.

— Julia Spicher Kasdorf, poet and Liberal Arts Professor of English, Penn State

The voice of Hildi Froese Tiessen in these essays is strong and steady because of how flexible her mind is, how open she has always been to new developments. Such is her extraordinary and genuine modesty that she appears not to see what she has left out of her moving Afterword. It was not just that she was a person who was in the right place at the right time. It was that Hildi Froese Tiessen was THE right person in the right place at the right time. That generous and humble person who wrote the Afterword, that is the Hildi we all know and love, we Mennonites who write.

— Magdalene Redekop, author of Making Believe: Questions About Mennonites and Art

Wonder-Work

Selected Sonnets of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg

POETRY / LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION / 17th CENTURY STUDIES
/ DEVOTIONAL LITERATURE

November 2023 | 168 pages | 5½ x 8 paper | $30.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-14-3
includes Introduction to Greiffenberg's Life & Work,
Translators' Afterword, and Bibliography

• Poetry Silver Medalist, Illumination Christian Book Awards 2024
• Winner, "Specialty" Book Prize, Word Guild Canadian Christian Book Awards 2024

An unusual poet from the Baroque period meets 21st century poet-translators in this exceptional book. Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg's intense devotional poems are matched with innovative and moving new English versions from Canadians Epp, Ito, and Klassen. This is astonishing Metaphysical poetry: original, provocative, reverent.

The translators have chosen 65 poems from 300 in Greiffenberg's best-known work, Geistliche Sonette, Lieder und Gedichte. The sonnets in Wonder-Work are presented in both German and English.

Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633-1694), considered one of the most noteworthy German-language poets of the seventeenth century, was born into a family of the Protestant nobility in Austria midway through the Thirty Years’ War. Unusually well-educated for a woman of her time, she read widely and learned several languages. After experiencing a spiritual awakening as a young adult, she resolved to glorify God through her writing. Her works include a volume of poetry and three volumes of meditations on the life, suffering, and death of Christ.

About the Translators

Joanne Epp is a Winnipeg poet and musician with two published collections, Eigenheim (2015) and Cattail Skyline (2021).
Sarah Klassen is a Winnipeg poet and fiction writer. Her first language was German, but she writes only in English. She has published four books of fiction and eight books of poetry; her upcoming New and Selected Poems is also published by CMU Press.
Sally Ito is a poet and translator living in Winnipeg. Her first book of translated poetry, with Michiko Tsuboi, was Are You an Echo: The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, published in 2016. Her own latest collection, Heart’s Hydrography, was published in 2022.

The Russian Daughter
A Novel

Sarah Klassen

November 2023 choice, Winnipeg Free Press Book Club – click here
Nominated for Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction – Manitoba Book Awards

2022 | 272 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $22.00 in Canada
ISBN 978-1-987986-11-2

Book Club Discussion Questions

The Albrechts, a childless couple in Mennnonite village of Friedental, adopt a baby girl and later, twins. As the children grow, they develop in unexpected and individual ways. Love within a family can be difficult to give and to receive. The children’s coming of age and the parents’ family-building efforts are backgrounded by growing turbulence in the country. War, revolution, and anarchy threaten the faith and culture of the quiet village and its inhabitants. Will they be safe or should they flee? The five Albrechts face the crisis each with their individual fears, hopes, regrets, and convictions.

From Sarah Klassen we always expect fine writing but in this case it seems to me that she has outdone herself... I have lost track of the number of novels I have read in which adoption is used as a superficial plot twist. Not so here. The story of the adopted "Russian daughter" is embedded in among all the other stories, even when—perhaps especially when—we feel Sofia's painful separation.

— Magdalene Redekop, author of Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro and Making Believe: Questions about Mennonites and Art

I have longed for Klassen to say more about those post-revolution "Russian" Mennonite settlements because, besides having had access to her own parents' recollections of those times, she is simply so very good at giving expression to Mennonite communal, family, and personal experience of that era. In The Russian Daughter, informed by her wide, intimate knowledge of the people and places of that time, she has written the novel I have long hoped she would write.

— Hildi Froese Tiessen, editor of 11 Encounters with Mennonite Fiction

Sarah Klassen is the acclaimed Manitoba author of three previous works of fiction and eight collections of poetry. Her first book, in 1988, Journey to Yalta, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Other awards include the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award for A Curious Beatitude (2006). Her short story collection The Peony Season, published in 2000, was shortlisted for the Margaret Laurence Fiction Award; another short story collection, A Feast of Longing, won the High Plains Fiction Award in 2007. In 2014, Klassen's novel The Wittenbergs was the winner of the Margaret McWilliams Award for Popular History.

Return Stroke: essays & memoir

Dora Dueck

Excellent... A masterful work of personal history.

— Melanie Springer Mock, Professor of English, George Fox University

2022 | 248 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-10-5
Cover image: "Converging" by Anneli Epp Photography

Book Club Discussion Questions

These graceful, probing personal essays by award-winning fiction writer Dora Dueck engage with a diverse range of ideas (becoming a writer, motherhood, mortality, the ethics of biography, a child's coming-out) because in non-fiction, she writes, “the quest for meaning bows to the experience as it was.” Yet within Return Stroke, one theme in particular does resonate—change. “How wonderful,” the author writes, that our “bits of existence, no matter how ordinary, are available for further consideration—seeing patterns, facing into inevitable death, enjoying the playful circularity of then and now.”

The book’s title, Return Stroke—the title of one essay, where it literally refers to lightning—suggests such a dynamic: “When I send inquiry into my past, it sends something back to me.” The topic of memory, in all its malleability, impermanence, and surprising power, is especially central to the collection’s concluding piece, an absorbing memoir of the author’s 1980s life in the Paraguayan Chaco. Whether she is discovering the more meaningful part that imagination holds within her religious faith or relating with astonishing clarity and honesty the experience of giving birth away from her home country, Dora Dueck’s beautifully written essays and memoir make her an insightful and generous companion.

Return Stroke is by turns personal, emotional, and intellectual. It asks the reader to engage thoughtfully, to join with the writer in probing under the surfaces, and it rewards those who do.

— The Mennonite Historian

Reading Return Stroke engenders the best kind of stillness: we are thinking and often feeling, but in concert with our intellect, alert to the act of reading itself. May Dueck be assured that the return stroke, that lightning flash back between her words and her readers, will be achieved many times over; a gift from her and our good fortune in turn.

— Winnipeg Free Press

Dora Dueck outdoes herself with every book that she writes. I marvel at her craft. Every word counts and every trope (like the one in the title!) illuminates the territory. This is the kind of writing that invites a reader to slow down, to savour the beauty while pondering the intersections of history and poetry. Dora Dueck is surely one of Canada's finest writers of both fiction and creative non-fiction.

— Magdalene Redekop

Dora Dueck is the author of four books of fiction, All That Belongs (2019), What You Get At Home (2013), This Hidden Thing (2010), and Under the Still Standing Sun (1989). Her novella “Mask” won the 2014 Malahat Review novella contest. This Hidden Thing was Book of the Year at the 2011 Manitoba Book Awards, while What You Get at Home won the High Plains Award for short fiction. A lay historian and former editor, Dueck grew up in Alberta, resided later in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Paraguay, and has retired to British Columbia. She and her late husband Helmut have three children and ten grandchildren. You can find Dora’s writing on her Borrowing Bones blog.

To and From Nowhere: A Biographical Novel

The Conclusion of Favoured Among Women
Hedy Leonora Martens
2015 | 503 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $25.00 limited stock
ISBN 978-0-920718-97-1

Book Club Discussion Questions

What terrible storms they have in this place, Greta thought, her skin screaming a silent protest, her eyes blind against the driving snow. "Where are we?" she called into the wind, but her words were swept behind her.

In this gripping and moving novel, Greta and her family, treated as "non-existent" along with thousands of Russian Germans, Mennonites, and other ethnic groups displaced by Stalin, struggle to exist in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1976. Based on painstaking historical research and interviews with Greta's family, To and From Nowhere tells a harrowing and beautiful story in the unusual style that author Hedy Martens has fused, combining narrative, biography, poetry, history, and personal reflection.

Favoured Among Women: A Biographical Novel

Hedy Leonora Martens
2010 | 430 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $25.00 limited stock
ISBN 978-0-920718-88-9

Book Club Discussion Questions

This vibrant and unusual re-creation of one woman's life is the result of years of painstaking research and interviews. Favoured among Women combines biography, personal reflection, poetry, historical commentary, and (above all) vivid storytelling. We meet Greta Enns as a curious, observant, and compassionate child born in peaceful times which are soon torn asunder. Her life becomes one of hardship and the utter confusion of war, but one also marked by profound religious hope, as well as love and joy. Hedy Leonora Martens has written a novel both epic and intimate, dramatically presenting daily life in Leninist and Stalinist Russia in the first decades of the twentieth century.

This Hidden Thing

Dora Dueck
2010 | 350 pages | paper | $19.50
ISBN 978-0-920718-86-5

Book Club Discussion Questions

Winner, McNally Robinson Book of the Year, Manitoba Book Awards 2011

Dora Dueck tells a compelling woman’s story too often obscured by history. She inhabits her characters in such a way that the reader is drawn into a living, breathing world that lingers even after the covers of the book are closed. This Hidden Thing offers a worthy female, urban counterpart to Rudy Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many.

— Ann Hostetler

The young woman standing at the back door of the prosperous Winnipeg house that cold day in 1927 knew she had to have work. An immigrant, she needed to help her family. But she had no idea, when she finally got inside the house to be a domestic, that her experiences there would mark her for the rest of her life. This Hidden Thing reminds us how dangerous and powerful secrets can be. This is a lyrical and moving novel that offers one woman's compelling, ordinary, and surprising life.

Dora Dueck is author of the novels Under the Still Standing Sun and All That Belongs and the short story collection What You Get At Home (winner of the High Plains Book Award). In 2014 she was the winner of the Malahat Review Novella Prize. Her most recent book is the creative non-fiction collection Return Stroke, also available from CMU Press. She lives in British Columbia.

West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature

Sue Sorensen, Editor
2008 | 340 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $15.00 now $5.00 limited stock
ISBN 978-0-920718-81-0

West of Eden takes us to a new stage in prairie writing: we dare to rejoice: we rejoice in our abundance of writers, in our many and varied talents, in our literary accomplishments. The editor, Sue Sorensen, dares to lead us in a multi-voiced song of celebration.

— Robert Kroetsch

Gems abound in this display, particularly those cut by Sorensen, Cooley, and Calder. Sue Sorensen's Introduction alone is worth the price of admission.

— Ken Probert

These 17 essays ponder the character of prairie literature. What is prairie literature now, what has it been, and what is its future? That the prairies are "west of Eden" is an idea only, and a somewhat mischievous one. Is this spot distant from the glory of the garden? Writers have often pondered the ambiguous sanctity of the prairies, while those who recruited settlers certainly exploited the notion. These varied essays engage with Margaret Laurence, Rudy Wiebe, and Neil Young. They present analysis of NFB films and the gopher as icon. Here are strategies for teaching and views of the Canadian prairies from abroad. This is a significant collection of fresh views of prairie literature.

On the Zwieback Trail

A Russian Mennonite Alphabet of Stories, Recipes and Historic Events
Lisa Weaver, Julie Kauffman, Judith Rempel Smucker
2011 | 72 pages | 9.25 x 9.25 hardcover | $25.00
ISBN 978-0-920718-92-6

On the Zwieback Trail is a delightful and informative children's alphabet book of Russian Mennonite history, lovingly assembled as attractive collages of artefacts, historical narratives, photographs, recipes, and personal anecdotes of the past. Every page has something new to offer—whether it's the meaning of the word "Anabaptist", the role tractors played in the story of Mennonite Central Committee, or a delicious recipe for fluffy zwieback, this alphabet book is sure to charm and educate children and adults alike.

Anyone with Verenike strengthening their muscles and Borscht flowing in their veins knows that Z could only stand for Zwieback. Join a voyage of discovery down the alphabet trail to celebrate the history, culture, and service of this branch of Anabaptist believers. From the early 1500s to the present, it's all there for young and old to enjoy.

– Katie Funk Wiebe, author of You Never Gave Me a Name: One Mennonite Woman's Story

A World of Faith & Spirituality: Yours, Mine, Theirs & Ours

Diversity in Manitoba

Manju Lodha, Ray Dirks

2022 | 214 pages | hardcover | $35.00 includes DVD Leap in Faith
ISBN 978-1-987986-09-9

A co-publication with MHC Gallery

Discover the many faith traditions of Manitoba through stories and art. Featuring Indigenous Spirituality, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Bahá?í Faith, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Unitarian Universalism. Artists Manju Lodha and Ray Dirks explore friendships across many enriching cultures and spiritual practices. A richly illustrated book for youth and adults learning about diversity in Canadian faith communities.

Along the Road to Freedom: Mennonite Women of Courage and Faith

Ray Dirks

2017 | 132 pages | hardcover | $35.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-02-0

A co-publication with MHC Gallery

In story paintings and words Along the Road to Freedom follows the journeys of mothers and grandmothers, mostly widowed, who led or attempted to lead families out of the former Soviet Union to peace, freedom, and safety in Canada—primarily during the chaotic aftermath of the Russian Revolution and in the midst of World War II.