Canadian Mennonite University

 

Only at CMU's CommonWord (in person or online) until Dec 23: special holiday price for
ICE: Moments Photographs by Klaus Hochheim

New! for Fall 2024: the book industry ordering source for CMU Press titles is LitDistCo, the distribution collective for members of the Literary Press Group, with a reach throughout Canada and the US.

Contact: orders:@:litdistco.ca or call 1-800-591-6250.

In the US, order via Ingram or Baker & Taylor.

The latest from CMU Press

Book TitleBuy Now from CommonWord

Can Robots Love God and Be Saved?
A Journalist Reports on Faith

John Longhurst
With a preface by Paul Samyn, Editor, Winnipeg Free Press

June 2024 | 282 pages | paper 6 x 9 | $28.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-19-8

New! Interview with John Longhurst

A collection of two decades of columns from the Winnipeg Free Press about all kinds of religious faith. John Longhurst's journalistic reflections provoke thought and questions about faith, inviting readers to think beyond their own religions, theologies, and denominations. Why do people believe what they do? What might we learn from each other's acts of faith?

John Longhurst is the recipient of the 2021 Lieutenant-Governor's Award for the Advancement of Inter-religious Understanding in Manitoba. He has served as the director of communications for several international relief and development organizations, and continues to write for the Winnipeg Free Press and many other publications.

"For over 20 years John Longhurst has been at the vanguard of conversations about religion in our local community. He has been our ‘beat reporter’ and has done so with curiosity, integrity, understanding, and intelligence. But he has not simply reported on what faith communities do, he has been more interested in what faith communities are thinking, experiencing, and how faith is being changed in a rapidly changing world. John asks the questions we are all thinking to ourselves out loud, and our community is better for it."

— Rev. Dr. Michael Wilson, Charleswood United Church

"Newspapers are under enormous pressure and religion-based journalism even more so. Whether one agrees with John Longhurst or not, his presence in media is to be welcomed, as is this book. Let us hope it finds a large and eager readership. It certainly deserves to do so."

— Michael Coren, author, priest, broadcaster

Reviews and Media Coverage of Can Robots Love God and Be Saved? A Journalist Reports on Faith

Book TitleBuy Now From CommonWord

Ice: Moments
Photographs by Klaus Hochheim

includes

  • Foreword by Martha Hochheim
  • "Frozen moments, fluid meanings: Considering the circumpolar photographs of Klaus Hochheim" by Sarah Hodges-Kolisnyk
  • "From prairies to poles: The scientific career of Klaus Hochheim" by David Babb

June 2024 | 96 pages | 78 colour images |
cloth 11 x 12 | $60 | ISBN 978-1-987986-20-4
PHOTOGRAPHY / EARTH SCIENCE
A project with MHC Gallery

A review in Miramichi Reader

Watch:

Listen:

Penguin in Antarctica

This full-colour coffee-table-format art book of stunning Arctic and Antarctic photographs by Klaus Hochheim captures both the working life and the artistic eye of this ice researcher. In the tradition of great modernist photographers, Hochheim's pictures offer intimate seeing and profound clarity. This beautiful book of nearly 80 large-scale photos also includes essays by exhibition curator Sarah Hodges-Kolisnyk and ice scientist David Babb, and a foreword by Martha Hochheim, the photographer's widow.

Photographer Dr. Klaus Hochheim, a climatologist and ice researcher at the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba, was born in 1958 and died in a helicopter crash in the Canadian Arctic in 2013.

 
Book TitleBuy Now From CommonWord

New & Selected Poems
of Sarah Klassen
Lyrik Poetry Series 1

Sarah Klassen
Edited and with a new essay by Nathan Dueck

Essential voices from the Mennonite community
June 2024 | 232 pages | 5 3/4" x 8 1/2" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-13-6

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

Including an introduction by editor Nathan Dueck and an afterword by the poet, this beautiful "best of" 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 (born in 1932) is the Manitoba author of four 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). In 2014 Klassen's novel The Wittenbergs was the winner of the Margaret McWilliams Award.

Coming Soon 

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 | 5 3/4" x 8 1/2" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-16-7

Not yet published.

 

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 | 5 3/4" x 8 1/2" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-17-4

Not yet published.

 

Recent Releases

Book TitleBuy Now From CommonWord
Silver Medalist: Illumination Book Awards
Winner, Specialty Book category: Illumination Book Awards

Wonder-Work

Selected Sonnets of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg
Translated by Joanne Epp, Sally Ito, and Sarah Klassen

POETRY / LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION / 17th CENTURY STUDIES
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

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.

Not only in distress and death, but in my very mouth
my beloved gives himself to me in sweetness.
His blood, inflamed by love, shall quiet my heart’s heat.
I kiss and eat him out of love, here in my throat.
He could not be more closely wed with me.
On Reverently Receiving The Most Holy Supper (2)

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.

   
Book TitleBuy Now From CommonWord

On Mennonite/s Writing: Selected Essays

Hildi Froese Tiessen
edited and with an Introduction by Robert Zacharias

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

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

In 1973, Hildi Froese Tiessen published the first academic essay about Rudy Wiebe's fiction (included in this volume). Since then, in scholarly essays and talks, she has examined with great insight the literary careers of Di Brandt, Patrick Friesen, Julia Kasdorf, Sandra Birdsell, and David Waltner-Toews, as well as key origin figures like Arnold Dyck and Al Reimer. Dr. Froese Tiessen’s widely admired essays include several (among the first of their kind) which situate Mennonite literature in relation to postmodernism, as well as investigations of the sometimes disconcerting ethnic and theological assumptions about Mennonite artistic practice. The essays in On Mennonite/s Writing are the first solo collection of Dr. Tiessen’s writings, and she has written a major new piece especially for this publication.

Hildi Froese Tiessen is one of the foremost scholars of Mennonite literature today. Raised in Manitoba, Hildi Froese Tiessen earned a BA at the University of Winnipeg and an MA and PhD at the 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. She is the editor of Liars and Rascals (1989), an anthology of short fiction by Mennonite authors and, with Paul Tiessen, After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery's Letters to Ephraim Weber (2006).

"Hildi Froese Tiessen has played an essential role in the remarkable flowering of Mennonite/s writing over what is now half a century. The publication of this volume of her essays reveals anew the great generosity, critical acumen, and encyclopedic knowledge that Tiessen has offered to the Mennonite writing community—one that she has actively nurtured and guided into being over her long career as critic, editor, and organizer. This gathering is a great gift to anyone interested in that writing."

—Jeff Gundy, author of Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing

Printed from: www.cmu.ca/cmu-press