In the pristine gardens of quiet Oak Bay, the von Stronheim family seems perfectly at home, until young Poppy uncovers a mysterious subterranean world in which her mother is involved. Now years later, aboard the ocean liner The Empress of Asia, en route to China in search of her own daughter, Poppy begins a series of letters, determined to reveal the family secrets that shrouded her own life. Why did her mother leave San Francisco after her father's death to settle in Victoria, BC? What really happened to her father? What was going on in the basement of the family's waterfront home, with the Chinese workers who lived there and its hidden tunnel to the seashore? But Poppy has her own secrets and these too she is determined to bare. Her daughter Precious believes that Poppy is an adopted sister, and does not know Poppy is her mother. And who is the father? As she crosses the Pacific towards a hoped for reunion, Poppy relives and relates the extraordinary events of her life. From the proper drawing rooms of turn of the century Victoria, to the Chinatown opium trade and the studio of painter Emily Carr, to the gay London of Tallulah Bankhead, The Empress Letters is a riveting adventure exposing disturbing fractures beneath the smooth veneer of colonial society.

Linda Rogers is a poet passionately engaged with existence whose poems resonate a subterranean logic and the music of deep mindfulness. In Homing: New & Selected Poems she returns again and again to the unquiet ground of the theatre of life. A singular and uncompromising awareness of suffering and joy, hope and despair, the arc of naked dreams and the sense of community, informs her three decades of writing and numerous published collections. In Homing Rogers has included representative poems from previous volumes –– social poems, introspective poems, both thoughtful and exuberant –– as well as new work. The sequence is consistent and steadfast like a slow-moving train of perception through the world of time. Linda Roger’s poems sing with a compassion and concern for social justice that elevates the spirit and massages the mind. Homing is a delicate and deliberate portrait of one poet’s chronicle of residence on planet earth.

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