CMU Press

SIGHTINGS: poems

Patrick Friesen

2026

$24.00
ISBN 9781987986297

The poems in Patrick Friesen’s latest collection, Sightings, move between the visible and invisible, between the contradictions of human history and the immediacy of a complex present. Friesen examines memory and music, rivers and personalities, open to all possibilities and sceptical of wisdom. Instead, these poems rely on the kind of knowledge that comes from experience: tremors and fragments riding on the movement of thinking. The distance from Friesen’s first book, published fifty years ago, to this one, speaks to what it means to have known the world through poetry.

Patrick Friesen is the author of nearly twenty collections of poetry, including the influential The Shunning. Winner of a ReLit Award and Manitoba Book of the Year award, he has also been shortlisted for the Governor General’s award and Griffin Poety Prize. Born in Manitoba, he now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Nightberries: a novel

Elina Penner
translated from the German Nachtbeeren (2022)
by Bradley Schmidt

2026

$28.00
ISBN 9781987986280

Where is your husband? Nelli doesn’t seem to be in crisis—or does she? The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, does she even know where she belongs? Marriage, loyalty, faith, family: memory can be deceiving. Or are memories like nightberries? Nightberries taste good, with sugar, when ripe. But sometimes nightberries are dangerous, and you need to understand when that transformation happens. A tense situation boils over in this darkly entertaining psychological novel of contemporary German life.

Elina Penner was born in 1987 as a Mennonite German in the former Soviet Union and moved to Germany in 1991. Plautdietsch is her mother tongue. After years in Berlin and the US, she lives with her family in East Westphalia and is a successful personal essayist blogger. Nachtbeeren was her debut novel, in 2022. In 2025, her second novel, Die Unbußfertigen, will be published in Germany.

Bradley Schmidt is an American translator and educator currently living in Leipzig, Germany.

The Sacred Path of Simplicity

Mark A. Burch

2026

$28.00
ISBN 9781987986303

In this distillation of his life’s work, Mark Burch defines voluntary simplicity as “the deliberate organization of life for a purpose.” This book is for anyone who wishes to explore a spiritual grounding for simple living, and for anyone who wants to tread more lightly on the earth.

Mark Burch has practiced voluntary simple living since the 1950s and is the author of Simplicity: Notes, Stories and Exercises for Developing Unimaginable Wealth (1995) and Stepping Lightly (2000). Burch is the former director of campus sustainability at University of Winnipeg and co-director of the Simplicity Practice and Resource Centre. He taught at University of Winnipeg and at the Canadian School of Peacebuilding and has facilitated countless workshops on voluntary simplicity and meditation.

Wearing a Broken Indigene Heart
on the Sleeve of Christian Mission

The Very Reverend Dr. Carmen Lansdowne

BOOK LAUNCH Wednesday, November 5, 7:00 PM (CST) LIVE STREAM & In person at CommonWord, CMU (Marpeck Commons, 2299 Grant Ave., Winnipeg)

2025 | 208 pages | paper | $34.00
includes Bibliography | Suggestions for Further Reading
ISBN 978-1-987986-18-1
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY / MISSIOLOGY / INDIGENOUS STUDIES

"I believe that there are truths in Christian faith that can promote justice and reconciliation if handled gently and used to foster relational connection. My personal journey as a Christian has been an attempt to show that there can be new paths for us to walk together as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples....

... [A]lthough Indigenous Peoples are some of the most 'missionized'in the world, the theologies and histories of mission outlined by Western missiologists hardly acknowledge the role of Indigenous Peoples, either as subjects, objects, or communities with their own inherent potential to interpret and to construct unique theologies."—Carmen Lansdowne

At a time when divide-and-conquer methods keep pulling liberation movements apart, Lansdowne calls us to the commonalities of those who struggle for liberation. That she does so from her own Indigeneity among the Heiltsuk people takes the quest for solidarity to the next level.

—Joerg Rieger, Vanderbilt University Divinity School 

Carmen Lansdowne’s work is a profound critique of colonial legacies and a passionate call for decolonized theology. By weaving Indigenous perspectives with Christian mission, Lansdowne offers a bold, transformative vision of justice, reconciliation, and solidarity. This book challenges us to rethink missiology through the eyes of the marginalized, inspiring genuine intercultural dialogue and action.

—Hyuk Cho, author of Relation without Relation: Intercultural Theology as Decolonizing Mission Practice

The Very Rev. Dr. Carmen Lansdowne was elected Moderator of the United Church of Canada in 2022, the first Indigenous woman in that position. Born in Alert Bay, BC, and a member of the Heiltsuk First Nation, she has a history degree from University of Victoria and both Master of Divinity and Master of Theology degrees from Vancouver School of Theology. In 2016, she earned her PhD from Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Before her election as moderator, Dr. Lansdowne directed the First United Church Community Ministry Society in Vancouver; she has taught intercultural theology, Indigenous liberation theologies, and global religious traditions in many centres. In 2025 she takes up a position on the faculty of Emmanuel College, University of Toronto.

In Search of a Mennonite Imagination

Key Texts in Mennonite Literary Criticism
Edited by Robert Zacharias

REVIEW in The Miramichi Reader

2025 | 736 pages | 6" x 9" paper
$50 | ISBN 978-1987986-23-5
Errata notice

• An anthology of the most important essays in the field of Mennonite literary criticism, evaluating 150 years of writing about Mennonite literature in North America, each presented in full
• A detailed introduction by editor Robert Zacharias, York University
• An incisive introduction offering context for each of the 53 essays, by 44 authors, including bibliographies for further reading and research

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 the editor of After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (2015).

Moonroads

Connie T. Braun

POETRY
2025 | 120 pages | 8" x 5.5" paper | $24.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-22-8

Oriented to the four directions, the poems in this debut collection become a cartography of longing and belonging. Moonroads resounds with ideas of home, family, the body, and loss. The poems are full of emotional intelligence, indicating that history is written not just in memory, but in bone, muscle, and skin.

New & Selected Poems
of Sarah Klassen

Lyrik Poetry Series 1

Sarah Klassen
Edited and with an introduction by Nathan Dueck

2024 | 232 pages | 5 3/4" x 8 1/2" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-13-6

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.

New & Selected Poems
of John Weier

Lyrik Poetry Series 2

John Weier
Edited and with an introduction by Nathan Dueck

2025 | 216 pages | 5 3/4" x 8 1/2" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-16-7

This is writing which slips between genres and moods—surprising and occasionally exacting. Selected from a writing career of more than forty years, the poems are also lyrical and reflective, steeped in travel and the natural world, but always against a backdrop of loss. Including an imaginative and thorough introduction by editor Nathan Dueck and an afterword by Weier, this volume presents a suite of new work which reveals that his perceptive questioning of self and world is as keen as ever.

John Weier has published over a dozen books, including six major collections of poetry. His first book of poetry, in 1986, was After the Revolution and his most recent is Where Calling Birds Gather (2013). He is Past President of the League of Canadian Poets and was involved during the formative years of the Literary Press Group, Access Copyright, and Canadian Book Information Centre. For many years a professional luthier, he now has a career as a therapist. Known for his birdwatching mastery, he has logged over 3,400 species of birds.

New & Selected Poems
of David Waltner-Toews

Lyrik Poetry Series 3

David Waltner-Toews
Edited and with an introduction by Nathan Dueck

2025 | 240 pages | 5 3/4" x 8 1/2" paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-17-4

This is a poet who challenges you to imagine that the earth is one
body (the title of one of his collections). And he insists that you
remember "how the world loves you": is it too much to ask that you
love it back? The poetic voices here are many: affectionate, joyous, serious, curious, sometimes outlandishly comic. His subjects span flora, fauna, friends and family, and, ultimately, the concept of community itself. With a perceptive introduction by editor Nathan Dueck and a lively afterword by Waltner-Toews, this collection offers poems from the 1970s to the present day, with selections from his seven full-length books of poetry.

David Waltner-Toews is Professor Emeritus at University of Guelph, a veterinary epidemiologist, and founding president of Veterinarians without Borders-Canada. In 2022, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. His poetry titles include The Gravity of Love, The Complete Tante Tina, and The Impossible Uprooting. Other Waltner-Toews books, focusing on science, are The Origin of Feces; Eat the Beetles! An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects; On Pandemics; and the memoir A Conspiracy of Chickens.

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

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

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.

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
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.

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.

On Mennonite/s Writing: Selected Essays

Hildi Froese Tiessen
edited and with an Introduction by Robert Zacharias

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

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