Assembly Press

Poems that retrace unconscious lines of thought and flight to write a new history of the tar sands

Goose is a collection of hand-traced visual poems made using found text and images from the 1938 and 1956 editions of Northland Trails, a book of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about the Athabasca region authored by “father of the tar sands” S. C. Ells (1878–1971). Goose takes Ells’s early work surveying, mining, and separating bituminous sand, along with his colonial, racist, and sexist attitudes and aesthetics, as the starting point for an inventive and biting critique of the oil-sands industry and our petromodern energy system.

At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Goose inverts found-poetry erasure and procedural techniques to explore themes of extraction and the relationship between humans, nonhumans, and the land to enact irreverent, deconstructive literary criticism.

An evocative, lyric bricolage of memoir, literature, history, and translation that wrestles with the shape death takes.

Who would think to call Ophelia a corpse? She is but a woman emptied of herself.

In 1993, when she was 18 years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North-East Victoria, Australia. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw her loved ones again. Netherclift hasn’t stopped imagining the shape of this bodily loss. Not viewing the bodies grows into a form of ambiguous loss that makes the world dangerous, making people seem liable to suddenly vanishing.

What would it have been like to have seen them, after the fact? To have looked upon their bodies. To picture the emptied vessels of her father and brother is to reach toward a sense of closure; a form of magical thinking in which goodbye is made possible. Vessel pulls together a language of space and ruin, building toward the realization that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests—elegies—inked on the skins of the dead.

"Beautiful, and terribly moving. She approaches unbearable loss with a delicate step, and walks right to its core, paying it the deepest possible respect."—Helen Garner, author of This House of Grief and Monkey Grip

Inspiring correspondence from the originator of “The Medium Is the Message,” available for the first time in over 25 years

Called an “oracle” and a “sage,” Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) became one of the most famous men of the sixties and seventies. His reputation as a groundbreaking communications theorist was established by his many books, including The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967), and his work earned him a cult-like following that’s still devoted to this day.

The letters in this collection—which in the early years provide a fascinating background to McLuhan’s life and intellectual growth—are filled with discussions of ideas that altered people’s understanding of many aspects of the electronic age they live in. They reveal not only the amiability of a man who earned the friendship and respect of many outstanding people, but also his staggering knowledge of the great writers and thinkers of the past and present, which inspired him to become his time’s most renowned interpreter. Collectively, these letters offer a readable and comprehensible gloss on the ideas that made McLuhan’s name. His correspondents—distinguished scholars and colleagues, celebrated politicians, famous journalists, and stars of popular culture—range from Ann Landers to Tom Wolfe to Susan Sontag to Jimmy Carter.

This rich and varied collection of over 400 letters is an important contribution to the cultural history of the twentieth century and paints a fascinating portrait of a man who exerted a singular influence throughout the western world.

A gorgeous, Gothic, Romany coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the 1980s Southern Ontario tobacco belt—with a dash of magic realism.

Longing for glamour and riches and freedom, Zelda is a young woman who chafes against her Romany identity and her family's poverty. Everything changes when she’s lured away from working alongside her mother and aunts and other migrant workers in the tobacco fields and is hired as an assistant and good luck charm to the charismatic Trixie Tormentine.

What starts out as a summer of ease and access to the unfettered wealth of the Tormentines—Trixie's husband Jack owns the tobacco farm that employs Zelda's family and friends—unspools into dangerous displays of power and manipulation. One of the Romany family's puppets, grandmother Puri Dai, acts as Zelda's confidante and mentor, and warns her about the devil of the tobacco fields, a harbinger of destruction.

As Zelda struggles with her simmering feelings toward the Tormentines, the devil appears to her one night in a motel parking lot. Can Puri Dai's love pull Zelda back from the brink and into a new future? The fate of her family depends on it.

Told through a mother’s journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward, this is a novel about love, and the lost language and rituals of mourning.

The siesta hour, France. Bees fly in lavender bushes. Anna has just come home, but something is wrong. She fears nothing will ever be right again.

Following her son Lou’s death, Anna has a breakdown. Once hospitalized, Anna becomes determined to undo death by writing everything down in a set of orange notebooks: fragments and tales about her London childhood, the story of her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, Anna’s consequent obsession with the English Channel, a cursed trench coat, the duplicity of beige, Lou’s Jewish and Basque heritage, death rituals, and the role of bees—because their wax makes the candles that light the path of the dead.

In the psychiatric ward, Anna meets Yann, a Breton sea captain. Together, they go on a surreal Orphic journey to the underworld, sailing from Finistère to the middle of the English Channel, to try and find Lou at the exact point where his destiny began. Myth and reality collide, allowing Anna to journey through grief to radical hope.

Splendid and surprising prose poems from one of Norway's most imaginative poets

The sixty-one prose poems collected in The Mountains of Kong find magic in the little absurdities of everyday life and are populated by an unpredictable cast that includes kings and codfish and elephants, a couple looking for a surrogate for their tears, and a lemming on the run.

Presented here in both English translations and their original Nynorsk, and with an introduction by acclaimed poet Stuart Ross, Straumsvåg’s poems are a new kind of map that will deliver you to places you’ve never imagined.

McLuhan takes up his father Marshall's mantle by marrying communications and religion in this journey through the senses

In this essay of extraordinary scope and depth, Eric McLuhan explores faith as a form of knowing. He does so against the backdrop of preliterate man’s concrete, bodily submersion in the putting on of poetry and drama (the practice of mimesis) and post-literate man’s bodiless submersion in electronic communication, in which sender and receiver are everywhere and nowhere at once. In traversing the Aristotelian and Medieval concept of sensus communis, he examines synesthesia as, in effect, its operating system and charts the modern and contemporary mandate to embrace the discarnate. He washes up on the shore of religion as he uncovers a trinity of knowledge, that is, three kinds of sensus communis—the five physical senses, the four intellectual senses of Scripture (historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical), and the three theological senses (faith, hope, and charity)—each of the three complete in itself yet interacting with one another. A fascinating odyssey that will dazzle the senses.

Roger Angell meets Hanif Abdurraqib meets Bull Durham in this sharp new collection of baseball writing by Andrew Forbes

Baseball is a sport, a pastime, an obsession, a dream—and for some, it’s also a day job. A poetic survey of baseball’s rich history, Field Work shines a light on the people who make the game happen, from major-league stars and little-league coaches to gamblers, ballpark operators, and minor leaguers forging lives outside the dugout.

With sharp-eyed observations and beautiful digressions, these essays portray the complex relationship between work and play—both on and off the field—to demonstrate how baseball is more than just a game.

As binge-worthy as a miniseries, this lover's knot of a novel delves into the entangled lives of its ensemble cast.

Estela struggles in her relationships and in her professional life due to the loss of her brother at a young age. Ash, Estela’s estranged best friend, loves Estela unrequitedly and must come to terms with being bisexual in the context of his traditional Indian immigrant family. Ophélie works through PTSD and the emotionally abusive romantic relationship she was in as a teen. Roman is an academic whose pain post-divorce leads him to seek out younger women—his students—in the #MeToo era.

In her signature spare, poetic style, Bindu Suresh unfurls their lives and the relationships that drive them together and tear them apart. Travelling from Montreal to Ottawa to Toronto – and as far as New York, Beijing, and Buenos Aires – and spanning the first two decades of the twenty-first century, The Road Between Us is an episodic novel that explores why we make the decisions we do and the effects those decisions have on the people we love.

A lingering, long-haul collection of writing about sailing for readers of Julietta Singh and Kyo Maclear.

In Relative to Wind, Phoebe Wang delivers a poetic rendering of her decade-long journey of learning to sail and a deep dive into what it means to be a newcomer to an old tradition. From working along­side crewmates in tempestuous conditions to becoming an avid racer and organizer to drafting a wistful love letter to a Wayfarer dinghy—while examining the loose tether between sailing and a creative life—Wang delivers a book for sailors and would-be sailors that is thoughtful and surprising at every tack.

"A thoughtful, illuminating look at life away from land."—Kirkus

Most Anticipated Books of 2024 mentions in The Telegraph, Guardian, Stylist, and Vice

A dark comedy about lodgings, lovers, and mother-daughter bonds that falter across time and tenancies.

After a year away, a woman returns to her English hometown to live in a sublet. She is always on edge, anticipating a visit from her landlord, the arrival of her unknown roommate, and an impending reunion with her mother, Moffa. Her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left and the life she imagines its new occupant to be leading.

The dramas of temporary housing and the lasting effects of impermanence are turned out in this irreverent and boldly stylish novel that examines a life lived in other people’s spaces. A subtly comic novel about Generation Rent, this is a stunning debut from a writer already hailed as one of the most original poets of her generation.

"It is a rare debut that manages to tell a uniquely personal story while illuminating the problems of a generation. Holly Pester’s The Lodgers is such a book, reading more like a modern classic than a first novel."—The Irish Times

"Holly Pester is a genius and The Lodgers gets into everything that matters."—Kate Briggs, author of The Long Form

A new collection of stories by Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Gary Barwin that puts the fab in fabulist.

Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 1984–2024 couples brand new and uncollected stories with selections of the most playful and ambitious of Barwin’s previous collections, including Cruelty to Fabulous Animals, Big Red Baby, Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth, and I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251–1457.

Barwin’s prose kicks against short fiction’s more traditional forms: these are pieces that flirt with poetry and playwriting. Whole stories—and worlds—are packed into single compact paragraphs. There are narrators and fleas and lists and imperatives and Hitler’s moustache and radiant happiness.

Known as a “whiz-bang storyteller” who can deliver magical, dream-like sequences and truisms about the human condition in the same paragraph, Barwin’s trademark brilliance, wit, and originality are on display in this can’t-miss collection of short fiction.

Cultivate a state of mind to help your writing flow with acclaimed writing instructor and Giller Prize finalist Sarah Selecky.

Celebrated author Sarah Selecky brings the spirit of her popular online writing school to the page in Story Is a State of Mind. Short, personable essays deliver gentle coaching, practical advice, and heartfelt encouragement, alongside writing exercises and meditations that offer abundant opportunities to build awareness, confidence, and technique.

Designed for authors seeking support on individual projects or their practice as a whole, this book is overflowing with tips and tools to develop and support creative curiosity and whole-minded writing. Pair it with Sarah Selecky’s Story Is a State of Mind Deck of 50 writing prompts for maximum inspiration!

"A brilliant, soulful, transformative guide to the craft of writing.—Theresa Reed, author of The Cards You're Dealt