Assembly Press

A radically liberating collection of essays, ideas and approaches to writing and teaching poetry

Do It Wrong is a short, snappy series of provocations and suggestions designed to help poets think outside the box and foster creativity.

It’s a permission slip to take a path others reject, to do the counter-intuitive thing, to embrace the weird.

It's a guidebook designed to bring poets together, to question our assumptions, and to move past the “business as usual” educational models into the new, the strange, and the “wrong.”

And it's a playful, purposeful contribution toward the building of stronger, more resilient writing communities.

For readers of Beth Pickens’s Make Your Art No Matter What and Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, Derek Beaulieu distills 20 years of experience teaching creative writing into a joyfully mischievous manifesto on how to write and teach poetry with meaning.

A debut collection of interconnected fiction that delivers a frothy, philosophical take on modern female archetypes.

In elementary school math, she was given a worksheet with six connected squares in the shape of a T, so she drew one girl in each box. When Jeanne was told to cut around the shape, and fold and tape the squares into one cube, she couldn’t decide whether to keep the girls outside, looking away from each other, or trapped inside, looking in. Her solution was to rip it up and eat the pieces. The six characters have lived inside her ever since.

An unnamed woman retreats to sort herself into the various roles she has played (Sister, Friend, Server, Lover); another woman, Jeanne, checks into a hotel-turned-escape room emptyhanded. These parallel narratives lead a parade of interconnected stories and a novella featuring women of all ages who feel divided between their various roles and their past and present selves. With warmth and humour, the stories in Mom Camp reposition selfhood as rooted in relationship and explore the phenomenology of consciousness—and what it means to be the narrator of your own life.

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.

Prince Edward County is the stuff of magic: gorgeous beaches, unruly vineyards, Horn Trips, and meat rolls at the Elks Lodge. Don’t Honk Twice: A Prince Edward County Anthology is a dedicated effort to try and pin down that magic and celebrate everything Prince Edward County has to offer. Edited by Tanya Finestone and Leigh Nash, and illustrated by Nella Casson, contributions span the breadth of PEC experiences, including local legends (and gossip!), family stories, historical anecdotes, and personal essays that capture the colour and character of the real County.

"This book introduces you to the local personalities. The writers draw you into their world and leave you feeling like you belong."―Canadian Cookbooks

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.

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, and she fears nothing will ever be right again.

Anna is haunted by the death of her only child, Lou. Hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, Anna becomes determined to undo death by writing everything down in a set of orange notebooks: fragments and tales about bees, death rituals, the story of her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, and their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, a cursed trench coat, Lou’s Jewish and Basque heritage, and the duplicity of the colour beige.

In the hospital, 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.

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

Tracing words the way a tracker moves across land, Goose collects hand-copied details from 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. At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Melanie Dennis Unrau’s poems explore extraction and the relationship between humans, non- humans, and the land, resulting in an act of 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 eighteen 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.

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.

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.

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.

Longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize

A lover's knot of a novel that spans continents and decades, The Road Between Us delves into the entangled lives of its ensemble cast.

Estela, a lawyer, struggles professionally after a deep childhood loss and an ill-advised undergraduate dalliance. Ash is a diplomat posted to Buenos Aires and Beijing who wants what he can’t have. Ophélie, a nurse, makes a grievous medical error that alters the course of her life. And Roman is an academic whose careless sexual escapades after a painful divorce lead to even more painful consequences.

Tense, poetic, and as binge-worthy as a miniseries, The Road Between Us explores why we make the decisions we do, and how those decisions affect the people we love.

The controlled and calm life of William Oaks is shattered when his parents die suddenly in a car accident. A reclusive paper conservator at a renowned Toronto museum, William must face the obsessions and denials that have formed him: delusional family history, religious fundamentalism, and get-rich-quick schemes. Memory and facts collide, threatening to derail his life and career as William feverishly prepares for an important exhibition on the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

"A book about grief has no right to be a page-turner, but this one is."—Globe and Mail

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

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

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.

Longlisted for the 2025 Nelson Ball Prize

Typography broken down into its most basic (and beautiful) forms to reveal the inherent voice within each shape.

Inherent is a collection of concrete poems that uses poetic tools to reduce words and letters and characters to their structural components, celebrating the shapes we’re used to taking for granted. Produced by physically scraping each letter onto the page using Letraset sheets—a process of tangible transference that requires irrevocable choice—this is a poetry of format that plays with aspects of form and design to demonstrate each typeface’s individual poetic stance.

Sitting somewhere between Hanjorg Mayer’s Futura and Johanna Drucker’s concrete poetics, with a hint of punk DIY zine culture and a heavy study of typographic graphic design, Inherent moves with palindromic rotational symmetry, arrays of potential landscapes, and alien languages where the Roman alphabet goes supernova into brilliant new forms.

"These works shimmer, shake, and vibrate with excitement."—Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Presentand Diagrammatic Writing

A spirited collection of photos and interviews that celebrate PEC wineries, cideries, breweries, and distilleries.

Best known for its pioneering cool-climate wineries, Prince Edward County is now home to a vibrant craft beverage industry that includes cideries, breweries, and distilleries. In County Social, over forty local makers share how they got started and what keeps them going, giving readers a unique look at the people and processes behind their favourite bottles and cans. Plus, a handful of recipes by some of the County’s most celebrated chefs offers up inspiration for food and drink pairings.

Featuring full-colour photos and sessionable interviews that cover farming, developing recipes, canning, tourism—and everything in between—County Social raises a glass to PEC’s distinctive and award-winning drinkmakers.

Royalties from sales of the book will support Alternatives for Women, a County-based organization that advocates on behalf of women and children.

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