Coach House Books

Contemporary responses to biblical texts offer hope and guidance in difficult times.

When lifelong activist and celebrated author Maggie Helwig became an Anglican priest, she brought both her social justice wisdom and her incomparable literary prowess to the role. Where other priests might make of the homily – the weekly act of taking pre-assigned sections of an ancient and sometimes cryptic biblical text and making them speak to their time, their place, their community – a rote exercise, Helwig takes the language and narrative very seriously. These homilies, selected from those presented to her congregation over the last five years, talk about the Bible, and by extension, the world, through both an activist and a literary lens.

‘Instructions for the End of the World’ is how Helwig describes the gospels. As we live through the climate crisis and the rise of fascism around the world, Helwig’s responses to the ancient texts feel urgent and necessary, reminders of hope and meaning during a time of great anxiety and fear. Whether you’re religious or not, these homilies offer a basis for resistance and resources for building communities that may sustain us all.

Poems that look at our little world from space 

In Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee positions these giant clouds of glowing space dust, often the “nursery” where new stars and planets are born, in an interconnected web of lyric form. As dazzling masses of matter and energy, fleeting, exploding and collapsing, creating connection across incomprehensible distances, these poems use constellations and light-years to reconfigure how art, mortality, loss, death, and afterlives are miraculous echoes and patterns in a gorgeous, chaotic universe.

Included in this dazzling collection are an extraterrestrial fox who works at a gas station, meditations about living across from a hospital during the Omicron surge, weathering climate disasters in North Vancouver, strange deep-sea ecosystems, conversations with a space-god who may be Walt Whitman, and multiple retellings of a Zen koan about tigers and strawberries. Here, respiration and repetition — literally, verse — acts as an outstanding formal feature, a way of creating connections and shared breath across spacetime.

A twenty-first-century reconsideration of the occasional poem by contemporary writers.

On Occasion is a collection rooted in the tradition of the poem as an act of love, an act of protest, an act of visionary incantation, of remembrance, of a call to arms, and a much-needed balm. 

The traditional ‘occasional poem’ has a bad rap: a tedious rhyming poem at a wedding or a dreary verse at a funeral. This is not that. These are poems for a tumultuous and complicated world, for occasions that may be celebrations or mournings, or anything in between; from life cycles, to earth cycles, to social cycles, editor Sina Queyras brings together a collection of poetry that speaks to moments of upheaval, revolution, and challenge. Poetry that people can turn to.

An irreverent, laugh-out-loud pastiche of free verse, hallmark card, bad truism, picture book, advice website, and meditative reflection on fatherhood.

This collection compels readers to ask what it means to share a heart with another human in a world on the precipice of destruction. Although Abel doesn't have an answer and likely never will, he understands deeply that "the bond between a parent and child can sometimes be explained with words." Here – brilliant, hilarious, and loving – are those words.

Dad Era explores Jordan Abel's role as a father to his daughter, Phoenix, and his relationship to popular and often toxic constructions of “fatherhood” on the internet. Breaking apart the idiomatic registers that define parenting today using distortion, contrast, sequencing, and palimpsest, all qualities that have come to define his oeuvre, Abel explores what it means to live, laugh, and yes, father "in a world without dads." 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Annihilation in this poetic space-age fable of proletarian internationalism.

At the end of the twenty-first century, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, a minor Marxist politician’s speech is interrupted by the arrival of an iridescent, pill-shaped object. It brings him, briefly, to another world, and to a state of ecstasy he will struggle to interpret upon his return. Soon, many others will be offered the same incantatory opportunity. Rival states attempt to capitalize on these developments, and a cynical spy sets an elaborate psychological operation in motion. Thousands of miles away, on an agricultural commune near the Caspian Sea, a young poet spends her nights troubled by prophetic dreams. The politician, the spy, and the poet will be ineluctably drawn into one another’s orbits, as will the mysterious Bell Letterist, author of a text about “the interdimensional will to the aesthetic” – a powerful motive force that requires human solidarity in order to thrive.

The Coffin of Honey is inspired equally by apocryphal stories of Alexander the Great, Bolaño-esque tales of literary vanishings, thousand-year-old Persian poems by exiled princesses, and the fever-dream conclusions of every parapolitical conspiracy theory that might just be true.

A Mad Libs–style project contends with poetry from Turtle Island and Palestinian writers and asks: How can you claim space for claiming these [spaces]? 

Sourcing from the works of more than twenty Palestinian and Indigenous poets, SPACE: Lessons in Taking and Making brings to light the relationship between reader and writer, person and space. By working through the poems and removing words, first person(s) and place(s) and finally linguistic subjectives such as language, Cox uses the extracted words to create a word list, prompting the reader to fill in the blanks. The process presents theory-through-practice: collaborative and participatory composition methods that rely on intimate forms of engaging with Palestinian and Indigenous poetry writing and storytelling as qualitative research methods themselves.

Do you want to participate? Who and what are you accountable to? Should this be participatory work? At once playful and nostalgic, SPACE: Lessons in Taking and Making asks readers to consider their role in colonialism through their own instances of extraction and displacement.

A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary life: from the cult-favourite poet and author of The Baudelaire Fractal comes a glittering and erudite new novel of Paris.  

Some ruins are invisible. 

Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, our narrator has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris’s academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt’s youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers – and laundries. 

She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river’s laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.

Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of aging and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.

Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry Award

ink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion.

Starting with ad copy that extols the iconic Pink Pearl eraser, Holbrook erases and erases, revealing more and more. Rubbing out different words from this decidedly non-literary, noncanonical source text, she was left with the promise of “100 essays” and set about to find them. Among her discoveries are queer love poems, art projects, political commentary, lunch, songs, and entire extended families.

The absurdity of the constraint lends itself to plenty of fun and funny, while reminding us of truths assiduously erased by normative forces. ink earl’s variations are testament in micro to the act of poiesis as not so much a building as an intrepid series of effacements; we rub away at the walls of language we’ve lived within in order to release both what’s been written over, and what we want to say now.

CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023

49th SHELF EDITORS' PICK FOR JUNE 2023

When a family is forced to return to the mother’s childhood home, she seeks meaning in her ancestral roots and the violent beauty of the natural world.

Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are cramped together in a small century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones or internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds, a language of fireflies and clover. The five children explore nature and its treasures, while our narrator, Anaïs, turns to the eccentric neighbours and her own family history to find peace and meaning in the middle of her life.

To the Forest is a field guide to a quieter life, a call to return to the places where we can reweave the threads of memory, where existence waltzes with death, where we can recapture what it means to be alive.

In pop culture as much as in policy advocacy, the feminist movement has historically left infertile women out in the cold. This book traverses the chilly landscape of miscarriage, and the particular grief that accompanies the longing to make a family. Framed by her own desire for a child, journalist Alexandra Kimball brilliantly reveals the pain and loneliness of infertility, especially as a lifelong feminist. Her experience of online infertility support groups -- where women gather in forums to discuss IVF, surrogacy, and isolation -- leaves her longing for a real life community of women working to break down the stigma of infertility.

In the tradition of Eula Biss’s On Immunity and Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided, Kimball marries perceptive analysis with deep reportage -- her findings show the lie behind the prevailing, and at times paradoxical, cultural attitudes regarding women’s right to actively choose to have children. Braiding together feminist history, memoir, and reporting from the front lines of the battle for reproductive rights and technology, The Seed plants in readers the desire for a world where no woman is made to feel that her biology is her destiny.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOKS OF 2021

CBC BOOKS THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2021

A fresh take on the romance novel from the Giller Prize–winning author of Fifteen Dogs

From their first meeting, it was clear that Gwen and Tancred were meant to be together. But, as we know, the course of true love never did run smooth.

Gwen’s mother, intuiting that her daughter is in love, gives her a magic ring that has been passed down through endless generations of mothers and daughters. This ring grants its wearer the opportunity to change three things about her beloved. Like all blessings, this may also be a curse.

Ring turns the literary romance upside down and shakes out its pockets. It’s a playful meditation on the past, on magic, on race, on honour, on faith, and, yes, on love.

Following on the heels of Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, The Hidden Keys, and Days by Moonlight, Ring completes Alexis’s Quincunx, a group of five genre-bending, philosophically sophisticated, and utterly delightful novels.

“A great novel doesn’t try to answer questions, but, like Days by Moonlight, complicates them. ” —The Globe and Mail on Days by Moonlight

“This imaginative travelogue will amuse readers even as it raises weightier issues. ” —Publishers Weekly on Days by Moonlight

“I’m far from being a dog person, but as a book person I loved this smart, exuberant fantasy from start to finish. ” —The Guardian on Fifteen Dogs

“A clever exploration of our essence, communication, and how our societies are organized. ” —Kirkus Reviews on Fifteen Dogs

"Ring raises questions about love, marriage, fidelity, and the divine." —Canadian Writers Abroad

Now You See Her nominated for three Dora Mavor Moore Awards; Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Costume Design & Outstanding Sound Design/Composition.

Now You See Her named one of Toronto’s Top Ten Plays of 2018 by the Toronto Star.

Six diverse women’s voices merge into one devastating (and funny) portrait of modern feminism.

They are the invisible, the vanishing, and the disappeared. In an insurrectionary outburst of original music, words, and movement, the six characters in Now You See Her explore some of the diverse ways women fade from sight in our culture. They sing, dance, and thrust themselves into the elements as they travel through the seasons of their lives. Their voices are defiant. Their question is simple: why and how do we allow our power to disappear without a fight?

Now You See Her follows Quote Unquote Collective’s acclaimed international hit Mouthpiece.

CBC BOOKS' "CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2024"

Imagining a vast blue expanse of what a poem might be

The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes. It contains new entries in Ross’s ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more. In an era of thematic poetry and conceptual poetry books, this collection is a celebration of possibilities and miscellany.

"Stuart Ross doesn’t hold back, happily for us. In letting his poems go where they want to go, sometimes by leaps and bounds, he reminds us that poetic rules are meant to be broken and that the results, in the hands of a skillful poet, can be moving, or amusing, or subversive, or exhilarating, or all of the above. His work brims with surprises. From start to finish, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a delightful and thoroughly engaging book." – Charles North, author of News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems/Selected Prose

"Here, we’re invited to gawk at horror and kick it in the pants, but also to notice the horror within us, because we all have it, and Ross doesn’t shy away from the odd and uncomfortable. He’s easy with sentiment, honest about grief, clear about death being our final destination, and behooves us mightily to enjoy it while we can. This book contains some of Ross’s greatest love songs for the dead as well as some sideways laments for the living – in these poems we can see ourselves and our friendships, our future losses, and present mysteries examined with no preference or perfunctory reverence. Each time I read Stuart Ross’s work I feel grateful, hopeful, reminded to lift my skeleton up and enjoy the abundant wonders the world holds." – Gillian Wigmore, author of Orient

"Stuart Ross is one of the most important poets to have found himself somehow on planet Earth, where readers have been rejoicing in his work for nearly six decades. He makes it seem easy: open your eyes, your ears, your heart; look into the world and write. However, to do so with such unflinching candour, many-layered humour, the deepest emotional intelligence, and rarest lyric acumen? No, you have to be Stuart Ross to bring all of everything to bear upon being alive in one’s time. To rejoice is also to mourn, of course, and these poems are afraid to do neither. Ross trusts poetry more than any of us, so poetry trusts him back: this book dazzles the very sunlight with what it knows, including of the estrangements of the self upon which poetry so often insists, and the fictitiousness of borders between the present and the past, dream and not-dream, hilarity and grief. Whoever you are, including the laws of physics, you will be startled and moved by The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky. At times a momentarily posthumous point of view propels the poems, but do not grieve (or do): the book is immortal." – Lisa Fishman, author of Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition

Annie Ernaux meets Annie Dillard in this sultry story of a woman’s obsession with a painter — and a river. 

A woman is on an artists’ retreat on an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway, taking time away from her partner and her daughter to write. There she encounters a painter who spends his days with his easel set up on the shore trying to capture the blue of the water. They are drawn to each other, and their desire builds, through conversations about art and the colour blue, into a passionate extramarital affair, both deep and fleeting.

Savage in its beauty, this new work from Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette is a novel of resilience and longing, staking out the territory of female desire, exploring how it’s been regarded through the ages and how it’s reflected in art and nature.

Following the bestselling Suzanne and To the Forest, this latest offering in a series of novels about women by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette captures the power and beauty of desire set against the power and beauty of nature. An accomplished filmmaker, Barbeau-Lavalette writes with a visual flair, embodying both the calm and the turbulence of the river that runs through the story.

No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do.

Curry is a dish that doesn't quite exist, but, as this hilarious and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn't properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations.By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own background, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavour calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.

"Everyone must read this book." – Lucia Osborne-Crowley

"Extraordinary and utterly compelling." – Adam Phillips 

"An almost impossible balancing act." – Merve Emre

“Part philosophical treatise, part memoir, part history, Rees’s genre-bending meditation on hypochondria references everyone from Freud to Kafka to Seinfeld in a provocative search to find out why, exactly, we believe we’re sick.” – The New York Times

A free-wheeling philosophical essay, Hypochondria combines incisive contemporary cultural critique, colourful literary history, and the author’s own experience of chronic health anxiety to ask what we might learn from the hypochondriac’s discomforting experience of their body. Hypochondria is expansive in its range of references, from the writings of Franz Kafka to original yet accessible readings of theorists like Lauren Berlant. Whether he is discussing Seinfeld, John Donne, or his own past, Rees reveals himself to be a wry and perceptive critic, exploring the causes – and the costs – of our desire for certainty.

With wit and erudition, Hypochondria demonstrates both the rewards and the perils of reading (too) closely the common but typically overlooked aspects of our everyday lives.

Softening concrete poetry with humour and tenderness, POP takes an uncommon perspective on modern poetic traditions, combining deft lyricism with visual poems for a playful romp.

POP rummages through the stale Cheetos after the love poem: what remains? What never existed to begin with? The book invites the reader to journey both forward and backward in time, to retrace steps, solve word searches, hold pages to the light. POP delineates the intensities of a volatile relationship through a variety of lenses. As the speaker tries to anchor her experience, she is met with a clamour of perspectives: it is a junk food fight of poetic styles, each line fried and seasoned using recipes passed down for generations; it is a sad clown’s skincare routine; it is a singalong, a cartoonish cacophony of pots and puns. The speaker shakes the love poem for all it’s worth, leaving behind a trail of lint, wrappers, fibs, and soap foam, but opening up enough space to move in herself.

"Moving through a variety of poem-structures, including more traditional lyric structures, prose poems, drawings and visual poems, Banu becomes the explorer, fearlessly pushing out into the unknown." —rob mclennan's Blog

Menopause: so many symptoms, so few remedies, so many years, so few heads-ups. 

In Steamy, you’ll find forty-five of the ever-expanding list of things people can encounter when going through The Change, including challenges (such as #4 Night Sweats and #21 Anxiety) and boons (such as #41 Individuation and #45 Fewer Shits). 

In this raucous memoir, Susan Holbrook opens up an experience still constrained by cultural silences and myths. Steamy is honest, vulnerable, gross, and might just be the funniest book you’ve ever read about menopause, or anything else (see #37 Bloating). 

If, at a certain stage of life, you find yourself sucker-punched by a sweaty fistful of symptoms you can’t believe no one told you about, Steamy is for you – and for all the other hot-and-bothereds out there.

2022 QUILL & QUIRE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 30TH ANNUAL HAMILTON LITERARY FICTION AWARD

A bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture

Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And she’ll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan’s wish come true.

But Ülle begins to remember her past and the outrageous steps her government took to combat a deadly pandemic of parasitic infections, which have brought her to this new country and to Regan’s house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both Ülle and herself alive. But the shadowy organization that brought them together wants to keep them both quiet – permanently.

A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly comic dystopian tale that probes our anxieties around boundaries, whether territorial or bodily, and our fraught desire not to die alone.

"Gripping from the first page, Robert McGill’s A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a dark, speculative novel with echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale, set against the backdrop of a plague. Some of us would do anything to survive, down to flatpacking ourselves like IKEA furniture, while others would do anything to make our miserable lives end. This is timely, provocative, ethically challenging fiction that asks whether the drive to survive is stronger than the inevitability of death." –Ian Williams, author of Reproduction

"Terrifying and tender, A Suitable Companion's sci-fi angle serves to frame a fascinating parable about the post-post-modern family. Unpredictable and completely original, this is a propulsive, rewarding, and thought-provoking read." –Michael Redhill, author of Bellevue Square

​​“The guy knows what he’s doing, from missing children to silk parachutes, you are never lost and he will catch you.” – Zadie Smith, author of Swing Time

“A storyteller who refuses to keep things straight, and for this produces freshly captivating effects.” – Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist

“A writer of striking talent and originality.” – Daily Mail on The Mysteries

“McGill is a talented writer, adept at expressing the nuanced, unspoken truths that beg the lies by which we live.” – Observer on The Mysteries

Camus’s Meursault and Thelma and Louise meet up under the blazing sun.

Vexed by the ‘unremarkable star’ that ‘presses’ Camus’s Meursault to commit murder, Because the Sun considers the blazing sun as a material symbol of ambient violence – violence absorbed like heat and fired at the nearest victim. Likewise, as a friendship between women confronts gendered aggression in Thelma and Louise, the sun becomes the repository of pain, the high noon that pushes us through desert after desert. Because the Sun’s pastiche of voices embodies both stylistic and formal relentlessness by teasing out tonalities that blend and merge into each other, generating a blinding effect, like looking into the sun.

“Breathless and death defying, the poems in Because the Sun are high-wire work. They sway above us in a blazing light of Burgoyne’s making. It is so rare that a book of poems is both a tuning fork for our minds as well as a balm for our bodies. But that is exactly what happens page after page in this blazing book.” —Michael Dickman, author of Days & Days

“This beautiful work wraps Camus’s The Stranger in a poetics concerning erasure/+ hope. Out of the titular Sun’s burning punctum burst telling shards of what is erased by Camus’s remarkable construction of whiteness in-the-masculine: the dead ‘Arab,’ the female body’s interminable violations – but also its warming, even blinding capacity for consequential pleasures.” —Gail Scott, author of Heroine

“Sarah Burgoyne begins with the sun and ends with flowers. In between is a complicated exploration of what it means to exist within a tradition that is Camus, Rimbaud, Blake. Taking her cue from Sara Ahmed, she notices how hard it is to challenge this tradition and yet that it matters to do it anyway.” —Juliana Spahr, author of That Winter the Wolf Came

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 COLE FOUNDATION PRIZE FOR TRANSLATION

A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Up is a meditation on the makeup that colours, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be.

The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.

“The most radical book of 2020 talks about makeup. Radical in the intransigence with which Daphne B hunts down the parts of her imagination that capitalism has phagocytized. Radical also in its rejection of false binaries (the authentic and the fake, the futile and the essential) through the lens of which such a subject is generally considered. With the help of a heady combination of pop cultural criticism and autobiography, a poet scrutinizes her contradictions. They are also ours.” —Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir

“[Made-Up] is a delight. I read it in one go. And when, out of necessity, I had to put it down, it was with regret and with the feeling that I was giving up what could save me from a catastrophe.” —Laurence Fournier, Lettres Québécoises, five stars

"Made-Up is a radiant, shimmering blend of memoir and cultural criticism that uses beauty culture as an entry point to interrogating the ugly contradictions of late capitalism. In short, urgent chapters laced with humor and wide-ranging references, Daphné B. plumbs the depths of a rich topic that’s typically dismissed as shallow. I imagine her writing it in eye pencil, using makeup to tell the story of her life, as so many women do." —Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points

"A companion through the thicket of late stage capitalism, a lucid and poetic mirror for anyone whose image exists on a screen." —Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

"Made-Up is anything but—committed to the grit of our current realities, Daphné B directs her piercing eye on capitalism in an intimate portrayal of what it means to love, and how to paint ourselves in the process. Alex Manley has gifted English audiences with a nuanced translation of a critical feminist text, exploring love and make-up as a transformative social tool." —Sruti Islam

"The book will leave you both laughing in recognition and wincing at the reality of the beauty world’s impact on our collective psyche." —Chatelaine

"[Made-Up] examines the intersection of beauty culture and consumer culture... Aided by the work of writers like Anne Carson, Anne Boyer, Amanda Hess, and Arabelle Sicardi... B. makes sharp observations about the ideologies behind both beauty [...] and consumerism." —Bitch Media

"Made‑Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism is well worth reading." —Literary Review of Canada

"[Made-Up], newly translated by writer/poet Alex Manley from its original French, puts an intersectional, feminist lens on the author’s personal fascination with the makeup industry; it also reckons with the cultural dominance of this fascination as she aims to square anti-capitalist principles with beauty-product obsession." —BitchReads: 11 Books Feminists Should Read in September

Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry Award

Smart, raunchy poems that are sorry-not-sorry.

One minute she’s drying her underwear on the corner of your mirror, the next she’s asking the sky to swallow her up: the narrator of Exhibitionist oscillates between a complete rejection of shame and the consuming heaviness of it. Painfully funny, brutally honest, and alarmingly perceptive, Molly Cross-Blanchard’s poems use humour and pop culture as vehicles for empathy and sorry-not-sorry confessionalism. What this speaker wants more than anything is to be seen, to tell you the worst things about herself in hopes that you’ll still like her by the end.

“Sticky, sad, and sultry, Exhibitionist is a merry-go-round circling back to the tender, awkward parts of ourselves. Molly Cross-Blanchard allows her poems to ask the reader out for ice cream, to fart at a dinner party, to sprawl out on a chaise lounge, stare through a dusty skylight and whisper that they think they may love you. And that love will be unmistakably mutual.” —Mallory Tater, author of The Birth Yard and This Will Be Good

“Multiple orgasms appear in the first line of the first poem in Exhibitionist. Multiple orgasms, as a relative image or a practice, elicit everything from mystical worship to moral panic. Molly Cross-Blanchard understands this diametric power. She nods to this power with countless crisp and explicit images throughout her debut collection. Read her poems first to marvel at the well-crafted voicing of sexuality. Read a second time to appreciate Cross-Blanchard’s beautiful charge of juxtaposition. Again and again, she places the erotic beside mundane so that both are transformed — a dirty basement carpet becomes the backdrop of profound intimacy and gas station coffee acts as a symbol of self-discovery.” –Amber Dawn, author of My Art is Killing Me and Sodom Road Exit

"If this book had a fragrance, it'd be a Britney perfume, any one of them really, but with hints of prairie in the dry late-summer, notes of the sweet ocean smell that passes through Vancouver when the wind gets high, and a fabulous pair of overalls.” —Katherena Vermette, author of River Woman and The Break

What if poetry and prayer are the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion that hooks you to the thrashing, imperfect world?

Good Want entertains the notion that perhaps virtue is a myth that’s outgrown its uses. 

Exploring the value and shame ascribed to our desires both silly and serious – artistic, superficial, spiritual, relational – these poems grapple with deeply rooted questions: How can there be a relationship between goodness and godliness, if god is a character with shifting allegiances and priorities? Is clarity worth the pain of redefining your experience of the world? Is privacy the same as secrecy the same as deceit? Each caveat becomes a prayer, ritual, invocation, dream, or confession, requiring a blind faith that feels increasingly more impossible to sustain. 

Good Want looks inward, at once both sincere and tongue-in-cheek, to confront the hum of class and intergenerational trauma. Playing with and deconstructing received notions of ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ and ‘god,’ these poems open up a series of further possibilities: empathy for difficult people, acceptance of our difficult selves, and joy in every difficult thing.

"These are lush, provocative poems that luxuriate in unexpected detail while examining how economic precarity shapes both shame and desire. Firmly rooted in the working class, Martinello explores the hunger we inherit from our ancestors, what it means to indulge from a position of bottomless want, and to 'Waste not your wanting.' With impressive range, a sense of humor, and entrancing musicality, Good Want is a celebration of the gluttony of girlhood, the paradoxes of faith, and everyday pleasures of a “small, specific life.” – Cassidy McFadzean, author of Crying Dress

"Good Want is a baroque painting of Dutch aristocracy, but all the subjects’ garments are secretly from Walmart. I mean this in the best way. Each poem cracks me open and out shines a never-before-seen shade of light." – Shy Watson, author of Cheap Yellow

"Sometimes the confessor reckons with the confessional. In Good Want, it's a wracking and lucky sometimes, full of piss and vinegar, and one that finds Domenica Martinello performing the wonderment, the depth and push and pull, between what there is to reveal and what each revelation ruptures or binds. Happily, sadly, the poet scours a life lived and unearths inheritances, burdens, and selves destined for and not for the telling. And tells them brilliantly as she pleases."  – D.M. Bradford, author of Bottom Rail on Top

CBC BOOKS "CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2024"

For bpNichol’s 80th birthday, a selection of 80 pieces from his 1980s notebooks, an astounding trove of never-before-seen work.

One of Canada’s most beloved poets, bpNichol (1944–1988), left a huge legacy of poetry, prose, scripts, comics, and playful interrogation of language after his untimely passing in 1988. In celebration of what would have been Nichol’s eightieth birthday, Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from Nichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits of writing.

Lovingly edited by noted poet-scholars Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, who provide an afterword contextualizing Nichol’s practice, Some Lines of Poetry is a map of hidden corners, a guidebook to poetic play, and a tribute to Nichol’s ongoing influence.

A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh ventures toward a tender vision of the future, lifting up children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. If we wish to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and orient ourselves toward revolutionary paths that might yet set us free.

"The Breaks is amazing—I read the whole thing through in one sitting. It’s got the heft and staying power of Baldwin’s 'A Letter to My Nephew.'" —Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism

“If a book can be a hole cut in the side of an existence in order to escape it, or to find a way through what is otherwise impassable, then this is that kind of book … How will we live in the new space that we keep making, through refusal but also adjustment, the necessary accommodations to the ‘nowhere and nothing’ that this space also is? The Breaks leads us through such moments, questions, and scenes, with tenderness. And deep care.” —Bhanu Kapil, author of How to Wash a Heart

“This is a lens-shifting book, an immeasurable gift. With poignant, aching, beautiful, and deeply loving prose, Singh brings Brown girls into the sun, and makes you want to change the ways of the world for our young people and for us all.” —Imani Perry, author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons

“Julietta Singh is exactly the kind of company I want for the ride, to bear witness to the pains and pleasures of our being here, in these bodies, in these times.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts, on No Archive Will Restore You

LONGLISTED FOR THE PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD

From the author of The Baudelaire Fractal, a poetry classic, with new work

In 2004, boldly original poet Lisa Robertson published a chapbook, Rousseau’s Boat, poems culled from years of notebooks that are, nevertheless, by no means autobiographical. In 2010, she expanded the work into a full-length book, R’s Boat. During the pandemic, she was drawn back into decades of journals to shape Boat. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson’s ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself.

“Robertson has quietly but surely emerged as one of our most exciting and prolific philosophers—I mean poets. Interested in architecture, weather systems, fashion, autobiography, gender, the classics, and just about everything else, she manages to irradiate her subjects with calm, wit, and astonishing beauty. Robertson’s style is both on splendid display and under fierce interrogation in her latest book, R’s Boat.” —Kenyon Review

“In R’s Boat, Robertson has penned a post-conceptual, post-lyric, relentlessly self-examining performance of memory and sincerity that manages, remarkably, to be both theoretically concerned and deeply emotive.” —Harvard Review

“R's Boat grapples with form, the constraint of language and tradition, and the challenge to avoid anything that might exist as template. The poems examine feminism, discourse, the body, and poetry itself through sumptuous, seductive language.” —American Poets

A provocative look at why our current understanding of female sexuality isn't getting us off.

QUILL & QUIRE BEST OF 2016

QUILL & QUIRE BEST COVER OF 2016

We think of the modern woman as sexually liberated – if anything, we’re told we’re oversexed. Yet a striking number of women are dissatisfied with their sex lives. Over half of women report having a sexual complaint, whether that’s lack of desire or difficulty reaching orgasm. But this issue doesn’t get much press; the urge is to ignore or medicalize it (witness the quest for ‘pink Viagra’). If so many ordinary women suffer from sexual frustration, then perhaps the problem isn’t one that can be addressed by a pharmaceutical fix – or isn’t a problem. Maybe we need to get hot and bothered about a broader cultural cure: a reorienting of our current male-focused approach to sex and pleasure, and a rethinking of what’s ‘normal.’

Using a blend of reportage, interview and first-person reflection, journalist Sarah Barmak explores the cutting-edge science and grassroots cultural trends that are getting us closer to truth of women’s sexuality. Closer reveals how women are reshaping their sexuality today in wild, irrepressible ways: nude meetings, how-to apps, trans-friendly porn, therapeutic vulva massage, hour-long orgasms and public clit-rubbing demonstrations – and redefining female sexuality on its own terms.

Modernist poet-painters Mina Loy and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven had many friends in common (including Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp), yet there is no record that the two ever met. Their non-relationship presents a curious “absent presence” in modernist history. Zelazo weaves lines of poetry by both women into an imaginary conversation, exploring the way their work has been suppressed, stitched, spliced, and edited by male editors and arbiters of taste.

FEATURED IN QUILL & QUIRE'S 2023 FALL PREVIEW

THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023

CBC BOOKS CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN FALL 2023

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BIG INDIE BOOKS OF FALL 2023

THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST 100 BOOKS OF 2023

THE TORONTO STAR BEST 100 BOOKS OF 2023

From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s

Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends her away from their home in Brazil to Israel, on a Birthright trip for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires. 

But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto and then California. As she wanders, Yara is forced to reframe her relationship and her ideas around consent. Set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s, Yara is a reverse cautionary tale about what the body can teach us.

"Tamara Faith Berger is one of our best writers of the body, capturing in sharp, red-hot prose its raw animal urges, its often confused and contradictory desires, and the way our search for pleasure can be both liberatory and self-annihilating. Like Israel, bodies are contested territories, and in Berger's revelatory new novel, Yara seeks to wrest control and meaning from the forces that seek to instrumentalize hers: nationalism, capitalism, pornography, and lovers." – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners

"Yara is a complicated novel about the confusions of consent and kinship, the way love makes victims of us all, told with cool, epigrammatic verve. As raw, destabilizing and searching as its titular protagonist, it's Berger's best book yet." – Jason McBride, author of Eat Your Mind

"Canada’s finest and boldest writer. Tamara Faith Berger is my favourite ball buster." – Anakana Schofield, author of Bina: A Novel in Warnings

A revolutionary anthology of essays and dramatic works by contemporary disabled theatre artists

Rebellious Bodies and Radical Acts brings together some of the most innovative minds working in the realm of disability theatre today. Through essays, poetry, interviews, and critique, these disabled and Deaf artists pull back the curtain on the creative process, revealing how they engage in the practice of performance. As performers, their bodies and abilities must be used as the raw material of their craft. And as disabled people, their bodies and abilities are extraordinary, lending their exploration of this embodied artform an essential and overlooked perspective.

Each writer brings their expertise as an artist to the task of defining what is most urgent, cogent, or germane in the ongoing evolution of their artform. The centrepiece of this book is the complete text of Alex Bulmer’s Perceptual Archaeology (Or How to Travel Blind), a richly layered exploration of her experiences travelling across differing geographies and unexpected emotional terrain. Other writers share excerpts of their work, including Niall McNeil’s Beauty and the Beast: My Life, Debbie Patterson’s How It Ends, and Audrey-Anne Bouchard’s Camille, among others.

These bold artists are pressing in from the margins, demanding a new era in the creation of live performance: one that engages a broader scope of lived experience, one that embraces the disruptions of disability as opportunities, and one that welcomes the adventure of travelling in the unfamiliar. 

Squatters at a rural gas station try to find freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization in this sensual novel.

A community of outsiders takes over an abandoned gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking beer and eating hot dogs, and wandering through woods and towns in search of new ways of living. People come and go: a charismatic landscaper, Italian anarchists, a policewoman, travellers. A teenager drifts into homelessness. And The Girl With No Name keeps a journal of her attempts to meet new people and sleep with them, sex that is “not a sideline” but the motivating force in a story she is struggling to understand.

Neighbors grow hostile. An investigation threatens the community. Tension builds between the surface violence of “normal life” and the attempt of these outsiders to experience freedom and build something new on the ashes of our oil-addicted society.

With a character borrowed from Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and inspiration taken from Anne Boyer’s writings, Anne Lardeux’s highly original debut assembles elements of poetry, film, and visual arts into an exuberant choral novel, an ode to the daughters of fire and to the poetry of the body. Often funny, sometimes raunchy, consistently surprising, never flinching, The Second Substance heralds an important new voice in Quebec literature.

"A revolutionary diary that parses the lines of sex and power, in language that pushes itself around on the page like paint. With echoes of Emma Goldman's if I can't dance, Lardeux's revolution has fucking at its core. The Second Substance is fleshy, cinematic, intuitive." -Tamara Faith Berger, author of Queen Solomon

“A nomadic miscellany of gruff scavengers and would-be pioneers has commandeered the derelict filling station at 69 Rue Principale—an anonymous sensualist and moonlighting authoritarian among them—all jockeying for position at the nexus of self-determination and fate. In Anne Lardeux’s enigmatic debut, presented here in a translation by Pablo Strauss, the constant friction between societal strictures and communal revision spark a series of disorderly experiments, abstract epiphanies blasting off in every direction. The Second Substance is a novel about overriding our programming, rewriting our code in order to initiate an even more radical set of protocols for eroticism, destruction, and rebirth.” —Justin Walls, Bookshop.org

Away From Her meets Strangers on a Train in this follow-up to cult bestseller And the Birds Rained Down

After And The Birds Rained Down, a stunning meditation on aging and freedom, Jocelyne Saucier is back with her unique outlook on self-determination in this unsettling story about a woman’s disappearance.

Gladys might look old and frail, but she is determined to finish her life on her own terms. And so, one September morning, she leaves Swastika, her home of the past fifty years, and hops on the Northlander train, eager to put thousands of miles of northern Quebec between her and the improbably named village, and leaving behind her perennially tormented daughter, Lisana.

Our mysterious narrator, who is documenting these disappearing northern trains, is eager to uncover the truth of Gladys’s voyage, tracking down fellow passengers and train employees for years to learn what happened to Gladys and her daughter, and why.

From martyr to insult, how “Uncle Tom” has influenced two centuries of racial politics.

Jackie Robinson, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Christopher Darden have all been accused of being an Uncle Tom during their careers. How, why, and with what consequences for our society did Uncle Tom morph first into a servile old man and then to a racial epithet hurled at African American men deemed, by other Black people, to have betrayed their race?

Uncle Tom, the eponymous figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a loyal Christian who died a martyr’s death. But soon after the best-selling novel appeared, theatre troupes across North America and Europe transformed Stowe’s story into minstrel shows featuring white men in blackface. In Uncle, Cheryl Thompson traces Tom’s journey from literary character to racial trope. She explores how Uncle Tom came to be and exposes the relentless reworking of Uncle Tom into a nostalgic, racial metaphor with the power to shape how we see Black men, a distortion visible in everything from Uncle Ben and Rastus The Cream of Wheat chef to Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Bill Cosby.

In Donald Trump’s post-truth America, where nostalgia is used as a political tool to rewrite history, Uncle makes the case for why understanding the production of racial stereotypes matters more than ever before.

How artists make a living and how money changes art

It may not be the worst time in history to get paid to make art, but it certainly is the strangest. The institutions and markets that have been supporting the arts are undergoing massive changes, some even disappearing. Meanwhile the tools to make art and find audiences have never been more accessible, and there are more people than ever making art.

How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists is an attempt to reckon with the history of money in the arts — from Titian to Taylor Swift — and how that complicated relationship is changing. David Berry analyzes past and present financial dynamics in the arts to show the practicalities of how artists make a living and how that, in turn, affects the reception and perception of artists and their work: the impacts art has on wider society, how economic realities affect aesthetic judgements of art, what kind of people are able to work as artists, and how political and cultural ideas about the nature of art affect what kind of resources are made available to it.

David Berry explores how art has become central to our understanding of humanity by tying art to what makes the world go round: money. Along the way, he challenges popular ideas of what constitutes a successful artistic career and considers what our treatment of artists says about us. 

In Greater America, with sleep under siege, this lucid and prophetic novel of ideas depicts the end of human reverie.

An unnamed, unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, diplomat of Onirica, a foreign republic of dreams, to resist a prohibition on sleep in near-future Greater America. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people’s nightmares and dreams. As Comprehensive Illusion – a social media-like entity that hijacks creativity – overtakes the masses, Chevauchet, the old radical, weakens and disappears, leaving our narrator to take up Chevauchet's dictum that "daydreaming is directly subversive” and forge ahead on his own.

In slippery, exhilarating, and erudite prose, The Eyelid revels in the camaraderie of free thinking that can only happen on the lam, aiming to rescue a species that can no longer dream.

"A slight but quick-witted and thoughtful philosophical parable that falls somewhere between Camus and Gaiman’s Sandman universe." —Kirkus Reviews

"S. D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid is a brilliant, visionary satire on the digital mindscape of twenty-first-century late capitalism embodied in the new global state of Greater America. Insomnia is in; dreams are seditious; sleep is outlawed. Lulled by false fantasies projected by Artificial Intelligence (CI in the book), video games, and media collaborators, humans drug themselves to stay awake so they can slave through the now standard twenty-hour work days. Witty, oracular, Surreal, trenchant, politically astute, and often hilarious, The Eyelid is a throwback to the classics of the genre, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Samuel Butler's Erewhon. We are turning into a race of sleep-deprived automatons, Chrostowska warns, increasingly unable to mount political opposition or even dream a different future." —Douglas Glover

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION

FEATURED ON LITHUB

CBC BOOKS: 2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEW

Dickinson after her death: a novel of the trio of women who brought Emily Dickinson’s poems out of the shadows 

When she died, Emily Dickinson left behind hundreds of texts scribbled on scraps of paper. She also left behind three formidable women: her steadfast sister, Lavinia; her brother’s ambitious mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd; and his grief-stricken wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. With no clear instructions from Emily, these three women would, through mourning and strife, make from those scraps of paper a book that would change American literature.

From the author of Paper Houses, this is the improbable, almost miraculous, story of the birth of a book years after the death of its author. In these sensitive and luminous pages, Dominique Fortier explores, through Dickinson’s poetry, the mysterious power that books have over our lives, and the fragile and necessary character of literature.

A buddy-cop dramedy starring a bottle of Advil and a headache that won’t quit

Imagine you’re standing in a room, and someone on the other side of the door won’t stop knocking – ever. Welcome to Andrew Faulkner’s world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil. Through direct address, sideways glances, lyrical interludes and deep consideration of what it means to overcome a condition when living is a part of the condition itself, these poems observe the speaker’s world as it crowds around him, coming into sharper and specific focus, from the hard wisdom of saints on suffering and a slightly unhinged Caravaggio on the metaphysics of painting, through to the deep meaning of a hot dog and a thoroughly botched retelling of a Norm Macdonald joke. Throughout it all, Advil whirls around like an unruly tornado of a sidekick, snapping Polaroids and “searching for a cloud that resembles a plausible end-of-life scenario.”

Think of this collection as a meditation on how to deal with pain and uncertainty when life itself is an uncertain, painful mess. These are poems that acknowledge the shakiness of the ground we stand on. The opening poem wonders: “If you stay with the shakiness through its conjugations? Who knows.” But don’t worry. Advil’s on the case and aims to find out.

"These wry poems cajole the reader into feverish attentiveness. Andrew Faulkner's Heady Bloom is that unusual collection of poems whose aim is generous and profound, but whose means are often comic and provocative, all jagged edges and elbows. Chaplinesque, perhaps, but Chaplin at an all-ages hardcore show, or having been to one and reflecting on it later, in tranquility." —Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City and Run the Red Lights

"Among other issues, this book explores how the seizures, hallucinations, and excruciating pain caused by neurological conditions that are now treated clinically were once thought of as visions granted to and endured by saints. Faulkner does this in poems that are filled with seriousness but also humor, unlikely allusions, and exhilarating wordplay. A running conceit is the speaker’s ambivalent relationship—a kind of “bromance”—with Advil, modern medicine personified as his nemesis and doppelgänger, a taunting comedian but also a vital helpmate, a debased version of the saints’ archangelic protectors. Faulkner’s imagery and conceits surprise and delight. A strange and beautiful book. " —Geoffrey Nutter

Mad Long Emotion wants to talk flora to fauna like you. It talks by dancing, as bumblebees do. In its dances, loosestrife shoos humans away, green carnations flirt with handsome men beyond the shade, and “dogbanes though dead bloom.” Meanwhile, in better-discerned motion, numerous species both spiny and spineless prove invasive, from Great Lake lampreys to hydraulic triceratopses. But they’re just looking for better homes. The book concludes with a long poem about distance, desire and the difficulty of combining the two.

Lend this book your eyes and nose; mouth its contents to your house plants. The poetry of Mad Long Emotion wants to live forever, and you can make that happen with your face.

The lives of three families intersect in the hallways of an apartment block in a Montreal neighborhood.

Mélissa, Roxane, and Kevin have never had it easy. As their parents face their own struggles – with addiction, unemployment, and abuse – they must learn to fend for themselves. Though their lives converge at school, on the street, at the corner store, or when they can hear each other through their apartments’ thin walls, they each feel deeply alone. Neighbourhood Watch tells their coming-of-age stories with a cinematic ease, moving between despair and the unalterable hope of childhood.

With her characteristic poetic flair and generosity, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, author of the acclaimed Suzanne, has painted, in brief strokes, an unforgettable and moving portrait of a fictional apartment block in Montreal.

This translation of her 2010 debut novel is presented with an afterword interview with a woman who, as a child, was the inspiration behind the character of Roxane.

‘This is prose to lose yourself in. Never complicated, it’s gentle like a love song, comforting and enveloping like a black-and-white film, full of tones and textures. These sentences can destroy us. Not for their simplicity, but for the powerful beauty within the simplicity.’ —Peter McCambridge, ‘Best Translated Book Award: Why This Book Should Win,’ on Suzanne

CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023

In his follow-up to SKY WRI TEI NGS, Nasser Hussain tackles the absurdity of the English language

The title of Love Language can be read at least three ways: as an imperative, as the signoff to a letter, and as a contemporary way of talking about relationship styles. None of these would be wrong.

In his followup to the acclaimed SKY WRI TEI NGS, which used only the language of airport codes, Nasser Hussain moves toward a more expansive version of experimentation; in a time of physical lockdown, his pandemic poetics refuse to be confined. And so we have poems that repeat and hypnotize as English becomes more and more absurd, that compare an affair to a relationship with Apple, that list love poems the poet loves. Through it all we see a deep affection for our language, and for the ways that language lets us talk about love.

“The Garden of Eden, it turns out, is always just a layover away.” -Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine on SKY WRI TEI NGS.

"Think of 'time as a lantern,' suggests Nasser Hussain, in these inimitable poems that take play seriously and allow seriousness to enter the room disguised as incantation. These are poems that long to dismiss the lyric’s most recent pretty mask of polite propriety and instead take us to the lyric’s ancient roots. It started way back, the poet says, 'when a cave person made a grunt,' to speak the name of a thing. Indeed. This is the lyric’s ancient pact with the world: to spin playful language into seriousness of giving things their names—what are we without this speaking, this tune? Hussain knows this and writes beautiful poems—and I, for one, am grateful." – Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

"Hussain's humour is never complacent; it is the opposite of a defence mechanism (we are encouraged to imagine such a thing) and wryly sidesteps the bad binary of conservative withdrawal as set against algorithm-envenomed hyperassertion. He puts into words a new masculinity maturer than we deserve, that acknowledges swerves of defiance to be inseparable from underswells of doubt." – Vidyan Ravinthiran, author of The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here

WINNER OF THE 2019 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

Can poems mourn the unmourned? In Obits. a speaker tries and fails to write obituaries for those whose memorials are missing, those who are represented only as statistics. She considers victims of mass deaths, fictional characters, and her own aunt, asking what does it mean to be an 'I' mourning a 'you' when both have been othered? Centring vulnerability, the various answers to this question pass through trauma, depression, and the experience of being a mixed-race queer woman.

WINNER OF THE HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARD

Rich and diverse narratives of Indigenous Toronto, past and present

Beneath many major North American cities rests a deep foundation of Indigenous history that has been colonized, paved over, and, too often, silenced. Few of its current inhabitants know that Toronto has seen twelve thousand years of uninterrupted Indigenous presence and nationhood in this region, along with a vibrant culture and history that thrives to this day.

With contributions by Indigenous Elders, scholars, journalists, artists, and historians, this unique anthology explores the poles of cultural continuity and settler colonialism that have come to define Toronto as a significant cultural hub and intersection that was also known as a Meeting Place long before European settlers arrived.

"This book is a reflection of endurance and a helpful corrective to settler fantasies. It tells a more balanced account of our communities, then and now. It offers the space for us to reclaim our ancestors’ language and legacy, rewriting ourselves back into a landscape from which non Indigenous historians have worked hard to erase us. But we are there in the skyline and throughout the GTA, along the coast and in all directions." -- from the introduction by Hayden King