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.