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." 

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.