SELECTED NOVELS |
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Seventhblade
Tonia Laird
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Danceland Diary
dee Hobsbawn-SmithRadiant Press, 2022 Luka Dekker and her sister Connie are the inheritors of a secretive and disturbing family history going back three generations to the disappearance of their great-grandfather. Their troubledmother, Lark, also mysteriously disappeared; and their beloved grandmother, who raised the two girls, had a life haunted by a traumatic event that is only revealed after her death. The story unfolds against a backdrop of the drug-fueled Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and the horrific pig farm murders, the seductive beauty of rural Saskatchewan, and the glittering lights of a famous prairie dance hall. Luka's quest for her mother, and for peace and love, is a disquieting, moving, and thoroughly engaging examination of intergenerational trauma and forgiveness.
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ThickwoodGayle Smith
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Disappearing in ReverseAllison McFarland A fierce and vulnerable journey through grief, mental health and self-discovery that fearlessly explores the intensity of young womanhood. Devin died five years ago. She got an infection, lost her arm, and died. How can Devin be in a picture posted online today? Disappearing in Reverse is a mystery, a road novel, and a coming of age story. Blending past and present, the self and the other, it crosses genres and defies categorization to be met and addressed on its own terms. Fearless and vulnerable, unabashed and wounded, this is a story of the liminal places where expectations falter and the unexpected thrives. |
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Tiny RuinsNicole Haldoupis A funny and touching coming-of-age and coming out story that follows Alana, as she grows up, and navigates a perplexing and sometimes hostile world. Her sister is both her constant companion and tormentor, and Alana is desperate for her approval. This book is for anyone who ever stood alone at the edge of the playground and longed to be included.
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SELECTED SHORT STORIES |
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The Holy Ones: Stories
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Only Human: Short StoriesKristine Scarrow Only Human by Kristine Scarrow is a thought-provoking collection of eleven short stories that explore how ordinary people respond when life pushes them to their limits. Each story reveals the quiet struggles beneath everyday life—careers that falter, relationships that fracture, and moments of loss or discovery that change everything. |
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What Can't Be Undone: Storiesdee Hobsbawn-Smith These exquisitely crafted stories travel across the rolling prairies, unforgiving mountain ranges, and coastal highways of Western Canada, shining a light on the complexities of life. A chef, a former rodeo cowboy, a grieving playwright, a middle-aged man smitten with a young woman and horse-crazy teenage girls catapult into painful realizations of loss and change. |
SELECTED POETRY |
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How I Bend into MoreTea Gerbeza Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza’s grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation. Paper-quilled shapes represent the poet’s body on the page; these shapes weave between lines of verse and with them the reclaimed disabled body is made.
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Demographics Report, November 2023Patrick O'Reilly "Most of Demographics Report is a long, bleakly funny modernist poem attempting to catalogue, in the spirit of Georges Perec, the comings and goings of a city’s fauna, humans included." [From blog.derekgodin.com] |
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StayKatherine Lawrence “At first glance, Stay appears to be modest in length, form, and story. But within the spare pages of this middle-grade novel in verse is a powerful narrative about a family in transition, and the young girl at its centre who needs to form something new and whole from what remains. . . Stay might be a quick read, but it’s a book that should be savoured.” – Quill & Quire (starred review)
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FlywaySarah Ens This meditation on the impact of human and ecological trauma explores the cost of survival for three generations of women living between empires. Writing from within the disappearing tallgrass prairie, Sarah Ens follows connections between the Russian Mennonite diaspora and the disrupted migratory patterns of grassland birds. Drawing on family history, eco-poetics, and the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, Flyway migrates along pathways of geography and the heart to grapple with complexities of home.
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PitchblendeElise Godfrey Elise Marcella Godfrey’s Pitchblende is a powerful, political collection that challenges us to urgently rethink our responsibilities to the land, water, and air that sustains all species, and our responsibilities to one another. Inspired by and adapted from testimonies given at the public hearings about the Rabbit Lake mine, which prioritized the voices of industrial interests, Godfrey gathers voices from the found texts, and adds others, in defence of the natural world. Interconnected, Godfrey's poems are a choral and visual, literal representation of how industry, capitalism, and colonialism seek to erase affected peoples and their voices. |
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The Burden of Gravity: PoemsShannon McConnell In her debut poetry collection, Shannon McConnell explores the fraught history of New Westminster's Woodlands School, a former "lunatic asylum" opened in 1878 which later became a custodial training school for children with disabilities before its closure in 1996. Partially set in the 1960s and 70s, The Burden of Gravity uses personas to imagine residents' lives, giving voice to those who were unable to speak for themselves, to shift focus from the institutional authority to the experience of residents. |
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First Lift Here and Other PoemsTaidgh Lynch Taidgh Lynch. Lynch’s work examines the nature of relationships by seeming to explore around them, into the spaces and objects which colour that negative space. The book was printed by hand in house by JackPine Press on Kona grey cover paper with painted paper covers, tied with ribbon. Photographs of Ireland are printed throughout the book on vellum. |
SELECTED NON-FICTION |
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Canada & NATO: The Myth of a Global PeacekeeperOwen Shalk By mapping decades of Canada’s role in global militarization, a position that has led to death, destruction, and destabilization around the world, Canada and NATO: Myth of a Global Peacekeeper carefully pulls apart longstanding myths and misconceptions regarding Canada’s role in world conflicts, and disrupts the popular perception of NATO in the West: that the alliance is a defensive security organization rather than an offensive organization led by the capitalist interests of the U.S. and its allies. |
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Shifting Gears: Coast to Coast on the Trans Am Bike RaceMeaghan Hackinen Meaghan Marie Hackinen’s follow-up to her award-nominated debut South Away charts her unforgettable, twenty-five-day journey on the Trans Am Bike Race: a coast-to-coast ride across the entire North American continent from Oregon to Virginia. Without the aid of a support crew, Hackinen must rely entirely on her wits, ingenuity and sheer determination to finish this extremely challenging feat. A sports story with a unique theme, Hackinen writes about the Trans Am Bike Race as a cultural whole, as she encounters consequences and unforeseen repercussions of an underground, unregulated athletic endeavour. Shifting Gears is another expertly-delivered travelogue and a thrilling glimpse into a world of athletes driven to impossible lengths. |
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Black UmbrellaKatherine Lawrence In this poetic memoir, Katherine Lawrence rides the electric charge of childhood innocence to its moment of impact with adult manipulation and betrayal. Black Umbrella offers a bold portrait of family breakdown through the lens of a child, a teenager, and later as an adult who approaches love with wariness and longing. These poems speak of long-held secrets, the bonds of love, strained loyalties, loss, and the courage required to embrace happiness through the thickening underbrush of adulthood.
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Bread & Water: Essaysdee Hobsbawn-Smith When chef and writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith left the city for rural life on a farm in Saskatchewan, she planned to replace cooking and teaching with poetry and prose. But—as begin the best stories—her next adventure didn’t quite work that way.
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South Away: The Pacific Coast on Two WheelsMeaghan Hackinen South Away follows Meaghan Marie Hackinen and her sister in the adventure of a lifetime: bicycling from Terrace, BC down the West Coast to (almost) the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Along the way Hackinen battles with the elements in Vancouver Island’s dense northern forests and frigid Mexican deserts; encounters strange men, suicidal highways and monster trucks; and makes some emergency repairs as tires and spokes succumb to the ravages of the journey. Luckily, the pair meet some good people along the way and glean some insight about the kindness of strangers.
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SELECTED GRAPHIC NOVELS |
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We Don't Go Through the Angelgrass (I - IV)Courtney Lang Courtney Loberg invites readers to experience a compelling journey in Volumes 1-4, We Don’t Go Through the Angelgrass. In a certain country, in a certain swath of land, there was a town in the palm of a Gulch. Angelgrass grew on the crest of the circular valley surrounding: pearlescent and shifting, like a rainbow made of pond water. Anyone who ventured in was not seen again. Cornflower has lived in the town all their life, like almost everyone else. But when their best friend Jasper disappears, they are compelled to descend into the dark histories and dreamlike workings of the Gulch, and themselves. |
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My favourite girl that I never seeCourtney Loberg My favourite girl that I never see is the story of a backwoods witch. Rejected by her closest friend, Ori exiles herself on a hermitage deep in the boreal forest outside the town of Boyle. One day while testing her powers at the old Lutheran church, she meets Gideon, a member of the local youth group who holds extensive knowledge on local botany and an obsession with the occult. As Gideon and Ori trade knowledge, they form a tenuous friendship. As the season grows darker, Ori encounters burnt symbols on trees, disemboweled crows and beer cans in geometric arrangements: all signs that another witch is working in the area. As markers of dark magic infest the landscape, midnight conferences are held in the red light of the church basement. In rich, autumn watercolour, this prairie folktale traces Ori?s paranoid path through the lonely, marshy forest. Isolation, heartbreak and ritual interweave online and IRL as Ori tries to identify her true friends and hold onto the version of reality she knows. |