Happy New Year! We're looking forward to four wonderful new books in Spring 2024
Happy New Year! We are so excited to welcome these four wonderful books in Spring 2024.
This is a collection of poetry about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines.
Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. Dallas Hunt grapples with the material realities and imaginaries Indigenous communities face, as well as the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still this collection seeks joy in the everyday, in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples in the elsewhere, in worlds to come.
Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.”
Late September is an intimate queer coming-of-age novel exploring the nuances of love, trauma and mental health. A compelling literary fiction pick for readers of Heather O’Neill and Zoe Whittall.
In the summer of 2000, Ines, a grief-stricken skateboarder beginning to explore her sexuality, leaves behind her sheltered hometown on a Greyhound bus bound for Montreal. In awe of the city’s vibrancy, and armed with a journal and a Discman, Ines sets out to find a new way, befriending April, a latex-loving goth who gets her a job as a cam-girl. In the midst of a bar fight Ines meets Max, a magnetic skateboarder, whom she quickly falls for.
As summer fades to fall Ines tries to uphold the bliss of their intoxicating summer, realizing that while she has escaped the confines of her small-town life, she cannot escape her past. The city changes and their romance darkens as Ines learns that Max is experiencing mental health challenges, all while a regular at the cam studio gets threateningly close. Ines learns that loving herself first requires trial and error—and that love is not always an innocent word.
Excerpts From a Burned Letter by Joelle Barron
Award-winning writer Joelle Barron looks back at history through queer eyes in their second poetry collection.
Excerpts from a Burned Letter places the experiences of historical figures and fictional characters in modern contexts—and makes their queerness explicit. This collection highlights the circular nature of time, demonstrating how even in a post-marriage-equality world, queer experiences and queer histories still face erasure.
From the perspective of a single, modern speaker, each poem is haunted by a fictional or historical queer couple, connecting ancestors to their descendants and underlining the ancientness of being queer. The book also explores themes of religion, disability, motherhood, birth, and the experience of being a queer child. The poems zoom in and out; gross, visceral depictions of bodies and their functions stand beside poems that call out the hypocrisies of religion in both its extreme and subtle forms. These poems describe the experience of being a queer person in the present day—writing the queer history of the future.
When searching for stories of themselves in history books, queer people are often met with denial and resistance. Excerpts from a Burned Letter provides explicit acknowledgement where it didn’t exist before: You were here. You live on.
Charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm, Matt Rader conjures a vision of the present from a deep future in these poems.
The follow-up to Ghosthawk, Fine is set largely in the Kelowna area of the Okanagan Valley, BC, over the period of June 2021–June 2022. The poems address the extraordinary natural, historical and social events of that period including the June 2021 heat dome and the November 2021 atmospheric river, the ongoing pandemic and resulting social anomie, the public announcement of hundreds of unmarked residential school graves across the country, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a personal level, the poems grapple with questions of disability, illness, trans identity, healing and what a good future might look like. Written in a speculative mood, the poems in Fine look back on the contemporary moment with its terrors and mythopoetic digital scrim from an imagined future, so that the voice itself becomes an incantation, a summoning of a world of survivance and beauty.