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Midway: Poems
By Kayla Czaga. 2024
Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, Midway is an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. “I feel like…
the crud / I accidentally touch sometimes, whatever it is / that collects under cushions on my couch,” writes Kayla Czaga in her third collection, Midway, an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. In her search for meaning in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths, Czaga visits the underworld (at least twice), Vietnamese restaurants, the beach, London’s Tate Modern, Las Vegas casinos, and a fish textbook. Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, these poems take the reader through bright scenery like carnival rides with fast climbs and sudden drops. The meanings and messages Czaga uncovers on her travels are complicated: hopeful, bleak—both comforting and not. Along with the parents the poet mourns, this collection showcases a varied cast. A suburban father-in-law copes with a troubling diagnosis. Marge Simpson quits The Simpsons. Death is a metalhead who dates girls too young for him. Midway is a welcome and necessary collection from one of the most celebrated and accomplished poets of her generation.
Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey toward Personal and Ecological Healing
By Dr Jennifer Grenz. 2024
"This beautiful book can completely change how we approach science, using both Indigenous and Western perspectives, and how we can…
work collaboratively to help foster balance in nature." —Suzanne Simard, bestselling author of Finding the Mother TreeA farm kid at heart, and a Nlaka'pamux woman of mixed ancestry, Dr. Jennifer Grenz always felt a deep connection to the land. However, after nearly two decades of working as a restoration ecologist in the Pacific Northwest, she became frustrated that despite the best efforts of her colleagues and numerous volunteers, they weren't making the meaningful change needed for plant, animal and human communities to adapt to a warming climate. Restoration ecology is grounded in an idea that we must return the natural world to an untouched, pristine state, placing humans in a godlike role—a notion at odds with Indigenous histories of purposeful, reciprocal interaction with the environment. This disconnect sent Dr. Grenz on a personal journey of joining her head (Western science) and her heart (Indigenous worldview) to find a truer path toward ecological healing.In Medicine Wheel for the Planet, building on sacred stories, field observations and her own journey, Dr. Grenz invites readers to share in the teachings of the four directions of the medicine wheel: the North, which draws upon the knowledge and wisdom of elders; the East, where we let go of colonial narratives and see with fresh eyes; the South, where we apply new-old worldviews to envision a way forward; and the West, where a relational approach to land reconciliation is realized. Eloquent, inspiring and disruptive, Medicine Wheel for the Planet circles toward an argument that we need more than a singular worldview to protect the planet and make the significant changes we are running out of time for.
More Richly in Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod
By Marilyn Bowering. 2024
Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) was a rarity: a female bard in seventeenth-century Scotland. While her lyrics were honoured,…
she was also marginalized, denigrated as a witch, and exiled, both for being a writer and for what she wrote.Presented as a chronicle of journeys through the Scottish Hebrides, More Richly in Earth explores MacLeod’s legacy, preserved within landscape, memory, and identity. In an act of recovery and restoration, Canadian poet and novelist Marilyn Bowering pieces together the puzzle of radically different accounts of MacLeod’s life, returning to the places the bard once lived with the help of contemporary Scottish Gaelic poets and scholars. Through investigation and imagination, Bowering forms a connection with MacLeod despite vast differences of culture and language, time and place. Their connection deepens as Bowering twines MacLeod’s story with accounts of the people and places that shaped her own life, a connection that ultimately reveals the foundations of Bowering’s artistic vocation to herself.MacLeod’s life and writing, little known today beyond the Gaelic world, harbours cultural truths about a transformative era of war and colonization in Gaelic Scotland. Bringing a poetic sensibility to investigative scholarship, More Richly in Earth offers a profound reflection on the necessity of art in all forms.
Coexistence: Stories
By Billy-Ray Belcourt. 2024
A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from one of contemporary literature&’s most boundless minds.Across the prairies…
and Canada&’s west coast, on reserves and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They&’re learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment.An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school—a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal.Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt&’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers.
Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir
By Danny Ramadan. 2024
A queer Syrian refugee reckons with a life spent out of place.&“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.&” So begins this…
electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he&’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.Starting with his family&’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city&’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria&’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that&’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.What emerges is a powerful refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative—a book that holds space for joy alongside sorrow, for nuance and complicated ambivalences. Written with fearless intimacy, Crooked Teeth is a singular achievement in which a master storyteller learns that his greatest story is his own.
The Knowing
By Tanya Talaga. 2025
From Tanya Talaga, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Seven Fallen Feathers, comes a riveting exploration of her family’s…
story and a retelling of the history of the country we now call Canada For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals” and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.
A Face Is a Poem
By Julie Morstad. 2024
Look through the one-of-a-kind eyes of acclaimed author/illustrator Julie Morstad and explore the beauty, diversity and wonder of faces all…
around.A face is a poem with all the parts put together, adding up to someone you love. Have you ever stopped and looked, really looked, at a face? Do faces stay the same forever, or do they change? What if we could change faces to see through someone else's eyes? What if eyelashes were butterflylashes?Julie Morstad guides readers through a playful and fantastical exploration of the unique eyes, noses, mouths, freckles, wrinkles, scars and all those one-of-a-kind marks that make up a face. Embracing commonalities and differences alike, A Face Is a Poem is an ode to the unique beauty of each and every person's appearance, with an empowering message of love.
Death by a Thousand Cuts: Stories
By Shashi Bhat. 2024
From the Governor General&’s Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth comes a breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday…
trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman.What would have happened if she&’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away. A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man&’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend&’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers. With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman&’s relationships with others and with herself.
Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation
By Murray Sinclair. 2024
Named a Book to Read This Fall by CBC Books and the Toronto Star • One of Indigo&’s Most Anticipated…
BooksJudge, senator, and activist. Father, grandfather, and friend. This is Murray Sinclair&’s story—and the story of a nation—in his own words, an oral history that forgoes the trappings of the traditionally written memoir to center Indigenous ways of knowledge and storytelling. As Canada moves forward into the future of Reconciliation, one of its greatest leaders guides us to ask the most important and difficult question we can ask of ourselves: Who are we?For decades, Senator Sinclair has fearlessly educated Canadians about the painful truths of our history. He was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba, and only the second Indigenous judge in Canadian history. He was the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and remains one of the foremost voices on Reconciliation. And now, for the first time, he shares his full story—and his full vision for our nation—with readers across Canada and beyond.Drawing on Senator Sinclair&’s perspectives regarding Indigenous identity, human rights, and justice, Who We Are examines the roles of history, resistance, and resilience in the pursuit of finding a path forward, one that heals the damaged relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. In doing so, it reveals Senator Sinclair&’s life in a new and direct way, exploring how all of these unique experiences have shaped him as an Anishinaabe man, father, and grandfather.Structured around the four questions that have long shaped Senator Sinclair&’s thinking and worldview—Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Who am I?—Who We Are takes readers into the story of his remarkable life as never before, while challenging them to embrace an inclusive vision for our shared future.
May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers
By Minelle Mahtani. 2024
A searing, intimate and blisteringly honest memoir about mothers and daughters, grief and healing, and finding your voice.Minelle Mahtani had…
taken a leap of faith. A new mother in a new life, she'd moved across the country for love, and soon found herself facing the exciting and terrifying prospect of hosting her own radio show. But as she began to find her place in the majority white newsroom, she was handed devastating news: her Iranian mother had been diagnosed with tongue cancer.Just as Minelle was finding her voice, her mother was losing hers.What does it mean to amplify the voices of others while the stories of your ancestors are being buried in your mother's mouth? Why do we cling to superstition and luck when we&’ve lost all faith in healing those we love? And how do we juggle bearing the burden of looking after an ill parent when we are trying to parent our own children?In exquisitely lyrical and inventive prose, Mahtani recounts the experience so many of us recognize: a life calibrated through calculating when to speak and when to be silent in a world that feels like it forces us to be broken.
Picture a Girl
By Jenny Manzer. 2024
Key Selling Points In their small coastal town, Addie lives with her mom and little brother...until her mom (who struggles…
with alcoholism and depression) leaves and Addie is forced to take care of herself and her brother, without anyone finding out. Refusing the easy answers, Picture a Girl looks unflinchingly at the life of an 11-year-old girl who has learned to be an adult in her mother's absence and to lie to keep her family together. Shows surfing in a less glamorous way, as Addie's mother's only true "happy place" and an obsession that can take precedence over her kids—but also reveals it as a way forward for the family, after she returns and promises to give Addie and Billy regular surfing lessons. Jenny Manzer is the author of Save Me, Kurt Cobain , which was nominated for the Bolen Books Children's Book Prize, and My Life as a Diamond , which was nominated for numerous awards and named one of Bank Street College of Education's Best Books of the Year.