“I’m just going to break this, okay?” writes Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick in her sixth full-length poetry collection. The 14 long poems in Ox Lost, Snow Deep range from confessional narrative to collage to surrealism, exploring representations of history, both public and personal, and within that, they probe what is considered important and what is considered not important.

Painted Lives & Shifting Landscapes showcases the artwork of Vancouver painter, printmaker and muralist Richard Tetrault. Tetrault’s work explores universal themes of the figure and the urban landscape.

In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather.

Permission to Settle fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration — the anxiety, and the bureaucracy of application, identity, foreignness, and inadequacy — all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler.


Pineapple Express is Evelyn Lau’s eighth collection of poetry and marks an important contribution to the literature on depression.

Modelled after the American folk music revival songbooks of the 1950s and 60s, Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introductions and ends with the songs — or in this instance, poems — to which they refer.

“Anyone who wanted to be anybody in Vancouver had a pool by the summer of ’83.” Thus sets the scene for Pools, a novel that delves into themes of excess through the lens of the 1980s party culture.

Highly personalized and idiosyncratic, yet public places of mourning and memory, roadside shrines invite us to ask questions about their meaning and provenance. Sometimes referred to as Roadside Death Memorials, or RDMs, structures or installations of this kind have become commonplace in many parts of North America and elsewhere. The media plays significant attention to the RDM phenomenon and there are scholarly studies which focus on the social, legal, cultural, and psychological interpretations of their meaning. Folklorists, in particular, have struggled to understand RDMs in the context of widespread secularism. Unlike cemeteries, roadside shrines elude the religious ceremonial practices with which mourning was formerly imbued.

The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity.

The award-winning author of Afflictions & Departures turns her kaleidoscopic lens on England in the 1970s in Queasy, a series of linked memoirs. While still grieving her father’s death and the end of her first romantic relationship, Madeline Sonik moved with her mother from Windsor, Ontario to the seaside village of Ilfracombe in North Devon, England.