By Jen Currin
Hider/Seeker is the debut fiction collection from award-winning poet Jen Currin. These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality.
History tells us that the short and violent life of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, ended at the hand of Pat Garrett on the moonless night of July 14, 1881. But I Am Billy the Kid tells a different story, straight from Billy himself. This revisionist history seen through the lens of a twenty-first century sensibility features the picaresque hero we thought we knew and the unexpected one that we don’t: a fearless and determined young woman who is in no mood to be saved and would much prefer exacting her own revenge.
By Jay Millar
Spanning more than 25 years, I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You gathers work from three distinct eras of Jay Millar’s development as a poet.
The poems in I Heard Something comprise a surreal menagerie — funny, chilling, tender — of what it is to be a human at this very minute. Cup a hand around your ear as you read this book — it’ll enhance the experience.
il virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto.
By Mark Laba
Mark Laba’s second full-length poetry collection—and his first in seventeen years—brings to life the old variety shows he watched on TV as a child, shows forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. In The Inflatable Life, the reader will find a little singing, a little dancing, a little drama, a little comedy, a little experimentation.
By Doug Diaczuk
Just Like a Real Person is a story about broken cars and broken people. A story of intoxication, sobriety, and potent memories of a woman in a yellow sundress. But, it’s also a story about love that asks what it means to finally feel, after years of feeling nothing but numb.
By Melissa Bull
Melissa Bull’s debut short story collection The Knockoff Eclipse hums with the immediacy of distant and future worlds. Firmly rooted in the streets and landmarks of Montreal and its many neighbourhoods and subcultures, Bull’s characters shine with the dirt of digging just deep enough.
Ever since Europeans first laid claim to the Squamish Nation territory in the 1870s, the real estate industry has held the region in its grip. Its influence has been grotesquely pervasive at every level of civic life, determining landmarks like Stanley Park and City Hall, as well as street names, neighbourhoods — even the name “Vancouver” itself. Land of Destiny explores that influence, starting in 1862, with the first sale of land in the West End, and continuing up until the housing crisis of today.
An autobiographical essay on fear, The Lily Pad and the Spider (Le nénuphar et l’araignée) explores the symptoms, sources, and genesis of anxiety, from the most intimate to the most ordinary kind. Using short chapters that are fragments of her life, Claire Legendre breaks down the psychological, physical, and social mechanisms associated with that emotion. Her style is lively, often funny, sometimes dark — though never complacent — and the story traces a unique path between France, Canada, and the Czech Republic, casting a defiant yet vulnerable gaze upon the world.