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2022 Award Winners and Nominees
The following books won or were finalists for some of Canada’s top literary awards, including the Giller Prize, Writer’s Trust Awards, Governor General’s Awards, and League of Canadian Poets awards.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 21–39 of 39 results
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Lady Sunrise
$18.95From the glittering high-rise condos to the desperate streets of Vancouver, powerful stories told by women reveal the fraying social fabric among the wealthy and hangers-on in the city’s Asian Canadian community.
Lady Sunrise introduces us to six women who are risking everything, all motivated by the need for more money and the freedom it could buy, whether it’s the allure of expensive items and real estate to substitute what’s been lost or the safety of not being in abusive debt to anyone else just to survive. This heartbreaking examination of the effects of today’s hyper-consumerist society will challenge perspectives of strength and power, exposing painfully raw consequences.
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Little Housewolf
$17.95Medrie Purdham‘s Little Housewolf delves deeply into the world of domestic miniatures, a realm where thimbles, baby teeth, push pins, keyholes, teacups, and wedding rings become meticulously realized scale models of one’s terrors and joys. Purdham uses the fine-grained signatures of her poetry–close observation, exact detail, precise sounds–not only to examine childhood and its fascination with size and scale, but also to measure herself against the larger, untamed landscapes she feels increasingly alienated from (“It is all anachronism, / grasses vintage wild”). Marked by bold emotion and arresting imagery, Little Housewolf is a brilliant debut.
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Me, You, Then Snow
$20.00Me, You, Then Snow by Khashayar Mohammadi is a collection of poetry woven from dreams, memories and deep-seeded longing, a collection of poetry that ranges from ambiguously addressed love-letters, to ekphrastic poems for arthouse cinema, to pieces written near midnight when the day?s experiences rush back into view. Though working in diverse forms and styles, the poetry manifests as a profoundly unified desire to experience and communicate the world.
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Moldovan Hotel
$20.00Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora.
In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women’s lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.
With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick’s poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. “No one ever thinks they might be the dragon,” Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together.
“If Leah Horlick’s second book invited us to witness, this time she draws from her Jewish heritage and takes us back to show us how to read the landscape and mind-scape and tell us what the texts left out. This is an accounting, a calling, an invocation, a return, a skilful mediation on how to remember when the ‘names of the oppressors are blotted out’.” — Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days
“Every poem in Moldovan Hotel is a room thick with ghosts. Here, Horlick takes the language of the past–used to dehumanize and unmoor–and crystalizes it around revelation after revelation. A graceful, striking collection.” — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
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Mouthfuls of Space
$16.00The poems in Mouthfuls of Space offer a dissociative journey through the life of a once homeless recovering drug addict and victim of childhood sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. Tom Prime’s debut solo collection was written under the haze of antipsychotics later discovered to have caused many of his symptoms. His hypnotic, surreal voice reveals his transition from the street into the low-paying menial labour of factory work. There is beauty here too, and deeply dark comedy: a sprite-like being imagines his hallucinations as a deeper reality, where indescribable creatures coexist with “hyenas dressed as real estate agents” and those who march in “the skeleton parade.” Mouthfuls of Space explores trauma and the dehumanizing enterprise of factory work with sensitivity but also desperation. The voice in these poems struggles to breathe but finds a certain comfort in “the mother-shadow of trees, the old light of vibrating stars.”
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Nothing Without Us Too
$25.00Nothing Without Us Too follows the theme of Nothing Without Us (a 2020 Prix Aurora Award finalist), featuring more stories by authors who are disabled, d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing, Blind or visually impaired, neurodivergent, Spoonie, and/or who manage mental illness. The lived experiences of their protagonists are found across many demographics–such as race, culture, financial status, religion, gender, age, and/or sexual orientation. We want to present these stories because diversity is reality, and it belongs in literary and genre fiction.
So, whether we’re being welcomed to Sensory Hell by hotel staff, witnessing a stare-down between a convenience store worker and an arrogant vampire, or unsure if our social media account is magic, these tales can teleport us elsewhere yet resonate deep within.
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Persephone’s Children
$22.99Finalist for 2022 Governor General?s Literary Award for Non-Fiction ? Co-Winner of 2022 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
After years of secrecy and silence, Rowan McCandless leaves an abusive relationship and rediscovers her voice and identity through writing.
She was never to lie to him. She was never to leave him; and she was never supposed to tell.
Persephone?s Children chronicles Rowan McCandless?s odyssey as a Black, biracial woman escaping the stranglehold of a long-term abusive relationship. Through a series of thematically linked and structurally inventive essays, McCandless explores the fraught and fragmented relationship between memory and trauma. Multiple mythologies emerge to bind legacy and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, racism and intergenerational trauma, mental illness and resiliency.
It is only in the aftermath that she can begin to see the patterns in her history, hear the echoes of oppression passed down from unknown, unnamed ancestors, and discover her worth and right to exist in the world.
A RARE MACHINES BOOK
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Remnants
$23.00Finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation
Winner of the 2022 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
Remnants is an exploration of our relationships with family and perception, told through a profound investigation of a father’s life and sudden death. Employing various voices and hybrid forms—including dialogues, questionnaires, photographs, and dream documentation—Huyghebaert builds a fragmented picture of a father-daughter relationship that has been shaped by silences and missed opportunities.
The reader attempts to untangle fact from fiction: multiple versions of Huyghebaert’s father are presented while remnants of his life disappear achingly quickly. What is left of someone who was not important enough to be archived? How do we talk about what no longer exists?
Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-language fiction, Remnants asks essential questions we often only peer at from the corner of an eye; questions about the value of life in its duration and passing. This is a transcendent work, ideal for readers of Annie Ernaux, Sophie Calle, and Maggie Nelson.
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Still Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader
$39.95<More than a decade after the publication of Living the Edges: A Disabled Woman’s Reader, the lives of women with disabilities have not changed much. Still Living the Edges provides a timely follow-up that traces the ways disabled women are still on the edges, whether that be on the cutting edge, being pushed to the edges of society, or challenging the edges?the barriers in their way. This collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities, both physical and mental, from nations such as Canada, the United States, Australia, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe. Through articles, poetry, essays, and visual art, disabled women share their experiences with employment, relationships, body image, sexuality and family life, society’s attitudes, and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. In their own voices, they explore their identity as women with disabilities, showcasing how they continue to challenge the physical and attitudinal barriers that force them to the edges of society and instead place themselves at the centre of new and emerging narratives about disability.
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The Junta of Happenstance
$19.95Personal, primordial, and pulsing with syncopated language, Tolu Oloruntoba?s poetic debut, The Junta of Happenstance, is a compendium of dis-ease. This includes disease in the traditional sense, as informed by the poet?s time as a physician, and dis-ease as a primer for family dysfunction, the (im)migrant experience, and urban / corporate anxiety. In the face of struggles against social injustice, Oloruntoba navigates the contemporary moment with empathy and intelligence, finding beauty in chaos, and strength in suffering. The Junta of Happenstance is an important and assured debut.
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The Lost Time Accidents
$19.95Finalist, Raymond Souster Award
In this timely and powerful debut, Síle Englert explores what it is to feel othered in a world where everything is connected. Moving through time and memory — from childhood to motherhood, from historical figures and events to the precarious environment of the Anthropocene — Englert’s voice brims with grief while still holding space for whimsy.
Juxtaposing unlikely metaphors and inchoate memories, these poems wander a timeline where Amelia Earhart’s bones call out from the past, an abandoned department store mannequin keeps an eye on the future, and spacecraft sing to each other through the dark: “we are only what we remember.” Unearthing objects beautiful and bizarre, The Lost Time Accidents challenges the reader’s perceptions, finding empathy for the lost, the broken, and the overlooked.
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The Piano Teacher
$16.95Winner of 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama
The Piano Teacher, by acclaimed playwright and musical director Dorothy Dittrich, is a play about loss, love, friendship, and the healing power of music. When Erin, a classical pianist, experiences the loss of the life she knew, she finds herself dealing with the departure of her own musical expression. Navigating her way through this change, she meets an unconventional piano teacher who gives her new hope for the future. As Elaine gently reacquaints Erin with her instrument, other life changes naturally follow – not just for Erin but for Elaine as well. The Piano Teacher is replete with lessons about moving through grief, friendships, music as a healing art, the temptation of self-deception, compassion, and love.
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The Untranslatable I
$20.00In unmeaningable, her previous Trillium Poetry Awards winning book with Gordon Hill Press, Roxanna Bennett renovated the North American disability poetics canon via her queer fusion of invisible and visible disability identities. The Untranslatable I builds on Roxanna’s acute sense of form and cripping of myth by establishing a more reflective, heartbreaking voice that asks, “Was I chosen? Is this a gift or a curse?” and provides answers not as prescribed path or cure, but as beautiful song.
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The Winter Knight
$24.95Arthurian legends are reborn in this upbeat queer urban fantasy with a mystery at its heartThe knights of the round table are alive in Vancouver, but when one winds up dead, it’s clear the familiar stories have taken a left turn. Hildie, a Valkyrie and the investigator assigned to the case, wants to find the killer — and maybe figure her life out while she’s at it. On her short list of suspects is Wayne, an autistic college student and the reincarnation of Sir Gawain, who these days is just trying to survive in a world that wasn’t made for him. After finding himself at the scene of the crime, Wayne is pulled deeper into his medieval family history while trying to navigate a new relationship with the dean’s charming assistant, Bert — who also happens to be a prime murder suspect. To figure out the truth, Wayne and Hildie have to connect with dangerous forces: fallen knights, tricky runesmiths, the Wyrd Sisters of Gastown. And a hungry beast that stalks Wayne’s dreams.The Winter Knight is a propulsive urban fairy tale and detective story with queer and trans heroes that asks what it means to be a myth, who gets to star in these tales, and ultimately, how we make our stories our own.
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Through The Sad Wood Our Corpses Will Hang
$25.00At the age of twenty, Sheyda Porrouya’s life is almost over. She was born in Iran on the day staunchly orthodox mullas declared the birth of the Islamic Republic and set about summarily purging the country of all things Western and un-Islamic. To make matters worse, as she matured, Sheyda seemed increasingly unable to distinguish between fairy tale and reality. She began to exhibit disturbing behavior. When Sheyda is accused of killing her mother, she is immediately jailed and sentenced to death by hanging. The narrative jumps back and forth from Sheyda’s childhood to her current life in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons, where she awaits either release or execution.
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Undoing Hours
$18.95Selina Boan’s debut poetry collection, Undoing Hours, considers the various ways we undo, inherit, reclaim and (re)learn. Boan’s poems emphasize sound and breath. They tell stories of meeting family, of experiencing love and heartbreak, and of learning new ways to express and understand the world around her through nêhiyawêwin.As a settler and urban nehiyaw who grew up disconnected from her father’s family and community, Boan turns to language as one way to challenge the impact of assimilation policies and colonization on her own being and the landscapes she inhabits. Exploring the nexus of language and power, the effects of which are both far-reaching and deeply intimate, these poems consider the ways language impacts the way we view and construct the world around us. Boan also explores what it means to be a white settler–nehiyaw woman actively building community and working to ground herself through language and relationships. Boan writes from a place of linguistic tension, tenderness and care, creating space to ask questions and to imagine intimate decolonial futures.
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Urchin
$14.99They say Dor?s family is cursed. The house her great-great grandfather built on the south side of St. John?s has never been at peace; the old people think it lies on a fairy path. Ever since electricity came to the island, things have worsened, and experiments in the brand-new technology of radio put her family in real peril. In December 1901, Marconi arrives in Newfoundland with a secret mission: to receive the first wireless trans-Atlantic radio signal. Disguised as a boy, Dor joins his team. Then the Little Strangers kidnap her mother. Must Dor sabotage Marconi’s experiments to save her?
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Why I Was Late
$20.00With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch’s debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.
Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, brings a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing–Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject–grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence–is off limits.
A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.
“Charlie Petch’s Why I Was Late is a poetic debut with the wisdom of a sage and the emotional range of an expert comedian. … Do yourself a favor and read this book. This is a master at work.”–Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World
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with/holding
$20.00with/holding is a collection of genre-blurring poems that examines the representation and reproduction of Blackness across communication media and popular culture. Together, text and image call up a nightmarish and seemingly insatiable buzzing-clicking-scrolling-sharing appetite for a daily diet of Black suffering.
In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection How She Read (2019), Gibson gives sombre voice to Nostalgia, “the signifying ache in search of its signified.” A meditation on the rise of falling monuments, in the wake of Add to Cart consumer culture, this collection draws on the language of brand marketing, news and social media, DIY culture and graphic design–“the tyranny of copy and paste”–to confront the role of the new colonial machinery in the relentless consumption and commodification of Black bodies.
Drawing on icons past and present, this collection imagines Black voices moving freely across time and space: the hold of a 19th century slave ship diagram printed on a white rubber yoga mat; a whispering set of 1950s grinning salt ‘n’ pepper shakers on a Pinterest dinner table; ringside with wrestler Sweet Daddy Siki at 1970s Maple Leaf Gardens on YouTube; and the dissenting centre of the 2020 Black Square. In the journey from longing to belonging, with/holding disrupts the fetishizing algorithms that continue to reproduce Black pain, promote anti-Black racism, and reinforce white supremacy. As an act of protest, this collection imagines how to survive the unspeakable present. As an act of reclamation it seeks to build a meaningful connection to the past through transcending acts of resistance.