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Subdivided
$20.95How do we build cities where we aren’t just living within the same urban space, but living together?
Greater Toronto is now home to a larger proportion of foreign-born residents than any other major global metropolis. Not surprisingly, city officials rarely miss an opportunity to tout the region’s ethno-cultural neighbourhoods. Yet there’s strong evidence that the GTA is experiencing widening socio-economic disparities that have produced worrisome divisions. We say that ‘diversity is our strength,’ but has a feel-good catchphrase prevented us from confronting the forces that seem to be separating and isolating urban communities?
Through compelling storytelling and analysis, Subdivided’s contributors – a wide range of place-makers, academics, activists and journalists – ask how we can expand city-building processes to tackle issues ranging from transit equity and trust-based policingto holistic mental health, dignified affordable housing and inclusive municipal governance. Ultimately, Subdivided aims to provoke the tough but pressing conversations required to build a truly connected and just city.
Contents
Introduction – Jay Pitter
Identity and the City: Thinking Through Diversity – Beyhan Farhadi
Doing Immigrant Resettlement Right – Doug Saunders
Wasauksing–Vancouver–Toronto: My Path Home – Rebeka Tabobondung
How We Welcome: Why Canada’s Refugee Resettlement Program Undermines Place-making – Sarah Beamish and Sofia Ijaz
Finding Space for Spirituality – Fatima Syed
Navigating the City with an Invisible Illness: The Story of Dorothy – Denise DaCosta
Culture and Mental Illness – Karen Pitter
Neighbourhood Watch: Racial Profiling and Virtual Gated Communities – Asmaa Malik
Accessing Education: An Immigrant’s Story – Nicholas Davis
Policing and Trust in the Hyper-Diverse City – Nana Yanful
Three Questions about Carding – Idil Burale
An Overburdened Promise: Arts Funding for Social Development – Ian Kamau, Paul Nguyen and Ryan Paterson, with John Lorinc
Designing Dignified Social Housing – Jay Pitter
Walking Through Loss: A Critical Visit to an Old Neighbourhood – Photography by Taha Muharuma
Reconsidering Revitalization: The Case of Regent Park – Jay Pitter in conversation with Sandra Costain
Model Citizens – Andrea Gunraj
A Tale of Two – or Three – Cities: Gentrification and Community Consultations – Mariana Valverde
Mobility in the Divided City – Eric Mann
Toward MoreComplete Communities: Business Out of the Box – Alina Chatterjee
Going Beyond Representation: The Diversity Deficit in Local Government – John Lorinc
Brampton, a.k.a. Browntown – Noreen Ahmed-Ullah
Life in the City In-Between – Shawn Micallef
Conclusion – J. David Hulchanski
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Subject to Change
$18.95Composed of stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of an auto- biography, Subject to Change is a series of portraits along the road of a life well lived. Each story is an articulate, intelligent, passionate record of how an encounter with a significant “other,” be it a parent, a lover, a neighbour, a child, a grandchild, a politician or a friend, has changed and shaped the humanity, character and community—the “subject”—of the writer.
These are masterfully crafted stories: attentive to detail; conscious of the fact that our eccentricities often mask precisely what is authentic in our lives; and aware that a finely honed empathy is as likely to cause exhilaration as to cause pain. It is precisely this uncompromising empathy of Rodin’s voice that lends a sense of profound drama to the lives of the “ordinary characters” she reveals in these stories—a voice that knows how to take a measure of those characters on their own terms, to let them speak for themselves and to report on what both shakes us to the core and transports us to a place where we seem larger than ourselves.
Renee Rodin has said that: “Throughout my life I’ve had the privilege of peace and have never seen, unless in the media, the ravages of war, what people have had to live with, or die because of.” Subject to Change reminds us that the most vital moments of recognition in our lives come from those with whom we share our hopes and dreams.
It is Rodin’s masterful ability to show the reader that things we usually think of as too ordinary to talk about or too extraordinary to be able to communicate to others are often the most formative elements of our social lives that make this book such a great read.
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Sublime
$27.00sublime (adjective) of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.
sublime (verb) (Chemistry): (Of a solid substance) to change directly into vapor when heated, typically forming a solid deposit again on cooling.
In Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice, poets from across Turtle Island explore what it means to enter into conversation with ice. The poems in Yvonne Blomer’s third, water-focused anthology exemplify sublime as both verb and adjective: these are poems that skate, drink, stomp, crush and dive. In poems that range from street hockey, to snow angels, to meltwater, poets write to the ever-changing ways of ice. Other poems grapple with fires that melt permafrost and rising temperatures that fracture and erode lives. In the poems, fissures form into ever-expanding crevasses, and animals suffer because of humanity’s negative impact on Earth’s most ancient of water systems: ice.
Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice features poems by Governor General Award winners, Poet Laureates in cities across Canada, and other important voices for our time and place in history. Contributors include John Barton, Gary Barwin, Marilyn Bowering, Elizabeth Bradfield, Kate Braid, Terry Ann Carter, Trevor Carolan, Dymphny Dronyk, Karen Enns, Katia Grubisic, Penn Kemp, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Anita Lahey, Evelyn Lau, Joanna Lilley, Annick MacAskill, David Martin, Micheline Maylor, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Catherine Owen, Arleen Pare, Troy Sebastian, Bren Simmers, Rob Taylor, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Tom Wayman, and many, many more.
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sublingual
$18.95sublingual is perhaps the most highly structured yet of bissett’s “textual visions.” Its first seven poems construct a Genesis, beginning with a poem of birth—our pre- or sub-lingual first breath, a phenomenological gesture of recognition, of both being and belonging, in and of the world. Following this short creation story, the book continues to unfold in luminous and lucid delight.
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Subterrane
$22.95Winner – 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
A speculative comedy comprised of a carousel of Black and Queer voices being pushed further underground by urban prosperity.
New Stockholm, a metropolis like any other across North America, is unofficially divided between two worlds. Its upwardly mobile form the centre of its gleaming eye, but their prosperity and affluence are not the focus of Zeynab’s government-funded abstract documentary. Her lens trails to the city’s margins instead, in polluted industrial wastelands such as Cipher Falls, one of New Stockholm’s last affordable neighbourhoods, where creatives and other anti-capitalist voices increasingly find themselves pushed into demeaning, dead-end jobs. In this growing underground network, Zeynab’s lens focuses on the mysterious demise of Doudou Laguerre, whose death may be related to his activism against a construction project.
Subterrane connects us to a constellation of Black and Queer voices, the hair braiders, tattoo artists, holistic healers, weed dealers, and sidewalk horticulturists struggling to make a life in New Stockholm. Together, they illustrate how in cities across the continent, entire communities are being sidelined in the name of prosperity.
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SUBTEXT
SUBTEXT refracts the language of identity formation. It collages the echoes of diasporic and colonial histories through poetry, drama, autobiography, and archival uncovering. Divided into four parts, SUBTEXT peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed realities and obscured memories. Dwelling in the bubbling froth of dreamwork, these poems take a multifaceted approach to questions of diaspora and selfhood, incorporating visual and textual elements that dialogue with one another and ask readers to negotiate the unsteady shoals of identity and history.
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subUrban Legends
$16.95Joan Crate’s much-anticipated third book of poetry is equal parts revision and reverie, offering a mid-life view of childhood influences and expectations that is stirring, startling, and wise. Deliciously invoking the iconic figure of Snow White, subUrban Legends considers what lies beyond youth and the trite promise of “happily ever after,” transporting readers to a land of complexity and nuance from which few cultural officiados report.
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Suburban Motel
$29.95Something completely different from George Walker! Six plays, united only by the fact that they each take place in one and the same suburban motel room. Transients, lovers, the haunted and the hunted, the desperate and the dumb, each “strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard of no more.” Real, funny and heartbreaking. With an introduction by Daniel De Raey.
Suburban Motel contains six plays: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta and The End of Civilization.
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Suburban Pornography
$18.00‘Suburban Pornography’ is contemporary literature, which documents Canadian urban life in a raw and naked manner. The prose is stripped-minimalist, direct, urgent, unflinching. The stories revolve around ordinary characters and problems-people stuck in bad relationships or jobs. Some yearn for something just beyond their grasp, something authentic to knock them out of their malaise. Their frailties and obsessions are front and centre. They are garbage men, bus drivers, waitresses, soupkitchen clients, and neighbourhood perverts-tired and busy, too weary to contemplate-from social conditions that sanction only mere existence in redemption’s agony and fleeting glory.
” ‘Suburban Pornography’ surpasses a generic understanding of a tell-it-like-it-is literary form, born from American 20th century fiction, and delivers a unique Canadian voice offering a universal reflection of troubled humanity.” – Discorder
“What makes ‘Suburban Pornography’ so memorable is the brutally honestsnapshots of the inner-city ill-privileged and sad-sack suburbanites who fuck, suck, bleed, bruise, cruise and search for love among the loveless.” – Xpress
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Subverting the Lyric
$19.95One of the most prolific and engaged book reviewers in Canada over the past fifteen years, Ottawa writer rob mclennan has slowly been moving into longer forms, producing essays on the works of such diverse Canadian writers as George Bowering, Jon Paul Fiorentino, jwcurry, Margaret Christakos, and Barry McKinnon.
subverting the lyric: essays works through mclennan’s years of writing, thinking, and blogging through literature, as reader, writer, performer, editor, critic, reviewer, and just plain fan of the art. In these fifteen pieces, mclennan writes about travel, Canadian poets in general – and some very specifically – as well as his own investigations of the writer’s craft. Together, they remap our literary and linguistic landscape, “the contours, rifts, subductions, tectonic plates of the medium in which we exist,” inscribing a poetics of geography, process, and culture that is at once strikingly new and refreshingly communal. The breadth of mclennan’s take on Canadian poetry, alone, is remarkable: his ability to reconcile the concerns, successes, and failures of both the “mainstream” and the “fringe” of our literature urges – and begins – a critical overhaul that’s been long overdue.
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Succession
$19.95Succession is a story cycle about a rural community in transition. It follows Al, a musician burned out from too many nights playing the same classic rock songs, as he returns from Vancouver to the farm where he grew up in the Bearspaw district near Calgary.
Al’s story is intertwined with those of his family, friends, and neighbours, as they struggle to come to terms with the choices they make, and those that are forced upon them by the suburbanization of their agricultural community. Succession explores themes of place and belonging, the place of art in working life, and urban and rural identity. Most of all it’s a meditation on what is lost when the beautiful places of the earth are discovered and changed by outsiders—and what remains.
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Successions
$18.95After the unexpected death of their parents, two second-generation Italian Canadian brothers must come together to decide whether to hold on to the family home, which is full of secrets and hoarded junk, or save what’s left of their strained relationship.
When Anthony, an uptight lawyer running for office, arrives with his former actor-turned-campaign-manager wife Cristina, they’re set on signing away the house and everything that comes with it. But Enzo, a disorganized plumber, and his pregnant girlfriend Nat have other plans. The pleasantries quickly turn to tense deliberations that unearth dramatically differing views of the group’s past experiences and present values.
This clever family dramedy takes a close look at issues that affect modern second-generation immigrant families in Canada—class differences, antiquated old-world beliefs, and a crumbling Canadian dream.
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Such a Lovely Afternoon
$22.95Such a Lovely Afternoon is a poignant, unflinching debut collection. Characters confront urgent questions about gender, identity, family, community, what reconciliation in Canada might look like and where it falls painfully short.
A refugee single dad caring for a man with fetal alcohol effects becomes a scapegoat. A useless toilet, a derelict landlord and wacky neighbours turn an unemployed woman’s cabin life upside down. In the linked section, we first meet Tracy, a feisty tomboy grappling with gender roles. As a cub reporter, she finds herself caught in a typhoon in China, then covering an inquest for a Yukon teen who froze to death. With her boyfriend Rick, she struggles to care for both their baby and Rick’s mother who lives with dementia and residential school trauma. In the final and title story, Tracy attends the preliminary hearing into her father’s murder by a mentally ill former patient, and she, her brothers and grandmother each try in their own ways to make sense of the unfathomable and move on with their lives.
Brimming with compassion, humour and wisps of hope, the stories are set against vivid landscapes from Canada’s West Coast to Hong Kong to the Yukon.
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Such a Lovely Little War
$28.95This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy’s father works for the South Vietnamese embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious about his otherness thanks to schoolmates who play war games against the so-called “Commies.” The family is called back to Saigon in 1961, where the father becomes President Ngo Dinh Diem’s personal interpreter; as the growing conflict between North and South intensifies, so does turmoil within Marco’s family, as his mother struggles to grapple with bipolar disorder.
Visually powerful and emotionally potent, Such a Lovely Little War is both a large-scale and intimate study of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of the Vietnamese: a turbulent national history intertwined with an equally traumatic familial one.
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Such Miracles and Mischiefs
$21.95Colonists come face to face with Indigenous Americans, enslaved Africans, and pirates as they struggle to build a life in North America.
Such Miracles and Mischiefs, the second book in the Cupids trilogy, adventures across the first three English colonies in the Americas—Newfoundland, Virginia, and Bermuda—and highlights women’s colonial experience. After pirates attack the Guy family’s plantation near Cupids, Nancy Ellis needs all her ingenuity to survive in the hands of lawless men. Ned Perry crosses the ocean to find her, while Nancy’s employer and friend, Kathryn Guy, must rebuild a home on the harsh shores of the New Found Land.
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Suddenly Light
$24.95A stunning new work of intimate, nuanced, and quietly profound realism.
From the award-winning author Nina Dunic, stories in this collection have twice won the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, been long-listed for the CBC Short Story Prize four times, nominated for The Journey Prize, and pre-date her critically acclaimed novel The Clarion .
With crisp and penetrating prose that recalls the work of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, the stories in Suddenly Light are bracing, buoyant, and test the delicate threads that tie us together.