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Reads for Asian Heritage Month
May is Asian Heritage Month, and the perfect chance to check out new and new-to-you books by Asian-Canadian writers.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 17–32 of 128 results
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Dream of Me as Water
$19.95Moving beyond the themes of race, identity, and personhood navigated in Mythical Man, David Ly?s second book of poetry, Dream of Me as Water, explores ways of being that are not beholden to the expectations of others. Using water as his central metaphor, Ly meditates on how identity is never a stagnant concept, but instead something that is intangible, fluid, and ever-evolving. Dream of Me as Water revels in the nuances of the self, flouting outside perceptions for deeper, more personal realities. .
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echolalia echolalia
$23.95Shortlisted Raymond Souster Award
Interviewed on CBC Books
CBC Best Poetry Book 2024
Relentlessly inventive poetry that proclaims a diasporic, queer, and disabled self-hood.
In Jane Shi’s echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one’s chosen family, love and justice.
“Shi extends her poetics in all directions with silky skill. Language flourishes in the realm of a poet like this.”
– T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice and Obits.
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Elegy for Opportunity
$20.00In her debut collection, Natalie Lim asks: How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises?
Anchored by elegies for NASA’s Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, this collection explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift’s cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Confessional, funny and bursting with joy, Elegy for Opportunity extends a lifeline from Earth that will leave you feeling comforted, challenged and a little less alone in the universe.
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Ezra’s Ghosts
$20.95Award-winning author Darcy Tamayose returns with Ezra’s Ghosts, a collection of fantastical stories linked by a complex mingling of language and culture, as well as a deep understanding of grief and what it makes of us. Within these pages a scholar writes home from the Ryukyu islands, not knowing that his hometown will soon face a deadly calamity of its own. Another seeker of truth is trapped in Ezra after her violent death, and must watch how her family—and her killer—alter in her absence. The oldest man in town, an immigrant who came to Canada to escape imperial hardships, sprouts wings, and a wounded journalist bears witness to his transformation. Finally, past and present collide as a researcher reflects on the recent skinwars that have completely altered the world’s topography. Binding the stories together is an intersection of arrival and departure—in a quiet prairie town called Ezra.
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Familial Hungers
$23.95Poems that reckon with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food.
Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs – the reader’s appetite is satiated with these poems’ complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.
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Festival of All Souls
$18.95Festival of All Souls explores the experience of an Asian woman born in Canada. Although neither fully rooted in one or the other, the influence of two different cultures allows heritage, gender and values to nonetheless, enrich a personal vision. The title refers to an Asian ceremony whereby families visit ancestral gravesites in the spring to pay their respects to the departed. During this observance of tribute and commemoration, time is also provided for contemplation and the acknowledgement of renewal that is in harmony with the season. The poetry in this collection is guided by, and ultimately expands upon themes inspired by this ritual: cycles of fullness and loss, expressions of visible and hidden energy, as well as navigations through public and private space. A definition of soul widens to include within our human capacity–plants, animals, minerals, and even weather. Whether leaves pause on the rim of a jade plant bowl, a starling understands Cantonese, or waves lunge like white dragons across Lake Ontario, an invitation is extended to celebrate the diversity of being in this world.
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Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
$18.95At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runs
away from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood-and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.
There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
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Flesh, Tongue
$20.95In this brilliant and provocative first collection, Yaya Yao confronts her inherited fragmented self and her hunger for a home, using scraps of personal and communal memory to bridge languages, worldviews, and physical distance from her ancestral homeland. Bits of Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, and Shanghainese are translated and altered to explore the dynamics between language and identity. In this collection, Yaya Yao has created a unique and authentic voice.
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Forgiveness
$20.95Mitsue Sakamoto and Ralph MacLean both suffered tremendous loss during WWII: Mitsue as a survivor of a Japanese Canadian internment camp, and Ralph as a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp. In order to rebuild their lives and their families after the war, Ralph and Mitsue must find the grace and generosity necessary to forgive those who have wronged them. Their paths eventually cross in 1968 when Mitsue’s son and Ralph’s daughter begin dating, and Ralph is invited to Mitsue’s home for dinner.
This soaring adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s award-winning memoir affirms the power of forgiveness and shows us that in our challenging times characterized by political divisiveness, xenophobia, and race hatred, the story of Mitsue and Ralph’s personal triumphs over hatred, injustice, violence, and bigotry remains vitally relevant and urgently necessary.
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Four Sufferings, The
$20.95Shiku hakku in Japanese means to endure, an expression that originates in Buddhism. This collection links Terry Watada’s past and present while acknowledging the fundamental suffering of human existence–in birth, aging, illness, and death–and the suffering endured in daily living–common frustrations, desire, separation. But at the same time it celebrates love, and in the end seeks an enlightened state of acceptance. Rise above life’s hardships and rejoice in the state of life is the overall theme of this collection.
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From the Shoreline
$20.00Steffi Tad-y’s debut collection brings forward diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness. Family history and work lyrics occur against a tonal backdrop of the carceral. Yet Tad-y brings a tenderness to these fraught circumstances, finding beauty in detail and repetitive acts of love, in part due to the use of a multiplicity of forms that render a surplus of affect into beautiful images. Though danger properly exists in Tad-y’s world, her poetry takes its own advice in “Writer’s Archive”: “Look. Enough. Each full stop unspooling / the cardinal & bluebird privacy of things.”
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Fugue Body
$19.95“I did not know there was a sound / silence made as it laps at the body’s shore,” observes Bridget Huh in her debut collection, Fugue Body—a book in which the body becomes a site of inquiry: a compositional space of melody, counterpoint, and theme. In surprising and intricately orchestrated poems that range from the lyric to the essayistic, Huh meditates on linguistic and racial identity, considers generational differences in an immigrant context, and recounts the life of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. In doing so, she renders the music of a restless, relentless mind with remarkable candour and beauty. “I want all the violins to shimmer,” writes Huh, “I want them to stand for impermanence.”
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Game of 100 Ghosts, The
$20.95Inspired by an old Japanese parlour game of the Edo period (1603-1868), The Game of 100 Ghosts is a lyrical tribute to the poet’s friends and relations who recently departed their lives. In the game, participants gather in the dark at night and sit around 100 lit candles. Each player tells a ghost story, after which a candle is snuffed out. The last candle ends the spiritual evocation, which the participants hope will summon a supernatural being. This wonderful collection then evokes the spirits of lost friends and relations while paying tribute to a tradition.
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Ghost Face
$19.95‘Greg is clearly a poet of great vision and clarity. His voice is extremely confident and strong, with each poem well-crafted and lean… If you enjoy the work of Sarah Howe or Ocean Vuong, I would recommend this book with no hesitation.’ Stuart Buck, author of Become Something Frail
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Grande Prairie With an E
$19.99Following the success of Straight Outta Busan, Stefano returns with more cartoons from his hit web comic series Modern Asian Family. This second collection of short cartoons from Stefano Jun chronicles his experiences as a Korean immigrant in Western Canada. Having moved to Canada as an 8 year old with no knowledge of English, Stefano encounters culture shock, family love, friendship, and ultimately finding a place for himself in the vast country he has called home for 20 years now.
These slice of life stories are a keenly observed insight into the experience of growing up in an unfamiliar place. Full of emotion, humour and surprise, Modern Asian Family: Grande Prairie with an E is a delight to read.
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Grappling Hook
$19.95Taking its title from Tomas Transtr�mer, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang?s Grappling Hook sifts the debris of the twenty-first century for insights into identity, desire, and the everyday struggles inherent to motherhood. In doing so, she presents vivid portraits of the joys and perils of marriage, the evolving fight for social justice in a world divided by inequity, and the uncertain future thats?s left for children of the digital age. Grappling Hook is an impressive display of Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang?s considerable poetic gifts, and a love letter to those who are making meaningful change in unprecedented times.