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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 49–64 of 101 results
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Monster Child
$20.00In this powerful debut novel set in the spring of 2000, Rahela Nayebzadah introduces three unforgettable characters: Beh, Shabnam and Alif. In a world swirling with secrets, racism and danger we watch through the eyes of these three children as Nayebzadah’s family of Afghan immigrants try to find their way in an often uncaring Canadian society. But as the sexual assault of thirteen-year-old Beh spirals into a series of terrible events that threaten to unleash the past and destroy the family, the reader is left wondering who is the monster child? Is it Beh, who says she is called a disease? Is it Shabnam, who cries tears of blood? Is it Alif, who in the end declares, “We are a family of monsters”? Or are the monsters all around us?
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Music at the Heart of Thinking
$24.95The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. From jazz, the unpredictable ad lib driving itself from itself. From a drunken Shaolin monk, the poem as imbalanced tai chi. From Keats’s negative capability, the half-closed eye, the estrangement of language. All intended to bump beyond the end of the word into focus. As a response to readings in contemporary texts, art, and ideas. Music at the Heart of Thinking relocates critical language and thinking to the poetic bavardage at the heart of such endeavours. The poetics that generates these texts arises out of a lifelong poem project that has its roots in the long poem genre of the ’80s and its interest in the resistance to closure and the containment of meaning characteristic of the lyric. This book continues the work of two previous out-of-print publications, Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987) and Alley, Alley Home Free (1990). The poems are generated as textual responses in the reading, looking, and listening of the poet’s attention to his cultural milieu. Thus the writing addresses contemporary texts and art over the past forty years. Within this poetry of estrangement lie possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as feeling. The difficulty of this writing is literal and intentional, wary of any attempt to make thinking simple, easy, or predictable.
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Mythical Man
$18.95In Mythical Man, David Ly builds, and then tears down, an army of men in a quest to explore personhood in the 21st century. Tenderness, toxic masculinity, nuances of queer love, and questions of race and identity mix in Ly?s poetry, casting a spell that enters like “a warm tongue on a first date.” Mythical Man is an authentic and accomplished debut.
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Odori
$22.95In the spring of 1999, Mai Yoshimoto-Lanier falls into a coma after her husband loses control of the old Ford and drives over a bridge into the Belly River. Eddie dies. But Mai falls into the world of her great-grandmother on the island of Hamahiga somewhere between heaven and earth.
Odori is a novel that navigates through the glorious Ryukyuan Kingdom and the Golden Era of the Sho Dynasty, through bloody World War II Okinawa, and over parched prairies of Southern Alberta’s Rainmaker Hills — all the while exposing human sorrows, indignities, idiosyncrasies, failed faiths, splintered spirits, and an island culture so resilient, so embedded it becomes mythical. It tells of Mai’s journey into the world of an old kataribe storyteller, the ghost of her great-grandmother, where she hears of Tree Gods, Sky Gods and human lumps of clay – where her mother’s poignant war letters tell of sights and sounds that singe a child’s soul. In this dream world she has fallen into, Mai allows her basan’s tumble of words to fall gently on her ear as she creates painting after painting, sketch after sketch.
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One and Half of You
$16.95From the talented multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer Leanne Dunic comes the lyric memoir One and Half of You. In sinuous language, with candour, openness, and surprising humour, Dunic explores sibling and romantic love and the complexities of being a biracial person looking for completion in another. Including links to three songs written and performed for the book by tidepools.
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Paper Teeth
$19.95Winner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize!Shortlisted for the 2017 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award!Finalist for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction at the 2017 Alberta Literary Awards!Shortlisted for Trade Fiction Book of the Year at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Lauralyn Chow’s debut, Paper Teeth, follows the lives of the Lees, a Canadian-Chinese family and their friends who reside in Edmonton, Alberta. While playing with time and place, from Edmonton in the 1960s and 70s up to present-day Calgary, Lauralyn Chow creates a world of walking dolls, family car trips, fashion and frosty makeup, home renovations inspired by pop culture, and moving up to big, new houses. The interconnected stories found in Paper Teeth are fun, funny, and heart-warming journeys about the pursuit of identity and the crafting of home.With domestic tomfoolery and through deft observation and prismatic-voiced humour—including ironic asides—Lauralyn Chow reveals how family nourishes hope.
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Pebble Swing
$18.95A much-anticipated debut collection from one of Canada’s most promising emerging poetsPebble Swing earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author’s case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water’s reflective surface. This collection is about language and family histories. It is the author’s attempt to piece together the resonant aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which stole the life of her paternal grandmother. As an immigrant whose grasp of Mandarin is fading, Wang explores absences in her caesuras and fragmentation—that which is unspoken, but endures.The poems in this collection also trace the experiences of a young poet who left home at seventeen to pursue writing; the result is a series of city poetry infused with memory, the small joys of Vancouver’s everyday, environmental politics, grief and notions of home. While the poetics of response are abundant in the collection—with poems written to Natalie Lim and Ashley Hynd—the last section of the book, “Thirteen Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals after Phyllis Webb,” forges a continued response to Phyllis Webb on Salt Spring Island, and innovates within the possibilities of the experimental ghazal form.
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Peeling Rambutan
$19.95A poetic travelogue, Gillian Sze’s Peeling Rambutan meditates upon the rifts between immigrant parents and their Canadian-born children and the struggle of overlapping values which sometimes arises when we view the complexity of our heritage through the lens of the present. Rooted in Sze’s first experience of Asia, these poems mingle the familiar spaces of her childhood home in Winnipeg with impressions of the distant villages of her parents’ origins. The result is a complex exploration of the relationship between identity, place, and history. Landscape and language prove unstable, inhabited by ghosts and other echoes of passing time which leave indelible impressions on the poet: A market in Hong Kong seems reminiscent of Montreal; the spirit of her great-grandmother shows up on a commercial street in China, then in Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver. The mundanea bite of fruit, a boy selling raisins, the floured hands of a bakertakes on a contemplative cast. In such a world, a traveller is never wholly certain whether she is discovering an unexplored world or descending into memory, but Sze’s lyrically-driven poems navigate confidently, mapping new terrain while remaining sensitive to the claims of the past.
Shortlisted for the 2014 A.M. Klein Poetry Prize.
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Personal Attention Roleplay
$18.95A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships–with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band’s summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.
The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected–in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley’s precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.
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Phantompains
$20.00Therese Estacion survived a rare infection that nearly killed her, but not without losing both her legs below the knees, several fingers, and reproductive organs. Phantompains is a visceral, imaginative collection exploring disability, grief and life by interweaving stark memories with dreamlike surrealism.
Taking inspiration from Filipino horror and folk tales, Estacion incorporates some Visayan language into her work, telling stories of mermen, gnomes, and ogres that haunt childhood stories of the Philippines and, then, imaginings in her hospital room, where she spent months recovering after her operations.
Estacion says she wrote these poems out of necessity: an essential task to deal with the trauma of hospitalization and what followed. Now, they are demonstrations of the power of our imaginations to provide catharsis, preserve memory, rebel and even to find self-love.
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Picture Bride
$22.95Following the India-China war of 1962, the Chinese Indians (the Hakka), fearing suspicion and hostility, begin to emigrate. Twenty-year-old Jillian Wu leaves Calcutta to marry a man she has never met–Peter Chou, also a Hakka–with much anticipation, only to discover that he is gay. Forced by her husband to keep up the charade of a “normal” marriage, and pressured by her in-laws to have a child, she flees back to Calcutta, only to be disowned by her conservative family. A moving story with political overtones, set during a period of changing times and changing values.
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Prairie Ostrich
$19.95Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers
Not every story has a happy ending.Since her brother’s death, eight-year-old Egg Murakami has been living day-to-day on the family ostrich farm near Bittercreek, discovering life to be an ever-perplexing condition. Mama Murakami has curled up inside a bottle, and Papa has exiled himself to the barn with the birds. Big sister Kathy tells stories to Egg so that the world might not seem so awful.
The Murakami family is not happy. But in the hands of Tamai Kobayashi, their story becomes a drama of rare insight and virtuosity. Weighing physical, cultural, and emotional isolation against the backdrop of schoolyard battles and adult mysteries, Kobayashi paints a compelling portrait of a feisty and endearing outsider.
As Kathy’s final year in high school counts down to an uncertain future, the indomitable Egg sits quiet witness to her unravelling family as she tries to find her place in a bewildering world.
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Primal Sketches
$17.95Fueled by our perpetual need to find meaning and purpose in our lives, Primal Sketches is a book that considers how our actions profoundly effect the lives of fellow humans as well as the natural world around us. How our desire to connect, care, and empathize, are constantly interrupted by feelings of insecurity and growing anxiety of our uncertain future in a world that is continually bombarded by global conflicts and environmental crises. However, our determination to carry on provides glimpses of hope amid brutal and unthinkable actions and these bright, tender moments reveal our capacity to learn, understand, and love–the essence of our humanity.
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Quiet Night Think
$21.95“Quiet Night Think is a stunning work.” — Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time,” writes Wallace Stevens. In Quiet Night Think, award-winning poet Gillian Sze expresses her own definition.
During the remarkable period of early parenthood, Sze’s new maternal role urges her to contemplate her own origins, both familial and artistic. Comprised of six personal essays, poems, and a concluding long poem, Quiet Night Think takes its title from a direct translation of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Li Bai, the subject of the opening essay. Sze’s memory of reading Li Bai’s poem as a child marks the beginning of an unshakable encounter with poetry. What follows is an intimate anatomization of her particular entanglement with languages and cultures.
In her most generically diverse book yet, Sze moves between poetry and prose, mother and writer, the lyrical and the autobiographical, all the while inviting readers to meditate with her on questions of emergence and transformation: What are you trying to be? Where does a word break off? What calls to us throughout the night?
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Reel Asian
$29.95Founded in 1997 by producer Anita Lee and journalist Andrew Sun, the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival is a unique showcase of contemporary Asian cinema and work from the Asian diaspora. The festival fosters the exchange of cultural and artistic ideals between East and West, provides a public forum for homegrown Asian media artists and their work and fuels the growing appreciation for Asian cinema in Canada.
In Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen, contributors, many of them filmmakers, examine East and Southeast Asian Canadian contributions to independent film and video. From artist-run centres, theories of hyphenation, distribution networks and gay and lesbian cinema to F-words, new media technologies and sweet n’ sour controversies, Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen presents a multi-faceted picture of independent Asian film in Canada. The collection highlights the screen as a site forthe reflection, projection and reimagination of identities and communities, and explores the idea that ‘Asian Canada’ is less a demographic category than it is a term of art.
Reel Asian brings together creators of award-winning features and acclaimed experimental shorts; critics, curators, artists and activists; enemy aliens, impersonators, ex-pats and ‘Food Jammers’ to explore how history and culture have played out onscreen. Whether calling geopolitical and generic categories into question or finding new ways of unleashing the magic of the cinematic image, the anthology showcases the ways in which Asian Canadians are making their distinctive mark on screens from the multiplex to the iPod, across Canada and beyond.
Co-published with the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, this is the first anthology of its kind, and includes a substantial selection of images and stills, as well as a resources section providing detailed artist and distribution information.
Contributors include Nobu Adilman, Jason Anderson, Leon Aureus, Cameron Bailey, Romeo Candido, Lily Cho, Nicole Chung, David Eng, Ann Marie Fleming, Richard Fung, Monika Kin Gagnon, Colin Geddes, Kwoi Gin, Mike Hoolboom, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Cheuk Kwan, Julia Kwan, Anita Lee, Helen Lee, Karin Lee, Keith Lock, Pamila Matharu, Christine Miguel, Tan Hoang Nguyen, Midi Onodera, Mieko Ouchi, Alice Shih, Mina Shum, Mary Stephen, Ho Tam, Loretta Todd, Khanhthuan Tran, Phil Tsui, Paul Wong, Su-Anne Yeo, Iris Yudai and Wayne Yung.
‘[The Reel Asian Festival] strikes the best balance between cutting edge and community. Strong programming and deep roots attract a super-hyphenated tribe.’
– NOW Magazine
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Reticent Bodies
$17.00Reticent Bodies is Toronto author Moez Surani’s long-awaited debut collection. Shaped by a childhood spent listening to a mixture of Gujarati, Kutchi, Urdu and Swahili around the kitchen table, while attending a French Immersion school in Toronto, Surani’s poems could define the epitome of Canada’s ethnic layering. Spare Canadian lyricism is combined with unusual linguistic rhythms and sharp bursts of vibrant imagery in an exceptional poetic debut.