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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 65–80 of 128 results
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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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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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Precedented Parroting
$21.95Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”
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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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Remembering Taiyaki
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Revolutions
$18.95Revolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities. Working between a Palestinian and Iraqi poetics drawing from artists like Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma and a feminist Canadian poetics inspired by Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Nicole Brossard, Revolutions spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.
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Salt in My Life
$20.95In her latest collection of poetry, Lien Chao covers a wider terrain of forms and styles to include symphonic lyrics, reflective travelogues, and multimedia-poetic stage performance. Sound and vision blend across the collection with a sense of textual fluidity, connecting her physical and emotional journeys as she strives for inner peace. Salt in My Life is a spiritual quest carried out through the creation of poetry.
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Saturn Peach
$20.00In Saturn Peach, Lily Wang establishes a distinctive voice that is part heartbreak and part wise witness chronicling the strangeness of a technologized world. When asked to describe her book, Wang answered in her quintessential way, “There are things I never want to know but always know. Every day I live with them. Every day I live. I am like a young fruit. Like a peach, common, not the popular kind but oblate, saturn. I live and inside me this pale fruit, yellow and white. I take bites out of myself and share them with you. Maybe you taste like me. Maybe you hold this fruit and become a tree.” If ever there were a book that disarmingly – and seemingly effortlessly – encouraged its reader to become a metaphor, then Saturn Peach is it.
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Scarborough
$19.95SHORTLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2022
NOW A MOTION PICTURE directed by Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson; screenplay by Catherine Hernandez
Trillium Book Award and City of Toronto Book Award finalist; Edmund White Debut Fiction Award finalist; A Globe 100, National Post and Quill and Quire Best Book of the Year
Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education.
And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father’s mental illness; Sylvie, Bing’s best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.
Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighbourhood that refuses to be undone.
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Seeking Spirit
$22.95In her memoir Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non)Buddhist Memoir, Linda Trinh says she had everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. Yet she felt empty. Growing up in Winnipeg, Linda helped her mom make offerings to their ancestors and cleaned her late dad’s altar. These were her mother’s beliefs, but was Buddhism Linda’s belief? In her late-twenties, Linda sought answers in Egypt and China and prayed during corporate downsizing, seeking meaning in contemporary life. Via a collection of essays, she plays with form and structure to show the interconnection of life events, trauma, and spiritual practice, to move from being a passive believer to an active seeker.