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Winner of the 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry * 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist * 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award Shortlist * 2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist * 2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal Jury Selection * 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize Shortlist
An expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family.
Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it’s-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, D.M. Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can’t quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself, Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness.
More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one’s own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.
Talent can be discovered in the most unexpected of places! With a little inspiration and a magical cape, Drew learns to embrace his creativity with confidence and pride.
The school talent show is just around the corner, and every kid has signed up to perform—except Drew. Drew thinks he doesn’t have any talents worth sharing. He loves butterflies, his Grandma, and playing pretend—but those aren’t talents, right? Talents are juggling, singing, or magic tricks! He is discouraged until his Grandma brings him to meet a drag queen named Saturn, who gives Drew the confidence to fully embrace his true self and declare his talent proudly. With Saturn’s advice and magical cape, can Drew give an unforgettable performance at the school talent show?
Finalist for the 2024 Quebec Writers Federation Fiction Award
Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren’t your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a remarkably original, literary page-turner that explores such pressing questions of our time.
A depressed writer visits a war zone. He knows it’s a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there. Amid the fighting, he stumbles into a small strip of land that’s being reimagined as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. As he learns about the principles of the collective, he moves between a fragile sense of self and the ethical considerations of writing about what he experiences but cannot truly fathom. Meanwhile, women in his life—from this reimagined society and elsewhere—underscore truths hidden in plain sight.
In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.
After the sudden death of her lawyer husband, Nora flees her small town for the anonymity of Toronto. An ad lures her to rent a cheap apartment, where the landlord Henry lives in the next unit. Initially helpful to Nora, his charm hides a desire to manipulate women, leaving Nora vulnerable to his predations. Nora hides some secrets of her own too – secrets that might lead to her undoing. A propulsive plot with terrifying twists, this essential debut novel brings forth a confident new literary voice to the trade.
Dying to be Thin is a witty and inspirational look behind locked doors into the secret life of a young teenager battling with the eating disorder bulimia. Written from the authors own personal experience, the play unfolds to tell the poignant story of Amanda, as she sets out to have her “Last Ever in Her Whole Life Binge.”
When Erika Drake, of the Westmount Drakes, met and fell in love with Marc Reiser, a Jew from northern Ontario, their respective worlds were turned upside down. Set against the backdrop of the first three years of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven captured the hearts and minds of its generation and helped to shape the more diverse and inclusive culture we have today.
Published in 1944, this classic novel was very timely; it spoke of the prejudices of its time, when Gentiles and Jews did not mix in society. Earth and High Heaven was the most successful novel of its time, winning many awards and prizes, including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1945 (an award founded to reward books that exposed racism or explored the richness of human diversity). It was translated into eighteen languages and the film rights were purchased by Samuel Goldwyn for a remarkable $100,000. Earth and High Heaven was the first Canadian novel to top the New York Times bestseller list for the better part of a year.
When Erika Drake, of the Westmount Drakes, met and fell in love with Marc Reiser, a Jew from northern Ontario, their respective worlds were turned upside down. Set against the backdrop of the first three years of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven captured the hearts and minds of its generation and helped to shape the more diverse and inclusive culture we have today.Most agree on the urgent need for climate action, yet we are often divided on how to stop the destruction of the natural world. Earth for Sale exposes the danger of governments giving over this responsibility to powerful private interests, namely the same energy, chemical, agribusiness, and bottled water corporations that brought us to this ecological brink.
Their answer? Put a price on nature and bring it into the market. Under the inviting language of “nature-based solutions” and “ecosystem services,” this financialization and commodification of nature takes many forms: carbon trading; debt-for-nature swaps; water pollution trading; biodiversity credits; green, blue, and wildlife conservation bonds; plastics offsets; water futures; and more.
Renowned activist Maude Barlow, who sounded the alarm decades ago on the corporate assault on water, argues the financialization of nature is dangerous and surprisingly few understand the implications, including many in environmental movements. With detailed examples and meticulous research, Earth for Sale unmasks this insidious new form of corporate plunder. We must not allow the movement to protect nature and biodiversity to be handed over to private interests whose driving motive is, and always has been, profit.
Shortlisted 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.
A revolutionary chemist, Dr. Fritz Haber discovered too late that when his knowledge was put in the hands of the wrong people, millions would die; his efforts to serve humanity futile against political will, nationalism, and war. This updated edition of Vern Thiessen’s Governor General’s Literary Award–winning play about the collision of power and pride still resonates with verve and vigour.
It’s a busy summer for Truly. Though her mother is less of a mother than she ought to be, and spends her time drinking and smoking and working her way through new boyfriends, Truly is determined to raise as much money for herself as she can through her lemonade stand … and to prove that her cool new neighbour is the one and only King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. And when she can’t find motherly support in her own home, she finds sanctuary with Andy El, the Salish woman who runs the trailer park.
An abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement.
Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, you come to a road sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement—about why we’re here in front of this sign? Mixing historical documents, oral histories, and experimental translations of the original lesbian poet’s works, this book combines documentary and speculation, surveying a century in reverse. This town is one of many with a classical name. Take it as a symbol: perhaps in a place that no longer exists, another kind of future might be possible.
This is the story of Barry and Lupus. Barry, an exhausted newspaper owner physically and economically on the ropes, meets Lupus, a wolf-German Shepherd cross, at an animal shelter. Despite a nagging belief that he cannot take responsibility for anything or anyone else, Barry rescues Lupus and takes him home.
Every Wolf’s Howl recounts their incredible three-year journey together, back and forth across the country, enduring poverty, heartache, and illness. Beginning at the tail end of Barry and Lupus’s story and looping back in time, this memoir presents a moving portrait of economic struggle and an intimate glimpse into an extraordinary friendship. Lupus’s inner wolf never completely submits to domestication: he heels only when he chooses to. Barry witnesses something determinedly natural, untamed, and fierce within Lupus. Something admirable. Something he can learn from.
Do you believe in angels? When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene?s mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way. Everything Affects Everyone,/em> is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.
Revived from a coma after a traumatic event, Megan’s injuries leave her capable of great violence, forcing her desperate physician Cassandra to recruit Alison, an Indigenous clinician, as her consultant. Alison uses an innovative form of technologically enhanced expressive arts therapy to augment the rehabilitative effects of speaking Lenape, their shared (and almost extinct) language. However, this reminder of cultural expression and identity triggers Megan, putting herself into a life-threatening situation. With Megan’s safety in jeopardy, Alison must internalize a life-changing lesson to save her: pain is often unjust, but it also reminds us that we’re alive.
Everything I Couldn’t Tell You is a potent reminder of the healing and rehabilitative power within Indigenous languages.
Award-winning writer Joelle Barron looks back at history through queer eyes in their second poetry collection.
Excerpts from a Burned Letter places the experiences of historical figures and fictional characters in modern contexts—and makes their queerness explicit. This collection highlights the circular nature of time, demonstrating how even in a post-marriage-equality world, queer experiences and queer histories still face erasure.
From the perspective of a single, modern speaker, each poem is haunted by a fictional or historical queer couple, connecting ancestors to their descendants and underlining the ancientness of being queer. The book also explores themes of religion, disability, motherhood, birth, and the experience of being a queer child. The poems zoom in and out; gross, visceral depictions of bodies and their functions stand beside poems that call out the hypocrisies of religion in both its extreme and subtle forms. These poems describe the experience of being a queer person in the present day—writing the queer history of the future.
When searching for stories of themselves in history books, queer people are often met with
denial and resistance. Excerpts from a Burned Letter provides explicit acknowledgement where
it didn’t exist before: You were here. You live on.