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Viva Magenta! Check out these perfectly purple/pink reads in honour of 2023’s colour of the year.
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A is for Acholi is a sweeping collection exploring diaspora, the marginalization of the Acholi people, the dusty streets of Nairobi and the cold grey of Vancouver. Playfully upending English and scholarly notation Bitek rearranges the alphabet, hides poems in footnotes and slips stories into superscripts. With writing that is lyric, layered and deeply felt, the poems in A is for Acholi unfold maps of history, culture and identity, tracing a route to a present where the poet dreams of writing a world without empire.
A man runs for his life from the promise of death held by trees; a lost VHS tape offers footage of a lost, grisly history; a diaspora clings to magical shards of home and more in this collection of genre fiction by authors from across the Canadian Prairies.
A follow-up to 2018’s hit, Parallel Prairies.
Longlisted for Canada Reads; Finalist, City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
In this intimate and moving graphic memoir, Teresa Wong writes and illustrates the story of her struggle with postpartum depression in the form of a letter to her daughter Scarlet. Equal parts heartbreaking and funny, Dear Scarlet perfectly captures the quiet desperation of those suffering from PPD and the profound feelings of inadequacy and loss. As Teresa grapples with her fears and anxieties and grasps at potential remedies, coping mechanisms, and her mother’s Chinese elixirs, we come to understand one woman’s battle against the cruel dynamics of postpartum depression.
Dear Scarlet is a poignant and deeply personal journey through the complexities of new motherhood, offering hope to those affected by PPD, as well as reassurance that they are not alone.
While the poor have always been monitored and surveilled by the state when seeking financial support, the methods, techniques, and capacity for surveillance within and across government jurisdictions has profoundly altered how recipients navigate social assistance. Welfare surveillance has exacerbated social inequality, especially among low income, Indigenous, and racialized single mothers. Krys Maki unpacks in-depth interviews with Ontario Works caseworkers, anti-poverty activists, and single mothers on assistance in Kingston, Peterborough, and Toronto, and employs intersectional feminist political economy and critical surveillance theory to contextualize the ways neoliberal welfare reforms have subjected low-income single mothers to intensive state surveillance. Maki centres their experiences to examine how their status as lone parents prompted fraud investigations and invasive questioning about their relationship status, and triggered investigations by other governing bodies such as child welfare agencies. This book also examines the moral and political implications of administering inadequate benefits alongside punitive surveillance measures. Despite significant restraints, anti-poverty activists, caseworkers, and recipients have discovered individual and collective ways to resist the neoliberal agenda.
Journal
Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award
Longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2024
A riveting exploration of the complexity within mother-daughter relationships and the dynamic vitality of Vancouver’s former Hogan’s Alley neighbourhood.
1930s, Hogan’s Alley—a thriving Black and immigrant community located in Vancouver’s East End. Junie is a creative, observant child who moves to the alley with her mother, Maddie: a jazz singer with a growing alcohol dependency. Junie quickly makes meaningful relationships with two mentors and a girl her own age, Estelle, whose resilient and entrepreneurial mother is grappling with white scrutiny and the fact that she never really wanted a child.
As Junie finds adulthood, exploring her artistic talents and burgeoning sexuality, her mother sinks further into the bottle while the thriving neighbourhood—once gushing with potential—begins to change. As her world opens, Junie intuits the opposite for the community she loves.
Told through the fascinating lens of a bright woman in an oft-disquieting world, this book is intimate and urgent—not just an unflinching look at the destruction of a vibrant community, but a celebration of the Black lives within.
Little Red Warrior is the last remaining member of the Little Red Warrior First Nation. One day, he discovers a development company has begun construction on his ancestral lands. In a fit of rage, Little Red attacks one of the engineers and is arrested for assault and trespassing on his own lands. In jail he meets his court-appointed lawyer, Larry, who agrees to help Little Red get his lands back. Larry convinces his wife, Desdemona, to allow Little Red to move into their basement while they sort out Red’s case. Desdemona and Red strike up an uneasy relationship. When Red notices that one of Desdemona’s eyes is slightly lazy she becomes increasingly neurotic, convinced that Little Red is up to something. Despite herself Desdemona, who is not accustomed to being thrown off her game, is increasingly drawn to Red’s apparently hypnotic Indigenous charisma. As sparks begin to fly between them Larry prepares to fight for Little Red’s Land Rights. An unexpected intervention by a greater power occurs in the court case, and nothing will ever be the same.
Drug-runners threaten the West Coast!
A semi-conscious man looks about a boat’s cabin as a woman presses a wet cloth to his forehead. She’s young, her nails are short, and her small hands are calloused. When another man tries to enter, she grabs a gun: “If you come down here, Joe, I’ll shoot you.”
For a moment, the intruder doesn’t move. “I don’t want your damn’ old hulk,” he tells her. When the woman threatens a second time, he leaves. “You’d better too,” he says. “She’s near sunk.”
So begins the story of Clint, a reform school runaway, and Devvy, an orphaned farm girl saddled with a deceitful drunk of a stepmother. Clint and Devvy are pushed together as they struggle against the corrupt, criminal, violent adults trying to exert control over their lives.
Perilous Passage first appeared in 1949 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post. It has since been published in hardcover, paperback, and in Swedish translation. This Ricochet Books edition marks the first new edition since 1952.
Gathering together powerful voices of feminist writers, peace activists, and matriarchal studies scholars from around the globe, The Legacy of Mothers reconceptualizes mothers, motherhood, and mothering as an alternative human logic to create a new sociopolitical order. The contributors draw on ancient knowledges, Indigenous perspectives, and African traditions like Motherism to argue for the reordering of our world according to a distinctly transformative feminism. The book then explores where this new logic is already taking root,demonstrating that a better world is not just possible but already evolving./p>
Voices of a Generation gathers three Canadian plays that crack open millennial stereotypes to reveal a generation’s complex and varied experiences.
zahgidiwin/love by Frances Koncan follows Namid through multiple generations: as a survivor of abuse in a residential school in the 1960s, as a missing woman held in a suburban basement in the 1990s, and as the rebellious daughter of a tyrannical queen in a post-apocalyptic, matriarchal society. A comedy about loss in the era of truth and reconciliation, zahgidiwin/love uses a mash-up of theatrical styles to embody the millennial creative impulse to remix and remake while presenting a vital perspective on what decolonization might look like both on and off stage.
The Millennial Malcontent by Erin Shields is a gender-swapped adaptation of Sir John Vanbrugh’s Restoration Comedy The Provoked Wife, following a group of millennials during a night out as they search for love and sex and document it all on social media. Satirizing every trope from social media stardom to economic precarity to slacktivism, Shields reveals the loneliness lurking under every smiling profile photo.
In Smoke by Elena Belyea, Aiden’s ex Jordan arrives at Aiden’s door to confront her about the allegation that Jordan sexually assaulted her two years ago, forcing them to discuss their conflicting memories of their last night together and whether and how they’re going to move forward. With Jordan meant to be performed by either a cis-male or cis-female actor, Smoke is a nuanced examination of issues and perceptions surrounding sexual assault and consent.