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Pride Reads 2025
Get into the spirit of Pride Month with these 20 new and notable books from the LGBTQ2SIA+ community.
All Books in this Collection
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a body more tolerable
$19.95Ferocious and vulnerable poems about redefining acts of creation, destruction, deconstruction, and recreation, from a singular Indigiqueer point of view
a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.
In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.
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Bebías Into ?hndaa Ke
$28.00Bebías Into ?hndaa Ke: Queer Indigenous Knowledge for Land and Community is a powerful collection of essays, stories and conversations that provide us with a diverse roadmap for navigating and overcoming hate, supporting queer Indigenous kin, and revitalizing radical ethics of care for building healthy, inclusive, and self-determining lands and communities. A celebration of trans, queer, and Two-Spirit Indigenous brilliance, with an intentional inclusion of voices from the North (the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Inuvialuit and Nunatsiavut), the essays in this collection offer a wealth of queer Indigenous theory, experience, and practices, with a unique emphasis on the critical role of land in these conversations.
The contributors, who range from young activists, artists, families, and both emerging and established scholars, provide insightful and transformative queer perspectives on a number of pertinent topics, including: knowledge reclamation, resurgence, nation-building, community life and governance, cultural revitalization, belonging, family relationships, creative practice, environmental degradation, mental health and wellbeing, youth empowerment, and Indigenous pedagogy. Amidst the ongoing violence of settler colonization, and its legacies of exclusion and erasure that continue to target queer, gender-diverse and Two-Spirit Indigenous people, this collection is an invaluable gift and resource for our communities, showing us that a different world is possible, and reminding us that queer Indigenous people have always belonged on the land and in community.
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Eraser
$18.95An immersive experience, Eraser delves into the memories and fantasies of a classroom of students as they figure out who they want to be. Six students guide readers through their different journeys, taking them along to the cafeteria, change rooms, and playground, to the places where they feel safest and the most brave, vulnerable, and afraid.
Afroze just moved to Canada from Pakistan and is struggling to fit in as a white-skinned gender-questioning convert to Islam. All Jihad wants is to be cool, but he struggles with the appearance of this new student who doesn’t look like any of the Muslims he knows. Noah’s brother just died, and he’s been avoiding processing his grief, which makes him lash out at his best friend, Eli. Eli doesn’t know how to support Noah, who he also harbours questioning feelings for. Whitney wants to live by her own rules in her own imaginary world, but she’s forced to deal with annoying kids like Tara. Tara loves school and getting straight As, but all the pressure she feels eventually adds up and she crumbles.
Finding a balance between tough realities and honest fantasies, Eraser is an energetic and sentimental look at what it’s like to navigate differences and connections as a kid.
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Gay for Pay
$18.95In Gay for Pay with Blake & Clay, two out-of-work gay actors teach straight men how to play the gay roles that lead to awards season glory. Blake and Clay may not be leading men, but they are leading these men to greatness by teaching them to go from straight to straight-up booked. Because representation matters, but Blake and Clay’s representation hasn’t called them in ages. Blake & Clay’s Gay Agenda invites you to the fabulous book launch for the world’s first how-to manual about the eternal conundrum that is gay living. Watch as Blake and Clay take the guesswork out of the queer experience and unite the community once and for all. Because if the gays can agree on one thing, it’s that they can’t agree on anything.
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Green by Zachari Logan
$20.00An exciting new collection of ekphrastic poems accompanied by a compilation of green sketches via the lens of a queer poet and visual artist. Zachari Logan carried a sketchbook as he travelled the world and responds to iconic artwork as well as art that once existed but is now lost, destroyed, or far away. Whimsical art and thoughtful poems that ponder the nature of existence.
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Hag Dances
$24.95Hag Dances
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Home Fires Burn
$22.00In the conclusion of the award-winning Merry Bell trilogy, a celebrated philanthropist is found slumped against his car, frozen to death. PI Merry Bell is hired by his son, country music star Evan Whatley, to find out the truth behind what really happened on that desolate stretch of road. As Merry’s investigation uncovers old wounds which never healed, her own are revealed as she confronts her pre-transition past and questions the boundaries of family and friendship.
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How I Bend Into More
$21.95Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza’s grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation. Paper-quilled shapes represent the poet’s body on the page; these shapes weave between lines of verse and with them the reclaimed disabled body is made. How I Bend Into More is a distinctive poetic debut that challenges ableist perceptions of normalcy, and centres “the double architecture / of ( metamorphosis (.”
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I Remember Lights
$24.95The first novel from award-winning poet Ben Ladouceur, I Remember Lights depicts a time when the world promised everything to everyone, however irresponsibly.
In summer 1967, love is all you need…but some forms of love are criminal. As the spectacular Expo 67 celebrations take shape, a young man new to Montreal learns about gay life from cruising partners, one-night stands, live-in lovers, and friends. Once Expo begins, he finds romance with a charismatic visitor, but their time is limited. When the fireworks wither into smoke, so do their options.
A decade later, during the notorious 1977 police raid on a gay bar called Truxx, he comes to understand even more about the bitter choice, so often made by men like him, between happiness and safety.
I Remember Lights is a vital reminder of forgotten history and a visceral exploration of the details of queer life: tribulation and joy, exile and solidarity, cruelty and fortitude.
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In Your Nature
$23.95Poems that show us a world in which precedent for gender transition is everywhere if you know how to look.
“I delete my history / badly,” writes Estlin McPhee in this searing, witty, lyrical, and elegiac debut collection of poems about intersections of trans identity, magic, myth, family, and religion. The line refers at once to a young person’s browser data that reveals an interest in gender transition; an adult’s efforts to reconcile complicated relationships; a culture’s campaign to erase queerness and transness from the historical record; and a religion’s attempt to pretend that its own particular brand of miraculous transformation is distinct from the kind found in folktales or real life. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.
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Lily
$29.99“Pass Me By feels like something David Bowie would have created if he made comics instead of music: original. Ahead of its time. Utterly addictive.” – The Comics Journal
Exploring family, loss, tragedy, identity, and self-discovery, the third book in the award winning Pass Me By series, Lily, is a heartfelt tale about how our stories carry through time, and how we come to terms with change.
17 year old trans girl Lily, visits her estranged grandfather Ed, as he struggles with his rapidly developing Alzheimers. Lily too, faces struggles of her own.
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One Box
$24.95One Box is a children’s counting story about a migrant worker sending a box of gifts and supplies to their loved ones in the Philippines. Also known as Balikbayan boxes, these are typically filled with things like canned goods, clothing and snacks. But in One Box there’s more than just stuff — it’s full of promises.
With tenderness and gorgeous illustrations, this Filipino parent tells their child about all the things they will do together when they are reunited. Part of a young queer family separated by migration and indentured labour, they don’t count the days. They count the ways they will rebuild their relationships.
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Openly Karl
$24.95Openly Karl is a frank and generous memoir by one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s most well-known media figures.
Dive into the private and public life of Karl Wells, as told in his own words. From his birth in Buchans and early life in St. John’s, to his rise in media and a 32-year career with Here and Now at the CBC, Openly Karl is a rare opportunity to bring the face and voice you know from your television back into focus. While he will forever be known as “the weatherman,” Openly Karl explores the expanse of Karl Wells’s career and the nuances of his personal life, including coming to terms with being gay during a less tolerant period of Newfoundland and Labrador’s history and throughout the subsequent decades of social change. At times fascinating and funny, at others harrowing and heartbreaking, Karl’s story will keep readers tuned in.
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Soft Shelters
$20.00A compassionate meditation on the transformative power of relationships, Soft Shelters examines what it is to become home for another person, how to shelter those we love without losing ourselves in the process. These poems ask us to consider the gifts left by dear ones who drop into—and sometimes back out of—our lives; how the love we have to give the world is in many ways a patchwork of the love we have received. Like offering a pulled thread from one end while weaving new fabric on the other, this work is both an unravelling and a becoming.
Marie Metaphor Specht explores the double-edged gift that is caregiving through the lens of queer motherhood, intimacy, and our complex relationship with the natural world. In a world that gives us much to worry about, these poems ask us to reframe our worry as a transmutation of love. In a world that asks us to be stronger every day, this book finds unexpected strength in softness.
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Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells
$19.95In their second poetry collection, Tawahum Bige explores belonging and voice of a Two-Spirit Dene youth.
These poems are a stark plunge—an answer to how voice emerges for a young Two Spirit growing up in so-called “Surrey, BC,” far from his Łutselk’e Dene territories. The fundamental thrum in which vocal cords produce sound to whisper, cry, holler and laugh—these inner workings are made corporeal through moments of growth from childhood to young adulthood to show how the seeds sprouted for someone who needed to learn to express to find their path.
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Subterrane
$22.95A speculative comedy comprised of a carousel of Black and Queer voices being pushed further underground by urban prosperity.
New Stockholm, a metropolis like any other across North America, is unofficially divided between two worlds. Its upwardly mobile form the centre of its gleaming eye, but their prosperity and affluence are not the focus of Zeynab’s government-funded abstract documentary. Her lens trails to the city’s margins instead, in polluted industrial wastelands such as Cipher Falls, one of New Stockholm’s last affordable neighbourhoods, where creatives and other anti-capitalist voices increasingly find themselves pushed into demeaning, dead-end jobs. In this growing underground network, Zeynab’s lens focuses on the mysterious demise of Doudou Laguerre, whose death may be related to his activism against a construction project.
Subterrane connects us to a constellation of Black and Queer voices, the hair braiders, tattoo artists, holistic healers, weed dealers, and sidewalk horticulturists struggling to make a life in New Stockholm. Together, they illustrate how in cities across the continent, entire communities are being sidelined in the name of prosperity.
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This Report is Strictly Confidential
$20.00Presented in four linked sections, this debut poetry collection from award winning writer Elizabeth Ruth offers readers rare glimpses into private worlds, revealing the life of the author’s aunt who lived for decades in a notorious government-run residential hospital, exploring the experience of critical illness, and addressing the biological father Elizabeth Ruth has never met. With fresh, inventive use of language, biting irony and an unflinching gaze upon the human condition, these intimate poems give voice to the things that can’t be said. This Report Is Strictly Confidential is an act of literary alchemy that carries all kinds of secrets out of the shadows and into the light, thereby transforming ugliness into beauty.
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Under All the Lights
$24.99A songwriter wrestles with instant stardom and his bisexuality in this raw and propulsive novel for fans of If This Gets Out and Alice Oseman’s I Was Born for This.
After one of his songs goes viral, Ollie Cheriet gets the opportunity of a lifetime: a cross-country tour, an album deal, and a chance to help his family with their financial struggles. The only problem? Ollie has major stage fright, a symptom of his anxiety disorder. As pressure from performing, social media rumors, and his romantic life rises, his mental health starts to spiral. So he’s surprised at how grounded he feels when he collaborates with his wildly talented—and distractingly cute—touring partner, Jesse. Music has always helped Ollie through hard times, but he’s going to have to be more vulnerable than he ever thought possible to find self-acceptance in the glow of the spotlight.
Featuring characters from Maya Ameyaw’s acclaimed debut When It All Syncs Up, this story takes readers into the green room, immersing them in the vivid behind-the-scenes world of touring musicians.
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West of West Indian
$20.95Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize, Poetry, 2025
West of West Indian constructs the Queer Caribbean experience as simultaneously individual and collective, embracing the language that continues to unsettle queer life. The collection is, at once, a summons and a love letter to familiar figures like the Bullerman, the Chichiman, the Funny man, and the Anty man. It collects a distinctly queer Vincentian Canadian account of love and autonomy, and while it represents a written journey into queer pain, it is also an exhibition of pleasure flowing through the bodies and minds of its many subjects.
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Winging It
$24.95A wedding and a summer camp that Tommy and Carter are never going to forget.
Tommy discovers magic exists, his boyfriend is a rock giant, and his sister is marrying one of the leaders of a supernatural community called Aetherborn.
Carter learns to navigate an in-person relationship, introducing Tommy to the magical world, and being involved in his Ariki’s wedding.
Both boys need to build their confidence in each other, themselves, and their relationship. The Door Tech summer camp seems to be the perfect way to do that, until they get magically transported to the not-so-fictional world of Everdome. In this realm of Domed continents floating in space, winged beasts, and new cultures, the boys will have to overcome challenges beyond anything they’ve seen before.
The only way they, and their relationship, can survive is if they start Winging It!