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Pride Reads

Happy Pride, June and all year long! Discover these amazing titles by LGBTQ2SIA+ writers from across Canada.

All Books in this Collection

  • Winter’s Cold Girls

    Winter’s Cold Girls

    By: Lisa Baird
    $18.00

    In her debut collection of poetry, Lisa Baird explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political scope. These poems bear witness to the resilience of bodies and sexualities and are grounded in an earthy humour. Baird’s poetic style shifts from lyric to deeply personal to fantastical: an old woman plants broken light bulbs and harvests dark flowers; two sisters grow feathers in a nest in the backyard maple; a mother turns into a deer and escapes the unspeakable through a kitchen window. These are poems of disruption, discovery, and witness–they balance brutal honesty with a welcoming intensity. They want you to come close.

  • Wrist

    Wrist

    By: Nathan Adler
    $19.95

    In 1872, dinosaur hunters become embroiled in a battle over the discovery of fossils in Northern Ontario as their excavation crews are driven mad by a bizarre and terrifying illness. Over a hundred years later, Church and his family show signs of the same monstrous affliction. As he begins to unravel his family’s dark history, Church must race to protect the secrets buried deep in bones and blood. A fascinating story embracing Anishinaabe legend, culture, and language, Wrist is set in the fictional town of Sterling and Ghost Lake Reserve, and is Nathan Adler’s debut novel. It is the companion volume to Ghost Lake, which won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award in Published English Fiction.

  • You are Enough

    You are Enough

    By: Smokii Sumac
    $16.00

    Finalist for the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English. In his debut poetry collection you are enough: love poems for the end of the world, Smokii Sumac has curated a selection of works from two years of a near daily poetry practice. What began as a sort of daily online poetry journal using the hashtag #haikuaday, has since transformed into a brilliant collection of storytelling drawing upon Indigenous literary practice, and inspired by works like Billy Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World, and Tenille Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems. With sections dealing with recovery from addiction and depression, coming home through ceremony, and of course, as the title suggests, on falling in and out of love, Sumac brings the reader through two years of life as a Ktunaxa Two-Spirit person. This collection addresses the grief of being an Indigenous person in Canada, shares timely (and sometimes hilarious) musings on consent, sex, and gender, and through it all, helps us come to know that we are enough, just as we are.

  • You Only Live Twice

    You Only Live Twice

    By: Chase Joynt, Mike Hoolboom
    $14.95

    YOLT explores two artists’ lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive.

    The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolve. Man and woman. Queer and straight.

    What if it’s not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call ‘second lives’: Chase’s transition from female to male and Mike’s near-death from AIDS.

    Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT asks intimate questions about what it might meanto find love and hope through conversation across generations.

    ‘Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom here give each other the gift so many people only dream of: ample, unhurried space to unspool crucial stories of one’s life, and an attentive, impassioned, invested, intelligent receiver on the other side. The gift to the reader is both the example of their exchange, and the nuanced, idiosyncratic, finely rendered examination it offers of biopolitical experiences which, in many ways, define our times. I’m so glad they have each other, and that we have this.’

    – Maggie Nelson

    ‘Despite its complexity, the book is refreshingly clear, direct, and elegant, and pleasingly consistent in tone despite its shared authorship … This is an ode to friendship that is as beautiful as it is revelatory.’

    – Shawn Syms, Quill & Quire

    ‘You Only Live Twice is an intelligent ode to enchantment, to the possibilities that arise in ‘second lives’ when all past expectations have been foreclosed.’

    – Chris Kraus

    ‘The writing is out of the park – strong and surprising, a relay race of brilliant twirling, tossing thoughts back and forth like balletic rugby bros. Joynt and Hoolboom’s dances of disclosure are so courageous and generative, gifts to us all.’

    – John Greyson