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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
Showing 17–32 of 178 results
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Body Politic
$17.95The point is that we started the conversation.
In 1971 Phillip was on the cusp of starting something big. Something that would make history. Now he’s an aging journalist trying to make sense of Grindr. Phillip was a founding member of The Body Politic, a gay-liberation newspaper based in Toronto. As he recounts memories of censorship battles, police raids, historic rallies, and the onset of HIV/AIDS during an intimate encounter with a younger man, their generational differences shine a light on the massive shifts in queer identity and politics over the last fifty years.
This historical drama reimagines the events surrounding the birth, life, and death of one of the most important journalistic forces in Canada, and the opportunities it created for the future.
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Body Work
$17.95If Body Work begins by writing desire through a belief in the stability of the physical body, this is undone in exploring symptoms of disease, new self-knowledge and rewriting one’s personal story. Because Body Work explicitly undertakes to write of a protracted and often painful period of chronic illness, these poems complicate notions of ability and disability. Connecting all six long poems are prose footnotes chronicling a natural history of human skin. This emphasis on skin, as metaphor for the body, allows for both an exploration of the desire for connection as well as a fear of vulnerability. Body Work is also interested in expanding notions of what poetry is, or could be, and is especially interested in both language play and innovative lyricism. Of this poetry, Julia Emberley, editor of English Studies in Canada says: “Emilia Nielsen plays the dermographer and writes the skin as if she is wearing its language inside out. There is a lusciousness in Nielsen’s language; you can not only taste the words but also feel the desire for touch in them.” In spare, arresting language, Body Work explores not only pleasure but pain, wondering how to repair a self forever changed by illness.
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Bones
$20.00Poems about a young two-spirit Indigenous man moving through shadow and trauma toward strength and awareness.
Bones, Tyler Pennock’s wise and arresting debut, is about the ways we process the traumas of our past, and about how often these experiences eliminate moments of softness and gentleness. Here, the poems journey inward, guided by the world of dreams, seeking memories of a loving sister lost beneath layers of tragedy and abuse. With bravery, the poems stand up to the demons lurking in the many shadows of their lines, seeking glimpses of a good that is always just out of reach.
At moments heartrending and gut-punching, at others still and sweet, Bones is a collection of deep and painstaking work that examines the human spirit in all of us. This is a hero’s journey and a stark look at the many conditions of the soul. This is a book for survivors, for fighters, for dreamers, and for believers.
“Here is a spare and urgent voice that speaks of ‘wounds and beauty,’ that gestures to a story of trauma and abuse while offering us a potent journey of self-reckoning and reclamation. Bones entwines brutality with the deepest tenderness and in its clear-eyed way asks us, as poetry must, to re-see the world.” –Catherine Bush, author of Accusation and The Rules of Engagement
“Tyler Pennock’s poetry unfurls like breath: measured, light, caught, whispering, and vital. It charts memory with a steady hand and unerring allegiance to locating the ‘beauty/in terrible things.’ Bones addresses the effects of intergenerational, state-sponsored trauma with an enviable grace, inscribing and affirming life on the other side of overwhelming pain, abuse, and grief. It carries on, resilient, defiant, gazing at the stars, one breath at a time.” –Laurie D. Graham, author of Settler Education
“Tyler Pennock’s Bones is a soft meandering through the memories of the narrator’s hearthome: a place in which trauma, kinship, abuse, and nostalgia cradle one another in a circle. Here, poetics are deployed to inspect the most minute of objects with such wild abandon that the narrator transplants us into a world rife with sharpness so as to make the image complete, focussed, lifelike, photographic even as he continually ‘wish[es he] were like water’. Here we find memory and dream animated in equal measure: two spirits sitting in a basement, a headless mother, a white bear, wihtiko, and a sister slowly vanishing. Lyrical, witty, heart-wrenching, and empowering, Pennock’s debut book of poetry is a contemplative epic asking us to ponder the ethics of remembrance in all of its lacings of razing and revitalization.” –Joshua Whitehead, author of Full-Metal Indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed
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Bottle Rocket Hearts
$19.95Welcome to ’90s Montreal. It’s been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. Revolution seems possible to eighteen-year-old Eve, who is pining to get out of her parent’s house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back. She meets Della: ten years older, mysterious, defiantly non-monogamous, and an avid separatist. Their explosive beginning and volatile relationship paves a path for the personal and political to collide on the night of the referendum.
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Bowling Pin Fire
$14.95In his second book of poems, Andy Quan recounts a series of firsts: first time listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue, first loss of a friend, first dance with a man. Building on earlier explorations of memory, sexuality, and culture that are the signatures of his best work, Bowling Pin Fire transcribes the arc of one man’s life from growing up Chinese in Vancouver, to seeing the world through the lens of fearless, free-spirited youth, to arriving, as we all must, at the initial cautionary glimmerings of midlife. The rituals and rivalries of grade school, the later experiments with everything new, the close-knit dynamics of family and far-flung friends, the happenstances and fidelities of love, the elation and hangover of travel to unexpected quadrants of the globe all prompt the quality of reflection necessary to the leading of a truly examined, contemporary life. Andy Quan asks of himself and of everyone: how to be fully in and of the moment? Bowling Pin Fire is filled not with empty answers but with the good fortune of worldly insight.
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Breaking Boundaries
$13.95Breaking Boundaries: LGBTQ2 Writers on Coming Out and Into Canada is an anthology of fiction, personal essay, and poetry by LGBTQ2 writers (Canada-born, immigrated, or refugee). The common thread throughout is that for LGBTQ2 people, Canada is the place to be. Nominated for the 2019 GEORGE RYGA AWARD for social awareness. Authors: Teryl Berg, Kyle Chen, Wendy J. Cutler, Corrie H. Furst, Kevin Henry, Anne Hofland, Chantal Hughes, Masaki Kidokoro, Dale Lee Kwong, Austin Lee, JL Lori, Eka Nasution and Rainer Oktovianus (narrators), Adam Nixon, Gail Marlene Schwartz, Caelan Sinclair, LS Stone, Sosania Tomlinson, E.T. Turner, Hayley Zacks. Teacher resources available on publisher website: rebelmountainpress.com/breaking-boundaries-teacher-resources
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Breathing Lessons
$18.00A bold and explicit debut novel by one of the most visceral new voices in gay fiction. Breathing Lessons is the story of Henry Moss, a homosexual everyman whose life knows none of the limitations or abuses his predecessors experienced. When a teenaged Henry came out to his mother, she worried only that he’d be lonely. At the time, he thought her concerns were old-fashioned. Two decades later, he’s had supportive family and friends, he’s well-liked by the athletes who train with him, trusted in his professional life, parties whenever he pleases, and performs all manner of sexual acts with whomever he wants. But as he gets older and, increasingly, the men he sleeps with are married, Henry finds that his mother may have been right. Can he find the lasting intimacy he craves in his life amidst the equal-opportunity freedom afforded by his generation’s openness? Learning to navigate between the two is as delicate as learning to breathe again.
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Buoyancy Control
$18.00Buoyancy Control, the latest collection of poems from Vancouverite Adrienne Gruber, presents a fascinating culmination of land and sea, mind and body, in linguistic form. Metaphors of oceans, lakes, and other bodies of water (as well as the creatures that inhabit those spaces), swim and swirl their way through Gruber’s languid poems, which are divided into two evocative sections that explore themes of sexuality, sexual identity, and queerness, while confronting the feelings of loss and longing found in relationships, and the chance glimpse into a new life, while still recovering from a painfully failed connection.
Buoyancy Control is an honest, at times humorous, and revealing look inside the mind and body of a woman manoeuvring through experiences of longing, loss, and the fluidity of sexual identity, presented in a powerfully feminist and unapologetic poetic voice, from one of Canada’s most promising young writers.
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Burning the Night
$19.95Includes Author-Curated Discussion Questions!
From small-town Alberta, Curtis comes to Edmonton to obtain a teaching degree. There he forms a close friendship with his elderly, blind Aunt Harriet, considered a family pariah due to her eccentric enthusiasm for a lost world of artists and musicians.
When Curtis begins reading aloud to Harriet the diary her intended husband Phillip kept before his death during World War One, an obsessed Curtis examines parallels to his own life: his desire to become a skillful artist and to find fulfilling love.
Timeless and essential, award-winning author Glen Huser’s Burning the Night spans across generations and distance, traversing from Vancouver to Halifax, as it bears down on the history of Canadian painting and Curtis’s awakening as a gay man.
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Canary
$18.95Canary
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Catch and Release
$20.00About coming out and coming of age.
In Catch and Release, twenty-one-year-old Lucca looks back on her childhood and adolescence as she comes to terms with both her sexual orientation and her mental illness. When she falls in love with the brilliant and beautiful Adèle, Lucca is forced to acknowledge not only that she is not and never has been straight, but also that her relationship with a teacher in high school was not as harmless as she might have thought.
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Chenille or Silk
$18.00Chenille or Silk is a startling first collection of confessional poetry examining the slippery relations of desire, class, embodiment and trauma. Emma McKenna’s writing traverses the bounds and the wounds of a family marked by poverty and intergenerational trauma. The collection asserts the primacy of intimacy and sexuality to subjectivity, as the poems move through the struggle to find identity, love and belonging in an urban queer community’s ever-shifting economy of desire. Striking, brave and at times uncomfortable, Chenille or Silk captures the ambivalence–and the hope–of possibility.
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Claimings and Other Wild Things
$20.00Noelle Schmidt plows through the distorted shrapnel of trauma dormant and still tingling.
Claimings and Other Wild Things is a brave debut poetry collection which delves into a catalog of personal struggle and identity, all the while inviting readers to imagine the “prophet in the dirty motel” or “the illusion of soft flesh giving way” or the pent up rage of a “boxed-up grenade sent round trip”.
This is poetry of exactitude — honest, at times tender, a collection which reminds us how life’s obstacles inform the accruing intensity of being human in the twenty-first century.
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Claws of the Panda
$24.95Claws of the Panda tells the story of Canada’s failure to construct a workable policy towards the People’s Republic of China. In particular the book tells of Ottawa’s failure to recognize and confront the efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate and influence Canadian politics, academia, and media, and to exert control over Canadians of Chinese heritage. Claws of the Panda gives a detailed description of the CCP’s campaign to embed agents of influence in Canadian business, politics, media and academia. The party’s aims are to be able to turn Canadian public policy to China’s advantage, to acquire useful technology and intellectual property, to influence Canada’s international diplomacy, and, most important, to be able to monitor and intimidate Chinese Canadians and others it considers dissidents. The book traces the evolution of the Canada-China relationship over nearly 150 years. It shows how Canadian leaders have constantly misjudged the reality and potential of the relationship while the CCP and its agents have benefited from Canadian naivete.
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Coconut
$19.95In her debut collection, Canadian National Slam Champion Nisha Patel commands her formidable insight and youthful, engaged voice to relay experiences of racism, sexuality, empowerment, grief, and love. These are vitally political, feminist poems for young women of colour, with bold portrayals of confession, hurt, and healing.
Coconut rises fiercely like the sun. These poems bestow light and warmth and the ability to witness the world, but they ask for more than basking; they ask readers to grow and warn that they can be burnt. Above all, Nisha Patel’s work questions and challenges propriety and what it means to be a good woman, second-generation immigrant, daughter, consumer, and lover.
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Company of Crows, The
$16.95At thirteen, bookish Veronica Reid lives in a world inside her head, even if she isn’t entirely successful at resisting the intrusions of the world outside. It’s bad enough that she has to wear awful new glasses; it’s downright disastrous that she’ll have to spend the summer at Laughing Willows Trailer Park with her obnoxious younger brothers and unhappy mother. She can’t imagine anything worse. Lonely and bored, she begins to observe the activities of the local crows, even as she gradually finds a community among the odd denizens of Laughing Willows. When violence erupts, she finds unexpected strength both inside herself and in the people–and the crows–around her. LGBTQ interest.