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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 65–80 of 164 results
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I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me?
$17.95A funny and sweet—but not saccharine—jaunt through the back alleys of queer love.
Intimate, nostalgic, and surprising, the poems in I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? spark connections that alter trajectory and carry lasting resonance. Encounters across phone lines, over drinks, through walkie-talkies, and unspoken recognitions between queer bodies fill this collection with explorations of what it means to be seen.
The micro-narratives in I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? both celebrate and grieve the connections they illuminate. Nolan Natasha’s poetry is plainspoken but lyrical, sweet but frank, nostalgic but unromanticized, combining the atmosphere of Eileen Myles with the musical insight of Helen Humphreys. These poems bring an unflinching examination and a keen sense of humour to moments of human connection and self-exploration.
“Nolan Natasha’s writing is so clear-eyed, funny, tender, and absorbing. I love these poems and this sparkling debut.”—Zoe Whittall
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I Hope We Choose Love
$17.95American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book; Winner, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?
In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author’s characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.
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In Our Own Aboriginal Voice 2
$18.95In Our Own Aboriginal Voice 2 is a powerful collection of short fiction, non-fiction, personal essay, poetry, and original Indigenous artwork by Indigenous authors and artists from across Canada. Featuring the work of established authors such as the late Connie Fife, and up-and-coming Aboriginal authors to watch out for (according to CBC Books) Joanne Arnott, Michelle Sylliboy, and Dennis Saddleman, as well as emerging writers from across Canada who shine a light on the lives of Indigenous Peoples living in Canada. The Indigenous selection committee was headed by author Richard Van Camp. Foreword by former Chief Edmund Metatawabin–appointed to the Order of Canada and author of Up Ghost River: A Chief’s Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History, a finalist for the 2014 Governor General’s Award.
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Indiana Pulcinella
$18.95After saving the Calgary Stampede from a potential terror attack in Glycerine, Detectives Lane and Li find themselves on the hunt yet again, this time following a pair of gruesome killers whose perfectly composed crime scenes match those of an inmate put away by Calgary Police years earlier. As more people come into the line of fire, Lane must team up with some unlikely new allies in order to crack the case.
Meanwhile, with the birth of a new nephew, the happily chaotic Lane household must deal with the taciturn detective’s estranged, fundamentalist family and their efforts to interfere in raising the child.
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it was never going to be okay
$18.95it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry:i am fivemy sisters are saying boyi do not know what the word means but—i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,the hollowness of the o, the blade of y
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It’s All Tru
$17.95“There used to be people dying and they didn’t know why and there was nothing anyone could do, but most of all—no one cared whether we lived or whether we died.”
Love, sex, and pharmaceuticals are put to the test when a gay couple’s open relationship is threatened with dangerous consequences.
Kurt, a silver fox dance instructor, and his young fiancé, Travis, have an arrangement: when one’s away, they’re allowed to stray . . . as long as they’re safe. One night, over a dinner conversation about wedding invitations, Travis admits that he had a fling with a man named Gideon whom he believes removed the condom during sex. He also reveals that he didn’t start taking the HIV preventative medication PrEP (Truvada)—as promised—putting himself and Kurt in danger of contracting HIV. When Gideon appears on their doorstep in the middle of the night, the threat against Kurt and Travis’s relationship is an alarming force to be reckoned with.
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Kiskajeyi- I AM READY
$19.99Kiskajeyi- I AM READY is a ground breaking Indigenous poetry book that also includes ancient Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) hieroglyphics. In 2020, Kiskajeyi- I AM READY won the Canadian Indigenous Voices Award (IVAs) for Published Poetry (English category). Indigenous artist and writer, Michelle Sylliboy blends her poetry, photography, and Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) hieroglyphic poetry in this unprecedented book.
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Listen Before Transmit
$18.00Dani Couture’s latest poems are transmissions that travel across the cosmos, the spaces we live in, as well as within the more intimate distances we navigate between one another. Distances we hope to bridge with contact, often to profound or disastrous effects. With language rooted in science, sociology, memoir and aesthetics, she questions the limits of our bodies, both human and celestial. Like the subtle cues we lend one another and the hopeful messages we send into deep space, these poems broadcast our greatest aspirations and vulnerabilities.
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Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)
$18.95The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman’s unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island.
The experimental form functions at once as a manual for how pop culture can help soothe and mend us and as an exploration of oft-overlooked sources of pleasure, including karaoke, birding, and butt toys. Ultimately, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) reveals with glorious detail and emotional nuance the woman the narrator loved, why she loved her, and the depths of what she has lost.
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Lost Family
$17.95A bold experiment in autobiography, Lost Family: A Memoir is a book of sonnets that centres around the deaths of John Barton’s mother and sister, but tracks much of the poet’s early life in Alberta through to a conflicted, restless adulthood. Alongside tales of love, friends and mentors, intolerance, AIDS, and the struggle for equality, Barton’s collection–his first in eight years–explores how being gay rewrites and expands one’s sense of lineage, both inherited and chosen. A book of penetrating self-awareness and humility, marked by powerful image-making, Lost Family: A Memoir is a profound test of poetry’s ability to give coherence to life. It is also a celebration of the sonnet form, that finely made reliquary that permits memory to take shape.
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Lost Lagoon / Lost in Thought
$20.00After moving to Vancouver’s West End in 2014, The Human is drawn to a small body of water called Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Daytime visits, with a surprising array of wildlife, are quietly revelatory; but so is suddenly waking in the night when owl hoots, or geese startle in alarm at otter on the prowl. The Human savours this up-close relationship between wildlife and fast-paced urban living, questioning the interface between the urban and natural world.
Upon learning the lagoon was named by nineteenth century Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson, of Mohawk and English origin, Johnson then becomes a presence in the narrative. Pauline Johnson wrote evocatively about it: “Among the wild rice in the still lagoon/In monotone the lizard shrills his tune.”
During five years of intimate counterpoint between urban living and wildlife, The Human’s notions are challenged and altered. Questions of how significant the specificity of place is to story, how our relationship to nature is altered by urban living, and how we might return to the natural world. Reminiscent of Henry Thoreau’s Walden Pond, perceptions about nurturing, fear, inventiveness, delight, death, protection, humour, even tenderness change as the lagoon has exposed what being human in the twenty-first century actually means.
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Love Cake
$20.95Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Lesbian Poetry, 2012
Honourable Mention, San Francisco Book Festival, Poetry, 2012In Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Refusing to forget the traumas of post 9/11 Islamophobia, and Sri Lanka’s civil war, Love Cake documents the persistence of survival and beauty. It maps the complicated, luscious joy of reclaiming the body and sexuality after abuse, examines a family history of violence with compassion, and celebrates the beautiful resistance of queer people of colour in love and home-making.
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love, life
$19.95A hilarious romp through love, food, and Italy.
Do you love life? In this hilarious frolic through the hills of Italy, our heroine discovers the past is never really gone: it runs beside us our entire lives, just waiting to bite us in the arse. love, life is a made-up true fable about coming out, going back in, getting fat, Italian food, and stalking the Piazzo Bernardini. It’s a haunting love story, transcending decades, countries, and heartbreak. A Newfoundlander in Italy offers the humour, optimism, and romantic yearning the world needs now.
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Lucky Elephant Restaurant, The
$10.95When the young daughter of popular radio talk show host Bobbie Reddie disappears along with Bobbie’s ex-husband, Detectives Lane and Harper are on the case. Haunted by flashbacks from a previous missing child case, Lane once again takes to the streets of Calgary looking for answers.
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Lyric Sexology Vol. 1
$19.95Largely written before the current cultural visibility of trans lit, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is Salah’s prescient contribution to a canon of self-determined literature that explores transness. In this case, the author sidesteps the “I” in the text and instead draws on archives–sexological, anthropological, psychological, among others–to demonstrate the shifting and shifty nature of our identities, affiliations, and narratives.
This 2017 edition is the first to be published in Canada and features four new poems and a new cover design by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li.
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Mad Long Emotion
$19.95Desire and dieffenbachias: new poems from the award-winning author of Otter .
Mad Long Emotion wants to talk flora to fauna like you. Loosestrife shoos away humans and green carnations flirt with handsome men. Numerous species, both spiny and spineless, prove as invasive as desire: from Great Lake lampreys to hydraulic triceratopses, we’re all just looking for love.