Reads for Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month, and what better way to mark the occasion than with these amazing books by authors with disabilities.

All Books in this Collection

Showing 17–25 of 25 results

  • Still Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader

    Still Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader

    $39.95

    <More than a decade after the publication of Living the Edges: A Disabled Woman’s Reader, the lives of women with disabilities have not changed much. Still Living the Edges provides a timely follow-up that traces the ways disabled women are still on the edges, whether that be on the cutting edge, being pushed to the edges of society, or challenging the edges?the barriers in their way. This collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities, both physical and mental, from nations such as Canada, the United States, Australia, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe. Through articles, poetry, essays, and visual art, disabled women share their experiences with employment, relationships, body image, sexuality and family life, society’s attitudes, and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. In their own voices, they explore their identity as women with disabilities, showcasing how they continue to challenge the physical and attitudinal barriers that force them to the edges of society and instead place themselves at the centre of new and emerging narratives about disability.

  • The Art of Floating

    The Art of Floating

    $22.95

    Melanie Marttila captures the solace and healing she has found in the terrestrial landscapes, flora, and fauna of northeastern and southwestern Ontario while balancing the ebbs and flows of her mental health. There is similar reprieve in looking skyward as she shares in beautifully crafted poems the reflections of celestial patterns on moods, perceptions and relationships. Through the often insignificant and mildly miniscule moments in life, Marttila demonstrates the truth and hope that lie within each, whether connecting with land or sky. The Art of Floating is dedicated to the poet’s father, who taught her how to surrender to and survive the rough waters of mental illness.

  • The Black Drum

    The Black Drum

    $18.95

    Hailed as the world’s first Deaf musical—told entirely in American Sign Language and Signed Music—The Black Drum revolves around Joan and her journey to healing after the death of her wife, Karen. Since Karen’s passing, Joan has been unable to share her music with the world, anguish snatching her desire to perform. Joan’s grief pulls her into a bizarre, black-and-white world where her two beautiful tattoos come to life as guides and together they confront a monster called the Minister. But the only way to defeat the Minister and begin to heal is for Joan to embrace her own voice.

    An epic fantasy about grief and healing, The Black Drum questions the concept of music we are conditioned to believe, suggesting that music is not just something you hear, it is something you see and feel.

  • The Future Is Disabled

    The Future Is Disabled

    $24.95

    In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled – and what if that’s not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?

    Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other – and the rest of the world – alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.

    Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.

    This updated edition includes a new chapter and afterword by the author.

  • The Repoetic

    The Repoetic

    $20.00

    A whorling pseudotranslation of French Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux’s La Repoetique, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is a herniating long-poem, a w(h)orld built by and for the word. Unconventional and otherwise inconceivable relationships thrive in this unreal space, where hot tub (s)cum, The Tinder-Poem, comes to life to date a mercurial living-meme, the Chose-Coke Poser: sometimes Goblin, sometimes aristocratic variant of the Femboy Hooters meme. The whorld at once a food-tray fastness, a clotted pocket mirror propping open a mouth, and a bloody buffet for twenty befanged criminals seeking refuge from the law. Whorld as ever-unrolling unraveling rug; as yawnsense; as slimey timey oneness; as aerated English, Nu-Cue-Ler Alberta English, used-to-be-the-bottom-of-an-Ocean English, as the trembling timbre of the Tinder-Poem’s voice asking “does your English always fight like this, or just at the holidays?” The Repoetic is the realm of the loser, the cruiser, and the havering grief that an immortal Mother asks of us. Sieve for the unreal, forgotten, and trampled; for Lady Di and Dido and Bart Simpson’s unending boyhood. The cerebral, no-chill, scab-picking, contours flush to contours queertopia, the nemesis to cartopia, straight-time and straight-rhyme alike. The Res Poetica a long-overdue middle-finger to Plato?s no-poet Res Publica. And though no panacea nor samizdat, The Repoetic‘s an annihilating solvent; the joke-rupt-by-hiccup haghounding its way into existence twixt split sycamore Pocky sticks; the stretched elastic embouchure of the things we wish we could say yet can’t couch-twirl thru the threshold. The Repoetic a singu(hi)larity, the Poem a noise the Poem annoys.

  • The Winter Knight

    The Winter Knight

    $24.95

    Arthurian legends are reborn in this upbeat queer urban fantasy with a mystery at its heartThe knights of the round table are alive in Vancouver, but when one winds up dead, it’s clear the familiar stories have taken a left turn. Hildie, a Valkyrie and the investigator assigned to the case, wants to find the killer — and maybe figure her life out while she’s at it. On her short list of suspects is Wayne, an autistic college student and the reincarnation of Sir Gawain, who these days is just trying to survive in a world that wasn’t made for him. After finding himself at the scene of the crime, Wayne is pulled deeper into his medieval family history while trying to navigate a new relationship with the dean’s charming assistant, Bert — who also happens to be a prime murder suspect. To figure out the truth, Wayne and Hildie have to connect with dangerous forces: fallen knights, tricky runesmiths, the Wyrd Sisters of Gastown. And a hungry beast that stalks Wayne’s dreams.The Winter Knight is a propulsive urban fairy tale and detective story with queer and trans heroes that asks what it means to be a myth, who gets to star in these tales, and ultimately, how we make our stories our own.

  • We Speak Through the Mountain

    We Speak Through the Mountain

    $19.95

    The enlivening follow-up to the award-winning sensation The Annual Migration of CloudsTraveling alone through the climate-crisis-ravaged wilds of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, 19-year-old Reid Graham battles the elements and her lifelong chronic illness to reach the utopia of Howse University. But life in one of the storied “domes” — the last remnants of pre-collapse society — isn’t what she expected. Reid tries to excel in her classes and make connections with other students, but still grapples with guilt over what happened just before she left her community. And as she learns more about life at Howse, she begins to realize she can’t stand idly by as the people of the dome purposely withhold needed resources from the rest of humanity. When the worst of news comes from back home, Reid must make a choice between herself, her family, and the broken new world.In this powerful follow-up to her award-winning novella The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed is at the top of her game as she explores the conflicts and complexities of this post-apocalyptic society and asks whether humanity is doomed to forever recreate its worst mistakes.

  • Where the Silver River Ends

    Where the Silver River Ends

    $22.95

    Lyrical realism meets family drama meets sparkling global folktale.

    Joan, a half-Chinese English conversation teacher unmoored in Europe, flees Budapest for a fresh start. Stepping off the train in Bratislava, she meets Milan, a proud Roma teenager, and they strike up a friendship. Milan helps Joan settle into the city, and in turn, Joan introduces him to Adriana, who has travelled to lay the memory of her dead mother to rest. They form an unlikely trio, bound by love and luck into something like family.

    At the crossroads of youthful hope and the startling magic of coincidence, Where the Silver River Ends delves deep into mixed-race identity, systemic oppression, family reconciliation, and what happens when we gather the courage to slip out of the current and make our own way in the world.

    Praise for Where the Silver River Ends:

    “A rich, engaging novel about the difficulties of being an outsider.”—Foreword Reviews

    Praise for Anna Quon’s other novels:

    “An empathetic coming-of-age story about the redemptive power of love.”–Globe and Mail on Low

    “Quon writes with a great deal of humour, and she spins a good yarn.”—Quill & Quire on Migration Songs

  • Why I Was Late

    Why I Was Late

    $20.00

    With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch’s debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.

    Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, brings a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing–Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject–grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence–is off limits.

    A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.

    “Charlie Petch’s Why I Was Late is a poetic debut with the wisdom of a sage and the emotional range of an expert comedian. … Do yourself a favor and read this book. This is a master at work.”–Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World