Welcome to your next indie book

With winter looming and pandemic life in full swing, staying at home is the new national hobby.
Luckily, we have good books to keep us company. Canadian Independent literary presses publish books that reflect the richness and diversity of Canadian stories. Whether your taste is fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, or graphic novels, indie presses gift us with inventive, edgy, award-winning, homegrown books that inspire, awaken, challenge, and provoke.Books on All Lit Up belong to some of Canada’s best independent presses—all of which are small businesses. And now, more than ever, we want our purchases to support local companies, not internet giants. Scroll down to discover, buy, and collect their new releases.

All Books in this Collection

Showing 97–97 of 97 results

  • ZOM-FAM

    ZOM-FAM

    By: Kama La Mackerel
    $16.00

    In their debut poetry collection, Kama La Mackerel mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius. Composed of expansive lyric poems, ZOM-FAM (meaning “man-woman” or “transgender” in Mauritian Kreol) is a voyage into the coming of age of a gender-creative child growing up in the 80s and 90s on the plantation island, as they seek vocabularies for loving and honouring their queer/trans self amidst the legacy of colonial silences. Multiply voiced and imbued with complex storytelling, ZOM-FAM showcases a fluid narrative that summons ancestral voices, femme tongues, broken colonial languages, and a tender queer subjectivity, all of which grapple with the legacy of plantation servitude.

    Emerging from a creative process in spoken word and live performance, these poems transform the page into a stage where the queer femme body is written and mapped onto the colonial space of the home/island. Interwoven with Kreol, ZOM-FAM showcases a unique lyrical sensibility, a musicality influenced by the both unforgiving and soothing rhythms of the ocean, where the poet enunciates the complexity of their displaced Indo-African roots, “the lineage of silence / that we weave in-between our intimacies.”