Gift Guide Week with Selena Mercuri

Picks by Selena Mercuri

For the person in your life who underlines every other sentence to savour the small details: There Is No Blue by Martha Baillie (Coach House Books)

Anything Martha Baillie writes should be read (and reread) with a great deal of sustained attention, and that is certainly the case with There Is No Blue, a book of three personal essays centring around the deaths of the author’s mother, father, and sister. Rather than separate losses, these are interconnected absences that reshape her understanding of family and memory. Baillie asks questions about how clearly we can ever see those we live most closely to, how family imprints itself on us in millions of ways we may never fully understand, and what remains when presence becomes absence. There Is No Blue is the perfect gift for the reader who treats books as conversations that continue long after the last page, who believe that the best writing doesn’t provide answers but deepens the questions. It is an invitation into a more attentive way of being in the world.

For the person in your life whose reading appetite moves like weather: Speech Dries Here on the Tongue by Hollay Ghadery, Resiqra Revulva, & Amanda Shankland (The Porcupine’s Quill)

Speech Dries Here on the Tongue is the perfect gift for someone whose reading appetite moves like weather. This anthology gathers Canadian poets to wrestle with our climate emergency and its psychological toll. Edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland, the collection features work by Brandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Conal Smiley, Amanda Shankland, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien, Khashayar Mohammadi, Kathryn Mockler, Tara McGowan-Ross, D.A. Lockhart, Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Aaron Kreuter, gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sydney Hegele, Karen Houle, nina jane drystek, AJ Dolman, Conyer Clayton, and Gary Barwin. One of its central questions is the connection between how we treat each other and how we treat the natural world. Some contributors experiment with visual poetry and digital forms, others find dark humour in our predicament, while still others trace the connections between dying houseplants and melting glaciers. This collection captures how the climate crisis infiltrates our most intimate spaces—our dreams, our bodies, our relationships—while acknowledging how differently it touches each life depending on geography, identity, and circumstance. Speech Dries Here on the Tongue offers evidence that others too are searching for language adequate to this moment, creating community through the difficult act of continuing to speak when silence would be easier.

For the person in your life who reads to remember how childhood felt before they had the words for it: Starry Starry Night by Shani Mootoo (Book*hug Press)

Shani Mootoo’s Starry Starry Night is an immersive return to the textures of early memory—how a child learns language, secrecy, tenderness, shame, and fear. Set in 1960s Trinidad, this work of autofiction unfolds through the eyes of Anjula, a young girl navigating the contradictions of her world: intimacy and violence, beauty and danger, devotion and silence. Mootoo’s prose captures the sensory precision of childhood through small details, such as the feel of lime and honey on the tongue. The novel moves through kitchens scented with garlic, seaside vacations, and adult quarrels, showing how memory begins as a physical experience before it becomes story. As Anjula matures, her attention to women acquires a quiet charge—admiration that borders on longing, moments of closeness that feel ordinary yet electric. There are no declarations, only sensations that linger in Anjula’s body as she experiences desires without the vocabulary to describe them. Starry Starry Night is a portrait of becoming that traces how the earliest strings of love, art, and identity emerge first as feeling, long before they can be spoken.

For the person in your life who feels more like themselves outdoors: Skin by Catherine Bush (Goose Lane Editions)

Skin is a collection of stories that asks what it means to live in constant contact with the world and with one another. Each story examines how closeness—physical, emotional, environmental—can alter the shape of a life, leaving traces that are as indelible as they are invisible. The characters we meet include a storm chaser drawn to the ferocity of nature, a screenwriter with a history of short-lived relationships, a migraine-sufferer attending a migraine convention, and an Arctic-explorer hypnotized by an iceberg. Skin follows people who are changed by what they touch and what touches them in return. Whether through love, illness, or environmental collapse, Bush reveals how porous we really are, how weather, bodies, and feeling exist on the same continuum. This is a collection for readers who value fiction that lingers, that resists easy resolution, that pays attention to the symbiosis between body and world, and that uncovers the depths of both exterior and interior storms.

For the person in your life who knows nostalgia can be both ache and balm: from time to new by Lydia Kwa (Gordon Hill Press)

Lydia Kwa’s from time to new is a collection that moves with the rhythm of healing—slow, deliberate, and deeply attuned to the body’s wisdom. These poems trace how grief, memory, and regeneration overlap, how the act of noticing itself becomes care. Kwa writes about grieving and recovery from illness, surviving intergenerational trauma, and navigating life in the Asian diaspora in the wake of increased violence against BIPOC communities. One poem returns to the building where the poet’s mother once lived, now occupied by strangers, and captures the strange mix of familiarity and loss that comes with outliving a place.

From fallen trees to birdsong at dawn, Kwa finds meaning in the smallest gesture of endurance. Her language balances the clinical and the spiritual, as well as the physical and the imagined. Each poem feels like a breath taken in awareness, acknowledging pain but also allowing space for the possibility of renewal. from time to new invites readers to slow down, to listen, and to recognize the connections between the natural world, the body, and the act of survival.

For the person in your life who reads poetry to make sense of hard things: This Report Is Strictly Confidential by Elizabeth Ruth (Caitlin Press)

Elizabeth Ruth’s debut poetry collection fuses personal loss with bureaucratic language. Drawing from the archived medical and government records of her late aunt, who spent three decades institutionalized, Ruth rebuilds a life from the fragments left behind. The collection combines case notes, family memory, and imagined correspondence to provide a record of care and its failures, to ask the question of how a person’s story can be reclaimed once it has been taken away. The poems move between past and present, between file and feeling, capturing the disparity between what is documented and what is lived and restoring nuance, humour, and tenderness to a life reduced to reports. In this collection, personal history becomes social history, revealing how one woman’s confinement reflects a larger story about power, care, and those written out of public memory. The book’s structure—part archive, part elegy—shows Ruth’s gift for finding narrative in fragments.

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Selena Mercuri is a Toronto-based writer. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Hart House Review, Room (forthcoming), and The Literary Review of Canada. She was the recipient of the Norma Epstein Foundation Award.

She can be found online at selenamercuri.com.

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Thanks to Selena for these six fantastic book recommendations. You can order any of these books through All Lit Up, or click the “Shop Local” button on the book listings to discover them at your local indie bookstore.

Keep up with this year’s gift guide here, and stay tuned for picks from Kirti Bhadresa, next!