Consolidation is a natural phase in industry life cycles, and publishing is no exception; we’ve witnessed this happening at scale with branch plants, and the Canadian-owned sector certainly isn’t immune to the factors that also influence our larger counterparts. Fuelled by broader economic pressures like rising costs, inflation, and labour shortages, it makes good business sense to pool resources both to survive and to become more efficient.
But it’s reductive to say that this merger is only about bottom-line health or finding efficiencies. Our decision emerged from conversations about the state of the Canadian publishing industry, our individual aspirations, poetry’s role in the world, and the importance of stewardship. As the established systems that support discovery and book sales erode, we’re changing in order to help get our books in more hands.
Brick and Assembly are envisioning a new way forward as comrades and co-conspirators in a world that’s considerably hostile to the power of the written word. This merger is our way of committing to writers and readers. Our ethics are complementary; we value being fiercely independent and nurturing literature from that vantage point. We recognize that our books might not be for everyone, but there are readers for every book, and that is enough. We are committed to pursuing sustainability over endless growth.
We’ve just begun blending our day-to-day operations, and already we’re seeing small savings on things like website hosting fees and book storage spaces, which improves our confidence in this being the right path forward as we start to contemplate larger changes like distribution. And it means we’re already able to reinvest those savings into supporting our authors and their books.
And we’re touching everything—physical books as we set up the Brick archive in Assembly’s office, production files as we consolidate our digital file storage, receipts and P&Ls and financial statements—and trying to do so with respect for what’s come before while starting to articulate how things might look different going forward. Shifts in perspective are exciting; it’s so rare in our busy industry to take time to reflect and reimagine how and why we work. Now that we’re doing so, we’re seeing opportunities everywhere.
What does this mean for our authors and their books? We hope it will result in an introduction to a wider readership across North America and beyond, and more brainpower to generate greater opportunities for marketing and promotion. In the end, this is a grand experiment, but isn’t that the point of literature?
To that end, here are some of our favourite recent experiments:
The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia
Written in a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge and turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the UK asylum system, the West is both saviour and abuser, seeking always to shape her, but never succeeding in suppressing her voice. The 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize Judges’ Citation gets to the book’s heart: “A provocative, multi-faceted gem. Full of fierce anti-colonial rage and subtle artistry, addressing what it means to be a migrant in today’s fractured Britain.”
Goose by Melanie Dennis Unrau
The opposite of erasure poetry, “hand-traced, layered poems in Melanie Dennis Unrau’s latest collection, Goose, stalk and dance across the page…These poems are an angry, funny, generous intervention into the national mythology,” according to the Winnipeg Free Press. Tracing words the way a tracker moves across land, Goose collects details from Northland Trails, a book of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about the Athabasca region authored by “father of the tar sands” S. C. Ells, to explore extraction and the relationship between humans, non-humans, and the land in an act of deconstructive literary criticism.
Relative to Wind by Phoebe Wang
This poetic rendering of Phoebe Wang’s decade-long journey of learning to sail examines the loose tether between sailing and a creative life. From working alongside crewmates in tempestuous conditions to becoming an avid racer and organizer to drafting a wistful love letter to a Wayfarer dinghy, the Literary Review of Canada sums Relative to Wind up best: “In formally inventive chapters, Wang touches upon the history of sailing, the legacies of colonization and discrimination, the emergence of North American yacht clubs, and the evolution of Toronto’s waterfront.”
echolalia echolalia by Jane Shi
Jane Shi’s relentlessly inventive debut embodies the spirit of experiment on every page. In these poems, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one’s chosen family, love, and justice. Rebecca Salazar said it beautifully: “An anthem for the chronically ill and chronically online, echolalia echolalia sings with the complicated queer love we need to keep other alive. These poems are tricksters of form that play rough with colonial grammar, guided by a keen eye for satire that never loses sight of the urgency for marginalized kin to survive on our own terms.”
Infinite Audition by Charlie Petch
Part poetry book, part theatre audition resource, Infinite Audition reflects a transmasculine and disabled experience of the world in a voice that is funny, humane, and rooted in deep authenticity. The sections range from solo performance, to musical, dance, and puppetry collaborations, to monologues and audition pieces for trans and non-binary actors from Petch’s theatrical and operatic works. Each poem is its own little world: could be the voice of a hotel, a closet, Medusa’s serpent, or surgically removed body parts out for a night on the town. As Farzana Doctor wrote, “Reading Petch’s poetry is like watching a play that starts as a drama, then transforms itself into a circus, and then a joyful opera.”
The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson
Created entirely out of words found on trash collected at local swimming holes, Anna Swanson’s garbage poems reclaim hyperbolic corporate marketing-speak for the expression of physical pleasure, queerness, and vulnerability. Written in the years following a head injury, this book traces the connections experienced in the fiercely embodied act of swimming with a chronically ill body. Paired with tender, full-colour illustrations of the source garbage by award-winning artist April White, these poems refuse to conform to an illness-and-cure narrative and instead become a vibrant archive of the process of piecing together a voice back together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy. Michael V. Smith aptly wrote about the book: “Swanson’s recycling the language of garbage is queer genius.”
* * *
Thanks to publishers Leigh Nash and Alayna Munce for sharing a little behind the Assembly Press x Brick Books merger.
