news | Tuesday July 15, 2025

A Review of Sir John A.

Sharon Grose reviews Sir John A.: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion by Drew Hayden Taylor in The Ontario Farmer. A production of Sir John A. is running presently as part of the Blyth Festival.

Of the play, Grose says, “Taylor’s trademark ability to examine Canada’s complicated colonial past with humour and humanity is on full display in this whip-smart comedy.”

Read the complete piece here

news | Tuesday July 8, 2025

Kuei, My Friend Listed as an Anti-racism Resource

Kuei, My Friend by Deni Ellis Béchard and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (translated by Béchard and Howard Scott) is named as a resource on the government of Canada’s anti-racism learning hub! Check it out here.

news | Friday July 4, 2025

Talon Titles in The Tyee

Exciting to see two Talonbooks spring 2025 titles, allostatic load by Junie Désil and Revolutions by Hajer Mirwali, appear in The Tyee’s article about great books to read this summer. These can’t-miss poetry collections are a great addition to any TBR list. View all of their recommendations here.

news | Thursday July 3, 2025

Disability Pride Month 2025

July is Disability Pride Month! To celebrate the month, we’re highlighting recent and forthcoming titles written by disabled/chronically ill authors who will knock your socks off.

This brand new poetry collection by the multi-talented Junie Désil explores the intricacies and intersections of chronic illness, the commodifications, and the burden of systemic injustice. Désil digs into the personal, medical, and career spheres, sharing the experience of seeking healing in a sharp world which does not always believe you or wish you well.

An excerpt:

“cancel all my health-type subscriptions,
turn off all my notifications and reminders
to drink water, to get up and stretch for thirty seconds,
to box breathe, cancel previously free now not-free pandemic
subscriptions during my short-lived shelter-in-place
aspirations of knitting, breadmaking, preserve making,
guitar playing, indie-film watching.

put on my noise-cancelling earphones
and actually – i want to so much –
rest.”

Check out allostatic load here.

Forthcoming this autumn is tours, variously by poet and researcher (with a focus on mad, disability, queer, and trans rhetoric) Drew McEwan! The poems of this collection saunter through an abstracted network of transformational encounters where bodies struggle with and against a game of follow the leader, postured by the series of connected rooms we share. Together they guide the reader through an interrogation of the ways we tour the spaces of language, always stepping between the sayable and the unsaid.

An excerpt:

“Advice:

Lay out the ground lines the length and breadth of the monument proposed.
Collect foliage for the upper tier, browned leaves for flooring.
What remains ever exterior to thought is thought.
Lay bare the concrete while still damp.
Place visionary on paper, anticipate business to come.
The room does not exist before revealing itself.
Curve and scale may lead us to false impressions.
Surveil the animal complacencies beyond the door.
A forum models a proportionate citizenry.
Retain the excess, motivate a corrective.
Count the legs of the chair before an occupation.
Do not allow negativity to presuppose a body only to remove it.”

Pre-order your copy of tours, variously here.

Our favourite poet from lunaria is back with another stellar poetic offering in th book uv lost passwords 1. ths book asks is langwage lost wev had creativ langwage almost 7 thousand yeers we still dont undr stand each othr veree well dew we want 2? the book uv lost passwords 1 arrives this fall.

An excerpt from “th alphabets uv our beings”:

“dayze n nites retreev us
conseev us re create us row guide n steer us enlarge us diminish us find sheltr n recuse releev spin resiliens clasp each othr in hopeful em brayce th pineal mysterious”

Pre-order your copy of the latest bill bissett here.

Wishing everybody an excellent Disability Pride Month!

news | Wednesday July 2, 2025

Talon Title on Literary Hub

The New Long Poem Anthology (Second Edition) edited by Sharon Thesen is one of the ten collections named on Literary Hub’s list of Canadian poetry books to read to expand your mind. Some other familiar names such as R. Kolewe, rob mclennan, and David Homel are on the list as well! Read all of Dawn Mcdonald’s recommendations here.

news | Friday June 27, 2025

The Middle in The Winnipeg Free Press

melanie brannagan frederiksen reviews the new poetry collection The Middle by Stephen Collis in The Winnipeg Free Press. She calls the work, which extends Collis’s investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering, “Stephen Collis’s latest tour de force.” Read the entire article here.

news | Friday June 27, 2025

June is Audiobook Month!

Did you know? June is audiobook month! We love to listen to a book on the go. Picking out radishes at the grocery store? Audiobook! In transit? Audiobook! Cleaning up a stack of dishes? (You get the picture.) Here are a handful of available/forthcoming audiobooks to keep you company as you go about your day.

1. The Weight of Snow by Christian Guay-Poliquin, translated by David Homel

Available now! Listen to the winner of the Prix littéraire France-Québec, the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-Language Fiction, the Prix Ringuet, and the Prix littéraire des collégiens! After surviving a major accident, a man is trapped in a village buried in the snow and cut off from the world by a nationwide power failure. He is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for wood, food, and eventual escape from the village. Will they manage to stand up against external threats and intimate pitfalls? Download your copy here.

2. Unfuckable Lardass by Catriona Strang

Available now! Unfuckable Lardass reverts the patriarchy’s gaze. It began as an attempt to refract and undercut an outrageous insult allegedly lobbed at German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This stellar poetry collection draws on language from a wide range of sources – including European witch trials, Marx, Darwin, Renaissance and popular music, and common profanity, as well as from the author’s experience of post-reproductivity and of carrying out caring labour during declines, deaths, and the COVID-19 lockdown. Download your copy here.

3. Gaman – Perseverance: Japanese Canadians’ Journey to Justice by Art Miki

Keep your eyes peeled, because coming soon is the audiobook of the winner of a 2025 Canada-Japan Literary Award! Gaman – Perseverance is a revealing memoir by the former president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians that describes the long journey towards resolution for the historic injustice that deprived Japanese Canadians of their basic human rights during and after World War II. Gaman – Perseverance details the intense negotiations that took place in the 1980s between the Government of Canada and the NAJC – negotiations which finally resulted in the historic Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement of September 1988 and the acknowledgment by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney that Canada had wronged its own citizens. Watch this space!

Talonbooks uses Glassboxx, a free app, to deliver its audiobooks. Learn more here.

news | Thursday June 26, 2025

Future Works Review

Steven Ross Smith reviews the new poetry collection Future Works by Jeff Derksen in The British Columbia Review. Smith calls the collection “surreal, witty … and most often political … brilliant.”

An excerpt from the article: “Clever poems, accessible and complex in their leaps … Derksen has the gift of being able to embrace the language of institutions and structures … into modes, sometimes personal, sometimes societal comment, that draw engagement, critique, and are accessible.”

Read the complete piece here.

news | Thursday June 26, 2025

rob mclennan Reviews Talon Titles

rob mclennan has penned reviews of several of the new spring 2025 Talonbooks poetry titles! Check out his review of Revolutions by Hajer Mirwali here, his piece on allostatic load by Junie Désil here, and his take on Crowd Source by Cecily Nicholson here.

news | Wednesday June 25, 2025

bill bissett X The Chemical Brothers

The latest track by Tom Rowlands, co-founder of The Chemical Brothers, is built around a sample of poetry by literary phenom/lunaria’s top poet (not to mention author of the forthcoming th book uv lost passwords 1) bill bissett. Learn more and check out the song in this article in Electronic Groove.