catalogues | Wednesday May 1, 2024
The 2023 catalogue is replete with avant-garde, mould-shattering, important works in fiction, non-fiction, drama, and poetry.
A project nearly a decade in the making, 2023 saw the release of Lha yudit’ih We Always Find a Way: Bringing the Tŝilhqot’in Title Case Home by Lorraine Weir with Chief Roger William, a community oral history of Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, the first case in Canada to result in a declaration of Aboriginal Rights and Title to a specific piece of land. M.A.C. Farrant delights in her new work Jigsaw, where she explores existence, love, joy, science, history, aging, roads, cows, Buddhism, and more through our seemingly universal love of jigsaw puzzles. Community leader and activist Art Miki released his memoir Gaman – Perseverance: Japanese Canadians’ Journey to Justice which recounts the long journey towards resolution for the historic injustice that deprived Japanese Canadians of their basic human rights during and after World War II.
The 2023 poetry list is bursting with exceptional authors. We are so pleased to have introduced Another Order: Selected Works by Judith Copithorne and edited by Eric Schmaltz. This book gathers the previously inaccessible, genre-defying poetry, art, and prose of Judith Copithorne, an important figure in feminist Canadian poetry. 2023 saw the release of Song & Dread, a new collection from award-winning author Otoniya J. Okot Bitek. andrea bennett released their remarkable collection the berry takes the shape of the bloom explores familial and romantic relationships, parent and child, partner and ex, as a trans person. Nikki Reimer challenges the petrostate in No Town Called We and Wanda John-Kehewin “stands in her truth” as she takes on colonialism in Spells, Wishes, and the Talking Dead: ᒪᒪᐦᑖᐃᐧᓯᐃᐧᐣ ᐸᑯᓭᔨᒧᐤ ᓂᑭᐦᒋ ᐋᓂᐢᑯᑖᐹᐣ mamahtâwisiwin, pakosêyimow, nikihci-âniskotâpân, a finalist for the Raymond Souster Prize. Samantha Nock astonishes with her stunning debut, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist A Family of Dreamers, a love song to northern cuzzins, dive bars, growing up a young Indigenous woman in rural northeast British Columbia, and coming of age in the city.
In drama, local history takes centre stage in The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin & Kitimat by Elaine Ávila and Shadow Catch by Daphne Marlatt. Marcus Youssef and James Long look at Vancouver’s possible future in their surrealist new play Do you mind if I sit here? and coping with personal hardship during the climate crisis comes to the forefront in the darkly-funny No More Harveys by Chantal Bilodeau and modern myth retelling Antigone in Spring by Nathalie Boisvert and translated by Hugh Hazelton.