news | Wednesday April 2, 2025

You're Invited to the Talonbooks Spring 2025 Launch

You’re invited to celebrate the new spring releases from Talonbooks! Please join us at the Martha Lou Henley Rehearsal Hall on Friday, May 23, to welcome the following books to the world:

allostatic load by Junie Désil
Crowd Source by Cecily Nicholson
Future Works by Jeff Derksen
Revolutions by Hajer Mirwali and
Uiesh / Somewhere by Joséphine Bacon, translated by Jessica Moore!

The launch will be hosted by andrea bennett, author of the berry takes the shape of the bloom.

The Martha Lou Henley Rehearsal Hall is wheelchair and scooter accessible. There is a parking lot behind the venue in the alley between East 3rd and East 4th Avenues. Attendance is free! Snacks and drinks will be served. A live stream will be available on the Talonbooks YouTube channel. See you there!

Talonbooks Spring 2025 Launch
Martha Lou Henley Rehearsal Hall
1955 McLean Drive
Vancouver, BC
May 23, 2025
Doors open at 7:00 p.m.; readings begin at 7:30 p.m.

news | Tuesday April 15, 2025

Wet in MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Alexa Cho reviews Wet by Leanne Dunic in MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing.

Of the collection, Cho writes: “Wet does not hold back in explaining all the ways gentrification and labor exploitation hurt Singapore’s citizens. Numerous short vignettes and poems are simply the narrator living her life, but she constantly witnesses heart-wrenching moments in the process. … Wet is replete with dynamic and original forms of storytelling, breaking barriers between genres and incorporating images to visualize what cannot be described.”

Read the complete piece here.

news | Sunday April 13, 2025

An Interview with Jeff Derksen

BC BookWorld interviews Jeff Derksen about his poetry journey to date and his latest collection, Future Works.

From the interview:

“BCBW: You are also involved in the visual arts community. How does that intersect with your written poetry?

JD: In any of the cities I’ve lived in—Vancouver, Nelson, Calgary, New York, and Vienna (Austria)—I’ve always been part of those two communities—artists and writers—and that sparked a lot of friendships and collaborations. … Being part of two communities in that way, I’ve never felt like an isolated or solo poet and the ideas and dynamics of contemporary art have definitely shaped how I write poetry and how I think about poetry in the world. For me, it has been communities of writers and artists and others who have influenced my work, more than an individual writer.”

Read the complete piece here.

news | Friday April 11, 2025

Wet Named a Finalist for the 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

A huge congratulations to Leanne Dunic whose poetry and photography collection Wet is a finalist for the 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize!

In Wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. In photographs and language shot through with empathy and desire, Wet unravels complexities of social stratification, sexual privation, and environmental catastrophe.

You can view all of the titles shortlisted for the 2025 BC and Yukon Book Prizes here. Congratulations to all of the finalists!

news | Thursday April 10, 2025

allostatic load Has Arrived!

Great news! allostatic load, the second poetry collection by Junie Désil has arrived! allostatic load navigates the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuous years marked by global racial tensions, the commodification of care, and the burden of systemic injustice. allostatic load invites readers to hold the vulnerability and resilience required to navigate deep healing in a world that does not wish you well, in a world that is inflamed and consequently inflames us, in a world where true restoration and health must co-occur with the planet and with each other.

From “he has beautiful flowering trees this elder neighbour”:

“one time he dropped by with fresh-caught
salmon
sweet sun-ripe plums and plump fragrant
blackberries
purple mulberries that stain
lips and fingers
in my previous life i scheduled acquaintances
and loved ones
like appointments – i couldn’t handle spontaneity
and here a neighbour
happily unknowingly interrupts a work Zoom call
to hand me
this bounty of local seafood and fruit”

Moving between diaristic intimacy and the remove of news reportage, allostatic load is a triumph. Pick up your copy here.

news | Wednesday April 9, 2025

Four Talon Titles on CBC Books

National Poetry Month gallops on, and all around us, much like the magnolias, poetry collections are blossoming. We were excited to see four of our spring 2025 titles featured in a CBC Books article about must-read poetry collections arriving this season. As the folks at CBC Books would say, be sure to check out allostatic load by Junie Désil, Crowd Source by Cecily Nicholson, Future Works by Jeff Derksen, and Revolutions by Hajer Mirwali!

Peruse all of CBC Books’ recommended titles here.

news | Wednesday April 9, 2025

It's Arab American Heritage Month!

April is Arab American Heritage Month! To mark the occasion, we want to recommend some recent titles to enrich your to-be-read pile.

Revolutions by Hajer Mirwali arrives this month! Mirwali’s debut book sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities. Working between a Palestinian and Iraqi poetics drawing from artists like Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma and a feminist Canadian poetics inspired by Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Nicole Brossard, Revolutions spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.

An excerpt from “Meeting + and –: January 18th”:

“On the plane Mama asks if xxxxxxx has a
boyfriend. We are two women talking about
a girl we are worried for. We eat the halal
meal. We scroll past a photo on Instagram
think how ugly that girl’s shoes are. We sleep on our shoulder. We feel our warmth
doubling. We forget our obligation to split.”

Pre-order your copy of Revolutions here.

Released in February of 2024, Speaking Through the Night: Diary of a Lockdown March–April 2020 by Wajdi Mouawad and translated by Linda Gaboriau is a glorious demonstration of Mouawad’s unparalleled ability to turn a phrase. While isolating in the early days of the pandemic, Mouawad embarks upon a spectacular inner voyage, travelling from his own microcosm to the eye of the Big Bang. We follow him from Peter Handke’s office to his father’s retirement home, from the banks of the Saint Lawrence to Montréal, Greece, Greenland, and the Lebanon of his childhood. Through Kafka and Star Wars, by way of French phonetics and the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, he explores the razor’s edge of madness, conjures a dream shared by all humanity, and probes the bestiality of our everyday lives.

An excerpt from Speaking through the Night:

‘My father, like so many others, doesn’t fear confinement as much as he fears solitude at the moment of his death. War, it’s true, had accustomed my father to solitude. For years on end, having stayed in Lebanon to continue working while we were in Paris, then in Montréal, he had to learn to cope with unhappiness. For years, much later when I would stop by to visit him, I often asked him about those terrible years. He always avoided the question, finding clever ways to change the subject and bring me back to the question of money, his favourite subject. But as the years went by, with the onset of old age, illness, and the prospect of death, his heart opened and he began to speak more openly, freed from the sclerosis of shame that had restrained him for such a long time. “How did you manage on your own during the war, Papa? When the bombing was so intense, not only was it impossible to leave the house but it was impossible to communicate with us or with anyone? Internet didn’t exist, cellphones didn’t exist, and the phone lines were always down. So what did you do?…” I think I asked him that question every Sunday for ten years. And one day, instead of dismissing the question with his usual answer, “I don’t know. What do you expect me to say?! That’s how it was, there was no way around it. What do you think we could do? I don’t know. How can you expect me to remember? Stop asking me these questions, yallah khalas!”…One day, instead, he started to laugh and he said: “You won’t believe it, but I’ll tell you anyway, and you can use it for one of your plays and you’ll stop thinking your father’s an idiot and it will be a great comedy.”’

Pick up your copy of Speaking through the Night here.

Happy Arab American Heritage Month! As ever, we wish you great reading.

news | Sunday April 6, 2025

Crowd Source Has Landed!

Hold onto your feathers, folks, because Crowd Source by the award-winning poet and current Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley Cecily Nicholson has landed! Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.

An excerpt from Crowd Source:

“blooms of soot an everyday Newtonian wash
southern sky at dusk this city late summer

rooks taken flight in a low-end concert theory
of a widely distributed family

the designation of songbirds includes the position
of feet, unconcerned strides like no other

stride street hop lessons well in the anatomy
vocal areas moving as water sheds shores

onto Still Creek independent muscle controls
either side syrinx folds produce different sounds

in theory two different songs that is
two impressive vocal repertoires at the same time”

If you’d like to kick off your National Poetry Month with some tour de force poetry, pick up your caw-py of Crowd Source here.

news | Saturday April 5, 2025

Hot Off the Press! Open House Has Arrived!

Get ready, because the latest play by the award-winning author, playwright, and documentarian Drew Hayden Taylor has arrived! Open House is a dark comedy that follows an African Canadian man, a Chinese Canadian man, and a Jewish/Indigenous lesbian couple hoping to find their dream home in a red-hot housing market. They all show up to an open house run by a white settler real estate agent. Each potential buyer feels most deserving of the prize. When a police incident outside traps them together in the house, debate erupts over which of their cultures has faced the most discrimination and exclusion. Passions run high and opinions clash.

An excerpt from Open House:

“NED
If she’s so hands-on about all this, why isn’t she here?

ADRIAN
Selling our house in Vancouver. This kind of thing is more
her thing. I’m not really a details person, as she so frequently
points out.

NED
Vancouver. Got too many relatives there. One of the reasons
why I live here. You two moving here?

ADRIAN
I’m already here, renting a very small and rather expensive
studio for the moment. You?

NED
Just divorced. Or freed. It’s just a matter of semantics. Looking
for a place to call my own. I was going to go condo, but I don’t
know. Spent my whole life either in apartments or condos.
Wanted to try something a little different. I mean … who can
argue with a lawn? Love that tree out front. Must be amazing in
the fall. (looking around) Yeah, I can have a lot of fun here.

ADRIAN
Fun? Who buys a house for fun?

NED
Life is full of phases. This is my buy-a-house-and-have-
fun phase.

ADRIAN
Hey, I’m sure you’re your own guy, but aren’t you a little old for
that kind of attitude?

NED
Au contraire, I was raised to be old. In the Chinese community,
there are always obligations. Family, cultural, social, etc. It’s
a long story, but those obligations are never-ending and can
quickly age you. So now I am in the process of de-obligating
myself. (toasting) To the art of de-obligating.”

With wry humour, Open House deftly navigates current conversations about oppression, colonization, and middle-class aspirations. Order your copy here.

news | Friday April 4, 2025

Marie Clements Is Nominated for Multiple Canadian Screen Awards

Marie Clements, author of Burning Vision, has been nominated for three 2025 Canadian Screen Awards for her series Bones of Crows in the categories of Best Drama Series, Best Direction, Drama Series and Best Writing, Drama Series! See all of the nominees here. A huge congratulations to Marie!

news | Thursday April 3, 2025

Feast in Toronto Life

Tarragon Theatre’s production of Feast by Guillermo Verdecchia is featured in Toronto Life’s list of things to do this April! Check out their blurb and all of their suggestions here.

news | Wednesday April 2, 2025

Reviews Are In on Touchstone Theatre's Production of Behind the Moon

Reviews are in on Touchstone Theatre’s production of Behind the Moon by Anosh Irani, and spoiler alert, they’re raves! Check out Robert Kuang’s review in Stir, Jo Ledingham’s review in On the Scene, and Jerry Wasserman review in Vancouver Plays.

Behind the Moon runs until April 6, so get your tickets while you can! For more details about the show and to snag a ticket, click here.

news | Tuesday April 1, 2025

Graphic Documentation of Community Conversation

Take a look at this incredible graphic documentation of the aiya collective’s community conversation with Mercedes Eng, author of cop city swagger, at Paper Birch Books on January 15. Our gratitude to Aldricia Chong for this amazing piece!

news | Saturday March 29, 2025

Canoes in Public Books

Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal and translated by Jessica Moore is featured in Public Books’ segment “On Our Nighstands.” Check it out here.

news | Thursday March 27, 2025

In Memoriam: Denise Boucher, 1935–2025

It was with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Québec feminist author, activist, lyricist, and playwright, Denise Boucher. Boucher was the author of over a dozen books, working in a multitude of media including theatre, poetry, prose, and memoir. She was known for her unrelenting social justice work both on and off the page. In addition to her creative pursuits, Boucher was as an educator and an influential journalist. In 2002 she was awarded the Prix des lecteurs du Marché de la poésie de Montréal, and in 2015 Boucher was awarded the Prix Adagio for excellence in writing. Boucher’s legacy of artistry and activism enriches us all. Our thoughts lay with her community, and with all who knew and loved her.

news | Thursday March 27, 2025

World Theatre Day 2025!

March 27 is World Theatre Day! What a perfect opportunity to appreciate some of the stellar plays and playwrights enlivening stages all across the country. Here are a handful of amazing plays we’ve had the pleasure of publishing in recent years that we recommend checking out.

1. Open House by Drew Hayden Taylor

Hot off the press! Open House, the latest play by Drew Hayden Taylor has arrived! This dark comedy follows an African Canadian man, a Chinese Canadian man, and a Jewish/Indigenous lesbian couple hoping to snag their perfect home when they show up to an open house run by a white settler real estate agent. Open House deftly navigates current conversations about oppression, colonization, and middle-class aspirations. Pick up your copy here.

2. Hummingbird by Elaine Ávila

Forthcoming this spring is Hummingbird, the latest work of eco-theatre by Elaine Ávila! When forced to choose a topic for a mandatory high school project, Alex sarcastically says “hummingbirds” because one is hovering outside the window. Alex has no idea that this offhand choice will lead them to uncover hidden family histories in a mysterious journal from the 1860s, find an essential role in a community nest-finding network, open up to a vibrant ecosystem, and learn how a hummingbird disrupted a major pipeline project. Pre-order your copy here.

3. The In-Between by Marcus Youssef

Lily has always felt in-between. She looks Vietnamese but thinks of herself as white – her parents adopted her from an orphanage in Vietnam. Her parents both have good jobs, but her best friend Brit is always super broke. When Karim – a guy she’s liked for a long time – shows interest in her for the first time, Brit starts to hang out with some grade-twelves who wear T-shirts saying “white pride.” After Karim confronts Brit about her racism, a series of fear-induced misunderstandings lead to a lockdown, and Lily finds herself truly in-between, forced to make seemingly impossible choices about whose side she’s on. The In-Between brings humour, sensitivity, and a deftly authentic ear to the adult-sized questions all young people must begin to confront as they enter their later teens. Get your copy here.

4. Feast by Guillermo Verdecchia

Feast follows a comfortable North American family as they contend with compounding global crises and the end of things as we know them. Each member of the family deals with the coming troubles in their own way. Moving from North America to Beirut to Mombasa, with stops along the way at Starbucks, the Centre for Avant-Garde Geography, and a cave on the island of Lampedusa, Feast spans the globalized world and beyond, offering a wild, magic-realist take on the uncertainties and anxieties of the early twenty-first century. Order your copy here and check out Tarragon Theatre’s upcoming production of Feast here.

5. Redbone Coonhound by Amy Lee Lavoie and Omari Newton.

This scorching satire published in 2024 won six METAs (Montréal English Theatre Awards) and was named one of the Toronto Star’s “Ten Best Theatre Shows in 2023.” Out for a walk in their Vancouver neighbourhood, interracial couple Mike and Marissa meet a dog with an unfortunate breed name: Redbone coonhound. This detail unleashes a cascading debate between them about race and their relationship that manifests as a series of micro-plays, each satirizing contemporary perspectives on modern culture. Through hard-hitting comedic elements, Redbone Coonhound explores the intricacies of race, systemic power, and privilege in remarkable and surprising ways. Pick up your copy here.

6. Cottage Radio & Other Plays by Taylor Marie Graham

Cottage Radio & Other Plays animates a wild cast of Southwestern Ontario characters – particularly its strong, hilarious rural women – with complex histories and relationships to the land. The titlular Cottage Radio zeroes in on the sarcastic, charismatic Marley clan as they band together in the aftermath of a storm. White Wedding is a large-cast comedy set at a wedding reception in an old high school, where friends and lovers sneak off to reconnect and swim in nostalgia. Post Alice weaves a true Huron County mystery into an evening of stories, song, and secrets as four women (reminiscent of four Alice Munro protagonists) gather around a fire and begin to wonder what really happened to Mistie Murray, a teenager who disappeared in the mid-nineties. Order your copy here

7. we the same by Sangeeta Wylie

Inspired by a true story, we the same opens in 1979 Việt Nam, where six children and a mother become separated from their father and husband as they flee their homeland by boat. Against all odds, they survive pirate attacks, typhoons, and starvation, ending up shipwrecked on a desert island. Thirty-five years pass, and the mother at last shares heartfelt secrets and an unbelievable story with her daughter … allowing the past to be escorted into the present. Get your copy here.

8. Withrow Park by Morris Panych

Three people gaze out their living room window as the days pass. Across the street in Withrow Park, life goes on – or is it a dream?

Then comes a knock at the door. Time has found them, hiding in plain sight. Or possibly it’s just a man in a wrinkled suit. But Janet, Marion, and Arthur must act now or forever be devoured by their own indifference. They can no longer live on the periphery of their own lives. They must invite the young man to dinner. Pick up your copy here.

9. Behind the Moon by Anosh Irani

In a Mughlai restaurant in Toronto, a late-night visit from a mysterious stranger rattles the cage and shatters the peace. Now the restaurant’s employee Ayub must face reality, the family he’s left behind, and the dreams he’s abandoned, all while keeping the restaurant shiningly clean.

From the award-winning playwright and novelist Anosh Irani, Behind the Moon is a story of love and loss, freedom and faith, the meaning of brotherhood, and how we begin a new life. Order your copy here and check out Touchstone Theatre’s production of Behind the Moon here, which runs until April 6.

Happy World Theatre Day, everyone! We hope you enjoy a spate of wonderful plays and performances.

news | Wednesday March 26, 2025

Anosh Irani Interviewed in Stir

Emily Lyth interviewed the award-winning author and playwright Anosh Irani about his new play Behind the Moon and the forthcoming production presented by Touchstone Theatre in Stir.

From the article: “Having immigrated to Canada from India himself, Irani adds that many of the themes in Behind the Moon are pulled from a deeply personal place.

‘I’ve heard many people say “We came here in search of a better life,” whether it’s the U.S. or Canada or any other country,’ he says. ‘And over the years I’ve asked myself, “What is a better life? What does that mean?” I think that’s one of the things that we explore in Behind the Moon that’s never mentioned. The play emerges from that question and the notion of our dreams, our desires, our ambitions. Do we question them enough? And do we have the right lens through which we view our own dreams and desires?”

Read the complete interview here.

news | Tuesday March 25, 2025

Anosh Irani in The Georgia Straight

Mike Usinger interviews Anosh Irani about Behind the Moon in The Georgia Straight. The pair discuss the origins of the play, Irani’s homesickness during his early days in Canada, what makes a show resonant, and more.

From the interview: “‘I love being in a theatre where people have a very visceral response to a show,” he says. “Where there’s genuine emotion as opposed to, ‘Oh, that was an intellectual sort of exercise.’ I’m not interested in being clever. And so that kind of visceral response is what I have been getting from the audience and what I continue to hope for—that they are part of an experience. I’m not providing answers. I’m just helping them stay in an experience.’”

Read the complete piece here.

news | Tuesday March 25, 2025

Anosh Irani in BC BookWorld

Author of Behind the Moon Anosh Irani is BC BookWorld’s “I” in their alphabet of authors. Two productions of Behind the Moon have already launched in Canada this year. Learn your writerly ABCs here on page 33.

news | Friday March 21, 2025

Today Is World Poetry Day!

March 21 is World Poetry Day! Talonbooks has had the pleasure of working with tremendous poetic talent since its inception as Talon, a high school literary journal in 1963. To celebrate World Poetry Day this year, we’ve put together a reading list of collections from our backlist that are well worth a read, a re-read, and a shout out.

1. hypoderm: notes to myself by Weyman Chan

Weyman Chan’s 2010 poetry collection hypoderm: notes to myself is a manifesto of observations, intimations and recognitions of mortality that get under the poet’s skin—that remind the reader that poetry is documentation and speculation, not a sentimental fabrication of the rapture (rupture) of our “end times.” hypoderm was shortlisted for the 2010 W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize. Pick up your copy here.

2. page as bone – ink as blood by Jónína Kirton

Death, desire, and divination are the threads running through Jónína Kirton’s debut collection of poems and lyric prose. Delicate and dark, the pieces are like whispers in the night – a haunted, quiet telling of truths the mind has locked away but the body remembers. Loosely autobiographical, these are the weavings of a wagon-goddess who ventures into the double-world existence as a mixed-race woman. In her struggle for footing in this in-between space, she moves from the disco days of trance dance to contemplations in her dream kitchen as a mother and wife. Order your copy here.

3. breth /th treez uv lunaria by bill bissett

breth presents both new and selected poems from legendary Canadian sound, visual, and performance poet bill bissett. bissett’s innovations have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and have stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. breth includes more than a hundred illustrations and visual poems, many of them appearing in print for the first time. Get your copy here.

4. PERFACT by Nicole Raziya Fong

PERFACT is a series in three parts, beginning with an interrogation into the structure of experience, language, and identity. The title poem, “PERFACT,” is an approach to materiality and consciousness in which each intersect, partaking in a coded interchange. This interchange precedes the stage play, 物の哀れ (“mono-no-aware,” an untranslatable Japanese term which might be expressed as an empathy or awareness of things), a “dark night of the soul” whose dramatic interchange leads a feminine “I” inwards and back again, countering the coherence of singular identity with the threat of sublimation. This mystical junction makes way for “MINE,” a lineated poem presenting a disassociated clarity marked by absence, survival’s persistent interlude. Pick up your copy here.

5. full-metal indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead

It’s always a good time to revisit Joshua Whitehead’s full-metal indigiqueer. This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods. They dazzlingly and fiercely take on the likes of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and John Milton while also not forgetting contemporary pop culture figures such as Lana Del Rey, Grindr, and Peter Pan. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time – they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world. Order your copy here.

6 Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations 1–170 by Fred Wah

The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. The poetics that generates these texts arises out of a lifelong poem project that has its roots in the long poem genre of the ’80s and its interest in the resistance to closure and the containment of meaning characteristic of the lyric. This collection was shortlisted for the 2021 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Get your copy here.

7. The Place of Scraps by Jordan Abel

The collection that won the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, The Place of Scraps, revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a Nation. Drawing inspiration from Barbeau’s canonical book Totem Poles, Jordan Abel explores the complicated relationship between First Nations cultures and ethnography. His poems simultaneously illuminate Barbeau’s intentions and navigate the repercussions of the anthropologist’s actions. Pick up your copy here.

8. Wayside Sang by Cecily Nicholson

Cecily Nicholson’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry–winning collection Wayside Sang concerns entwined migrations of Black-other diaspora coming to terms with fossil-fuel psyches in times of trauma and movement. This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath Great Lake rivers between nation states. Nicholson reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it criss-crossed these borders in a study that engages the automobile object, its industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyond the Great Lakes region. Order your copy here.

9. Rom Com by Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli

At precisely the cultural moment you were hoping for, a dream team of smart, sexy, brunette, West Coast poets of Italian descent has passionately co-authored an intelligent collection of poetry that both celebrates and capsizes the romantic comedy. How to tell if you are compatible with this book: Are you equally versed in literature and pop culture? Are you a film-savvy fan of contemporary poetry? Are you an academic with interest in literature and cultural studies? Are you in general a cool, sad person? This book might just be the sassy best friend you’ve wanted. Get your copy of Rom Com here.

Happy Poetry Day to all of the poets and poetry lovers! May your day be full of verse, form, line, metaphor, and words that make you Feel Things.

news | Wednesday March 19, 2025

Dale Martin Smith Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize!

Dale Martin Smith, author of Flying Red Horse, has been longlisted for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize for his poetry collection The Size of Paradise (knife | fork | book)! Check out the complete longlist here. A huge congratulations to Dale!