news | Thursday June 5, 2025

Pride Month 2025

It’s Pride Month, everybody! We’re going to celebrate the best way we know how: by getting excited for a whole new slew of top-tier titles by queer and gender-diverse authors. We don’t want to spoil any surprises, but our forthcoming fall 2025 list is almost entirely comprised of works by amazing LGBTQIA2S+ writers. Without further ado, let us introduce you to new and upcoming books.

Investigating whose safety really matters in the most expensive city in the nation, cop city swagger conducts a threat assessment of Vancouver’s police. Holding close lived and living connections to the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods, Eng juxtaposes the police’s and the city’s institutional rhetoric with their acts of violence against marginalized people, presenting a panoramic media montage of structural harm and community care. Pick up your copy here.

The final book in the Desorsiers Diaspora series arrives this July! Following the unforgettable cast of characters in the scrappy and lovable Desrosiers family, A Great Consolation comprises Survive! Survive!, set in 1935, and Crossing the Gulf of Misfortune, set in 1941. In Survive! Survive!, we spend time in shoe stores, dingy apartments, cinemas, and gay bars in Montréal in the colourful company of Ti-Lou and “la Duchesse” Édouard, whose sparkling exchanges hide indissoluble pain, in sombre days with Victoire and Télesphore at the bottom of the ruelle des Fortifications, and with father and daughter Josaphat and Laura Cadieux. In _Crossing the Gulf of Misfortune, the realities of WW II and rationing have set in and we join the families of Nana and Gabriel as they unhappily cram together in a new apartment with Victoire and Édouard, as well as with Albertine, her husband Paul, and their children, Thérèse and baby Marcel. Pre-order your copy of A Great Consolation here.

Arrinving this August, No Depression in Heaven asks how we respond to bad times. Written during country music’s most recent ascent in popularity, this poetry “LP” consists of ten “tracks” that each take up a rhythm, only to bend it out of shape. This collection asks what it means to hold onto something toxic because of the comforts it affords, to daydream about days long past rather than gripping the reins of the present. No Depression in Heaven pulls on its boots, tilts its hat, and brushes the dust off its Nudie suit before tipping language out of key. Pre-order a copy here.

This September, be sure to check out tours, variously! A poem as a guided tour. A tour of a series of empty rooms. This book asks how words form spaces of shifting relation. In a central guiding poem enriched by numerous detours exploring side passages and related themes, tours, variously forms a network of transformational encounters. Together they guide the reader through an interrogation of the ways we tour the spaces of language, always as guests. Pre-order your copy of tours, variously here.

Stigmata by Scott Jackshaw is arriving back from the printer this September! Jackshaw’s collection is about bodies caught in the crosscurrents of sexual deviancy and religion. Its poems are ruinous encounters between traumatic and historical memory; they transfigure the cult of the wound into a mystic frenzy of sex, grief, and noise. Stigmata draws inspiration from a broad archive of texts and practices: apophatic theology, body horror, gardening, queer theory, classic films, poststructuralism, and bad sex. Together its poems form a counterhistory of the wound, an experiment in fractured memoir and misplaced anatomy that weaponizes the confessional mode, wrenching it from self-narration to approach a violence that breaks language and bodies apart. Pre-order your copy here.

Forthcoming this fall is the latest book of poetry from appointee to the Order of Canada and literary icon bill bissett! a novel uv pomes threding thru each othr th main charaktrs langwage n all uv us hedding off in all direksyuns 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 thru th mysteree loves n rapturs speek. Pre-order your copy here.

Happy Pride, everyone! We hope you keep resisting, celebrating, and delving into great reads.