news | Wednesday March 25, 2026

Hot Off the Press! SUBTEXT Has Arrived!

The new work of poetry by Nicole Raziya Fong is here! SUBTEXT collages the echoes of diasporic and colonial histories through poetry, drama, autobiography, and archival uncovering. Dwelling in the bubbling froth of dreamwork, these poems take a multifaceted approach to questions of diaspora and selfhood, incorporating visual and textual elements that dialogue with one another and ask readers to negotiate the unsteady shoals of identity and history.

An excerpt from SUBTEXT:

“Memory levels the spaces I’ve
set aside for transformation.
Transformation is bottomless,
protracted by a thin film of
memory. This film contains
images which gaze eternally into
themselves. The images expand
and evolve in their own way, but
this iterative fiction never forms
a conclusive body.”

SUBTEXT peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed realities and obscured memories. Order your copy of this thoughtful, multidisciplinary book here.

news | Tuesday March 24, 2026

th book uv lost passwords 1 longlisted for 2026 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize

Wonderful to see th book uv lost passwords 1 by bill bissett on the stellar 2026 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize longlist! What an awesome collection of books.⁠
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th book uv lost passwords 1 is a novel of poems that criss-crosses geographies, hopping on planes and between planes to get to th breth uv th pome and everywhere else. ⁠
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The Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize celebrates literary excellence from established Canadian poets.⁠
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A huge congratulations to bill bissett! Get to know all of the longlisted titles here.

news | Saturday March 21, 2026

World Poetry Day 2026

March 21 is World Poetry Day! If you’re looking for some exciting works of poetry to mark the occasion with, we’d love to recommend some recent titles for you to sink your teeth into.

1. Spells, Wishes, and the Talking Dead: ᒪᒪᐦᑖᐃᐧᓯᐃᐧᐣ ᐸᑯᓭᔨᒧᐤ ᓂᑭᐦᒋ ᐋᓂᐢᑯᑖᐹᐣ mamahtâwisiwin, pakosêyimow, nikihci-âniskotâpân by Wanda John-Kehewin

A finalist for the Raymond Souster Award, Spells, Wishes, and the Talking Dead: ᒪᒪᐦᑖᐃᐧᓯᐃᐧᐣ ᐸᑯᓭᔨᒧᐤ ᓂᑭᐦᒋ ᐋᓂᐢᑯᑖᐹᐣ mamahtâwisiwin, pakosêyimow, nikihci-âniskotâpân weaves together history with personal experience. Wanda John-Kehewin plays with form, space, and language, demonstrating which magics cannot be suppressed. Pick up your copy here.

2. No Depression in Heaven by ryan fitzpatrick

Shine up your spurs, gussy up for a visit to the Grand Ole Opry, and dig into No Depression in Heaven. Written during country music’s most recent ascent in popularity, this poetry “LP” features ten “tracks” that each tip language out of key. Order your copy here.

3. SUBTEXT by Nicole Raziya Fong

Divided into four parts, SUBTEXT peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed realities and obscured memories. These poems take a multifaceted approach to questions of diaspora and selfhood, incorporating visual and textual elements that dialogue with one another and ask readers to negotiate the unsteady shoals of identity and history. Get your copy here.

4. Pearl by George Bowering

George Bowering’s final book of poetry, Pearl, sprawls in search of the next glimmering insight, tugging at different threads with a multifarious large-heartedness. Touching, ribald, and cheeky, Pearl reflects on a life well-lived and well-written. Secure your copy here.

5. A Family of Dreamers by Samantha Nock

Longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, A Family of Dreamers delves into the complexities of growing up in rural northeast British Columbia and the love and grief that blooms there. In this debut collection, Samantha Nock weaves together threads of fat liberation, desirability politics, and heartbreak while working through her existence as a young Indigenous woman coming of age in the city. Pick up a copy here.

6. No Town Called We by Nikki Reimer

Longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Raymond Souster Award, No Town Called We writes through the death of elders, social panic, and the climate crisis via the lens of the multiply disabled, female-coded body approaching midlife. With an undeniable humour and irrepressible care, No Town Called We dissects griefs of many shapes. Order your copy here.

7. sometimes, forest by Elee Kraljii Gardiner

New poetry collection from Vancouver’s Poet Laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker yearns for in herself. But the coastal temperate rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. Get your copy here.

8. Verbal Violence by Danielle LaFrance

Verbal Violence weaponizes the email as a poetic form. This book confronts capitalism’s managerial style guide for saying nothing at all with the fiery and empathetic conscience of the managed, their cri de cœur cracking the straight-faced bureaucracy of our most banal communications. Pick up a copy here.

9. Save Your Prayers – Send Money by Jónína Kirton

Save Your Prayers – Send Money takes on the wellness industry from the perspective of a seventy-year-old Métis woman and recovering New Ager. These poems explore where healing might lie and how a peace might be found whether we heal or not. Order your copy here.

10. Stigmata by Scott Jackshaw

Stigmata draws inspiration from a broad archive of texts and practices, including apophatic theology, body horror, gardening, queer theory, classic films, poststructuralism, and bad sex to create a treacherous adventure through the cross-currents of sexual deviancy and religion, helped along by a bitter sense of humour, to the limits of faith and body. Get your copy here.

11. Crowd Source by Cecily Nicholson

With eyes on the skies, Crowd Source continues Cecily Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations. This is a book for all fascinated by corvid sensibilities. Order your copy here.

12. Beautiful Unknown Future by Taryn Hubbard

Refusing false optimism, Beautiful Unknown Future layers the chaos of domestic life with the detachment of the corporate environment. Written in the shadow of compounding global crises, Beautiful Unknown Future looks critically to a future centred around tenderness, resilience, and love. Pick up your copy here.

Happy World Poetry Day, everyone!

news | Saturday March 21, 2026

Drew McEwan on bill bissett

Drew McEwan, author of tours, variously, pens an article about bill bissett (th book uv lost passwords 1, its th sailors life / still in treetment, and more) and lunaria in Canadian Literature 262.

From the abstract: “Drew McEwan explores the mythical planet both in lunaria and in the lunarian autobiographical paratexts as critical developments in bissett’s work and ideas. Further, it argues that these texts articulate a mad and queer temporality that provides a critical perspective on normative “erthling wayze.” bissett’s poetic and extra-poetic lunarian texts elaborate a utopian state of temporality, community, and nurturance borne in relation to the failures of those deemed too crazy, too queer, here on Earth.”

For more details and to order your copy of the journal, click here.

news | Friday March 20, 2026

In Memoriam: Gladys Maria Hindmarch, 1940–2026

We are saddened to learn of the passing of author, editor, educator, and activist Gladys (Maria) Hindmarch. Hindmarch’s work embraced the experimental and avant-garde with an eye trained to the concerns, lives, and practices of women. One of Hindmarch’s major areas of interest was proprioception, the self as an embodied creature as it interacts with the wider world. With a feminist slant, Hindmarch delved into pregnancy, birth, how the labour of working-class women lives in the body. Hindmarch taught at multiple postsecondary institutions in British Columbia, and her writing was firmly grounded in the earth and neighbourhoods of the West Coast. Talonbooks extends our heartfelt condolences to her loved ones. She will be deeply missed.

news | Wednesday March 18, 2026

Heartlines: A Love Story Shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Drama!

The shortlists for the 38th annual Lambda Literary Awards have been announced and we are over the moon to share that the debut play Heartlines: A Love Story by Sarah Waisvisz is one of five finalists for the Lambda Award in LGBTQ+ Drama!

Heartlines imagines the extraordinary love, art, lives, and resistance of gender pioneers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.

A huge congratulations to Sarah! Check out the complete list of Lambda Literary Award finalists here!

news | Friday March 13, 2026

Growing My Way Home on CBC Books

Growing My Way Home by Jenn Ashton is in great company on CBC Books’s list of fiction titles they’re excited about this spring! Coming out later this month, Growing My Way Home is a work of autofiction that chronicles Ashton’s experiences as a thirteen-year-old drug dealer, a fifteen-year-old parent, and finally an award-winning writer, artist, and filmmaker. Learn more about Ashton’s forthcoming title and all of CBC Books’s recommendations here.

news | Thursday March 12, 2026

Two Talon Titles for Readers Who Want to Read About Bygone Times

Wonderful to see two Talonbooks titles among Read Local BC’s suggested titles to check out if you love a book set in the past. The first is A Great Consolation by Michel Tremblay and translated by Linda Gaboriau, the final book in the Desrosiers Diaspora series. Comprised of the final two books of the epic family saga – Survive! Survive! and Crossing the Gulf of Misfortune –, this spellbinding book takes us to the crowded apartments and gay bars of Montréal in 1935 and carries us through to the early days of WW II in 1941.

The second title is the forthcoming alternate history of the eighteenth century Sailors Can’t Swim by Donminique Scali, translated by Jessica Moore. Set on the fictional island of Ys in the Atlantic ocean, orphan Danaé Poussin has the rare ability to swim, an extraordinary talent in a society where safety exists for the wealthy behind the city’s high walls and the poorer shore-dwellers below are exposed to the sea and must rebuild their ruined homes after each great tide. Danaé flows between shore, city, and open sea, she navigates the rocky possibilities for women – from salter to thief to aristocrat to sailor’s wife – learning to steer through the sexist and classist indignities of the calm before revolution.

Read about all of Read Local BC’s recommended books for those keen to be immersed in bygone times here.

news | Wednesday March 11, 2026

An Essay from Jessica Moore on CBC

CBC and Canada Council for the Arts are running a series about life transitions. Five of the artists behind the English-language winners of the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Awards pen an original piece about life’s transitions. Check out Jessica Moore (translator of Uiesh / Somewhere by Joséphine Bacon) stellar and personal essay and those of all of the 2025 winners here.

news | Sunday March 8, 2026

Women's History Month 2026

It’s Women’s History Month, and today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. There’s not much we love doing more than celebrating the voices, the ingenuity, and the creativity of women, whose work upholds entire creative spheres while also propelling them forward. March provides the perfect opportunity to hype up some recent and forthcoming titles by amazing poets and playwrights. Here are just a handful of books written by women that dig into women’s experiences that we’d like to spotlight:

1. sometimes, forest by Elee Kraljii Gardiner

Coming next month is the new poetry collection by Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, Elee Kraljii Gardiner! sometimes, forest develops a theory of hylofeminism (“hylo” from forest matter) that attends to a deep, communal connection with nature as a relational way of being with the self and the more-than-human world. sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker yearns for in herself. Returning daily to the same woods, the speaker notices minute seasonal changes and considers her own internal changes too. Pre-order your copy of sometimes, forest here.

2. The Book of Z by Rahat Kurd

Rahat Kurd’s latest work The Book of Z explores desire and longing. For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha – “the wife of Aziz” in the Qur’an – and her passion for Yusuf has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry, in Muslim folk traditions, and in Persian and Mughal miniature painting. At the same time, as the Biblical “wife of Potiphar” she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in misogynistic cautionary tales and canonical Western art. Kurd writes in the richly imagined voice of Zulaykha for an indelible collection you won’t want to put down. Pick up your copy here.

3. we the same by Sangeeta Wylie

This powerful debut play by Sangeeta Wylie is inspired by a true story. In 1979, Việt Nam, six children and a mother become separated from their father and husband as they flee their homeland by boat. They survive pirate attacks, typhoons, and starvation, ending up shipwrecked on a desert island. Thirty-five years later, the past arrives in the present as the mother reveals a secret to her daughter. With heart, humour, and hope we the same explores the aftermath of the Vietnam war, embracing devastation, alienation, and healing. Get a copy of your very own here.

4. tours, variously by Drew McEwan

Drew McEwan’s newest book of poetry builds and builds on itself, creating an encompassing resonance as it guides you on a tour of a series of empty rooms. Asking how words form spaces of shifting relation, tours, variously dwells on narration as an operation that works on spaces and bodies as they negotiate their place among framed exhibits and pinned specimens ready for misrecognition. Prepare to be led through the ways we live in the spaces of language as you never have before. Order your copy here.

5. wet by Leanne Dunic

Winner of the 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize Poetry wet by Leanne Dunic partners poetry, photography, and fairytale for an impactful and empathetic read. In wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore yearns for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. Filled with desire and all kinds of thirst, wet turns its attention to the ecological, the erotic, and the equitable. Pick up your copy here.

6. Slow Scrape by Tanya Lukin Linklater

Author and artist Tanya Lukin Linklater’s poetry book Slow Scrape brilliantly enacts a poetics of relation and action to counter the settler colonial violences of erasure, extraction, and dispossession. Drawing on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts, the book cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowing. Gorgeous in form and content, Slow Scrape is an essential poetry collection. Get your copy here.

7. Save Your Prayers – Send Money by Jónína Kirton

A new book by Jónína Kirton arrives next month! Save Your Prayers – Send Money tackles the wellness industry. Kirton delves into disability politics through the lived experience of a seventy-year-old Métis woman and recovering New Ager. The poems in Save Your Prayers – Send Money consider how we might find peace whether or not we heal. Pre-order your copy here.

8. Beautiful Unknown Future by Taryn Hubbard

Beautiful Unknown Future by Taryn Hubbard is coming down the pike in April! Haunted by the looming shadows of our compounding crises, Beautiful Unknown Future reflects with candour and wit on the precarity we share with the nonhuman world. Written while Hubbard’s children were young, these poems hold space for messy feelings about motherhood and care, the climate crisis, family ghosts, and office dynamics. Pre-order your copy here.

9. Selma Burke: Carving a Sculptor’s Life by Caroline Russell-King and Maria Crooks

Check out the winner of the Theatre BC Canadian Playwriting Competition, two Betty Mitchell Awards, and two Calgary Theatre Critics’ Awards, Selma Burke: Carving a Sculptor’s Life by Caroline Russell-King and Maria Crooks! This play is a flight of fancy based on the incredible life of sculptor Dr. Selma Hortense Burke, who lived from 1900 to 1995, approximately 49,932,000 minutes. Here, imagined, are ninety of them, in a play that asks, “Who gets to make art, and who gets to destroy it?” ⁠African American sculptor Selma Burke chronicled many of the extraordinary and devastating events of the past century in her outstanding work: lynchings, the Harlem Renaissance, the Holocaust, the assassination of Martin Luther King. Understanding that it is always easier to rip things down than build them up, Burke persisted in artmaking in the face of a society that didn’t always recognize her talents, a husband who demolished her work, and a government who stole it. Get your copy here.

10. Heartlines: A Love Story by Sarah Waisvisz

Up next we have another play that imagines into the corners of the lives of historical figures! Heartlines: A Love Story delves into the extraordinary love, art, and resistance of gender pioneers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Using a play-within-a-play structure and epic storytelling, Heartlines takes the audience through the dizzying romance of their early life together in the Parisian avant-garde – and the subsequent fracturing of that life with the rise of nazism. Identities of all kinds are explored, suppressed, and liberated as their love withstands oppression, violence, and time itself. Pick up your copy here.

11. Unfuckable Lardass by Catriona Strang

Rebellious and attentive, Unfuckable Lardass by author and editor Catriona Strang is a call to personal power and agency, even when exhausted, doubtful, pain-ridden, and marginalized. Unfuckable Lardass is fuelled by grief and rage, counterpoised by moments of love and hope. Drawing 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 – Strang’s sixth book of poetry not only refuses the objectifying gaze but, more importantly, turns towards the great and expanding richness of alternate possibilities. Order your copy here.

12. Song & Dread by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek

Song & Dread is an act of reflection and record keeping informed by care, grace, and attention. The poems in Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s book of poetry about the early days of the pandemic seek quietude, order, refuge, and space. They remind us of community, connectedness, and what is inherently shared. With an eye attuned to life outside the speaker’s window, the world within one’s home, the words printed in the press during the first months of COVID, and the myriad ways the unprecedented can become normalized, the poems in this book travel beyond insight into revelation. Touching on both the frontlines of feminized, racialized labour and labourers and the profoundly solitary experience of individuals in lockdown, these meditations on 2020 are both a portrait of a very specific moment in time and evergreen. Pick up your copy here.

Happy International Women’s Day! We hope you get the chance to enjoy some life-changing art in the near future and we hope that your Women’s History Month is full of great books.