news | Wednesday May 7, 2025

Asian Heritage Month 2025

May is Asian Heritage Month! To mark the occasion, we want to shine a light on some innovative, incisive, and all around phenomenal titles authored by writers of Asian heritage that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them. Whether you’re looking to be rallied, moved, engrossed, challenged, entertained, or given something entirely new to chew on, here are some recent books we think you’ll love:

Have you read cop city swagger, the latest poetry collection by author and activist Mercedes Eng? This new and timely collection 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.

An excerpt from “Chinatown Public Safety”:

“Muriel and Su and the dogs
murmurate up the Pacific coastline
travel pattern learned from starling kin
deployed to avoid being tracked

taking the inland freeway back is quicker
but they know how much the dogs need to play
to play with each other
play in the sand breathe in the salted air
run without command.”

Order your copy of cop city swagger here.

Hot hot hot off the press is Revolutions, the debut book by Toronto-based poet Hajer Mirwali. Revolutions 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, Iraqi, and feminist Canadian poetics, this collection spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.

An excerpt from “January 23”:

“+ and –, I have come too far to feel nothing.

Wait for me in the dark room. Strip apart my
arms. Hear me change. Daughter of + and –.
Daughter. Daughter. More daughterly with
every rotation.

… Yes, a very good daughter who loves
her motherlands and her God.

A daughter more and less.

A daughter + and –.

Never the same twice.”

Order your copy of Revolutions here.

A finalist for the 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Wet by Leanne Dunic is a must-read poetry and photography collection. 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.

An excerpt:

“My cousin told me about Mao’s campaign during the Great Leap
Forward to kill the four pests: flies, rats, mosquitoes, sparrows. The
people banged pots incessantly to prevent sparrows from resting. Soft
stones dropped from the sky.

What other animals fell?

Fifty-five million people. My ancestors.

In this block, poisoned bread is left on the sidewalk for pigeons. For
cats. For dogs. The hungry.”

Pick up your copy of Wet here!

Behind the Moon is the latest play by award-winning author 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. A story of connection, exploitation, love and loss, and beginning anew, Behind the Moon is not to be missed.

An excerpt:

“JALAL: Why did you give me the food?

AYUB: You said it was an emergency.

JALAL: I’m not sure if you believed me.

AYUB: Does it matter?

JALAL: I would be grateful if you told me.

AYUB: Fine. I gave you the food because you passed the test.

JALAL: Test? What test?

AYUB: You did not touch the glass. When you chose your food,
you did not touch the glass.”

Pick up your copy of Behind the Moon here.

No Signal No Noise by A Jamali Rad is the hybrid text you need to read. When Zero, the hero of our story, stumbles upon a mysterious manuscript, they’re thrown into a journey across centuries, continents, and concepts. They travel throughout the Muslim world, from Sumeria to India to Baghdad. They learn about Europe as other and outside. They’re guided by the cryptic mirror the manuscript provides as it traces a history of the number zero.

An excerpt from “Thinking Without Knowing”:

“Zero mocks
language builds
barriers around

nothing
makes
nothing

knowable taints
knowledge laughs at the
tools made for
enclosure”

Pick up your copy of No Signal No Noise here.

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t recommend you check out Flow: Poems Collected and New, which compiles the impeccable poetry of the late Roy Miki. Miki was one of Canada’s most innovative poets; an influential critic, founder of the literary journals Line and West Coast Line, and as a noted activist, became a prominent figure in the movement for Japanese Canadian redress. All of Miki’s roles and concerns coalesced in his poetry, carefully attuned to the complex relationships between language and power as they map and interrogate the layers of history enfolded within place and subjectivity.

An excerpt from “The Alternate Sources of Energy Are Drying Up”:

““memory dies on the prairies”
i thought that up
when i was 12 & under
the railway bridge over
the assiniboine river

cool nights
between the ties
stars here & there

in the corners
the metal pylings
meet to form
nests of pigeons

they’ve reproduced
over the river
in this space
where perspective
beckons below the brown
water moves as a street does”

Pick up your copy of Flow here.

Happy Asian Heritage Month, Talonites. This month and all months, we wish you good reading.