news | Thursday June 4, 2026

Pride 2026 Reading List

It’s Pride Month! We’re happy to take any opportunity to celebrate 2SLGBTQIA+ voices, perspectives, art, and self-expression. Talonbooks has put together a reading list of books by queer and gender diverse authors to put on your radar for Pride. Whether you want a zippy poetry collection, a pithy play, or a novel that will rake your emotions over the coals, we’ve got you covered.

1. SUBTEXT by Nicole Raziya Fong

SUBTEXT is the hot-off-the-press poetry collection by Montréal-based artist and poet Nicole Raziya Fong. 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. Check out this interview Nicole Raziya Fong gave with All Lit Up about SUBTEXT and pick up a copy of your very own here.

2. full-metal indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead

This triumphant poetry collection 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. 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. This is a must-read collection. Get your copy here.

3. Dear Chekhov by Michel Tremblay, translated by Linda Gaboriau

The scene is this: a table set outside in beautiful fall weather. A turkey roasting in the oven. Everything seems set for a festive family dinner – except that the playwright wants to rewrite his play. In classic Tremblay fashion, family dynamics take centre stage in this masterful play. Coming this fall, Dear Chekhov holds a mirror up to theatre. Pre-order your copy here.

4. Jump Scare by Daniel Zomparelli

This 2024 poetry collection is both hilarious and grief-y. In Jump Scare, Zomparelli uses horror movies as a vehicle to explore queer pop culture, the commodification of identity, neurodivergence, and grief. Written in an irreplicable, empathetic, irreverent voice, Jump Scare is a friendly ghost of a collection. Snag a copy of your own here.

5. Verbal Violence by Danielle LaFrance

Danielle LaFrance’s brand new book of poetry Verbal Violence weaponizes the email thread as a form, shredding the language of the managerial class. Here, they hack apart neoliberal doublespeak, ideological reproduction and progressive-except-Palestine rhetoric. This collection has edge, verve, and a bent towards justice carried always in its heart. Pick up a copy here.

6. Heartlines: A Love Story by Sarah Waisvisz

A finalist for a 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Drama, Heartlines centres around the lives, love, art, activism, and resistance of gender pioneers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. 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. Copies are available here.

7. the berry takes the shape of the bloom by andrea bennett

the berry takes the shape of the bloom began as a linear narrative, offering a window into one trans person’s life after they felt contented and secure. In the end these poems, which capture particular moments in time, may recur in any given present: sometimes what surfaces is anxiety or anger, sometimes love or eagerness. Some poems bear witness; others hold grudges or shake free of them. Together, they entwine around enmeshed experiences of gender, family, trans pregnancy, abuse, fear, and becoming. the berry takes the shape of the bloom took second place in the 2024 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Check out this review of the collection in Arc Poetry Magazine and pick up a copy here.

8. Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule

This formative sapphic novel first hit bookstands in the 1960s. It remains an essential work. Evelyn Hall is a literature professor who travels to Reno, Nevada in the summer of 1958 in order to obtain a divorce and thus put an end to her disastrous sixteen-year marriage. She is divorcing her husband on the advice of his psychiatrist because, this being the ’50s, he believes that Evelyn’s success is causing her husband’s depression. During her six-week stay at a boarding house (a residency requirement) Evelyn meets Ann Childs. The two fall in love and must navigate their feelings in the face of strain from inside and outside of their relationship. Get your copy here.

9. tours, variously by Drew McEwan

tours, variously takes readers on a guided tour, considering how we take up space within the imagined rooms of language and definition. The poems in this book lead the reader through an interrogation of the ways we tour the spaces of language, always stepping between the sayable and the unsaid. rob mclennan said of tours, variously that it writes “an exploration of betweenness, becoming and having become, having been the whole time, achieving an exploration not of uncertainty but of seeking, plumbing the depths of language into a solid ground.” Order a copy here.

Happy Pride, everyone! We wish you good reading and good resisting.