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.