BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
Chenille or Silk is a startling first collection of confessional poetry examining the slippery relations of desire, class, embodiment and trauma. Emma McKenna's writing traverses the bounds and the wounds of a family marked by poverty and intergenerational trauma. The collection asserts the primacy of intimacy and sexuality to subjectivity, as the poems move through the struggle to find identity, love and belonging in an urban queer community's ever-shifting economy of desire. Striking, brave and at times uncomfortable, Chenille or Silk captures the ambivalence--and the hope--of possibility.
Emma McKenna is a multidisciplinary writer and scholar. Her previous work as a musician includes the LP Run with It and digital EPs The Might and What It Becomes. Emma holds a PhD in English and cultural studies (ABD, McMaster University), and is an educator on social justice, intersectional feminism and sexuality studies. Emma's academic writing can be found in Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Women: A Cultural Review, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice and Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. Emma lives with her partner in Hamilton, Ontario. Chenille or Silk is her first book.
"Emma McKenna's confessional poetics hold power, subtle shifts and bittersweet complexities. With a voice that is just as striking on the page as off, McKenna's debut collection provocatively straddles an evolution of queer desire, multi-layers of intergenerational trauma and class. This is poetry undressing slowly. Poetry coming undone. Poetry redressing pain and beauty, knowing all material is part of the fabric of being.''
--Shannon Webb-Campbell, author of I Am a Body of Land and Still No Word
''These poems are as much about hiding out as they are about finding oneself, running away and coming to. They're a testament to a difficult girlhood, where worth was not a given. And they're a testament to surviving--finding likeness, light and calm--catching your breath. McKenna's poems arrive with bloody lips and grass stains--sometimes tentative, but never frail--ready to be seen.''
--Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, author of Whatever, Iceberg
''I love Emma McKenna's Chenille or Silk--these poems are tough and tender and perfect.''
--Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People