Indigenous Voices Award finalist

A celebratory, slyly funny, and bluntly honest take on sex and romance in NDN Country.

nedi nezu (Good Medicine) explores the beautiful space that being a sensual Indigenous woman creates - not only as a partner, a fantasy, a heartbreak waiting to happen but also as an auntie, a role model, a voice that connects to ot …

Iron Goddess of Mercy by Lambda Literary Award winner Larissa Lai (for the novel The Tiger Flu) is a long poem that captures the vengeful yet hopeful movement of the Furies mid-whirl and dance with them through the horror of the long now. Inspired by the tumultuous history of Hong Kong, from the Japanese and British occupations to the ongoing pro-d …

The first play by multi-media artist Vivek Shraya, about fame and personal transformation.

Described as "cultural rocket fuel" by Vanity Fair, Vivek Shraya is a multi-media artist whose art, music, novels, and poetry and children's books explore the beauty and the power of personal and cultural transformation. How to Fail as a Popstar is Vivek's deb …

Governor General's Literary Award finalist

Searing, intimate poems that render a history of trauma, addiction, and recovery through dreams and waking experience.

Render (v.tr.): to submit, as for consideration; to give or make available; to give what is due or owed; to give in return, or retribution; to surrender; to yield. To represent; to perform a …

The latest from Vivek Shraya's VS. Books: a poetic exploration of Black identity, history, and lived experience influenced by the constant search for liberation.

In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colo …

Finalist, Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes

In her novels, poetry, and prose, Amber Dawn has written eloquently on queer femme sexuality, individual and systemic trauma, and sex work justice, themes drawn from her own lived experience and revealed most notably in her award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life.

In this, her second poetry col …

Finalist, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

In their fourth collection of poetry, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha continues her excavation of working-class queer brown femme survivorhood and desire.

Tonguebreaker is about surviving the unsurvivable: living through hate crimes, the suicides of queer k …

Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers (Writers' Trust of Canada) and the Indigenous Voices Award; finalist, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet pow …

Jim Wong-Chu is a legend in the Asian Canadian writing community. As founder of the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop (and its magazine Ricepaper), he constantly encouraged and inspired writers across the country to get their work published and acknowledged, from Paul Yee and Evelyn Lau to Madeleine Thien and Catherine Hernandez. When Jim passed awa …

Winner, Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers; American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book; Finalist, Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender Variant Literature

This extraordinary poetry collection is a vivid, beautifully wrought journey to the place where forgotten ancestors …

Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature winner

Lambda Literary Award finalist

Longlisted for Canada Reads

As a writer, musician, performance artist, and filmmaker, Vivek Shraya has, over the course of the last few years, established herself as a tour de force artist of the highest order. Vivek's body of work includes ten albu …

New edition of Michael Turner's seminal 1995 poetry collection, including a new essay by the author.

When Michael Turner's Kingsway was published in 1995, critics and readers were either effusive in their praise or confounded by the book's unwillingness to adhere to traditional poetry structures. In this collection of linked poems that evolve around …

A wide-ranging anthology of Asian Canadian literature to celebrate 20 years of Ricepaper.

2015 marks the 20th anniversary of Ricepaper magazine, a pioneering periodical devoted to Asian-Canadian writing. Over the years, Ricepaper's focus has shifted from predominantly arts and culture reporting to the publication of original literature; as such, it …

The first full-length poetry book by the Lambda Literary and Vancouver Book Award Winner.

Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

Award-winning writer Amber Dawn reveals a gutsy lyrical sensibility in her debut poetry collection: a suite of glosa poems written as an homage to and an interaction with queer poets, such as the legendary Gertrude Stein, C …

Finalist, Vancouver Book Award

Billeh Nickerson is one of Canada's showiest poets; colourful, witty, and wise, with undertones of sexy. By turns outlandish and poignant, Artificial Cherry heralds the return of Billeh's cheeky/sweet sensibilities. From Elvis Presley and glass eyes to phantom lovers and hockey haiku, you're never quite sure where Bil …

Vancouver's Granville Island Public Market, established in 1979, is one of Canada's largest and most popular public markets. Featuring over fifty food retailers and day vendors, the Public Market is the main draw at Granville Island, which also features art galleries, retail shops, a live theatre, a hotel, and an art school as well as a functioning …

Billeh Nickerson is a Vancouver-based poet well-known across Canada for his playful, witty observations on sex and culture. In Impact, his third poetry collection from Arsenal, Billeh turns his attention to a more serious subject that has fascinated him ever since he was a child: the sinking of the Titanic.

Published on the 100th anniversary of the …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

"V6A" is the postal prefix for what is often described as "the poorest neighbourhood in Canada"--Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Statistics about the area depict conditions related to crime, drugs, sex work, and poverty that overshadow another reality based on self determination.

The anthology V6A refracts …

In The Only Poetry That Matters, novelist and poet Clint Burnham offers the first book-length examination of the Kootenay School of Writing, the notorious group of poets who came to international attention in Vancouver during the 1980s. Founded in 1984 after the closure of David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, the KSW offered writing and publ …

At the time of his death in 1992, Jon Furberg was one of the most disciplined and exciting poets writing in Vancouver. Ten years in the making, Anhaga was Furberg's masterly crafted retelling of the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Wanderer." Reading into the old text with courage and imagination, letting individual lines and words resonate and build associat …

In this extraordinary debut poetry collection, Proma Tagore's language is not the only thing that breaks explores the junctions between migration, race, the body, and desire. The poems in this book offer spaces to reflect on a variety of interlinking issues: the routes and brutal legacies of European colonization and imperialism; the interrelations …

Attila Richard Lukacs is one of Canada's most talented and controversial contemporary artists. He is best known for his epic paintings that depict masculine, homoerotic imagery, featuring figures such as gay skinheads and military cadets. His work has been exhibited at documenta in Kassel, Germany, as well as in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Col …

Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

Automaton Biographies is the first full-length solo poetry book by novelist Larissa Lai (When Fox is a Thousand, Salt Fish Girl).

With an ear to the white noise of advertising, pop music, CNN, biotechnology, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, cereal packaging, and MuchMusic, Lai explores the …

A groundbreaking, comprehensive anthology of Canadian gay male poetry, the first of its kind, that reveals a national queer poetic that is equal parts eloquent, subversive, and moving. The material, from the 1890s to present-day, includes work by fifty-seven poets from every region of the country, including some from Quebec who have been translated …

Since the mid-1980s, the once marginal city of Vancouver has developed within a globalized economy and become an internationally recognized centre for contemporary visual art. Vancouver's status is due not only to a thriving worldwide cultural community that has turned to examine the so-called periphery, but to the city's growth, its artists, expan …

In 1949, the forest magnate, H.R. MacMillan, opened an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled "Design for Living," a show which brought together design and artistic communities to create four imaginary households for postwar Vancouverites. It also heralded an unprecedented level of cooperation between the province's industry and its artis …

In Performance Bond, Wayde Compton, among the most progressive and experimental poets in Canada, defiantly and eloquently confronts the globalization and commodification of Black culture.

With poetry inspired by the insistent cadences of hip-hop and jazz, Compton fuses language, history, and contemporary Black politics. He deals with Black diaspora …

Rajinderpal S. Pal's first, acclaimed collection, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read, was an exploration, a search not only for a place in the world, but for a sense of one's self.

Pulse is a collection of love poems, about the sharing of stories and the sharing of that discovered self. Pal writes about those moments in our lives that …

Facing History: Portraits from Vancouver examines the inhabitants of a city through the camera-art of its greatest artists. Featuring a wide range of material, from historical images to documentary depictions to contemporary visual artists' work, the book provides an intimate glimpse into Vancouver's sense of itself, and how representations of the …

All Amazed celebrates the life and work of the late Roy Kiyooka (1926-1994), one of Canada's first multi-disciplinary artists whose work transcended categorical and cultural exclusivity.
At various periods of his life, Kiyooka was a painter, sculptor, teacher, poet, musician, filmmaker, and photographer. When Kiyooka arrived in Vancouver in 1959, …

In the spring and summer of 1858, 600 blacks moved from San Francisco to the colonies that would eventually become British Columbia. The move was in part initiated by an invitation penned by the governor of the British colonies, James Douglas, who is commonly believed to have had African ancestry, a rumour he neither confirmed nor denied. His appe …

A magnificent anthology of blues poems/songs by some of Canada's best poets; on the accompanying CD, the poems are masterfully interpreted by Canadian west coast blues artists.
Writing contributors include Ken Babstock, bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Coady, Lorna Crozier, Barry Dempster, Patrick Friesen, Mark Jarman, Ryan Knighton, Rob …

nathalie stephens' book, Somewhere Running, irreverently examines the tensions between two women ("the artist"), a photographer ("the eyes that watch"), and "the city." Beginning with a very simple premise--two women standing at a distance from one another--the text circles hypnotically as details come into focus and the pull between figures inten …

Billeh Nickerson is a poet for our times--a witty, urbane chronicler of life through lavender-coloured glasses. His poems, full of astonishing pleasures, speak to the wonders of the world: about "the push of knowing you're different" and "the pull of wanting to belong." Whether it is professing his unrequited love for Wayne Gretzky, or offering his …

An anthology of new poetic voices from Vancouver. Contributors include Lori Maleea Acker, Shane Book, Adam Chiles, Brad Cran, Carla Funk, Chris Hutchinson, Aubri Keleman, Ryan Knighton, Billie Livingston, Teresa McWhirter, Billeh Nickerson, and Karen Solie.
A publication of Smoking Lung Press.

Work by writers of Chinese-Canadian heritage have achieved international success: this includes books by Wayson Choy, SKY Lee, and Denise Chong, as well as the acclaimed anthology of Chinese-Canadian fiction, Many Mouthed Birds. Swallowing Clouds collects the work of some of the most vibrant and exciting Chinese-Canadian poets working today, being …

Bud Osborn's point of reference is the street of the disenfranchised – literally, the street corners bordered by Main and Hastings on Vancouver's notorious East Side, known as "Hundred Block Rock"--the poorest neighbourhood in Canada. While this area is well-known for its drug users, criminals, and prostitutes, it is also home to recovering addi …

Wayde Compton's first poetry book: a stunning set of poems documenting the migration of Blacks to Canada, specifically when the first Black settlers-facing an increasingly hostile racist government-left San Francisco and travelled north to British Columbia beginning in 1858.
With recurring themes of the unknowable, the crossroads, the trickster, …

Above all
a poem records speech:
the way it was said
between people animals birds
a poem is an archive for our times
-Dorothy Livesay, "Anything Goes"
Dorothy Livesay, who died in 1996, is considered a pioneer of Canadian poetry; her work is infused with an extraordinary grace and power, and shaped by a prescient feminist sensibility which le …

A raga is a melodic composition in Indian classical music that imparts certain emotions. Ragas From the Periphery is a collection that uses language as its instrument.
Phinder Dulai is first and foremost a South Asian writer, and while issues of identity and cultural immersion are central to his work, they are not all-encompassing. His poems are i …

Imagining Ourselves gathers together selections from Canadian non-fiction books that in some way have had a major impact on how we view ourselves as Canadians, revealing how the national identity has been shaped and informed by the written word. Included are selections from such well-known Canadian books as Wild Animals I Have Known (Ernest Thomas …

Tender Agencies explores the ephemeral yet tangible presence of language in our lives, and the manipulation of language and meaning; chaotic, confrontational, and laced with black humour.

The poetic record of the last year in the life of a fictional salmon cannery on the northern coast of British Columbia: a remarkable, multi-voiced document that, in text and photographs, tells the poignant tale, through Turner's anthropological insight, of an industry and a culture under siege.