In her debut poetry collection, Shannon McConnell explores the fraught history of New Westminster's Woodlands School, a former "lunatic asylum" opened in 1878 which later became a custodial training school for children with disabilities before its closure in 1996. Partially set in the 1960s and 70s, The Burden of Gravity uses personas to imagine re …

Spanning centuries, The Hammer of Witches reaches from present-day urban dystopias and the unlikely enchantments that they harbour, to medieval Norway, where the first Christian king waged war on the country's gender-nonconforming wizards. Macabre imagery, speculative themes, and everyday mysticism blur the distinction between the real and the unre …

Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds gathers the voices of poets from across Canada, the US and the UK who write of water. Bottled, clouded, held in rain, in river, estuary and lake, sweet water is the planet's life force and the poets here examine it from every angle--the pitcher plant, the beaver and the American Bull Frog, rain, clouds, smog, t …

Devolution is Kim Goldberg's eighth book and her personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. Using absurdism, surrealism and satire, Goldberg offers up businessmen who loft away as crows, a town that reshapes its …

After moving to Vancouver's West End in 2014, The Human is drawn to a small body of water called Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Daytime visits, with a surprising array of wildlife, are quietly revelatory; but so is suddenly waking in the night when owl hoots, or geese startle in alarm at otter on the prowl. The Human savours this up-close relationshi …

Ice melt; sea level rise; catastrophic weather; flooding; drought; fire; infestation; species extinction and adaptation; water shortage and contamination; intensified social inequity, migration and cultural collapse. These are but some of the changes that are not only predicted for climate changing futures, but already part of our lives in Canada. …

Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesn't fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection on/me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margi …

Through poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat. Inspired by Pablo Neruda's Elemental Odes, this wide-ranging and diverse collec …

Sybil Andrews was one of Canada's most prominent artists working throughout the late twentieth century. From a cottage by the sea in Campbell River, Andrews created striking linocut prints steeped in feeling and full of movement. Inspired by the working-class community that she lived in, her art is known for its honest depiction of ordinary people …

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 …

In her first full-length collection, award-winning poet Ruth Daniell offers work that is both earnest and hopeful, even in the face of trauma. In formally exquisite and lyrical poems, The Brightest Thing tells the story of a young woman who is raped by her first boyfriend and her struggle afterwards to navigate her fairy-tale expectations of romant …

How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.

Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal Gibson's sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist i …

Marion Quednau’s collection Paradise, Later Years plays with the language of juxtaposition, nothing is straight on; if there’s quiet beauty by the sea, there’s a passing warship. Quednau’s lyricism, whether of river or lover, bears witness to relationships transformed by the tension—and surprise—of setting one thing against another. The …

Take a delightful journey through BC's extraordinary bounty and explore the secrets of locally grown fruits and vegetables. In Jane Reid's new book, FRESHLY PICKED, foodies, locavores and gardeners will discover fascinating information about the plentiful harvests that BC farmers produce every year. In this beautiful colour edition, Reid shares val …

On the 120th anniversary of Amelia Earhart's birth and the 80th anniversary of her disappearance, award-winning poet, Heidi Greco revitalizes what we know about the iconic aviator through uplifting and historically mesmerizing verse. If most people were asked what they know about Amelia Earhart, they'd probably respond with something like "Wasn't s …

An anthology of Canadian immigrant women and their experiences of being caught between the world of their past and the world of their future. In this third anthology in the Canadian women series by Caitlin Press, Canadian immigrant women from a variety of ethnicities and intersecting identities share their diverse and personal stories.

A woman takes …

Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine celebrates the history and evolution of Canadian literature and feminism with some of the most exciting and thought-provoking fiction, poetry, and essays the magazine has published since it was founded in 1975 as Room of One’s Own. This collection includes poems about men not to be fallen in love with, tr …

In the decade since the publication of the first edition of In Fine Form, there has been a resurgence of Canadian poets writing in "form" - in sonnets and ghazals, triolets and ballads, villanelles and palindromes - and formal poetry has become more visible in books, literary journals and classrooms. The first edition of this anthology was called " …

The poems in The Dirty Knees of Prayer are hot and dark as night rain. The new Honeywell fan blows whips of simmered air against Shay's glistening back. He suspects a dystopian future and apparently it has arrived. These poems shrug at death. A tide of smoke rises and hovers over the city. Shay's picture is taken for his collection of grief and apo …

Covering Rough Ground, Kate Braid’s first book, was published in 1991 and awarded the Pat Lowther Award for Best Book of Poetry by a Canadian Woman. Since then Kate has written extensively in prose, poetry and on CBC Radio about her and other women’s experiences in the construction trades. Her work has been highly praised by women in almost eve …

An elegy to and celebration of British Columbia's second-longest river, one at the centre of contemporary conversations about resource extraction and northern geographies, Skeena is an assemblage of voices, stories and histories both about the river and from the river's perspective. As a single poetic narrative spanning more than ninety pages, this …

The poems in Average Height of Flight are founded in the landscape of coastal BC, built on the losses within the narrator's life in counterpoint to her walks in the natural world. In forests with her dog, along watersheds and hill climbs, Beth Kope goes off trail to find inspiration and time for meditation. She observes as the landscapes change wit …

Art, children, marriage, breaking, rejoicing. Love is a many-branched tree and in Hamilton's newest poetry collection, her third, it's autumn or winter, the winds are kicking up and branches are flying everywhere - bursting into a thousand shapes. Or maybe it's Hamilton's heart that explodes into many dimensions. Tender, furious, grief-stricken, wi …

How do we navigate a world of fast-food joints, big-box stores and traffic jams, where people grandstand in the deli and homeless men announce the end of the world through “slats in the sky”? Where the cumulative result of our lifestyle is a gyre of garbage and plastic in the North Pacific? Al Rempel’s This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For …

The Dreamland Theatre exists in a photograph of a white building on sledges being pulled through the mud from one location to another by a team of horses in Prince George (then Fort George) circa 1912. These poems are about imagining place and, continuing the work of Finding Ft. George, Rob Budde's process of trying, and failing, to find out where …

Why do some of us learn to bend? Others break? How do we move from shame to being "enough"? How do we bounce back stronger after adversity and then embrace our own humanity with its flawed beauty? In her first full collection of poetry, Jane Byers explores her personal experience with resilience, beginning with her own difficult birth, which she de …

Poems about Kate's early experience in construction.

Many Canadians say that British Columbia is the zaniest political province. It's too diverse, too polarized—geographically, demographically and ideologically. But the British Columbia political arena is lively, and it has often led the way in electing women to parliaments—as respected spokespeople for the public and as equal people.

In Seeking B …

In 1974 Lorne Dufour moved to Alkali Lake Reserve, a Shuswap community near Williams Lake in British Columbia, to help reopen the local elementary school. Like many First Nation communities across Canada, Alkali Lake had been ravaged by decades of residential schools and forced religion. Colonialism had robbed them of their language and culture and …

Dennis E. Bolen’s Black Liquor continues his exploration of modern disconnection and the disparate paths taken by those railing against the austere landscape of their lives.

Imbued with lyrical evocations of lost childhood, mature love and deep friendship contrasted against brutal depictions of grueling labour, industrial mishap, historical misfor …

The Earth Remembers Everything is a masterful blend of history, travel and poetic narrative, tracing the author's journeys to some of the most difficult destinations in the world; the Cui Chi Tunnels in Vietnam, Tiananmen Square in China, Hiroshima in Japan, and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland; First Nations sites such as Mosquito Lake on Moresby Isla …

Kim Clark believes that before multiple sclerosis began its insidious infiltration, there was no writing in her. That somehow the damaging changes that shut down certain functions in her brain also opened up other unused areas that housed a secret love affair with language and all its possibilities, its delicious sights and sounds and intimations.

T …

Emily Carr recorded the experience of the West Coast soul in her living landscapes and her portraits of BC's towering firs. Kate Braid, in To This Cedar Fountain, engages Carr in conversation as only a kindred spirit could: a West Coaster, an artist, a woman with an affinity for timber. In these poems Carr's sensual paintings envelop Braid; Emily r …

Isabel Lee's early life in rural BC was forever changed by a brief but powerful love affair with a young Oblate priest. Now a recovering alcoholic, Isabel struggles to pull the tattered fragments of her life together and repair the damage to her relationship with her estranged daughter. Once idealistic and hopeful, Father Alvaro Ruiz now has his ow …

A proud son of Bella Coola's Norwegian settlers, Lorne Greenaway grew up in the Okanagan in a time when kids left home after breakfast to face the day's adventures (and misadventures) armed with only an uncomplicated faith in their own youthful immortality. When Lorne won a pony in the Red River Cereal contest, a lifelong love of animals was born. …

Set in the volatile 1970s and '80s, when social norms and expectations were changing rapidly, Leaving Now is the emotionally candid story of a mother's anguish as she leaves her husband to love a woman. In this second book, Pare masterfully blends aspects of her personal journey with her own version of a well-loved fairy tale. Gudrun, the five-hund …

In this late-modern period of slackened meaning, G.P. Lainsbury's 'Versions of North' attempts to locate poetic consciousness in the drifting concept of north, using avantgarde techniques to reveal connections between disparate elements of signification. Lainsbury borrows from a wide variety of sources, filtering them through the grid of a disencha …

Maureen Foss's off-beat and darkly funny third novel begins when four quirky and mismatched women answer an ad to join a writing group. Unlikely friendships and wild adventures ensue as their lives start to unravel around them.

Bunny, the wife of a calculating, cheating husband, is writing a novel about the best way to carry out spousal disposal and …

Set in Vancouver in 1907, Better the Devil You Know is the outrageous tale of three unique and curious characters: the small-time con man who passes himself off as an evangelical preacher, the scrawny lady of the night whom he reluctantly befriends, and the five-year-old hellion left in his care by a former lady friend. In the course of their adven …

Annie Garland Foster was born in Fredericton, NB, in 1875. She was an educator, nurse, politician, social reformer, journalist and biographer of Pauline Johnson. But she was also a bit of a mystery.

In 1939, Annie wrote an autobiography titled "Passing Through" in which she described the challenges and adventures of her earlier life: as a co-ed at U …

Imagine you're given the startling news that your body is only capable of having six more orgasms. "It's either buck up or fuck up," decides Mel in "Six Degrees of Altered Sensation," adding this new restraint to the perplexity of single life with progressive Multiple Sclerosis. In "Flickering," Francis becomes a pyromaniac in order to give her gro …

In this jarring collection, Adam Pottle cracks open the world of disability, illuminating it with an idiom that is both unsettling and exhilarating. His subjects are gritty and multifarious: amputee sex swingers; drug-related shootings; institutionalized adolescents coerced into sterilization. Difficult as their circumstances may seem, Pottle's den …

In her first book of poetry, Ursula Vaira captures the rugged and challenging beauty of the West Coast landscape in three poignant stories.

The first, told through a set of linked poems, describes her thirty-day, thousand-mile paddle from Hazelton to Victoria with skipper Roy Henry Vickers. "Journeys 97" was an RCMP-First Nations venture to raise ad …

The junction of Highways 20 and 97 forms a rough right angle around which lies the city of Williams Lake. These are the coordinates by which Christian Petersen's fiction can be charted. From the building of the Gaol at Soda Creek to ruminations on the origins of the Barkerville fire, All Those Drawn to Me explores the unpredictable, romantic and sp …

In 1930, Emily Carr met Georgia O'Keeffe at an exhibition of O'Keeffe's paintings in New York. Inspired by the idea of a bond between these two powerful painters, award-winning poet Kate Braid has expanded that momentary meeting into a passionate, revolutionary friendship. In Georgia O'Keeffe's voice, she envisions what might have happened if the t …

Understories explores the meeting of the natural, suburban and inner-city experiences of Prince George. These poems look beneath the daily observations of a place jostled between stripmalls and pubs, the university and the mill, and a landscape that presses in at every corner, revealing a sometimes gritty underside. Al Rempel's poetry kicks the sno …

Memorials and the yearning to re-create the past permeate Valley Sutra, award-winning poet Kuldip Gill's new collection. The voices of East Indian communities and families speak up, reminding us that history is not just what is recorded in documents and ledgers, but is a mixture of smells, tastes and textures: the steam of hot rotis rising from met …

Enter the Chrysanthemum is a luminous collection of poems about family, love and loss. Employing precise imagery and concise language, Lam plumbs and mines ordinary events and experiences to find a central core of poetic insight and sometimes harrowing truth. Whether written from the vantage point of a young child observing her parents, a single pa …