Two plays from rising Canadian theatre star Ellie Moon. Asking For It looks at gender roles and sexual consent in the wake of the Ghomeshi scandal, and considers the various ways in which sexual consent is understood personally, culturally, and legally. In this documentary play, Moon speaks with people of all ages and backgrounds about their assump …

eat salt | gaze at the ocean explores the themes of Black sovereignty, Haitian sovereignty, and Black lives, using the Haitian (original) zombie as a metaphor for the condition and treatment of Black bodies. Interspersed with information about zombies, Haiti, and policies is the author’s personal narrative of growing up Black and Haitian of immig …

A debut poetry collection that grows from the impulse to explore home in the suburb – in the intersections, overlaps, and gaps between urban and rural. These are walking poems and driving poems. In growing suburbs across the country, there is a push to urbanize, to rethink this sprawling space; urban renewal is foreshadowed all over contemporary …

A moving new collection from award-winning poet, novelist, critic, and creative-writing instructor Margaret Christakos, charger considers the plugged-in self fuelled by the technologies that deliver us to each other. A deeply humane poetic cycle in twelve sections, charger grapples with the complicated currents that course between private and socia …

Wanting Everything presents the collected works of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch. In addition to reproducing newly revised editions of her book-length works (The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World), the volume collects unpublished works of prose as well as correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occ …

Within the contours of TENDER lie field notes from a life lived across multiple affinities, kinships, and desires. Equally visual and textual, TENDER is a beautifully complex collection spanning thirty years of curious inquiry into our shared human–animal condition. Laiwan traverses diverse terrains – the body, land, language – which are root …

In the follow-up to her BC Book Prize-winning book of poetry, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, Mercedes Eng continues her poetic investigation of racism and colonialism in Canada, weaponizing the language of the nation-state against itself in the service of social justice. my yt mama is a collection of poems that considers historic and contempor …

TIME: All.
SPACE: The Multiverse.
Come along for the ride to Kamloopa, the largest Powwow on the West Coast. This high-energy Indigenous matriarchal story follows two urban Indigenous sisters and a lawless Trickster who face our world head-on as they come to terms with what it means to honour who they are and where they come from. But how to go a …

Poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei’s Eight Track is a transliterary exploration of traces. Sound recordings, surveillance cameras, desert geoglyphs, drone operators, refugee interviews, animal imprints, and audio signals manifest moments of inspired wonder, systems of power, slippages, debris. In “the great era of seeing” when the …

Mercedes Eng’s first book is a risky and profoundly unsettling work of “auto-cartography,” documenting the struggles and politics of everyday life in Vancouver, foregrounding the literal and figurative violence behind the euphemism “missing women,” resistance to the Olympic-Industrial Complex, and other legacies of colonialism that contin …

A powerful verbatim play about young women’s resilience through foster care, drawn from in-depth interviews. No White Picket Fence stems from a research project conducted by social work professor Sue McKenzie-Mohr with ten individuals who, as girls, grew up in the foster-care system and now identify in their own ways as living well. The play’s …

People Live Here is a collection of three exciting new plays by George F. Walker, Canada’s king of black comedy and a winner of two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Drama. The Chance is a funny, quirky, and suspenseful play portraying three aspiring but economically deprived women living in a working-class neighbourhood of Toronto. The se …

In JUST LIKE I LIKE IT, Danielle LaFrance combines poetry and autotheory as a means of targeting ideological infatuation, spilling into an obsession with ideological abolishment. JUST LIKE I LIKE IT searches for ways to kill and abolish "it," seeking means to get it done right, even when attempted slowly and stupidly, even if the only way out is de …

My Favourite Crime ranges across the world and over a wide array of contemporary issues. Divided into five sections, all united by a recurring consideration of how writing helps transform our understanding of our family, of ourselves, and of the world, the book addresses such disparate topics as: the author’s tumultuous relationship with his fath …

PERFACT is a series in three parts, beginning with an interrogation into the structure of experience, language, and identity. The title poem, “PERFACT,” is an approach to materiality and consciousness in which each intersect, partaking in a coded interchange. This interchange precedes the stage play, 物の哀れ (“mono-no-aware,” an untran …

The Living is a powerful and unsettling documentary play by Colleen Wagner, author of the Governor General's Literary Award–winning play The Monument. It is inspired by the actual stories of women and girls who survived trauma in post-conflict zones like Rwanda and Uganda. The Living examines the lives of victims and perpetrators, post-genocide, …

So many things seem like a BIG DEAL: buying clothes, food trends for healthfulness and coolness, what’s trending online, your personal problems, what someone else has said, the political landscape, an Instagram post, avocado toast. This list could go on and on. What’s a big deal to someone might be nothing to another. It’s a Big Deal! questio …

Three early plays from influential Canadian Latina playwright, Carmen Aguirre. The plays, Chile Con Carne, ¿QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh?, and In a Land Called I Don’t Remember, deal with the experience of exile – the hardships, the heartache, and the horror – as well as revealing the fresh perspective refugees bring to North American society. …

Seven Sacred Truths presents a powerful exploration of an Indigenous woman’s healing journey. Seeing the world through “brown” eyes, poet Wanda John-Kehewin makes new meaning of the past, present, and future through a consideration of Love, Wisdom, Truth, Honesty, Respect, Humility, and Courage. By sharing her views on these Seven Sacred Trut …

How might poetic practices undermine racist ideologies and colonialism, engendering ecological attentiveness, and anomalous and compassionate communities? Christine Stewart’s Treaty 6 Deixis takes up these timely and pressing questions as it investigates what it means to be a non-Indigenous inhabitant of Canada’s Treaty 6 territory, “in this …

Heartily sincere, human, and compassionate, Around Her is a multifaceted novel that explores, through the words and reflections of a large community of characters, the bonds that unite us, and love in all of its manifestations – the love that one finds, that one loses, destroys, desires, or recovers.

In the mid-1990s, a sixteen-year-old girl, secr …

Combining visuals and text, this collection of poems travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities; social relationships; literature, cinema, and art; as well as dreams, as it moves between the page and the exhibition.

The Eyelash and the Monochrome asks: what happens when material becomes thought and thought becomes object …

The two one-act plays in Talker’s Town and The Girl Who Swam Forever are set in a small northern B.C. mill town in the 1960s. They portray identical characters and action from entirely different gender and cultural perspectives. In many ways, the two separate works are inter-related coming-of-age stories, with transformation as a key theme.

The ce …

Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces – concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms – that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection.
The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is a p …

Gracie is a dramatic monologue that tells the story of a girl raised in a fundamentalist community that transports child brides between polygamist communities in both Canada and the United States.

As the play opens, Gracie is eight years old and moving with her mother, brother, and sisters from her community in the southwestern United States to a co …

Kuei, My Friend is an engaging book of letters: a literary and political encounter between Innu poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine and Québécois-American novelist Deni Ellis Béchard. Choosing the epistolary form, they decided to engage together in a frank conversation about racism and reconciliation.
Intentionally positioned within the contexts of t …

An early member of the avant-garde TISH group, which turned Canadian poetry for the first time to a focus on language, Marlatt’s career has spanned five decades and a range of formal styles and concerns. Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems offers Marlatt’s perceptual and Vancouver-centric work of the 1970s, her feminist writing of the 1980 …

In 1776, at the age of sixty-four, an embittered Jean-Jacques Rousseau took to rambling. Feeling rejected, neglected, and condemned, he turned his back on the society in which he had never managed to feel at ease, and found peace in wandering the fields outside Paris, noting interesting flora and fauna, and ruminating on his life and career. Rousse …

The fifteenth summer of Beth Weeks’s life is full of strange happenings: a classmate is mauled to death, children go missing on the nearby reserve, and an unseen predator pursues Beth. Not to mention Beth is becoming aware that there is darkness in her own home: her mother’s relationship with her father is not all it seems, and her own relation …

An Honest Woman by Jónína Kirton confronts us with beauty and ugliness in the wholesome riot that is sex, love, and marriage. From the perspective of a mixed-race woman, Kirton engages with Simone de Beauvoir and Donald Trump to unravel the norms of femininity and sexuality that continue to adhere today.

Kirton recalls her own upbringing, during w …

During the groundbreaking Charles Edenshaw exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2013, poet Colin Browne found himself returning often to study three large argillite platters carved by the Haida master in the late 1800s. Produced several years apart, each depicts an identical scene at the same moment: two frightened figures in a canoe appear t …

They say hindsight is 20/20. They’re not wrong.

Ten years after their parents’ death in a car accident, now-grown sisters Carmen and Manon are together for one of their rare visits – and one of them is finally ready to confront their shared tragedy.

Carmen is a boisterous country-and-western singer who has left her home, and all her past, i …

How much do we value clean water? Enough to stop our industrialized way of life from degrading it? The documentary play The Watershed follows an artist and her family in the struggle to chart a sustainable course between economic prosperity and environmental stewardship.

Largely constructed from original interviews conducted by the playwright, The W …

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of his only model, complete with a glossary, a …

Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. One of Lucia Frangione’s blasphemy plays,’ it inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In an erotic world where men are traditionally cast …

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.

Seven women in this raucous Fra …

Music has long been considered beneficial in enhancing cognitive skills, and some have even suggested that music constitutes its own category of brain function; that it is, in fact, a separate and distinct type of thought. As is sex, which can produce, aside from children, complete dysfunction, confused mental activity – even, quite possibly, a c …

Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script

Inside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.

Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist who made a startling discovery: a bio-enginee …

Canada’s master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism.

We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed. The list of characters in We the Family reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed, it is, at least in …

Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script

Inside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.

Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist who made a startling discovery: a bio-enginee …

Rita Joe is a Native girl who leaves the reservation for the city, only to die on skid row as a victim of white men’s violence and paternalistic attitudes towards First Nations peoples. As perhaps the best-known contemporary Canadian play and a poetic drama of enormous theatrical power, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe had a major influence in awakening c …

A heartwarming comedy about two middle-aged First Nations seniors, Evie and Cecil, on their very first trip out of the country. Evie and Cecil reminisce and bicker as they review a lifetime together.

CECIL
So, what exactly are we going to do now that we’re here in Mexico?

EVIE
I’m so glad you asked. Supposedly there are some ancient Mayan ruins …

Mambo Italiano achieves its overwhelming power through a perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama. Angelo, at the prompting of his equally repressed sister Anna, has told his very traditionally Italian immigrant parents, Maria and Gino, that he is gay. Hurt, betrayed and mortified by Angelo’s coming out, his lover Nino is not unpre …

Cerulean Blue is a comedic play about a struggling blues band invited to participate in a benefit concert for a First Nation community in conflict with governmental authorities. Upon arriving, the band discovers the entire lineup of musical acts has cancelled and they’re left trapped behind barricades. Complicating the matter, there is conflict w …

Balconville is Canada's first bilingual play. Three families and Thibault, the neighbourhood rubbie, sit on their balconies in the heat of a Montreal summer. It is election time and Gaétan Bolduc is running for re-election for the Liberals. His broadcast truck roams the streets making election promises in English and in French, and playing the mus …

Canada’s top playwright takes on teen pregnancy in two comic dramas for young people.

Moss Park

It’s been twenty years since the debut of Tough!, but only two years have passed in the lives of Tina and Bobby, the main characters. Of course the poverty trap, which grips them both, is ageless.

In Moss Park, Bobby and Tina aren’t married, or eve …