“A warning. A movement. A collection borne of protest.” These words, printed in bold on the back cover of Watch Your Head, a print anthology dedicated to fostering and broadcasting artistic responses to the climate crisis, succinctly sums up the history of the project.
Read MoreReading Molly Cross-Blanchard’s Exhibitionist offers a return to the forthright intimacy of our younger years. The book—a collection of confessional lyric poems—is dedicated to “the young people who feel so embarrassed, all the time” (n.p.).
Read MoreThe experience of Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy is a purposeful wading through text that churns like rough water throwing up debris, seafoam, and dislodging sunken things from the seabed.
Read MoreThe story explores how we deal with grief, loss, and abandonment, and the ways we learn to cope—or not cope. Having never accepted Devin’s death, the narrator is fueled by the illusion that she could somehow still be alive.
Read MoreInterweaving and layering the narrative with questions about religion, morality, philosophy, commitment, and the difference between free will and God created destiny, Washes, Prays immerses the reader in an experience far beyond that of a linear narrative, using poetry’s ability to create layered meaning through disparate images to complicate the prose.
Read MoreIn knot body, queer Arab poet Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch writes “For some writers, the memoir is a space of control, a way to reveal the facts they want to reveal, to share their stories so other know they are not alone.
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Book of Wings is the debut novel from acclaimed artist Tawhida Tanya Evanson. Told in the first-person, Evanson takes her protagonist on a sweeping journey of grief across three continents.
Read MoreWhat if the rising tide of fascism amidst climate disaster manifested in a violent reorganization of society? What would resistance to white supremacy and its attendant systems of control look like? What would we retain of our past lives, and how would our past selves help, haunt, or hinder us?
Read MoreQueer, trans-feminine, Muslim playwright Bilal Baig unapologetically pushes against the walls of white comfort in theatre to create space for South Asian queer communities in their debut play, Acha Bacha.
Read MoreIn her stunning new collection, rushes from the river disappointment, stephanie roberts takes us deep into a terrain of disappointment but also love, peopled both with believers and those who have seen too much to believe, where one’s “heart // muscle withers when you hope love is happening / and it isn’t” (22).
Read MoreFor both Chernoff and Khan, fragmentation is not always synonymous with collapse. Instead, it can be generative and full of creative possibility. Fragmentation also raises the difficult question of faith: when we no longer have sound narratives or pretty conclusions to rely on, what remains for us to believe in?
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In jaye simpson’s debut poetry collection it was never going to be okay, the poems weave together to examine the beauty within grief and the pain within love, which demonstrate simpson’s poetic skill and attention to detail.
Read MoreSmall, Broke, and Kind of Dirty: Affirmations for the Real World by Hana Shafi is a collection of essays that provide a face to the online affirmation art series that Shafi posts on her Instagram, @frizzkidart.
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In their debut poetry collection ZOM-FAM, Kama La Mackerel interweaves mythology, biography and colonial history in a queer and trans narrative rooted in their native island of Mauritius.
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Natasha Ramoutar, a self-described Indo-Guyanese writer by way of Scarborough, is descended “from women whose voices herd clouds and conjure storms.”
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While residing in the speculative world of Terese Mason Pierre's Manifest, my mind was beckoned towards the space created in another one of my favourite chapbooks, Sanna Wani's The Pink of the Seams.
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This is not a book of elbow grease and scrubbing, but of the deep soak. Immersion. Accuracy of recall is not what is valued here, but experience: "I don't remember what I said, / only the way the light fell on your collarbone" (40).
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LeBlanc paints women as complex and frightening, secretive and forceful: women who know what it means to be broken, to bleed, and to generate strength, a sort of sorcery, from the very visceral quality of this bleeding.
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What is most chilling about The Birth Yard is that these patriarchal ideas and social structures can and do exist. It’s not a dystopian future that we can prevent, if only we put an end to misogyny, but a reality that could exist a few hours from where we live.
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How do real historical events become folklore, and how does this feedback loop inform women’s real lives? Angela Caravan's Landing (post ghost press, 2018) and Amy LeBlanc's Ladybird, Ladybird (Anstruther Press, 2018) examine how the feminine appears (or is notably absent) in folklore and myths.
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