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Barbara Tran’s entrancing poetry collection, Precedented Parrotting (Palimpsest Press, 2024), was a finalist for the Governor General Literary Award for Poetry. This beautiful book stands as an expansive debut that plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world.
We are honoured to have Barbara join us for our Power Q & A series to speak with us about the visual impact of her work, which uses the whole stage of the page.
Your Devotee in Rags truly is a voracious visage of passionate construction. Exotic soundstages tumble unfettered around thunderous drum breaks and wholly convincing vocal performances. The narrative is female - is woman. Churning laments championed by steaming percussion drive us through moments, memories, patriarchy. The narrator is hungry. The voice is visceral, snarling.
Close your eyes and open your ears, friends, ‘cause cultural icons, Anne Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment) and Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene) have collaborated to create Your Devotee in Rags—a metamorphic sonic poetry LP being released with Siren Recordings.
Your Devotee in Rags is a missive to this age of patriarchal power, its songs and poems are designed to specifically confront that power and hold it to account. Taking such activist inspiration from musicians like Lido Pimienta and Tanya Tagaaq, musically YDIR blends acoustic and electronic genres, waltzes, laments, and Pauls Boutique-era Beastie Boys mash-ups all with the intent of creating a new artistic headspace: sonic poetry. The cultural direction is forward, the earbuds open up the stereo field, listening to YDIR is, in a word, empowering.
The major achievement of RuFF (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024) is the artful way in which author Rod Carley weaves the slender threads of historical fact into a broader fictional tapestry to create a raucously pun-driven tale of Elizabethan politics, theatre, magic, and mayhem. The novel features a relatively familiar cast of characters from the theatrical scene in that era, including William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Kit Marlowe, Richard Burbage, and Will Kempe. Women are given equal time in the form of Anne Hathaway, daughter Judith, and Magdalene Marbecke, known here as Maggie. Rounding out the motley crew are an assortment of allies, enemies, soldiers, peasants, peers, and political toadies – but most importantly, animals – specifically Shakespeare’s three-legged beagle, Biscuit; Judith’s cat, Gray-Malkin; and a crow named Cawdor.
Call me “Incested.”
I earned that name. I struggled long and hard to be able to say those words.
I cannot speak for husbands, children, sisters, brothers, cousins, wives, ancestors, friends,
or any of the hundreds involved; I speak only for myself. I tell this from my vantage point, my version of vision, my fractured reality.
After two thousand years, the historical truth of the two sisters, Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị, has evaporated into the winds of time, carried along by gusts of myth throughout the centuries. In the most traditional account of events, the one most widely reported by historians, the Trưng sisters were born into a noble family, their father part of the Lạc lords living in the Red River Delta valley, in Giao Chỉ province.
I headed to the bathhouse nearest to my home, hoping to find some good company. In case I couldn’t, I brought a book, though once I took my place in the empty sauna, it sat unopened in my lap. I leaned back and felt sweat develop on my forehead. It was late in the autumn, which in Montreal meant that the air outside was always cold, even on days of bright sun. The heat of the sauna was novel and welcome.
It matters which origin stories we tell and retell as we try to place ourselves in the land. I was taught the story of martyrs and savages in my high school class in Canadian history. I had never heard the stream of stories about linking arms until I moved to Hamilton, Ontario in my thirties. It takes an adjustment of mind to begin to hear stories that differ from the ones to which we are accustomed. As I’ll discuss later in this book when I introduce myself more directly, it took armed conflict in my neighbourhood and at the university where I work for me to begin to listen to the stories of how Indigenous people made peace in the northeast part of this continent.
There is a school of thought that says we should live every day like it is our last. The impracticality of doing that should be obvious enough, although the spirit of that ideal carries a certain allure. Suzy Krause manages to capture something of both the impracticality and the allure, not to mention the sheer nightmarish absurdity of the world’s impending doom in her novel I Think We’ve Been Here Before (Radiant Press, 2024). Love, both romantic and familial, are put through the wringer in this story of human foibles juxtaposed against global doom. It is a kind of sci-fi tragi-rom-com, if you will.
Laine Halpern Zisman’s latest book Conceivable: A Guide to Making 2SLGBTQ+ Family (Fernwood, 2024) is the first book of its kind in Canada.
Laine Halpern Zisman is an adjunct professor at the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria. She is founder and project lead on Family Building Canada (familybuildingcanada.com) and a Certified Fertility Support Practitioner with Birth Mark in Toronto. Her research traverses the intersections of 2SLGBTQ+ equity, culture, and reproductive care.
For this Power Q & A we are joined by internationally acclaimed author Ayelet Tsabari to talk about her gorgeous debut novel, Songs for the Broken Hearted (Harper Collins, September 10, 2024).
Many of you may know of Ayelet from her widely-acclaimed memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019.
After finishing A Simple Carpenter (Radiant Press, 2024) by Saskatchewan-based poet and novelist Dave Margoshes, the opening sentence from David Copperfield came to mind: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
This not-so-simple story of a ship’s carpenter, who has no memory of who he is or where he came from and goes by various names but finally settles on Yusef, chronicles his search for identity, his past and his place in the world in the modern-day Middle East.
Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada's North (Dundurn Press) by journalist Kathleen Lippa is a highly anticipated work of nonfiction. After years of research, Kathleen has written about the shocking crimes of Edward Horne, a trusted teacher who wrought lasting damage on Inuit communities in Canada’s Arctic when he sexually abused his male students.
Kathleen is not Indigenous and some people might question why Kathleen is the person to tell this story. We are honoured to have Kathleen on our Power Q & A series to talk about her position.
We met U.S. author Sawyer Cole a few years ago on Instagram and were immediately struck by their kindness, enthusiasm, and ability to talk about difficult issues movingly and with compassion. Sawyer is also a wonderful supporter of books and authors from around the world and today, we are delighted to welcome them to our Power Q & A to talk about reading with boundless curiosity.
Lies I Told My Sister is Louise Ells’ second novel and is a sensitive, poignant work of fiction. Taking place over just 17 hours and alternating between past and present, the novel takes us into the strained relationship of estranged sisters Rose and Lily, who are meeting at the hospital after Rose’s husband has been injured. Very quickly, issues of their childhood, the death of their older sister, and the inevitable truth of past lies and secrets surface. But while centering around a serious injury, the novel focuses on the cost of secrets, the depth of the bond between sisters, and just how far we will go to protect the ones we love—and ourselves.
The main narrative thrust of Yellow Barks Spider (Radiant Press, 2024), the debut coming-of-age novella by Saskatchewan-born trans-woman, filmmaker, sound artist and writer Harman Burns, is a rural boy’s journey toward transitioning to a woman. But to describe the experience of reading it in terms of coining a genre, I’d have to call it a Prairie Gothic Phantasia.
all about canadian books (AACB) is one of our favourite author interview series. Host crystal fletcher doesn’t care if an author is a big name or the book a bestseller: she only cares that she likes the work. crystal has interviewed many of our favourite contemporary Canadian authors and brings with her to each conversation kindness, enthusiasm, and thoughtful and incisive questions—and her refreshingly raw and unfettered love of language. (Does anyone remember when she teared up during a National Poetry Month episode? As if we could adore her anymore!)
Kilworthy Tanner by Jean Marc Ah-sen (Vehicule Press, 2024) tells the story of Jonno—a ner’er-do-well and perpetually up-and-coming writer who becomes enthralled with the established, acclaimed, controversial, and already married but not monogamous author Kilworthy Tanner. What follows is a titillating metafiction that mirrors a literary world replete with “grasping, unprincipled” egos.
There’s much to love about this book, including Jonno’s narration, which teases and bites and soothes and is tender and playful. We are tickled to have Jean join us for this Power Q & A to talk about how he created his protagonist’s distinct voice.
Upon the death of her widower father, there came the matter of dismantling his possessions. Emptying and cleaning the house for resale. It wasn’t as though either of the children were planning on returning to the homestead, both some twenty years removed, but it fell to them to pick apart the entirety of their parents’ lives from out of this multi-level wooden frame, a structure originally erected by their grandfather and great-grandfather immediately following the Great War.
