Blog
Took the fat family bible and tossed it
off the Lions Gate Bridge
Goodbye Toronto pre-Depression infant death So long psalms of Edwardian fiscal failure
Hurled it the same as Cobden-Sanderson
into the Thames his blocks of type
so no one could come after
so no one could traffick in his lonely fight
Good riddance to fleshpress and letterpress
the antiquarian appetites of every cast
let the orca swallow the bile anvil
for a fibrillating sponge
and sound so deep
Books have long lives, but if it’s possible to be late to the party celebrating an amazing book, we are definitely late to this one. Ian Colford’s 2023 Guernica Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, is a mesmerizing read that runs a dazzling gamut of human emotion: love, greed, grief, jealousy, rage. You name it: the characters in this novel—particularly our protagonist, Joseph—sing with range that would make Mariah Carey weak with envy.
Award-winning writer Elizabeth Ruth’s first collection of poems, This Report is Strictly Confidential, (Caitlin Press, 2024) is stunning readers with its tender and biting look at Elizabeth’s aunt’s life in a notorious government-run residential hospital. These are poems that centre humanness in inhumane situations and undress taboo, pushing darkness into light and giving voice to the often voiceless.
Because the collection is so autobiographical in nature, we wanted to ask Elizabeth about the choices she made in deciding to share these parts of her aunt’s story with the world. Elizabeth was gracious enough to answer our question.
Stephanie Cesca’s heartwarming debut novel, Dotted Lines (Guernica Editions, 2024), is a binary-breaking book existing in stunning defiance of the “evil stepparent” narrative. It shows readers how sometimes, it’s the person who owes you nothing who gives you everything. Bibliophiles across the country are already sharing how much they enjoyed this novel and Stephanie’s ability to challenge stereotypes with her clear, straightforward, and utterly absorbing storytelling.
Karen Green’s debut novel Yellow Birds (Re:Books Publishing) is being hailed as a beautiful and textured exploration of love, community, and learning to accept ourselves and each other.
In the Toronto Star, Nancy Wigston writes that Yellow Birds, “carries readers into the heart of a vanished musical era, and does it with style and panache.” If you’re looking for a singular and stunning coming-of-age novel to lose yourself in this season, be sure to put this on your reading list.
I cradled Elyse in my arms. Playtime and storytime had ended. The sun descended in one fell swoop into the earth. The slack weight of Elyse’s being pressed against my breast. With one deft finger, I broke her latch; one tear of milk ran from the corner of her wet mouth. I transported her limp body to the soft cotton mattress of her crib, laid a blanket over her torso. Her hands were cupped by her face like half moons, wispy hair curled around the backs of her ears. I smoothed two fingers along the creases of her forehead. The motion soothed her. Then I bent over the crib railing to kiss her plump cheek, careful not to wake her.
When I purchased the press and moved it to Hamilton, we continued going our own way, as the steel city was not seen at that time as a place for the arts. But we found a thriving literary and arts community here and we’ve grown much since then. I believe this ability to see potential where many companies might shy away is what sets us apart. Whether it’s a dedication to poets, seeing the beauty in a post-industrial city, encouraging our authors to blur literary genres and making space for new voices, we find books that change how people think about literature in Canada.
Memoirist and poet, Hollay Ghadery has described her first book of fiction, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) as “the result of my struggling to make sense of my fantasising about planning my husband’s funeral.” Not that she wants him dead, but rather because of her need for a more equitable partnership in her marriage, such are the circuitous paths of the psyche.
Widow Fantasies is a unique collection of micro-fictions where Ghadery condenses her narratives into semi-oblique snapshots
In my bedroom, I did some shadowboxing while Bruce, in spandex shorts and boxing gloves, rope-a-doped and air punched rapidly.
I was doing a pretty good job, but Bruce refused to accept imperfection. “You are too rigid. Relax, bend, and shapeshift to respond to whatever comes at you mentally and physically.”
I told him to calm down.
“I do this by working hard,” he said.
It always starts with a definition. Whether you start by negative inference or Apollonian gazes over the landscape, it starts with a definition. Translation as it is practiced today should be slotted under another rubric – perhaps transliteration – the agronomical spewing out of words from one language or dialect to another. A semantic thresher. But, in the end, not up to the task. Garbage in, garbage out.
Translation is something that sups from a different chalice. It originates with an act of surpassing hubris. based on the belief that you are capable of mind-reading – of knowing the inner thoughts of the original author – be he or she writer, musician, or politician or even judge – and to even know these thoughts in their inchoate form, pre-articulation, while still hovering in the antechamber of the mind.
Having a middle-grade author on our blog is a first for us, and we are delighted to kick off what will hopefully be the first of many middle-grad lit features with Anna Rosner, the award-winning author of Eyes on the Ice (Groundwood Books, 2024).
This story follows ten-year-old Lukas and his brother Denys, who want nothing more than to play hockey, but it’s 1963, and they live in Czechoslovakia, where everyone is on the lookout for spies of the state.
This is a thrilling read, and one young readers have been enjoying.
Welcome to the Power Q & A series, Anna!
There’s nothing like connecting with other passionate, inclusive feminists to make our day. That’s why we were so thrilled to learn about Aurora, host of It’s Just Feminism. On this show, which runs on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok , Aurora interviews other feminists from a delightfully dizzing array of backgrounds and explores what it means — and what it doesn’t mean — to be a feminist.
Aurora is an international PhD student of Feminist and Gender Studies who moved to Canada from her home country of Croatia—and we are so happy to have her here in Canada, and on this Power Q & A.
Welcome, Aurora!
On a cool night, Denys, Andrej and I make our way to what will likely be our last evening with Coach Peter. The ice on the rink is thin, and there are bits of weeds and twigs poking through.
As I’m climbing up the chain-link fence, the last one over, I see a man emerge from the shadows. He moves differently than Coach Peter. I do a double take in the darkness. He is definitely shorter than our coach, and his back is more curved.
Denys and Andrej see him, too.
That first night, the audience seemed to know the music was about to begin even before the bright lights of the concert bowl went down. There was a tiny, brief silence; a wave of anticipation that rippled through the stands—and then everything changed. Lights out, plunging 26,000 screaming Yellow Birds into a momentary darkness somehow made even more impenetrable by the roar of the audience. Soon, spotlights brightened the stage, illuminating the drumkit, the guitar stands, the keyboard, moving across the stadium over hands raised above heads. And then the lights returned to the front as the five members of the Open Road walked onto the stage, walked to their instruments, and paused.
Toronto’s Daniel Maluka may be a debut poet, with his collection, Unwashed, recently released by Mawenzi House Press, but he’s no stranger to the world of art. Daniel has been writing much of his life and his striking visual art has been exhibited throughout the city and beyond. Both Daniel’s writing and visual art are a means to share narratives and he does this with an intricate yet unadorned style that’s singular and absorbing.
Daniel joins us for this Power Q & A to talk about being a multidisciplinary artist.
Whether you know it or not, you have probably seen the art of Ruth Abernethy. Ruth is the sculptor who created the installation of Queen Elizabeth II at Queen's Park, the Glenn Gould sculpture in front of CBC studios, and the Liu Xiaobo piece in Ottawa. Her art, which has been installed coast to coast, has inspired many conversations among many Canadians. (She's also the only non-American to sculpt Abraham Lincoln!)
In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Wasauksing (Parry Island) to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life.
In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is an exploratory journey that examines our relationship to the natural world through the lens of a single garden. Enunciated from both a human perspective and from the imagined voices of the plants and animals that actually live in the garden itself, this collection also explores conceptual and visual articulations that function to disrupt our assumptions about poetry, meaning, and language.
