Wonder World By K.R. Byggdin Enfield & Wizenty 183 pages, $21.95 Isaac Funk is a character many of us know. This is not to say he’s generic—he’s anything but—but he feels familiar, at least within certain communities or subcultures. We find Funk, a wildly dressed...
PLACE By Alexei Perry Cox Noemi Press 122 Pages, $24 In the author’s second full-length prose poetry collection, Perry Cox’s inquisitive nature shines through. In PLACE, the disciplines of language, anthropology, philosophy, history, and geography converge. Perry Cox...
Remnants By Céline Huyghebaert Translated by Aleshia Jensen Book*hug Press 259 pages, $23 Remnants, the English translation of Céline Huyghebaert ’s 2019 Governor General’s Award-winning autofictional novel Le drap blanc, is full of holes. A bookworm infestation in...
Slow Reveal By Melanie Mitzner Inanna Publications 304 pages, $22.95 Melanie Mitzner’s ambitious novel, Slow Reveal, grapples with questions of desire, intimacy, and the intrinsic human drive to create art through the unraveling of a dysfunctional, wealthy family of...
How had Marguerite ended up on that phantom island, the Île des Démons, crawling inside a dark cave surrounded by wild wolverines and hungry, snarling bears? What scandalous affair aboard the ship had led to her abandonment? These insatiable curiosities fill the writer’s mind, and she is swept away in research, trying to escape her own time by imagining life in the 16th century.
Poems in Beast at Every Threshold attempt both: the consumption of media and narratives is a process of looking for reflections of the self in another, while to “fluent” is to, in a way, translate between languages of love and touch.
In their debut essay collection, Lori Fox examines the intersections of queerness, class, poverty, gender, and mental heath. This Has Always Been a War is written in eleven essays and with each one Fox brings humour, urgency, and just the right amount of anger to conversations that demand attention.
Cid V. Brunet’s debut memoir, This Is My Real Name: A Stripper’s Memoir, is a loving, vengeful lament to sex work, based on the ten years Brunet worked as a stripper across Canada under the name Michelle. Anarchist and self-described “queer separatist,” Brunet reconstructs their experiences as Michelle with a precise, devastating eye, offering both the grime and glitter of the industry with the same restrained lyricism.
Alharthi’s work is careful and honest, written with respect for this grandmother character and the familial gravitas she represents. While the readers may feel a tinge of sadness for Bint Aamir and the life she could have lived, there is solace in knowing Zohour’s carries on.
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ROOM 49.3 NO CANADA
In the new era of CanCon, as feminists and writers it is our task to reject this Canadian exceptionalism, this too-comfortable back-patting. How can we begin to imagine alternative arts economies, Indigenous economies around art, that start with treaty, that align with BDS? What art, what literature, would such a system free us to create?
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ROOM 49.2 Science
Welcome to the Science issue of Room Magazine, where we privilege questions: questions about how to construct better worlds; questions about how to destroy hyper-capitalistic, necropolitical systems; questions that beget questions and new questions.
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