When My Ghost Sings by Tara Sidhoo Fraser Arsenal Pulp Press 184 pages $23 Memoir, by definition, is a genre of literature based on memory. So, what happens when a writer’s memories, their primary source material, are erased? In When My Ghost Sings, writer Tara Sidhoo...
Wifehood by Caitlin McKenzie Ethel Micropress 32 pages $10 Deceptively simple, beautifully balanced, and structurally near-infinite: Barrie, Ontario poet Caitlin McKenzie’s first chapbook charts what it means to be a wife after growing up within a shattered parental...
People You Know, Places You've Been by Hana Shafi Book*hug Press 132 pages $23 “We’re all just animals searching for dopamine,” writes Hana Shafi in her journey to find beauty in the mundane and every day. The bold statement is accompanied by one of many colourful,...
Making Up the Gods by Marion Agnew Latitude 46 Publishing 376 pages $24 Agnew weaves together in a tender fashion her three narrators’ shared experiences—all people who share separate loneliness, grief, and a childhood with only one parent. Agnew’s writing is simple...
Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border by Marina Sonkina Guernica Editions 100 pages $20 Journalist Marina Sonkina’s Ukrainian Portraits is a timely collection documenting her experiences at the Ukraine-Poland border in the spring of 2022. Sonkina, herself a...
Always Brave, Sometimes Kind begins with “All the Children We Don’t Know,” an earnest story about Rhanji, a doctor managing hospital overflow and a staffing crisis in 1995. Told through matter-of-fact prose, Bickell tells readers that workers are “used and abused, underpaid and unseen” instead of having readers infer the physical and emotional impacts that healthcare cutbacks have on characters.
There’s a meditative quality to Entering Sappho, a centrifugal movement that emerges as Dowling reinterprets and remixes her understanding of both the geographical and the literary Sappho. So proceeds “Soft Memory,” my favourite poem in the book, a sequence quickly identifiable as a rewriting of Sappho 31 (her “Ode on the Beloved”).
In the same spirit as the opening page, the book wastes no time diving into Tobimatsu’s diagnosis, treatment, and the aftermath, allowing the reader to get some glimpse into Tobimatsu’s whirlwind of emotions after being diagnosed at the young age of 25. In a matter of days, the diagnosis forced Tobimatsu to make long-term decisions about her fertility, while doctors gave her heteronormative advice on sexual health and appearance.
It is the simplest sentences that devastate in the debut novel from Hazel Jane Plante. “Vivian was my favourite person,” the narrator writes about her best friend, unrequited lover, and fellow femme trans conspirator in the wake of her sudden passing. It’s more a...
Sonnet L’Abbé’s third poetry collection is an incredibly ambitious project that assimilates William Shakespeare’s poetry, and it does not disappoint. Letter by letter, L’Abbé inserts her own language into his poetry, erasing and engulfing his words into her own. While...