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Dennis Duckworth -- widely considered the least-likeable person on the Chicago music scene -- is a philanderer and a misanthrope with a history of inflicting pain and suffering on nearly everyone he meets. When a routine flight from New York mysteriously alters its path, he finds himself penniless and stranded on a wooded hillside in rural Scotland. The hill is home to Eddie the Red Cap -- a curmudgeonly, thousand-year-old goblin who secretly loves books and regrets the violent past of his people. Eddie is determined to put his murderous life of mayhem behind him; Dennis merely wants to stop being a jackass. How can it be that Dennis faces the bigger challenge? Filled with absurdity, magic, humour and hope, The Captain of Kinnoull Hill asks what happens when we can no longer abide our own nature. How much can we truly change about ourselves and -- in the end -- is it worth it to try?

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Travel Writing. Blomer takes you into Southeast Asia by bicycle with her husband Rupert, their two companion-like bikes and her experiences cycling over 4000km through 4 countries over three months with the little devil she takes everywhere, her type 1 diabetes. A travel memoir, SUGAR RIDE explores the love of cycling and the roads it can pull you up, down and along while detailing the experience of having type 1 diabetes and the literal ride of sugar that daily injections of insulin, food and exercise create. Part love story, part true cycling adventure and part dance with the body's strengths and weaknesses, SUGAR RIDE is an exploration of past adventures and how to feel about those experiences in the present.

We call it a transfer Its important to use the terms, to distance yourself. Its a dead guy in the back of a van, really, but the words can be something else. Dead bodies, rum-runners, murdered mothers. Small-town Alberta is home to Ian, a transfer agent who removes dead bodies all day and who has forgotten how to talk to the living; Becky, a failed academic looking to invent a violent history to escape her mundane present; and Athene, a young woman who witnessed her mothers murder and now seeks answers from the man who took her mothers body away. In this novel the dead have stories left to tell. But who gets to do the telling?

A poetic primer on mothering and motherhood, After Birth is unflinching in its celebration of new life. Proffering poems that are both alchemical and personal, Elizabeth Ross taps into the contradictions of creation -- joy, distress, lassitude -- all while her speaker tenderly hovers, like Nosferatu, over newborns. After Birth blood[ies] the word, and marks Elizabeth Ross as a writer to watch.

Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Young Adult. In the heart of Scarborough sits the Nap-Away Motel, a hunched building providing hidden worlds for its occupants. Within its derelict walls, Suleiman longs to rebuild his broken family, Tiffany creates a fantasy world to escape from her mother's neglect and Ori plans a search for their run-away twin brother. While they grapple with the challenges of mental health, addiction, and grief, the three dwellers manage to forge a friendship over a litter of stray kittens. Together, they find joy in ruin, and hope when everything seems lost.

Renowned poet and editor John Barton collects his most provocative essays, public lectures, and reviews produced over the past twenty-five years. Barton began publishing in an era much less attentive to queer voices. In this special book, Barton grafts his own memoir about finding his voice as a poet and feet as an editor to astute takes on Margaret Avison, Emily Carr, Pat Lowther, Maureen Hynes, Anne Szumigalski, and many others. Making this book even more essential reading is the larger cultural context Barton brings to bear by writing about the historical production evolution and reception of queer writing in the lengthening shadow of equity.

This is the story of B, a young non-binary woman coming of age in the Montreal music scene. As she witnesses her friends struggling with mental illness and drug addiction, she also must deal with her own craft, the nepotism of the industry, and maintaining her transient lifestyle. Lucid, subconscious, introverted, and taking B from Montreal to Los Angeles, this is an intimate perspective on the life of making music.

Constructive Negativity is a book of criticism without precedent in Canadian Literature. The result of over twenty years of participation in the nations poetry community, it combines Shane Neilsons lived experience of disability with prize culture theory in order to create that rarest of creatures: criticism as page-turner. In the first section of the book, Neilson repurposes Rilkes famous admonition, saying to poets You must change your genre meaning, you must write criticism in order for poetry to have a life in an era dominated by prize culture. Later, Neilson provides a starting point for others to engage with books of Canadian poetry using the lens of disability, covering a range of texts and especially weighing in on the authors particular community, those with invisible disability.

When her brother dies in the turbulent water of B.C.s Thompson River, Isabel sets out to find traces of him in the places he loved. At the same time, she is seeking locations referenced in important literary works by Sheila Watson and Ethel Wilson for a graduate thesis. Her map becomes a cartography of both feminine and personal engagements with landscape and memory. In locating the sources of rich creative expression and by reaching back to ancient ceremonial rituals for death and the afterlife, she finds a way to reconcile her own grief and the writing of B.C.s early feminist writers whom she fears risk being forgotten.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. In this wide-ranging collection, Andrew DuBois rounds up some 200 reviews of contemporary Canadian poets (from Jordan Abel to Jan Zwicky); American poets, memoirists, and novelists; and twenty-first century literary critics. With an approach that balances careful attention to aesthetics and style with an over-arching commitment to the crucial role of the arts in our personal and social lives, DuBois describes the objects under his discussion with a clarity and precision that aims to be both fair to the artists and enlightening for the reader. Eschewing obscurity, exiling jargon, and resisting political boilerplate, START TO FIGURE is a compelling record of over twenty years of critical response, from a lover of genuine art, meant to educate and entertain.

In her second collection of poetry,Hell Light Flesh,Klara du Plessis returns with a Dantesque trilogy on family, punishment, and the ferocity and brilliance of creation.Hell Light Fleshdrops the reader into a narrative claustrophobically entwined in unquestioned systemic violence where art and art criticism act as a consistent glimmer of hope. Over and over, the poem lends itself to allegory, and yields to layers of interpretation.Hell Light Fleshis mandatory reading for devotees of the long poem and fans of du Plessis thrilling brand of essayistic poetry alike.

How does one write a pre-emptive eulogy for their hometown, a transient metropolis arriving at its last stop? Composed over a span of three months, Postscripts from a City Burning reassembles the embers left behind by the 2019 Hong Kong protests (and ultimately failed coup), weaving nostalgia, loss, and possible redemption into a time capsule of diaristic verse, photographs, dramatic monologues, and historical testimony. At once angry, despondent and unflinching, Sam Cheuks second full-length collection offers up a microcosmic prelude of a citys smouldering ruin among many in a world marching to the heartbeat of increasingly authoritarian impulses.

Do you believe in angels? When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well-known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irenes mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way. EVERYTHING AFFECTS EVERYONE, is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.

THE WINTER-BLOOMING TREE draws us into the lives of Ursula Koehl-Niederhauser, a schoolteacher suffering from lapses of memory who is convinced that she has dementia; Andreas, her charming, well-intentioned but somewhat self-absorbed husband; and their grown daughter, Mia, who is about to move home after bouncing all over the country, trying to find herself as a journalist. Distracted by thoughts and memories of the winter-blooming apple tree in her laundry room, Ursula misses the neurologists diagnosis and becomes convinced she is falling ill. Andreas, certain that she is fine, refuses to worry her with his own work and health problems. Mia, caught up with her own situation, has no idea that her parents are struggling and cant understand why her mother, especially, is behaving so badly. The Winter-Blooming Tree delves into the dissonance between family members and how sometimes pride is the only thing standing between those we love and the stories we tell ourselves.

POETRY IS QUEER is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers -- real and imagined -- conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word queer for those who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state, Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank OHara, to mowing Walt Whitmans grass, POETRY IS QUEER is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other.

In the early 1990s, Caitlin Maharg, grieving the loss of her parents, leaves everything she knows in Canada for Northern Ireland to pursue her love of poetry while living in a cottage by the Irish Sea. Feeling like a child again in a distant land still affected by the Troubles, she is haunted by the secrets her parents deaths unearthed. In her longing for emotional closeness, she befriends Andy Evans, a well-known poet with a roguish charm. Their attraction soon leads to a love affair. Flouting the paisley headscarf of respectability, she plunges into a relationship that gives her an entry to the literary world, but at a price. Filled with insights into grief, longing and creativity, The Most Cunning Heart is a novel about how a quiet heroine learns to navigate deception, love and loss.

In The Sunday Book, Michael Trussler uses memoir to excavate and explore a range of inner lives, alllived at different speeds. With essays touching on the meaning of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century to confronting the complexities of being a parent in the Anthropocene, Trusslers interconnected essays are united by his lived experience with a rare learning disability. The Sunday Book freshly engages with fundamental existential problems such as free will and contingency, all the while providing an original take on our contemporary moment.

Hartley Addison is probably the nicest guy in Port D'Espere, Ontario. Everybody loves him, even when they disagree with him. He's never officially run for mayor of his small lakeside town but he keeps getting elected anyway. The town has been a major environmental dumpsite for decades and most of his constituents prefer to look the other way and accept the government line: There is no problem. At home, his wife is slowly disappearing before his eyes, and the young reporter he's taken under his wing is out on the lake every night doing something downright mysterious. When the media circus comes to town chasing a runaway story about Boyd Banta, an escapee from the local poultry plant, Hart wants to believe that help has arrived at last. Will he finally get some much-needed national attention and possibly a little justice for his contrary citizenry, whether they want it or not? King of Hope brings Southern Ontario Gothic with an environmental twist, through the lens of a small town that's been facing radical environmental uncertainty for generations.

The book shouldn't exist -- yet here it is. River Black found cult success writing slasher flicks but has grown increasingly disillusioned and unhappy. When a mysterious book appears in her mailbox, her life is turned upside down. River returns to Nagano, Japan, where the book originated, hoping to pay respects to old friends and revisit her past. Instead, she finds her memory is duplicitous, her reality is porous, and the mysterious book is more alive than she could have believed. River, Diverted is a dark fairy tale that explores the trickery of memory, the delicacy of friendship, the nature of creativity and the deliverance of hope. Filled with pop culture references and a deep love of monster movies, River, Diverted is both a light-hearted and subtly serious read that will captivate readers.

For the last forty-five years, the distinguished poets Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin have read and discussed nearly every poem theyve writtenan unparalleled friendship in poetry. Here Peacock collects her most important essays on poetic form and traces the development of her formalist aesthetic across their lifelong back-and-forth. A Friend Sails in on a Poem offers a charming, psychologically wise, and metaphorically piquant look at navigating craft and creativity. This is a book both for serious poets as well as for anyone who wants a deep dive into the impact of friendship on art itself.