Invisible Books – serie

Winner of the John Glassco Translation Prize from the Literary Translators Association of Canadathe lantern light seems to have written a poem;they feel lonesome since i won’t read them.—“lantern” by Fei MingThe work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal yet often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry.In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China’s most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.Wang’s translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and accompanied by Wang’s  personal essays reflecting on the art, craft, and labour of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts.

Barrack Zailaa Rima’s celebrated graphic novel trilogy, gathered together and available in English for the first time.Beirut is an intimate and poetic look at a beloved city that is at once autobiographical, documentary, and fantastic in nature. In Rima’s hands, Beirut is a labyrinth of alleyways and stories, a theater teeming with revolts, and a cenotaph to buried memories. With Rima and her family serving as our guides, and through chance encounters with incongruous figures (a librarian, a garbage collector—or the city's last storyteller), we discover a city that longs for its Golden Age even as it is transformed by neoliberal forces in the aftermath of the Civil War—an evolution whose future remains uncertain.Dreamlike, tender, and ever-attentive to the beauty of the line, Beirut offers a glimpse into Lebanon's past and present, which must be pieced together to form a whole. From the promise of the political activism of its youth in the 1950s and 1960s, to the grating difficulties of the 2015 garbage crisis and the struggle to accommodate and assimilate refugees, this is a journey through a city, and an expedition into the idea of home, that only Rima could shepherd. No matter the detours.

“Country Music is both delicate and ferocious, tender and steely. [...] Spackled with violence, hilarity, grotesquerie, these poems are animated by Koss’s profound listening and attentiveness and a kind of wild longing. These are poems as if exchanged among friends and family, as if generated around an archaic campfire, as if John Prine had spent his youth in the Kootenays, as if poetry were still a medium of common life: and suddenly we see with this book that it is.”—Maureen McLane, author of My PoetsZane Koss grew up listening to stories. Often these were told late at night around kitchen tables or campfires against the backdrop of rural British Columbia. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing “extractiveness”—both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Mining these materials for a rural poetics—a country music—Koss begins to understand both his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings. Country Music is a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we’re given. Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place.

A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2025“This book is so strangely moving and truly funny and sad and beautiful. An impressive debut from a writer already in possession of a unique voice.”—Miriam ToewsThe Pugilist and the Sailor follows conjoined twins, Bruce and Dougie. Dougie is an ambitious amateur boxer, having dragged his brother into the ring since childhood. Bruce is a bookkeeper who has become smitten with Anka. Unaware of the facts of the twins’ physicality an epistolary relationship unfolds between Anka and Bruce, as he wrestles with broaching the topic of separation with Dougie. Dougie’s sole focus is the Heavyweight Amateur Boxing title as one half of “The Reuben Beast,” though he is trying to ignore his mysterious blackouts and severe headaches. Anka is, specifically, navigating through her grief over her parents’ deaths, but also, generally, reconciling her understanding of being a first-generation Canadian without her Guyanese parents as an anchor.A character-driven story with an ensemble cast, told across multiple points of view and time periods, examines the unique relationships between conjoined brothers, parents, crushes, and unexpected mentors. A story about the intertwined nature of longing and belonging, compromise and connection, this is ultimately a consideration of family and finding your unique place in it, and in the world.

“Opening Diving Board is like waking in a white room with no doors or windows. A question resonates as one reads these stories: How did Tomás Downey place me here so perfectly, and why is it that I don't want to leave?”—Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender is the Flesh and The UnworthyTomás Downey writes from the edge of the abyss. A little girl disappears midair; a horse grows from a seed; a war widow receives a visit of condolence, over and over and over again. In “The Astronaut” a man has become weightless, bobbing around on the ceiling, nauseated every time he is brought down and tethered to the earth. But the question here is not “how” or “why,” it’s “what happens next?” The astronaut wonders “Will I burn like an asteroid or drown in the void of space?” just as all of Downey’s stories reside in that threatening, destabilizing moment when all connection is lost. The world is filled with an ever-thickening mist, an old love haunts the living, making fruit rot in the bowl, and resolution isn’t offered or even sought—the human condition is queasy, fretful, absurd. All we can hope for is the leap into the unknown.

Brilliant, lyrical, and passionate, this collection from the acclaimed poet m. nourbeSe philip is an extended jazz riff running along the themes of language, racism, colonialism, and exile.In this groundbreaking collection, philip defiantly challenges and resoundingly overthrows the silencing of black women through appropriation of language, offering no less than superb poetry resonant with beauty and strength. She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks was originally published in 1989 and won the Casa de Las Americas Prize. This new edition includes an introduction by Katherine McKittrick.

Floating Islands gathers three key prose works by Joyce Mansour, a central yet still undertranslated figure of Surrealism whose writing confronts power, desire, and bodily dissolution with brutal clarity. Anchored by her final and most significant prose work, Floating Islands, the collection stages the hospital as a total institution: a sealed hierarchy where illness, authority, sexuality, and imagination concoct fevered realities.A woman arrives as a visitor to her dying father and becomes, almost imperceptibly, a patient herself. Recurring figures circulate around her: doctors and nurses whose vitality sharpens their cruelty, fellow patients suspended between consciousness and decay, and fragments of the self that split, double, and erode. Mansour’s prose moves between memoir, dream, and philosophical meditation, exposing how institutions oppress bodies while gaslighting them into their notion of healing.In addition to Floating Islands, this collection includes Mansour’s earliest prose experiments, the stories “Julius Cesar” and “The Parrot,” allowing readers to trace the evolution of her Surrealist method across decades. No longer cast aside as historical curiosities, these works position Mansour as a writer whose interrogation of authority, identity, and the unruly body speaks directly to contemporary feminist, experimental, and cross-genre literature.

A howl into the void, a ghost story, and a bit of a metaphysical hellride.A misanthropic ghostwriter roams an island off the Kenyan coast. An Arizona teenager awaits the next stage in a secretive covenant. A renowned poet retraces her past amid a baffling netherworld. An international arms dealer’s son drifts through time, atoning for the death of the man he loved.For readers who take their contemporary fiction with a tinge of the otherworldly, Bleeding Light is about mystical experiences, the symbolic fabric connecting us all, and desperate people seeking affirmation—through religious, cosmic, chemical and other means—of a world beyond their own. It’s a grimly funny and often trippy take on transcendence in a hypercommodified age."A darkly gleaming marvel. Searing, creepy and mystical—as if Don DeLillo had set out to steal Paulo Coelho's flock."—Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and author of The Wagers

A grossly inaccurate "memoir" about Canadian folk legends.HenryAdam Svec has been pushing boundaries in Canadian folklore since he unearthed songs by CFL players in Library and Archives Canada, thereby thrusting himself into the scene—and the media spotlight. Those spartan poems are finally included in this anthology, in addition to the fruits of his subsequent expeditions, but there is much more besides, includinghonest accounts of the folklorist’s myriad trials and tribulations. This experimental and genre-defying book mixes the adventurous energies of Alan Lomax and Stompin’ Tom, the intertextual conceptualism of Vladimir Nabokov and Mark Z. Danielewski, and the searing intensity of Elizabeth Smart and Chris Kraus."Comically entertaining, presented with 'performative verve', as novelist Jacob Wren puts it."—Atlantic Books Today"This book is cracking me up—and I don't even like football—but it isjust so well written."—Robert Dayton, author of The Canadian Romantic

Shortlisted for the 2022 Kobo Emerging Writer PrizeThe perfect marriage of literary and speculative fiction for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and NK Jemisin.When Freya Tanangco was ten, she dreamed of her mother's death right before it happened. That’s when she realized she was a veker, someone with enhanced mental abilities and who is scorned as a result. Freya's adult life has been spent in hiding: from the troubled literary legacy created by her author father, and from the scrutiny of a society in which vekers often meet with violence.When her prophetic dreams take a dangerous turn, Freya finds herself increasingly forced to sacrifice her own anonymity—and the fragile safety that comes with it—in order to protect those around her.Interwoven with themes of Filipino and mixed-race identity, fantastical elements from Norse and Filipino mythology, and tarot card symbolism, The Quiet Is Loud is an intergenerational tale of familial love and betrayal, and what happens when we refuse to let others tell our stories for us."Garner wears her spec fic, geek, and SF influences on her sleeve, and The Quiet Is Loud is a warm welcome to the more literary part of that universe."—Understorey Magazine"A deeply thoughtful book about identity and the quest for true acceptance—especially in a world that encourages us to hate, hide, and fear who we are."—Stacey May Fowles

Raised in a conservative Christian home in the East Coast of Canada, Mag is urged to preserve her purity at all costs. Desperate to secure her place in heaven, she rejects the hyper-sexual youth culture of her small town—until she falls for a magnetic, sophisticated girl while attending a program designed to usher young people into Evangelical Missionary work. Spiraling into shame and regret, Mag breaks away from the Church and launches herself into the world of sex for hire, attempting to shed her repressive past and become an anti-virgin—the antithesis of who she was raised to be.

A raw and intimate testimony of the spatial and emotional difficulty of facing the self and the otherA Number of Stunning Attackscontributes to the ongoing association of fragmented forms and women’s writing, yet the insistent repetitions and crystallized imagery produce something more coherent than a fragment and more dynamic than a single whole. Drawing on a line of innovative women’s poetics in Canada, these poems recall the radical experiments of Lisa Robertson, Erìn Moure, and Gail Scott. Intoxicated by disorientation, the reader will ask: Which city is this? Which woman is this? Which reader am I?"Fans of Lisa Roberston and Erín Moure will find lots to love in these pages."—Open Book“MacEachern’s poetry demands attention to the stunning beauty of her craft.”—Quill & Quire, starred review"A smart and stellar debut."—Winnipeg Free Press

Winner of the 2022 ReLit AwardsFinalist for the 2022 Trillium Book AwardA Gothic collection of stories featuring carnivorous beavers, art-eaters, and family intrigue, for fans of Alice Munro and Shirley JacksonThe small southern Ontario town known as The Pump lies at the crossroads of this world’s violence—a tainted water supply, an apatheticmunicipal government, the Gothic decay of rural domesticity—and another’s.In Hegele's interconnected stories, no one is immune to The Pump’s sacrificial games. Lighthouse dwellers, Boy Scouts, queer church camp leaders, love-sick and sick-sick writers, nine-year-old hunters, art-eaters—each must navigate the swamp of their own morality while living on land that is always slowly (and sometimes very quickly) killing them."An inescapable, ferocious dream of a book. Good luck getting out.”—John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments"[The] writing is beautiful... Nightmarish and yet somehow fantastical."—This Magazine