…And This Is the Cure is a novel about the weight of unresolved baggage — its pain and trauma — and working through the process of healing and moving on.

Ten Women is a new collection of short fiction from one of Canada’s preeminent writers. Each of these stories offers us a portrait of a woman with whom the author may or may not have had either an intimate and/or a meaningful relationship. You can’t really tell for sure.

Set somewhere between here and the heat-death of the universe, Jim Oaten’s debut collection serves up random samples of literal and literary truth scooped up at top speed. Whether peeking out from the backseat of Mom and Dad’s car or surveying the grimy wings of mental wards, Accelerated Paces hurdles that uneasy terrain between creative fact and honest fiction. These short stories and pieces ignore borders as they jaunt thorough external trips and internal voyages.

For the better part of a decade, Hollywood Hospital was the site of more than 6000 supervised LSD trips. Under the care of psychiatrist J. Ross MacLean and researcher/ex-spy Al “Captain Trips” Hubbard, it was the only medical facility in BC (and one of a handful across the country) venturing into the brave new world of psychedelic psychiatry — from a specialized inner sanctum known as the Acid Room.

Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir—in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory, Sonik seeks out connections between the microcosm of the daily events of her childhood and adolescence, and the social, historical, and scientific trends of the time.

Influenced by the dark edginess of Southern Gothic literature but set in 1984 to the music of Tina Turner, Madonna, and Stevie Nicks, After We Drowned ties together themes of environmental crisis and poverty, noting that it is poor people who often bear the brunt of ecological disaster. This is a coming-of-age story with a stealthy, yet kick-ass feminist subplot set in the swampy heart of Cajun America.

Against Death: 35 Essay On Living articulates the personal experiences of each author’s “near-deathness,” utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what “magical thinking” proposes.

In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents, hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself.

The stories in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change. Often at a crossroads they are oblivious to, Leggat’s characters seem to be captured in a cinematic slo-mo, teetering on the edge of something unknown, heroically resisting the ever-present pull of Fate.

As If is a collection of stories that reminds us that all literature—indeed awareness itself—is at first speculative. These stories confront the false certainties of the industrial and digital mechanisms of our age and, in the great fabulist tradition, call upon their characters to turn possibilities into action.

Asking for Directions is a happy hour of poetry, blurring the lines between straight-up realism, goofy weirdness, linear narrative, dreamscape, lovestruck awe, wonder, and joy.

ASSDEEP IN WONDER is a collection of heartbreaking and hilarious poems by “Canada’s answer to Billy Collins.” Raw and immediate, Gudgeon explores themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures. In simple love poems like “Let’s start small, my darling,” everyday anthems like “Future Tops of America, and visionary dreams like “The Revelations of Donald Trump,” Gudgeon tackles the tyranny of identity, the mystery of desire, the strictures of gender and the absurdity of homophobia in a style that’s hypnotic and highly accessible.

Every home has a social history and a genealogy that tells a tremendous amount about the history of the times and offers up a sense of place. Current home-owners are only temporary custodians, part of the chain in the ongoing narrative of the house. People change, styles change, colours change, cars change, but through it all, the house remains a central fixture and the structure for the stories in At Home with History.

Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to shut Rosenberg up once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Atomic Storybook is a new novel from the author of Spat the Dummy. It’s about the early years of Albert Einstein, an explosion on the moon, and a group of friends who feel like they are living in a long, strange dream. A delightful stew of lust, blood, ennui and physics, Atomic Storybook is also about living and dying in what is, undeniably, an illusion.

In Attack of the Lonely Hearts, each character is broken in their own forlorn way. A master of the dark and witty one-liner, Wagstaff manages to spin a hilarious and off-kilter story about what can happen when lonely hearts discover they’re attached to even lonelier bodies.

Carleigh Baker likes to make light in the dark. Whether plumbing family ties, the end of a marriage, or death itself, she never lets go of the witty, the ironic, and perhaps most notably, the awkward. Despite the title, the resolution in these stories isn’t always tragic, but it’s often uncomfortable, unexpected, or just plain strange. Character digressions, bad decisions, and misconceptions abound.

Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn’t exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest.

Lyle Neff’s Bizarre Winery Tragedy is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism.

Black Rabbit & Other Stories is a debut collection of great intensity and versatility. The stories range from the fantastic to the gritty, from urban dystopias to worlds of dreamlike possibility.

Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind as white as acid.

Body Breakdowns is a collection of true tales about brushes with mortality and the medical establishment. Some are serious, some are funny; all are about illnesses, both minor and major.

Bolt, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over familiar and unknown landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from twenty years as a welder with the Boilermakers’ Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, Bolt investigates rough terrain and long horizons.

Raw, violent, and at times absurd, Borderline treats all things — the city, class, education, mental health, despair, sexuality, love, and art, with an unflinching, unblinking regard.

Bounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper’s fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing.

Playful in form and formed full of play, this fourth book of poetry by Kevin Spenst explores loss, love and faith through the palindrome, Madlib, Fibonacci, found poem, prose poem, sonnet and various strains of free verse.

Brave New Play Rites presents twenty years of original and startling theatre from Canada’s best young writers. The book is a collection of short one-act plays written by students in the Creative Writing Program at UBC and produced at the annual festival, Brave New Play Rites, for public performances.

Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.

From the author of Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit and Foozlers comes another tale of madcap human folly. Budge is a novel about addiction, rehabilitation, and finding the meaning of life.

Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture’s vertiginous obsession with youth, and its reverse: the draw of death.

But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, Conyer Clayton’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is a collection of prose poems that employs surrealism, humour, and body horror to cope with CPTSD, assault, loss, fear, and the memories of it all.

Sun Belt’s collaborative work of fiction is a genre-defying chronicle of a tar sands company town.

Set against a backdrop of shifting weather and a blasted, mysterious landscape, Cactus Gardens explores the complexity and intensity of personal relationships. The narrator drifts through a variety of locales, from a hospital ward to a lakefront hotel, a downtown condo, and restaurant patios, depicting friendships that are as meaningful and volatile as romantic entanglements.

This volume brings the international voices of numerous facilitators of engaged philosophical inquiry, including some of the most prominent, together with observers in allied fields, to explore practical, organizational issues, but also to bring critical and theoretical perspectives to bear on the Café Philosophy.

The stories in Carthaginian Peace and Other Stories are centred in the domestic and every day. They follow youngish lovers and domestic partners attempting to find a cure for cosmic loneliness in an unstable society.

The poems in Catastrophe Theories reflect an increasingly unstable, surreal, and catastrophic world. Written over the past decade, the poems in Mari-Lou Rowley’s oracular work capture the zeitgeist of the moment. A world where human folly and frailty compete with corpocracy and technological determinism against the stubborn magnificence of the natural world.

Chalk is a tender story about love and loss, following a broken-hearted thirty-something cubicle worker, free-falling from every ledge of his life. Post-break-up and blue, he feels like nothing matters, that he has become invisible, like a chalk outline on the floor, empty inside.

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he’s sold thousands of his books in the streets, published and edited magazines, trained insurgents in his Poetry Boot Camps, and started Canada’s first Small Press Book Fair.

Set in Surrey, BC circa 1960, A Credit to Your Race is a story about innocent love awakening between a fifteen-year-old black porter’s son and the white girl next door. The novel is a disturbing and convincing portrayal of how the full weight of racism and bigotry came to bear on a youthful, interracial couple.

This is not the Alberta world of oil and hockey and wheat, but of people at night, living alternate lives, wearing clothes that usually remain hidden in the depths of closets. When they emerge from these closets wearing these clothes, these shopkeepers, lawyers, and students do things to themselves and each other that it would take Freud to explicate. Everywhere in the valley lies the fear of loneliness, the obsession with desire, and the human fixation with the unknown.

Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother.

From the author of 19 Knives and My White Planet comes a brilliant suite of stories built around music and travel. The five stories that comprise Czech Techno are replete with the sizzle and jump we have come to expect from a Mark Jarman story. And matters of the heart are never far away, weaving through these tales like a knife blade through sand.

DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts, is a singular effort, a visually exuberant work that is also on the vanguard of theoretical engagement, a symbiosis of form and content, in full-colour throughout, inclusive of extensive imagery, graphic intrigues and typographical accent—a rare and desirable art-infused statement of the city’s media art scene—now.

Heavily inspired by cante jondo (Spanish “deep song”) and Portuguese fado, these poems explore the kind of yearning that is contained in the Portuguese word saudad: a longing for something in the past that can never be found because time has shifted everything away from what it was.

Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit is a singularly Canadian novel featuring crime, culture, and sports. Written in the vein of John Kennedy Toole (Confederacy of Dunces) and JP Donleavy, Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit is set in Vancouver during an early 80s Grey Cup weekend.

Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine. His brother’s brittle bones are not the only legacy of Stalin. Cyril’s famine-free childhood has built up a distance between him and the rest of the household.

Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale. The Delusionist is a novel of longing, loss and rediscovered joy.

This first collection by Dale Tracy is the atmosphere that derelict bicycles breathe. Like weeds, ones we’ve built, they burgeon. These poems wonder what sort of a performance thinking is—they perform their own logical hysteria, that emotion that feels what the other emotions feel like.

These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and death in alternately moving, shocking, funny, and at times devastating ways. Whether these characters are facing the death of a parent, bad love choices, the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, the rupture of friendships, teen violence, or the exploration of sado-masochistic sex, Farrell exposes their ticking cores and pulls the reader along every step of the way.

“Farrell excels at very short, sharply realized tales that display a startling repertoire of styles and structural innovations.”
— Vancouver Review

Make no mistake; The Devil You Know belongs on the shelf alongside Nights Below Station Street.
— Elizabeth Bachinsky

Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning—with one’s past, one’s choices, and one’s expectations for the future. Dirtbags deals with the bonds between women, the cycle of poverty, self-destruction, loss of family, the outlaw code, and the fragile beauty of the human condition.

Finalist BC Book Prize (Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize)

Finalist City of Vancouver Book Prize

spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

The Dreamlife of Bridges is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son’s death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable.

The stories in Elysium are about the difficulties of life we all encounter as human beings, the fragility of life—the physical, mental, and spiritual challenges we must try to overcome.

At once bitterly funny, provocative and poignant, this remarkable collection – follow up to Greeting from the Vodka Sea, Gudgeon’s short story debut – The Encyclopedia of Lies builds on his growing literary reputation, offering up the work of a great storyteller at his very best.

Sharp with insights that cut to the core of the matter, the poems in Escape from Wreck City – like the people who inhabit them – are ecstatically alive.

In this debut collection of personal essays, Silcott looks at the tangle of midlife, the long look back, the shorter look forward, and the moments right now that shimmer and rustle around her. Here is love, grief, uncertainty, longing, joy, desire, fury, and fear. Also wandering bears, marauding llamas, light and laundry rooms.

We’ve all had good, bad, and sometimes ugly experiences on public transit. Exact Fare Only is an anthology of real-life stories about heading out, heading back, and everything that happened in between, whether the trip was across the country or just across town.

Back with more, Exact Fare Only 2 is the follow-up collection of the weird, the wild and the wonderful of commuter literature. Whether by land, sea or air, public transit around the world says more about the human condition than many want to admit. These real-life tales, reflections, poems, and rants are required reading for commuters everywhere.

Exit is at once a profound examination of what it is that drives someone to want to end their life, as well as how that urge can be turned on its head against all odds. Written with her signature brio and acerbic wit, Nelly Arcan’s last novel is a hymn to life.

Mysteriously, overnight, a father disappears from his family home. A few months later, the mother vanishes too. As the police investigations go on and on and reporters descend on the home week after week — as well as visits by social workers, doctors, and concerned relatives — the abandoned seventeen-year-old Cirrus starts his own investigation into who his parents really were, or who they might have been.

With a thousand members throughout the province, the Federation of BC Writers is one of the most active and vigorous writers’ organizations in the country. The Fed Anthology, edited by Susan Musgrave on the occasion of the group’s 25th anniversary, is a colourful bazaar of previously unpublished fiction and poetry by nearly 50 of those members.

Part punk rock travelogue, Five Little Bitches is full-throttle grit-lit. The novel is a testimony to a generation of grrrls in revolt. Suck it up!

In this collection of linked stories—part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery—magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations.

On April 1, 1968, a tall, bespectacled, thirty-five-year-old former social worker named Joachim Foikis received $3,500 from the Canada Council for the Arts in order to finance a unique, self-imposed mission unseen since Elizabethan England: reinvent the vanished tradition of “Town Fool.”

Foozlers is a 24-hour “Odyssey” that runs a juggernaut through the high- and lowlands of Vancouver. Jerry Lowe is the reluctant driver of a getaway car for two sketchy junkies on the make. A pair of cops spend a shift wobbling on the cusp of total breakdown. The groom-to-be in an Indian arranged marriage seeks an escape of the carnal variety. Soon, they will all intersect paths with a gas station attendant and a very “special” car wash operator. And somebody’s got to do something about that noisy, bad-tempered cockatoo.

Foreign Park situates itself in an epoch where prior assurances of the natural world’s solidity begin to slip. Poisons enter the Fraser River Basin.

In Greek mythology the Muses preside over the arts and inspire writers and artists to produce works of genius. In Frenzy, Catherine Owen pays homage to the muse in a six-part compilation of muse-quests, some the author’s, some those of others. These muses can be a person, a place, or even the absurdity itself of indefinitely seeking the muse.

Full Magpie Dodge is about the shiny brightness of modern urban life, its pressures and joys. More-or-less artful dodgers populate its pages, along with office workers, crows, exhausted junkies and jubilant lovers.

Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer takes up where Stuart Ross’s Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer left off in 2005. Memoir, tirade, unsolicited advice — this new volume is drawn largely from Stuart’s notorious “Hunkamooga” column that ran in subTerrain, but also includes pieces from his blog as well as previously unpublished work.

Galaxy is “emotional biography”—as Magaret Laurence called it—(Sometimes I have breathed flame, / I admit that my words—provoked— / have burned) where the facts are fabricated (“tell it slant,” said Emily Dickinson), but the feelings are authentic.

In Garage Criticism Peter Babiak gently eviscerates and deflates some of the cultural hot topics of our time. He deconstructs our fascination with Internet culture and its libertarian ideology, devolves the hallucinations of economics and marketing to rhetorical mystifications, and asserts and reasserts the supremacy of linguistic thinking in everyday cultural affairs no less than politics and philosophy.

Cinematic film, the art form that came into its own in the 20th Century, is not only familiar to all of us, but is likely the form that lodges most clearly in memory. Like music — and the music employed in a film — scenes come back, often carrying emotion as well as remembrance. One such film is Harold and Maude…

Going to New Orleans is a fantastic and graphic first-person narrative that serves as a surreal-but-faithful guide to the music, food, history, and literature of New Orleans. A spiritual book, as well as a dirty one.

Winner of the 47th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest

In Gone to Pieces an entire family’s lives are consumed by a single story: a tall tale about a forest fire and the horses who fled into a lake of ice to escape the flames. Everything they do, everything they watch, and everything they speak about revolves around the story of that fire and those horses and their father’s deep belief that it is real.

Hard Electric is Michael Blouin’s third book of poetry, a road-tripping, bridge-burning collection of the author’s hard-won and soft-edged reflections that seem to stutter-step towards resolution while tumbling down a decided slant towards disaster.

Hard Hed is a contemporary retelling of the Johnny Appleseed story. Hoosier Chapman, local historian and apple orchardist, has just been released from a Northwestern Ohio jail after serving two years for planting wild apple trees in a city park.

In language that twists together hobo slang and flights of troubadourish diction, Hearts Amok scrutinizes the history of the love sonnet in Surrey, England and simultaneously celebrates the tickings and tollings of one love-struck heart in Surrey, British Columbia.

Heroines Revisited is a follow-up volume to the original Heroines: Photographs by Lincoln Clarkes that was released by Anvil in 2002. This new edition features over 200 portraits accompanied by three new critical essays that contextualize the five-year photo project and the controversial body of work, as well as an interview with the artist.

Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award

Heroines is an epic documentary of addicted women in Vancouver, Canada. In 1997, photographer Lincoln Clarkes turned his lens away from the world of fashion and began documenting the dire circumstances endured by the marginalized women living and working on the streets of the city’s Downtown Eastside.

Hider/Seeker is the debut fiction collection from award-winning poet Jen Currin. These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality.

In The House With the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers, Dr. Myrl Coulter reflects on the family politics and social mores that surrounded closed adoption in the 1960s, and examines the changing attitudes that resulted in the current open adoption system and her eventual reunion with her firstborn son.

In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling.

History tells us that the short and violent life of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, ended at the hand of Pat Garrett on the moonless night of July 14, 1881. But I Am Billy the Kid tells a different story, straight from Billy himself. This revisionist history seen through the lens of a twenty-first century sensibility features the picaresque hero we thought we knew and the unexpected one that we don’t: a fearless and determined young woman who is in no mood to be saved and would much prefer exacting her own revenge.

In I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub, Stuart Ross, a veteran of the Canadian literary underground, unleashes his arsenal of pathos, absurdism, humour, and cantankerousness.

Spanning more than 25 years, I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You gathers work from three distinct eras of Jay Millar’s development as a poet.

I Cut My Finger is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish.

The poems in I Heard Something comprise a surreal menagerie — funny, chilling, tender — of what it is to be a human at this very minute. Cup a hand around your ear as you read this book — it’ll enhance the experience.

The characters in I’m not Scared of You or Anything are invigilators, fake martial arts experts, buskers, competitive pillow fighters, drug runners, and, of course, grad students. This collection of comedic short stories and exploratory texts is the ninth book by the critically acclaimed and award-winning author Jon Paul Fiorentino.

Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin’s stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, “what makes them so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.”

A finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and winner of the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, Ignite is a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man’s lifelong struggle with schizophrenia.

il virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto.

The twenty contemporary writers featured in this anthology have one thing in common: a connection to British Columbia, to a specific time, landscape, or community in BC.

Originally published in 2014, In the Slender Margin was enthusiastically received and applauded for its respectful sensitivity in dealing with a subject that is still, to many, an avoidable topic of conversation: death and dying. Using her 20+ years’ experience working as a palliative care counsellor in a hospice as a springboard for exploration, Joseph probes our collective knowledge of that final life experience that we all must face.

In The Trenches: The Best of subTerrain represents ten years of alternative writing, as featured on the pages of Vancouver's literary renegade magazine, subTerrain.

The Inanimate World is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. These are sincere, germane, and tender tales of longing—for love, understanding, acceptance, and peace.

The Incomparables is a novel about ambition, betrayal, “failure,” love, family dynamics, how we deal with societal, family, and personal expectations, and how we come to accept who we are.

Mark Laba’s second full-length poetry collection—and his first in seventeen years—brings to life the old variety shows he watched on TV as a child, shows forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. In The Inflatable Life, the reader will find a little singing, a little dancing, a little drama, a little comedy, a little experimentation.

Intensive Care isn’t a medical survival story; it’s a yearlong reflection on how the imminence of death can enhance life. The grass gets greener. Confirmation that one is loved is exhilarating, more powerful than any drug.

With its accessible style, this collection should appeal to a broad readership. Anyone who’s tried to write a poem about an object will be able to relate to the impossibility (and undesirability) of evoking a ‘thing’ outside of their own subjective relation to it. Inventory will be of particular interest to those who are familiar with the long and broad history of object poetry, including works by Francis Ponge, Robert Bly, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jorge Luis Borges.

B.C. Book Prize Finalist

Ivanhoe Station is the début collection from Vancouver poet Lyle Neff.

Kevin Spenst’s much-anticipated debut collection of poetry opens as a coming-of-age narrative of lower-middle class life in Vancouver’s suburb of Surrey, embroidered within a myriad of pop- and “post-Mennonite” culture.

Nathaniel G. Moore follows up his 2014 ReLit Award win for Savage with a diverse collection of short fiction, his first — Jettison, featuring stories which dangle somewhere between horror and romance.

Just Like a Real Person is a story about broken cars and broken people. A story of intoxication, sobriety, and potent memories of a woman in a yellow sundress. But, it’s also a story about love that asks what it means to finally feel, after years of feeling nothing but numb.

PRAISE FOR KASPOIT!
“…Reminds me of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange in its inventive language and insular
world of violence; also Beckett and Mamet in the lowlife characterizations, back-andforth dialogue, and the sheer absurdity.”
—Myna Wallin, A Thousand Profane Pieces

“…compelling, sickening, and, ultimately, hits what is most likely closest to the truth about what happened there than anything else that’ll get out in the world. Kaspoit! puts me in mind of A Clockwork Orange (the book), for its neologisms and violence/bleakness, and Pulp Fiction (the movie) for the unrelenting violence, so
much so that we become inured to it.”
—Janis Harper, Body Breakdowns

“…there is a well-executed gloom that maybe owes a tip of the hat to Harry Crews or
Flannery O’Connor, or maybe a drunken Hawthorne. The dialogue never grinds or
presents an obstacle—it runs smooth, which is a must considering its importance
to the story. In many ways it is the story.”
—Phillip D. Alexander, The Next Rainy Day

Melissa Bull’s debut short story collection The Knockoff Eclipse hums with the immediacy of distant and future worlds. Firmly rooted in the streets and landmarks of Montreal and its many neighbourhoods and subcultures, Bull’s characters shine with the dirt of digging just deep enough.

A strangely unified collection, unsettling and surprising, Knucklehead resides where the lines between real and imagined blur. Giles’s penetrating view and unsentimental honesty shape these stories and push the reader’s expectations of the “ordinary.” These are mature and compelling narratives that encapsulate everything great about short fiction. They freeze a moment, but upon closer examination reveal something more, a message that resonates long after that story has been read.

Simon Roy first saw The Shining when he was ten years old and was mesmerized by a particular line in the movie spoken by Dick Hallorann, the chef of the Overlook Hotel, while he is giving the family an orientation tour of the facilities. Hallorann seems to speak directly to Danny (and Simon Roy) while in the middle of enumerating the stock of the hotel’s pantry to Danny’s mother. He glances at Danny and the words cross telepathically into the boy’s mind: “How’d you like some ice cream, Doc?”

Ever since Europeans first laid claim to the Squamish Nation territory in the 1870s, the real estate industry has held the region in its grip. Its influence has been grotesquely pervasive at every level of civic life, determining landmarks like Stanley Park and City Hall, as well as street names, neighbourhoods — even the name “Vancouver” itself. Land of Destiny explores that influence, starting in 1862, with the first sale of land in the West End, and continuing up until the housing crisis of today.

The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings is a generous gathering of Venright’s most enduring and extraordinary poems, including the revised and expanded “Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of the Spooner”— the most outlandish and hilarious seafaring tale since Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. This volume also features an in-depth examination of Venright’s work by scholar Alessandro Porco.

Leaving Mile End is Jon Paul Fiorentino’s seventh collection of poetry and tenth book—a collection of poems that documents the daily din and clatter of cafés, galleries, and dive bars that make up Mile End in Montreal, perhaps the most artistically vibrant neighbourhood in the world.

An autobiographical essay on fear, The Lily Pad and the Spider (Le nénuphar et l’araignée) explores the symptoms, sources, and genesis of anxiety, from the most intimate to the most ordinary kind. Using short chapters that are fragments of her life, Claire Legendre breaks down the psychological, physical, and social mechanisms associated with that emotion. Her style is lively, often funny, sometimes dark — though never complacent — and the story traces a unique path between France, Canada, and the Czech Republic, casting a defiant yet vulnerable gaze upon the world.

Lonesome Monsters is a collection of prose and poetry from Vancouver writer Bud Osborn.

Long Ride Yellow is the debut novel from two-time Journey Prize finalist Martin West. The novel explores the limits of sexual desire, personal choice and the edge of reality. Nonni is a dominatrix who likes to play. She hates to pay.

As Canada’s punk poet laureate, Art Bergmann has been tearing up stages, and terrifying the music industry, for half a century. Often referred to as “Canada’s Lou Reed,” Art’s story is one of rock and roll’s great tales untold. Until now. From his days helping to lay the foundation of the Vancouver punk scene with The K-Tels, to his acclaimed solo work in the ’80s and ’90s, and a late career resurgence that has culminated with being named to the Order of Canada, The Longest Suicide chronicles every unlikely twist and turn Art’s life has taken.

The Loop chronicles the life of an alcoholic who is unable to escape his past to explore the ways in which abuse can shape someone into their abuser and the ways trauma can transfer from one generation to the next. How much of who we are is who we are? How much of it is someone else? What if this has all happened before?

Rimmer emerged as a young visionary in the late sixties with such startlingly original works as Square Inch Field and Migration. His films of the early seventies—Surfacing on the Thames, Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, The Dance, and Seashore—drew much critical acclaim for taking structuralist film in new directions. After spending several years in New York city he returned to Vancouver in the mid-1970s and made Canadian Pacific and Canadian Pacific II, which helped establish him as one of the world’s most accomplished cinematic artists.

These poems ask the questions you’d really like answered, sauntering into the room and staking claim.

Making Waves offers a mosaic of fresh approaches toward shaping a new “literacy of place”—a more coherent understanding of B.C. and Pacific Northwest literature in the 21st century.

On December 21st, 2012 the eerily accurate Mayan Calendar, which goes back over 5,000 years, suddenly comes to a stop. Obviously this means only one thing: the world will end. What no one knows is how the world will end and that’s where this book will be an invaluable companion as the conflagration begins. Will it be a massive earthquake,

Using the numerical structure of pi, Mechanophilia is a collaborative epic by American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne (who have never met) that follows the omniscient conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet.

Originally published in 1967 by McClelland and Stewart, Mirror on the Floor was the first novel from an emerging young writer named George Bowering. Now with over 100 publications to his credit, we are proud to be reissuing Bowering’s debut novel.

Set in Vancouver in the mid-1960s, Mirror on the Floor vividly evokes the Vancouver of that era, when neon signs still shimmered on the rain-soaked streets and Theatre Row bustled with excited movie-goers.

Whether in longer poems or the briefest, Hav invites a reader to consider along with him the feeling of existence, its inevitable joy, sorrow, noise, silence, not in binary terms but as mixtures.

From the bestselling author of Drunk Mom and Possessed comes Monster, a mesmerizing, brave new work of autofiction. Monster is a shattering, feminist manifesto exploring sexual awakening, motherhood, immigrant trauma, and the power of female rage.

In this ambitious short novel, R.H. Slansky weaves a complex narrative about the very nature of narrative: it is an annotated re-issue of a fictional autobiography that casts a questioning eye on the reliability of family lore.

The story starts with a newspaper photo taken in an obscure Nova Scotia town after the murder of eight bald eagles. The bizarre photo wins a contest and, over time, the unidentified girl in the foreground becomes, like Diane Arbus’s Boy with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, infamous. Rita Van Loon decides, after seven painful years, to explain herself and the events surrounding the murders.

Mr. Ross unapologetically leaps from howls of grief and despair to zany incursions into surrealism and the absurd. He embraces this panoply of approaches to respond to our cantankerous existential dilemma. All that, and it’s structured after Bela Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4! Get a room and enjoy.

These brief tales are alternately fantastic, humorous, menacing, contemplative, absurd, hallucinatory, violent, confessional, and always provocative. If there is one thing that unites these narratives it is their brevity and their drive for conclusion. Potent text-bites for the short-attention-span reader.

The poems in Mouthfuls of Space offer a dissociative journey through the life of a once homeless recovering drug addict and victim of childhood sexual, emotional, and physical abuse.

In Mutant Sex Party & Other Plays, Ed Macdonald eviscerates the high and the mighty, the hypocritical, and those who abuse power in late-Capitalism America.

Howard White says, “Some poets try to capture rare butterflies in their writing. The things I go after are more like houseflies.” The comparison does him no favours but it is true inasmuch as his writing is notably unpretentious and concerned with common and everyday realities.

Naked in a Pyramid is an unconventional book by an original thinker, a former rabbi who owns ancient Torah scrolls, a yellow star from the concentration camps, and Pee-Wee Herman’s yellow bike. There is quite simply nobody like him. Yosef Wosk is a reclusive Lone Ranger who frequently helps others but remains a stranger. Here, for the first time, he has gathered a medley of observations to reveal his private world.

Rodney DeCroo’s street photography project, Night Moves, is a gritty, touching, poignant, and truthful portrayal of contemporary urban life. With his poet’s eye for detail, he faithfully captures the living character of East Vancouver, especially the life and pulse of the Commercial Drive area that he has called home for the past thirty years.

No Flash, Please! documents an important period in Toronto’s music community. As seen and heard by two journalists covering it for a number of monthly independent magazines, not only did they experience the local bands they knew and loved becoming famous, they also witnessed soon-to-be legends, come through those same clubs and concert halls. Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Jesus Lizard, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Henry Rollins, all played Toronto during this period and von Essen’s camera and Saunders’ ears were there to witness their performances in crowds that varied in size from 20 to 500.

Infused with the spirit of Charles Bukowski, these down to earth poems take readers on a hard-scrabble journey, starting from Doyle’s early years as a runaway from foster homes, an incarcerated youth, a boxer, and a homeless wage-earner living in shelters and on the streets of Ottawa and Toronto.

Nondescript Rambunctious is a genre-busting thriller with a beating, human heart. More than a simple story of a killer and his victims, the novel takes the reader into the life of a family, the days of a community, and the very real possibility that evil is everywhere—maybe even inside us. Woven through this dark tapestry are the glittering threads of humanity, humour, and in the form of one young woman, the promise of redemption.

Like a sinister dream, Nondescript Rambunctious pulls you in and doesn’t let go. There is no easy way out.

On the Count of None is the first full-length poetry collection by Kingston poet Allison Chisholm. These are poems whose language looks both ways before licking the envelope.

Our Lady of Mile End is a neighbourhood of stories about gentrification and displacement in a once affordable area that is feeling the squeeze of social and cultural transformation.

Spanning a quarter century of Friesen’s work, the poems in Outlasting the Weather speak to what is meant by “a life lived in poetry.” The poems in this Selected are inseparable from the poet. To read them is to enter his thinking and ride his breath: to experience the art of making in as immediate a way as is humanly possible.

“I’m just going to break this, okay?” writes Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick in her sixth full-length poetry collection. The 14 long poems in Ox Lost, Snow Deep range from confessional narrative to collage to surrealism, exploring representations of history, both public and personal, and within that, they probe what is considered important and what is considered not important.

Painted Lives & Shifting Landscapes showcases the artwork of Vancouver painter, printmaker and muralist Richard Tetrault. Tetrault’s work explores universal themes of the figure and the urban landscape.

In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather.

Permission to Settle fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration — the anxiety, and the bureaucracy of application, identity, foreignness, and inadequacy — all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler.


Pineapple Express is Evelyn Lau’s eighth collection of poetry and marks an important contribution to the literature on depression.

Modelled after the American folk music revival songbooks of the 1950s and 60s, Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introductions and ends with the songs — or in this instance, poems — to which they refer.

“Anyone who wanted to be anybody in Vancouver had a pool by the summer of ’83.” Thus sets the scene for Pools, a novel that delves into themes of excess through the lens of the 1980s party culture.

Highly personalized and idiosyncratic, yet public places of mourning and memory, roadside shrines invite us to ask questions about their meaning and provenance. Sometimes referred to as Roadside Death Memorials, or RDMs, structures or installations of this kind have become commonplace in many parts of North America and elsewhere. The media plays significant attention to the RDM phenomenon and there are scholarly studies which focus on the social, legal, cultural, and psychological interpretations of their meaning. Folklorists, in particular, have struggled to understand RDMs in the context of widespread secularism. Unlike cemeteries, roadside shrines elude the religious ceremonial practices with which mourning was formerly imbued.

The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity.

The award-winning author of Afflictions & Departures turns her kaleidoscopic lens on England in the 1970s in Queasy, a series of linked memoirs. While still grieving her father’s death and the end of her first romantic relationship, Madeline Sonik moved with her mother from Windsor, Ontario to the seaside village of Ilfracombe in North Devon, England.

Anna van Valkenburg’s debut poetry collection, Queen and Carcass, is a rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the contradictions we embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths—especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable. At once ecstatic, meditative, and grotesque, these poems confront some of the most fundamental existential questions.

Part memoir, part polemic, Rain City, is his version of a fat old Sixties rock band’s Greatest Hits album.

Whether considering the simplicity of a butterfly in flight or the terror of a cancer diagnosis, Heidi Greco confronts the world head-on, yet always with the fresh eyes of the stranger in our midst. The issues she addresses belong to the world; the settings she employs are international.

News coverage of the fall of Baghdad and its aftermath were the inspiration for Ravenna Gets, especially the smaller stories of people being killed suddenly in their homes in the middle of otherwise normal days. Each story in Ravenna begins as any novel might, but abruptly loses the luxury of becoming a novel through a seemingly random and violent intrusion from beyond the world established by the story. The effect is intended to be that of the experience of war as the sudden end of stories, rather than being a war story itself. This destabilizing ‘pinch’ seeps into the consciousness of some of the stories, but not as a consciousness of events, but rather as nightmarish bends in experience and perception.
Ravenna Gets could probably be classified as speculative fiction, influenced by J.G. Ballard, and, though experimental in spirit, it employs strong conventional storytelling techniques.

Reading the Riot Act is a popular history that rereads and rewrites the legacy of riots in Vancouver. The project was conceived following the city’s Stanley Cup riots in 1994, when official reports and media coverage differed significantly from eyewitness accounts. Later, media reports on the APEC riots downplayed and obscured certain facets of the conflict.

Reckoning is one long poem in search of itself, its own meaning. A synecdoche of verse, segments calling and responding to each other, like jazz musicians riffing back and forth in a late-night smokey speakeasy. Snippets of conversation make it through the air, across the space that seems vast even in its closeness. We are big, we are small, there is eternity in a birdcall. This is end times, yet beginnings surround us. They are there in memory, in grief, in happiness, and in song.

Red Mango is a one-man play about a “single celibate sensualist” who constantly thinks about women—though not for sex, but for sweaty joy and sensual contact on the booming dance floors of Victoria’s blues clubs.

Burnham's poetry works at the edges of meaning, propriety, and the commodification of language. Combining elements of found text—the overheard, the over-read—he recasts his findings in various combinations that are unique to their presentation on the page. The essentials of language, how people use it—and how it uses them—is Burnham's main concern.

Through forty-three personal essays, Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing brings together insights from writers and publishers across Canada on the practices that fuel their work.

The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them is a vibrant and diverse collection from a who’s who of the west coast poetry scene.

Never before have as many outrageous and out-sized characters appeared in one place at the same time. Words like rogues, rascals, rapscallions, reprobates and rodomontades don’t completely describe these individuals; they are more than each or any combination thereof. They are scalawags.

A Room in the City presents Gasztonyi’s five-year project of photographing the residents of the Cobalt, Balmoral, Regent, and Sunrise Hotels in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the poorest postal code in the country. They are represented in private moments, with respect and dignity—in their rooms and on the streets—as they wish to be seen. Gasztonyi’s style continues in the great documentation tradition of Anders Petersen and Josef Koudelka, the photographer of the Roma.

Ruby Ruby is a soft-boiled murder mystery that follows the trail of our expatriate Canuck as he tries to sleuth out the answers to a puzzling series of pointless and apparently motiveless murders: Who’d want to kill a sixtyish night watchman guarding an abandoned pie factory?

In English, to rue is to regret; in French, la rue is the street – Rue’s poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and motion. Punctuated with neologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the collection explores the author’s upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and loves across North America, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist father’s struggles with terminal brain cancer.

First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, Salvage King, Ya! is a novel firmly rooted in Canada’s favourite national pastime—hockey. Critics have called Salvage King, Ya! “the great Canadian novel,” and a “postmodern Canadian classic.” Drinkwater, Jarman’s narrator, is the “heir reluctant” of the family business (the salvage company of the book’s title) and an aspiring NHL defenceman. His life hurtles between the hockey rink, the junkyard, the road, and the three women in his life: The Intended, the mesmerizing Waitress X, and ex-wife Kathy.

Savage 1986-2011 chronicles the middle-class implosion of Nate’s nuclear family, bracketed by July 1986 — when he first saw Randy Savage in person — and the wrestler’s sudden death in May 2011. When Savage dies, Nate is freed from beliefs — once a source of beauty and escape — that had come to constrict him, fusing him to a moribund past.

Savour is the follow-up to Bateman’s award-winning debut novel, Nondescript Rambunctious, and the second book in a trilogy about a dark, suspected serial killer named Oliver. Savour retains the dark threads of sociopathic depravity that ran through the debut novel, but is once again tempered with a tender ray of humanity. Lizzy is streetwise, yet fragile, and her desperate journey is both uplifting and heartbreaking.

In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. Scalawags, the lot of them.

Scofflaw is a long poem, a playful exploration of Indigenous-Settler relations amid globalized pressures.

The Second Detective is a deliriously entertaining reimagining of the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring a mysterious narrator, a missing husband, and a lascivious mountain goat with interspecies interests.

Seep limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.

Sensational Vancouver is a fully illustrated popular history book about Vancouver’s famous and infamous, the ordinary and the extraordinary, filtered through the houses in which they lived. Sensational Vancouver covers legendary women including Elsie MacGill, Phyllis Munday, Nellie Yip Quong and Joy Kogawa; high-end brothels, unsolved murders, and the homes and buildings of artists, architects and entertainers including Frederick Varley, Arthur Erickson, Bryan Adams, and Michael Bublé. Includes a Walking Tour map of historic Strathcona and Chinatown.

The follow-up to Eve Lazarus’s successful At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes, Sensational Victoria gives us a glimpse into aspects of Victoria rarely talked about in the tourist brochures or flowery garden guidebooks.

Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control, and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response.

Shag Carpet Action is Matthew Firth’s boldest and brashest collection of stories to date. These are absurd, raunchy, funny stories whose sharp, salty characters are boldly credible and wonderfully rendered by one of Canada’s most adventurous and courageous fiction writers.

Shylock is an award-winning play about a Jewish actor who finds himself condemned by his own community for his portrayal of Shakespeare’s notorious Jew.