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.

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.