Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

2019 Griffin Poetry Prize

Quarrels

By Eve Joseph

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.

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Queasy: a wannabe writer's bumpy journey through England in the '70s

By Madeline Sonik

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.

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Queen and Carcass

By Anna van Valkenburg

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.

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Rain City: Vancouver Reflections

By John Moore

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

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Real Enough: The Unlikely Story of Doug and the Slugs

By Simon Kendall & Aaron Chapman

Featuring never-before-published photos, posters, personal diaries, ticket stubs, and Slugs music ephemera, Real Enough is at its heart a celebration of Doug and the Slugs, their music, memories, the ups and downs of lifelong friends, who — as a group of musicians after a lifetime of playing together — still make for a good night out.

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Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing

By Andrew Chesham & Laura Farina (Eds.)

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.

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Scofflaw

By Garry Thomas Morse

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

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The Second Detective

By Shannon Mullally


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.

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Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery

By Vera Hadzic

In this debut collection, Ontario poet Vera Hadzic explores themes of anxiety, eating, excretion, compulsion, and change. Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery follows the construction and deconstruction of the body, both human and animal.

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A Sign of the Times: The Best of the Penthouse Marquee

By Benjamin Jackson & Aaron Chapman

For nearly eighty years, the Penthouse Nightclub has been the home of some of Vancouver’s naughtiest behaviour. But lately, it’s the nightclub’s neon marquee that hangs over its sidewalk that has become the talk of the town, its comic and witty messages going viral on social media and being mentioned on talk shows and news reports around the world.

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