…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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Following the success of his novel, The Dreamlife of Bridges, Robert Strandquist makes a much-awaited return to the short story form. Settings are extreme or post-apocalyptic and walk the line of magic realism. Despite the sometimes-alien landscapes his characters inhabit, there is always the motif of adults navigating the riparian paths of longing, love and loss.

A Temporary Stranger is the final manuscript that Jamie Reid was working on when he died unexpectedly in June of 2015. The book is comprised of three sections: “Homages,” “Fake Poems,” and “Recollections.”

“Gaps, blank spaces in the language of polite conversation—academic discourse being but one example—are linguistic manifestations of human psychology. They are like black holes into which we conveniently drop undesirable concepts referring to things we fear on the deepest levels, things we would rather not face without a hedge of psychological defences: sex, death, bodily wastes, things unmentionable in polite society. But these things do not go away by virtue of their unmentionability; and neither do the words referring to them, though most are now relegated to the status of street language, slang, or ‘obscenity.’”