What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Fall 2024

With the weather turning colder, we’re spending more time indoors – and inside our own heads. Many of the Hamilton Review of Books Staff Writers’ picks for most anticipated titles this fall are introspective, thoughtful, imaginative, and meditative. But make no mistake, we are delighted to be delving into deeper thinking this season. Here are our Staff Writers’ Picks for Fall 2024:

No Credit River

by Zoe Whittall

Book*Hug Press, October 2024

“‘It is a confusing thing to be born between generations where the one above thinks nothing is trauma and the one below thinks everything is trauma.’

From acclaimed novelist and television writer Zoe Whittall comes a memoir in prose poetry that reconfirms her celebrated honesty, emotional acuity, and wit. Riving and probing a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation, No Credit River is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself.

Open and exacting, this is a unique examination of anxiety in complex times, and a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally inventive as it is full of heart.”

The Beauty of Us

by Farzana Doctor

ECW Press, September 2024

“September 1984, Thornton College private school.

After 15-year-old Zahabiya’s father remarries, she can’t wait to leave home and convinces him to send her away to boarding school. But will she fit in? She joins a clique of smart students but isn’t sure if she measures up or how to read the mixed messages from a guy she’s crushing on.

Seventeen-year-old Leesa has been at Thornton since middle school after her parents’ messy divorce. She’s been climbing the school’s social ladder with equal measures of meanness and manipulation. She’s also guarding a big secret that she has to work overtime to keep from her friends.

Fresh out of university, this is Nahla’s first real teaching job, and she’s drowning. She has her distractions though: the flirty art teacher and a cryptic notebook left behind by her deceased predecessor, Mademoiselle Leblanc.

Zahabiya and her friends – all racialized girls and victims of Leesa’s bullying – uncover Leesa’s secret. But can they help Leesa? Nahla, too, is embroiled in her own mystery, assisted by Mademoiselle Leblanc’s ghost. Each is indelibly changed by what they learn.

Masterfully crafted, The Beauty of Us is a gripping novel about surviving hardship, the power of friendship, and growing up.”

Danica dela Torre, Certified Sleuth

by Mikaela Lucido, Illustrated by Joanna Cacao

Annick Press, September 2024

“Harriet the Spy meets Small Spaces in this heartfelt new paranormal mystery series for middle grade readers.

Danica and her partner Jack are Renley Crow’s best kid detectives. Well, they’re the only kid detectives . . . until Kennedy Fang moves to town. Kennedy’s convinced his new house is haunted, and he needs Jack and Danica’s help to figure out what’s going on. The only catch? Kennedy wants to solve the case with them. Danica’s not wild about working with her competition, but there’s a bigger problem: her tita has forbidden her from meddling with the spirit realm. Not that Danica believes in spirits. But when Kennedy shows her a box of letters addressed to all three kids – letters that start to fly around his attic – Danica knows she can’t turn down their biggest case yet. Even if it means uncovering scary truths about the world . . . and about herself.”

Recommended by James Cairns and Nico Mara-McKay

Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction

edited by Sonia Sulaiman

Fernwood Publishing, September 2024

“Thyme Travellers collects fourteen of the Palestinian diaspora’s best voices in speculative fiction. Speculative fiction as a genre invites a reconfiguring of reality, and here each story is a portal into realms of history, folklore and futures.

A man stands on the shore waiting to commune with those who live in the ocean. Pilgrims stretch into the distance, passing a stone cairn with a mysterious light streaming from it. Two Australian women fervently dig a tunnel to Jerusalem. Men from Gaza swim in the sea until they drown, still unconcerned. A father and son struggle to connect over the AI scripts prompting their conversation.

Building on the work of trailblazing anthologies such as Reworlding Ramallah and Palestine +100, this volume is the first of its kind in Canada. Editor Sonia Sulaiman brings together stories by speculative fiction veterans and emerging writers from Australia to Egypt, Lebanon to Canada.”

May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers

by Minelle Mahtani

Doubleday Canada, October 2024

“A searing, intimate and blisteringly honest memoir about mothers and daughters, grief and healing, and finding your voice.

Minelle Mahtani had taken a leap of faith. A new mother in a new life, she'd moved across the country for love, and soon found herself facing the exciting and terrifying prospect of hosting her own radio show. But as she began to find her place in the majority white newsroom, she was handed devastating news: her Iranian mother had been diagnosed with tongue cancer.

Just as Minelle was finding her voice, her mother was losing hers.

What does it mean to amplify the voices of others while the stories of your ancestors are being buried in your mother's mouth? Why do we cling to superstition and luck when we’ve lost all faith in healing those we love? And how do we juggle bearing the burden of looking after an ill parent when we are trying to parent our own children?

In exquisitely lyrical and inventive prose, Mahtani recounts the experience so many of us recognize: a life calibrated through calculating when to speak and when to be silent in a world that feels like it forces us to be broken.”

Playground

by Richard Powers

Random House Canada, September 2024

“From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Overstory comes an epic tale of love, friendship and humanity’s next great adventure.

When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school – one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side – their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths.

Rafi disappears into literature, and Ina into art. Todd, who once dreamed of escape into the world beneath the surface of the ocean, revealed to him by the legendary Canadian diver and marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, becomes instead one of the most powerful tech billionaires on the planet whose social media empire, Playground, is remaking the global order with its AI breakthroughs. But not even wild success can insulate Todd from mortality. As illness eats away at the brain that built it all, he dreams of the life that could’ve been and the relationships he should never have let go.

Before Todd’s final act is up, past loves and present ambitions collide on the ravaged Polynesian island of Makatea, where an unnamed corporation hopes to build the first floating, autonomous city on the open sea. Traversing borders and oceans, connection and loss, ingenuity and transcendence, Playground brings to light the systems of competition, cooperation, commerce, exploration and love that tie the fates of unlikely humans together, in Richard Powers’ most transporting work of fiction yet.”

Glass Houses

by Madeline Ashby

Tor Books, August 2024

“A group of employees and their CEO, celebrating the sale of their remarkable emotion-mapping-AI-algorithm, crash onto a not-quite-deserted tropical island.

Luckily, those who survived have found a beautiful, fully-stocked private palace, with all the latest technological updates (though one without connection to the outside world). The house, however, has more secrets than anyone might have guessed, and a much darker reason for having been built and left behind.

Kristen, the hyper-competent ‘chief emotional manager’ (a position created by her eccentric, boyish billionaire boss, Sumter) is trying to keep her colleagues stable throughout this new challenge, but staying sane seems to be as much of a challenge as staying alive.

Being a woman in tech has always meant having to be smarter than anyone expects – and Kristen's knack for out-of-the-box problem-solving and quick thinking has gotten her to the top of her field. But will a killer instinct be enough to survive the island?

A gleefully decadent near future whodunit from Madeline Ashby, the acclaimed futurist and author of Company Town – perfect for fans of Severance, The White Lotus, and Black Mirror.”

Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five MEditations

by Mark Kingwell

Biblioasis, October 2024

“Philosopher Mark Kingwell thinks about thinking for yourself in an era of radical know-it-all-ism.

‘Question authority,’ the popular 1960s slogan commanded. ‘Think for yourself.’ But what started as a counter-cultural catchphrase, playful in logic but serious in intent, has become a practical paradox. Yesterday’s social critics are the tone-policing tyrants of today, and critical theory that once augured emancipation has hardened into ideological enforcement. The resulting crisis of authority, made worse by rival political factions and chaotic public discourse, has exposed cracks in every facet of shared social life. Politics, academia, journalism, medicine, religion, science – every kind of institutional claim is now routinely subject to objection, investigation, and outright disbelief. A recurring feature of this comprehensive distrust of authority is the firm, indeed unshakeable, belief in personal righteousness and superiority: what Mark Kingwell calls ‘addiction to conviction.’

In this critical survey of the predicament of contemporary authority, Kingwell draws on philosophical argument, personal reflection, and details from the headlines in an attempt to reclaim the democratic spirit of questioning authority and thinking for oneself. Defending a program of compassionate skepticism, Kingwell illuminates the connection between humility about human limits, including the limits of certainty, and the infinite project of justice.”

i heard a crow before i was born

by Jules Delorme

Goose Lane editions, October 2024

“i heard a crow before i was born.
i heard tsó:ka’we before i was born.

i heard a crow before i was born opens with a dream-memory that transforms into a stark, poetic reflection on the generational trauma faced by many Indigenous families. Jules Delorme was born to resentful and abusive parents, in a world in which he never felt he belonged. Yet, buoyed by the love shown to him by his tóta (grandmother) and his many animal protectors, Delorme gained the strength to reckon with his brutal childhood and create this transformative and evocative memoir.”

Recommended by Brianna Wodabek and Dana Hansen

The Monster and the Mirror: Mental Illness, Magic, and the Stories We Tell

by K.J. Aiello

ECW Press, September 2024

“Revelatory memoir and cultural criticism that connects popular fantasy and our perceptions of mental illness to offer an empathetic path to compassionate care

Growing up, K.J. Aiello was fascinated by magical stories of dragons, wizards, and fantasy, where monsters were not what they seemed and anything was possible. These books and films were both a balm and an escape, a safe space where Aiello’s struggle with mental illness transformed from a burden into a strength that could win battles and vanquish villains.

A unique blend of memoir, research, and cultural criticism, The Monster and the Mirror charts Aiello’s life as they try to understand their own mental illness using The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and other stories as both guides to heroism and agency and cautionary tales of how mental illness is easily stereotyped as bad and violent. Aiello questions who is allowed to be ‘mad’ versus ‘sane,’ ‘good’ versus ‘evil,’ and ‘weak’ versus ‘strong,’ and who is allowed to tell their own stories. The Monster and the Mirror explores our perceptions of mental illness in a way that is challenging and tender, empathetic and knowledgeable, and offers a path to deeper understanding and compassionate care.”

Recommended by James Cairns and Brianna Wodabek

Satellite Image

by Michelle Berry

Buckrider Books, October 2024

“The night before they move from the bustling, expensive rat race of the city to a sleepy, innocent, affordable small town two hours away, Ginny and Matt decide to look up their new home on a satellite image website. When they see what appears to be a body lying in their new backyard everything changes and an uneasy chain of events is set into motion. Little do they know they have bought a house with a baffling history and life in their new town is not all it’s meant to be. Odd neighbourhood dinner parties and a creepy ravine just out their back door have Ginny and Matt quickly questioning their move. Michelle Berry is the master of literary page-turners with unexpected endings, and Satellite Image is sure to be delight new readers and long-time fans alike.”

Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence

by andrea bennett

ECW Press, September 2024

“Thoughtful, wide-ranging essays exploring food as a source of pleasure, practical creativity, and sustenance

Food is the primary way andrea bennett connects with the world. They worked in the restaurant industry for a decade, and though they don’t eat much meat and can’t eat gluten, they take as much pleasure in food as Jeffrey Steingarten, Anthony Bourdain, or Guy Fieri. When they want to show someone they care, they cook them a meal.

Hearty follows bennett’s passion and curiosity into kitchens, gardens, fields, and factories, offering a compassionate and compelling perspective on food from seed to table. Combining journalism, cultural commentary, and personal reflection, Hearty dives deep into specific foods, such as chutney, carrots, and ice cream, but also explores appetite and desire in food media, the art of substitution, seed saving, and the triumphs and trials of being a home gardener, how the food system works (and doesn’t), and complex societal narratives around health and pleasure. Nuanced and non-prescriptive, Hearty is a feast that invites all food lovers to the table.”

Season of the Swamp

by Yuri Herrera, Translated by Lisa Dillman

Gray Wolf Press, October 2024

“New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.

Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.”

Yellow Barks Spider

by Harman Burns

Radiant Press, October 2024

“At ten years old, Kid is increasingly disturbed by strange spider-infested visions of his next-door neighbour's shed. Pursued by shadowy memories that torment his waking thoughts, Kid falls deeper and deeper into a haunted inner world, retreating from his family and friends. Beneath this overwhelming pressure, the text itself begins to crumble, splintering as the workings of Kid's imagination become animate – and language self-destructs. Emerging from this anguish, Kid surfaces into adulthood as she navigates love, sex, addiction, and self-discovery as a trans woman. But, when a family member falls ill, she is forced to return to her hometown and confront all the old fears she thought she'd left behind.

Yellow Barks Spider is an unforgettable portrait of trauma, isolation, and self-compassion. It is a deeply felt exhumation of memory, love, and the human spirit, and it announces a bold new voice by a debut author.”

Grandfather of the Treaties: Finding our Future Through the Wampum Covenant

by Daniel Coleman

James Street North Books, November 2024

“When Daniel Coleman went into his office in McMaster University on a beautiful April morning in 2006 he was startled to see over thirty police vehicles parked on campus, and soon discovered that the campus was providing lodging for the officers who had raided the site of an Indigenous land dispute near the town of Caledonia. This discovery changed how Coleman thought about Indigenous issues, which he’d long supported, bringing home that there is no part of life in Canada where you are outside of the broken relationship between the nation of Canada and the Indigenous nations who have lived here since time immemorial. This began Coleman’s journey, working closely with Indigenous scholars, to understand more fully that relationship and to find a way to repair not only it, but our relationship with the land we call home. In Grandfather of the Treaties Coleman introduces the founding Wampum covenants that the earliest European settlers made with the Haudenosaunee nation and shows how returning to these covenants, and the ways they were made, could heal our society.”

Subterrane

by Valérie Bah

Esplanade Books, October 2024

“A speculative comedy comprised of a carousel of Black and Queer voices being pushed further underground by urban prosperity.

Subterrane connects us to a constellation of Black queer and trans voices, the hair braiders, tattoo artists, holistic healers, weed dealers, and sidewalk horticulturists struggling to make a life in New Stockholm. Together they illustrate how entire communities, despite being exploited in the name of prosperity, resist and enact their own freedom. New Stockholm, a settler colonial metropolis like any other, is unofficially divided between two worlds. Its upwardly mobile form the facade of its gleaming eye, but their prosperity and affluence are not the focus of hot young artiste Zeynab’s government-funded experimental documentary. Her lens trails into the city’s depths instead, to the polluted and overlooked district of Cipher Falls, one of New Stockholm’s last affordable neighbourhoods, where creatives and other anti-capitalist voices increasingly find themselves pushed into demeaning, dead-end jobs. In this sprawling underground network, Zeynab’s lens focuses on activist Doudou Laguerre, as he attempts to sabotage an insidious construction project.”

ALL OUR ORDINARY STORIES: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey

by Teresa Wong

Arsenal Pulp Press, September 2024

“From the author of Dear Scarlet comes a graphic memoir about the obstacles one daughter faces as she attempts to connect with her immigrant parents

Beginning with her mother's stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories – some epic, like her mother and father's daring escapes from communes during China's Cultural Revolution, and some banal, like her quitting Chinese school to watch Saturday morning cartoons - Wong carefully examines the cultural, historical, language, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family, seeking answers to the questions ‘Where did I come from?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ At the same time, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life.

A book for children of immigrants trying to honour their parents' pasts while also making a different kind of future for themselves, All Our Ordinary Stories is poignant in its understated yet nuanced depictions of complicated family dynamics. Wong's memoir is a heartfelt exploration of identity and inheritance, as well as a testament to the transformative power of stories both told and untold.”

When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance

by Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, with Sean Carleton

Between the Lines, September 2024

“There have been many things written about Canada’s violent siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke in the summer of 1990, but When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance is the first book from the perspective of Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, who was the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) spokesperson during the siege. When the Pine Needles Fall, written in a conversational style by Gabriel with historian Sean Carleton, offers an intimate look at Gabriel’s life leading up to the 1990 siege, her experiences as spokesperson for her community, and her work since then as an Indigenous land defender, human rights activist, and feminist leader.

More than just the memoir of an extraordinary individual, When the Pine Needles Fall offers insight into Indigenous language, history, and philosophy, reflections on our relationship with the land, and calls to action against both colonialism and capitalism as we face the climate crisis. Gabriel’s hopes for a decolonial future make clear why protecting Indigenous homelands is vital not only for the survival of Indigenous peoples, but for all who live on this planet.”

The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry

by Melanie Dennis Unrau

McGill-Queen’s University Press, October 2024

“Celebrating oil-worker poetry as a literary phenomenon, an indictment of extractive culture, and a rallying cry for climate justice.

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.”

THE RISE AND FALL OF MAGIC WOLF

by Timothy Taylor

Dundurn Press, September 2024

“Restaurateur Teo Wolf’s culinary fame is peaking just as a series of scandals and reckless decisions threaten to destroy everything.

Teo’s life as a Paris brasserie apprentice is filled with challenges and triumphs, as well as all the regular abuses of slammed commercial kitchens. Still, he rises through the ranks, eventually returning to his hometown of Vancouver to open Rue Véron, a French restaurant that goes on to become a sensation. His second restaurant, Orinoco, is also successful. But on the cusp of opening his third, a news story breaks suggesting that his popular sous chef, Frankie, is a sexual predator.

The media firestorm and subsequent public relations disaster threaten to destroy Teo’s empire, as well as his own personal life. And when the compounding consequences lead to unimaginable tragedy, Teo is left to question the impact of both individual action and people acting in great numbers.”

I Never Said That I Was Brave

by Tasneem Jamal

House of Anansi, May 2024

“A taut tale of female friendship and betrayal.

Set between the 1970s and 2010, I Never Said That I Was Brave examines the complicated relationship between two women as they navigate a culture vastly different from their parents’. Motivated by guilt and confusion, the unnamed narrator recounts the shifting dynamics of her lifelong friendship with Miriam, a charismatic astrophysicist who focuses on dark matter. As childhood immigrants to Canada from Uganda, the girls are able to assimilate (though not always easily). In adulthood, they chafe against the deeply held traditions and expectations of their South Asian community and their own internalized beliefs about women.

As the narrator follows her memories on their unpredictable and unreliable paths, the reader is taken along on a devastating journey, one which blurs distinctions between right and wrong, victim and manipulator, life and death.”

Rethinking Free Speech

by Peter Ives

Fernwood Publishing, November

“Clashes over free speech rights and wrongs haunt public debates about the state of democracy, freedom and the future. While freedom of speech is recognized as foundational to democratic society, its meaning is persistently misunderstood and distorted. Prominent commentators have built massive platforms around claims that their right to free speech is being undermined. Critics of free speech correctly see these claims as a veil for misogyny, white-supremacy, colonialism and transphobia, concluding it is a political weapon to conserve entrenched power arrangements. But is this all there is to say?

Rethinking Free Speech will change the way you think about the politics of speech and its relationship to the future of freedom and democracy in the age of social media. Political theorist Peter Ives offers a new way of thinking about the essential and increasingly contentious debates around the politics of speech. Drawing on political philosophy, including the classic arguments of JS Mill, and everyday examples, Ives takes the reader on a journey through the hotspots of today’s raging speech wars. In its bold and careful insights on the combative politics of language, Rethinking Free Speech provides a map for critically grasping these battles as they erupt in university classrooms, debates around the meaning of antisemitism, the ‘cancelling’ of racist comedians and the proliferation of hate speech on social media. This is an original and essential guide to the perils and possibilities of communication for democracy and justice.”

SOMETHING, NOT NOTHING: A Story of Grief and Love

by Sarah Leavitt

Arsenal Pulp Press, September 2024

“A poignant and beautifully illustrated graphic memoir about love and loss and navigating a new life

In April 2020, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt's partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. About a month after Donimo's death, Sarah began making comics again as a way to deal with her profound sense of grief and loss. The comics started as small sketches but quickly transformed into something totally unfamiliar to her. Abstract images, textures, poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink, and coloured pencil - for Sarah, the journey through grief was impossible to convey without bold formal experimentation. She spent two years creating these comics.

The result is Something, Not Nothing, an extraordinary book that delicately articulates the vagaries of grief and the sweet remembrances of enduring love. Moving and impressionistic, Something, Not Nothing shows that alongside grief, there is room for peace, joy, and new beginnings.”

I Feel That Way Too

by jaz papadopoulos

Nightwood Editions, September 2024

“Lambda Literary Fellow jaz papadopoulos offers a poetically critical look at how sexual assault trials impact survivors.

A critical response to the #MeToo movement, I Feel That Way Too is an experiment in narrative poetics. It weaves through past and present, drawing together art, philosophy, the Jian Ghomeshi trial and childhood memory to interrogate how media and social power structures sustain patriarchal ideologies. Inspired by the works of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Anne Carson, A.M. O’Malley and Isobel O’Hare, these poems are lyrical and meditative, moving to make sense of the nervous system in battle and in recovery.”

She Falls Again

By Rosanna Deerchild

Coach House Books, September 2024

“The Sky Woman has returned to bring down the patriarchy!

This book is about a poet who may or may not be going crazy, who is just trying to survive in Winnipeg, where Indigenous people, especially women, are being disappeared. She is talking to a crow who may or may not be a trickster, and who brings a very important message: Sky Woman has returned, and she is ready to take down the patriarchy.

This is poetry, prose and dialogue about the rise and return of the matriarch. It’s a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self.

Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild is an important voice for our time. Her poems – angry, funny, sad – demand a new world for Indigenous women.”

echolalia echolalia

by Jane Shi

Brick Books, October 2024

“In Jane Shi’s echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one’s chosen family, love and justice.”

GOING TO SEED: ESSAYS ON IDLENESS, NATURE, AND SUSTAINABLE WORK

By Kate Neville

University of Regina Press, May 2024

“An abandoned place, a disheveled person, a shabby or deteriorating state: we describe such ruin colloquially as “going to seed.” But gardeners will protest: going to seed as idle? No, plants are sending out compressed packets filled with the energy needed to sow new life. A pause from flowering gives a chance for the seeds to form. In a time of urgent environmental change, of pressing social injustice, and of ever-advancing technologies and global connections, we often respond with acceleration – a speeding up and scaling up of our strategies to counter the damage and destruction around us. But what if we take the seeds as a starting point: what might we learn about work, sustainability, and relationships on this beleaguered planet if we slowed down, stepped back, and held off?

Going to Seed explores questions of idleness, considering the labour both of humans and of the myriad other inhabitants of the world. Drawing on science, literature, poetry, and personal observation, these winding and sometimes playful essays pay attention to the exertions and activities of the other-than-human lives that are usually excluded from our built and settled spaces, asking whose work and what kinds of work might be needed for a more just future for all.”

The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History

By Daniel Macfarlane

McGill-Queen’s University Press, September 2024

“Lake Ontario has profoundly influenced the historical evolution of North America. For centuries it has enabled and enriched the societies that crowded its edges, from fertile agricultural landscapes to energy production systems to sprawling cities.

In The Lives of Lake Ontario Daniel Macfarlane details the lake’s relationship with the Indigenous nations, settler cultures, and modern countries that have occupied its shores. He examines the myriad ways Canada and the United States have used and abused this resource: through dams and canals, drinking water and sewage, trash and pollution, fish and foreign species, industry and manufacturing, urbanization and infrastructure, population growth and biodiversity loss. Serving as both bridge and buffer between the two countries, Lake Ontario came to host Canada’s largest megalopolis. Yet its transborder exploitation exacted a tremendous ecological cost, leading people to abandon the lake. Innovative regulations in the later twentieth century, such as the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements, have partially improved Lake Ontario’s health.

Despite signs that communities are reengaging with Lake Ontario, it remains the most degraded of the Great Lakes, with new and old problems alike exacerbated by climate change. The Lives of Lake Ontario demonstrates that this lake is both remarkably resilient and uniquely vulnerable.”

HÒT'A! ENOUGH!: Georges Erasmus's Fifty-Year Battle for Indigenous Rights

By Georges Erasmus and Wayne K. Spear

Dundurn Press, November 2024

“The political life of Dene leader Georges Erasmus – a radical Native rights crusader widely regarded as one of the most important Indigenous leaders of the past fifty years.

For decades, Georges Henry Erasmus led the fight for Indigenous rights. From the Berger Inquiry to the Canadian constitutional talks to the Oka Crisis, Georges was a significant figure in Canada’s political landscape. In the 1990s, he led the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and afterward was chair and president of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, around the time that Canada’s residential school system became an ongoing front-page story.

Georges’s five decade battle for Indigenous rights took him around the world and saw him sitting across the table from prime ministers and premiers. In the 1980s, when Georges was the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, he was referred to as the Thirteenth Premier. This book tells the personal story of his life as a leading Indigenous figure, taking the reader inside some of Canada’s biggest crises and challenges.”