What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Spring 2025

Whether you're looking for timely conversations about the state of the world or to calm your anxieties about the same, exploring an inner self or the ways a community fits together, or even just looking to dive deep into the pop culture you already love, the Hamilton Review of Books has got you covered. Here are our Staff Writers’ Picks for Spring 2025:

The Dissident Club: Chronicle of a Pakistani Journalist in Exile

by Taha Siddiqui & Hubert Maury, translated by David Homel

Arsenal Pulp Press, April 2025

“An urgent and compelling graphic memoir about a Pakistani investigative journalist at odds with his fundamentalist family and the Pakistani military that attempts to kidnap him

In Islamabad in 2018, Pakistani investigative journalist Taha Siddiqui is kidnapped at gunpoint and barely escapes being killed. He flees the country on the first plane to France with questions left unanswered: What motivated the attack? Was the tyrannical Pakistani military involved?

The Dissident Club is an action-packed graphic memoir about Islamic politics, complex family dynamics, and one man's dedication to truth and principle. With illustrator Hubert Maury, Siddiqui, winner of the prestigious journalism award Prix Albert Londres, tells the story of his intriguing life and career, beginning with his childhood in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan under the stern gaze of a fundamentalist Islamic father. Siddiqui rebels against his religion, but his personal freedom is constrained by strict Islam, especially after his father joins a jihadi mosque.

Following the Gulf War and then the shock caused by 9/11, Siddiqui enters university and begins his personal emancipation. He becomes a journalist, but as he reveals the crimes of the Pakistani military, he learns the hard way that journalists are moving targets. Once in Paris, he opens the Dissident Club, a bar dedicated to helping political dissidents from around the world.

An expansive Pakistani coming-of-age story, The Dissident Club documents Siddiqui's experiences as a young man fighting for truth and justice against the harsh backdrop of Islamic fundamentalism and corruption.”

Echo-Mirror

by Klyde Broox

James Street North Books, June 2025

“The long-awaited collection by much-loved dub poet Klyde Broox, Echo-Mirror is tour of his poetry over the decades. Filled with rich voice and song, the poems within this collection are meant to be heard as much read, but still resound on the page. Broox takes aim at the need to write in English, at inequality and at other injustices, with sharp images and strong rhythms, but also writes movingly of family and those lost along the way. The poems in the collection question the status quo, they celebrate Black voices and they are a call to action. These are poems that leap off the page into the reader’s heart.”

Ugh! As If!: Clueless

by Veronica Litt

ECW Press, June 2025

“A sweet and sly exploration of the Jane Austen–inspired teen movie and its evergreen imperative to be kind, do better, and find the activist within

We are totally butt-crazy in love with Clueless. Since the movie’s premiere in 1995, pop culture has mined Amy Heckerling’s high school comedy for inspiration, from Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX’s ‘Fancy’ music video to Cher’s iconic yellow plaid suit appearing at every Halloween party.

In Ugh As If!, Veronica Litt argues that this seemingly fluffy teen romp is the quintessential thinking woman’s movie, one in which the audience is asked to seriously consider the beauty and power of naïveté. Cher Horowitz’s gradual pivot from oblivious it girl to burgeoning activist is a powerful reminder that even the most unlikely people can change for the better and contribute to their communities. In this bright, shiny film, pursuing a more just society isn’t just possible — it’s enjoyable. This fun, feminine, feel-good movie is a counter-narrative to nihilism, a refusal to give into cynicism, hopelessness, and passivity. Almost without viewers noticing, Clueless teaches Cher, and us, how to become better. Like the film it examines, Ugh As If! nudges even the most jaded viewer into feeling hopeful about the future.”

Elegy for Opportunity

by Natalie Lim

Buckrider Books, April 2025

“In her debut collection, Natalie Lim asks: How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises? Anchored by elegies for NASA’s Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, this collection explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift’s cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Confessional, funny and bursting with joy, Elegy for Opportunity extends a lifeline from Earth that will leave you feeling comforted, challenged and a little less alone in the universe.”

Recommended by Dana Hansen and Jessica Rose

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse

by Vinh Nguyen

HarperCollins Publishers, April 2025

“An inventive memoir about one family’s escape from Vietnam and the father’s mysterious disappearance along the way. This book is an intricate exploration of a searching mind, shedding light on the psyche of a grieving son, as he chases certainty and seeks elusive resolution.

With the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.

Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To find his father—and anchor himself in the present—Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for years in broken hearts and guarded silences.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and reimagined lives.

Part fractured reminiscence, part invented history, and part fictional fabulation, Nguyen’s story is about learning to live with what’s already lost and the memories of what might have been.”

Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community

by Richard Powers

Maggie Helwig, May 2025

“An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind.

Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.”

Audition

by Katie Kitamura

Riverhead Books, August 2025

“One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.”

It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow

by Alisha Mughal

ECW Press, July 2025

“A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity

Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”

In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Alisha Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable.

Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Alisha brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope.”

The Beauty of Vultures

by Wendy McGrath

NeWest Press, April 2025

“The interplay between photography, nature and poetic form is on full display in Wendy McGrath's and Danny Miles' collaborative new work The Beauty of Vultures.

This innovative collection takes readers into the surprisingly chatty world of birds, whose avian artistry and poignant plumage mimics the formally and structurally inventive tones found in each poem. The language wings its way between funny and serious, poignant and morbid, while always drawing parallels between the poets thoughts and the cameras eye. From peahens telling off their elaborately festooned romantic partners, robins empty eggs recalling air raid tests after WWII, to seagulls serving as harbingers of humanity's ongoing crimes against nature, each unit of photography melds seamlessly with its poetic doppelgänger.”

In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times

by James Cairns

Wolsak & Wynn, June 2025

“In 2022, the Collins Dictionary announced that its word of the year was ‘permacrisis,’ which it defined as ‘an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.’ Have we reached a breaking point, arrived at the moment of truth? If so, what now? If not, why do so many people say we’re living through a period of unprecedented crises? Drawing on social research, pop culture and literature, as well as on his experience as an activist, father and teacher, James Cairns explores the ecological crisis, Trump's return to power amid the so-called crisis of democracy, his own struggle with addiction and other moments of truth facing us today. In a series of insightful essays that move deftly between personal, theoretical and historical approaches he considers not only what makes something a crisis, but also how to navigate the effect of these destabilizing times on ourselves, on our families and on the world.”

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers

by Marcello Di Cintio

Biblioasis, May 2025

“A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.

In 2023, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata spent two weeks in Canada, meeting with representatives from federal and provincial governments and human rights commissions, trade unions, civil society organizations, and academics—as well as migrants working in agriculture, caregiving, food processing, and sex work. His conclusion: the country’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is ‘a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.’ ‘I am deeply disturbed by the accounts of exploitation and abuse shared with me by migrant workers,’ Obotaka said in a statement. Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being denied access to health care, language courses, and other social services; of being physically abused, intimidated, sexually harassed; of the overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity. In response, some farm owners and their advocates, angry at Obokata’s comparison to slavery, defended the program, citing long standing relationships with workers who returned to their operations year after year. ‘If the program is so damned bad,’ one farmer advocate asked, ‘why do these guys keep coming back?’

In Precarious: the Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio seeks the answers to both the question and illuminates the charges that compelled it, researching the history of Canada’s migrant labour program and speaking with migrant workers across industries and across the country to understand who, in this global elaborate enterprise, stands to gain, who to lose, and how a system that depends on the vulnerability of its most disenfranchised actors can—or can’t—become more just.”

Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left

by David Camfield

Fernwood Publishing, April 2025

“Increasingly, people are responding to the contemporary crises underwritten by capitalism by exploring the politics of communism. Some have taken a sympathetic, even nostalgic, view of ‘actually existing socialist’ (AES) societies past and present, including the USSR, China, and Cuba, and the Marxist-Leninist political tradition associated with them. They see these states as a powerful alternative to capitalism, governed by parties genuinely committed to socialism and staunchly resisting Western imperialism. But were these societies really in transition towards a classless, stateless society of freedom — the original communist goal? Is Marxism-Leninism the political approach that should orient people on the left now?

Red Flags traces the path from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the construction of the world’s first AES society: the USSR. It also looks at the post-revolution societies created along the same lines in China and Cuba. Using the intellectual tools of historical materialism, Red Flags argues that they were not in fact moving towards communism because the social relations remained fixed in class exploitation. The workers were never liberated.

At a time of burgeoning anti-communism from both conservatives and liberals, this book is an accessible, vibrant synthesis of the history of communism that draws on the latest research to develop a rigorous analysis of the contradictions and uneasy truths the left needs to confront if it is to build a genuinely liberatory alternative to capitalism.”

Horsefly

by Mireille Gagné, Translated by Pablo Strauss

Coach House Books, May 2025

“A chilling tale about what happens when we mess with nature.

In 1942, a young entomologist, Thomas, is sent to a remote island to work on biological weapons for the Allied military. The scientists live like prisoners while they produce anthrax and look for the perfect virus carrier among the island’s many insects.

Sixty years later, in the same region of Quebec, a heat wave unleashes swarms of horseflies while humans fall prey to strange flights of rage. Theodore is living a simple life, working double shifts and drinking to forget, when a horsefly bite stirs him from his apathy. He impulsively kidnaps his grandfather, whose dementia has him living in the past on Grosse Île.

The horseflies, meanwhile, know a few secrets…

Loosely based on historical fact, Horsefly is a terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.”

No One Knows Us There

by Jessica Bebenek

Book*hug Press, April 2025

“From wherever I am, I will
send word like a golden thread,
roll an unravelling ball through time
towards myself.

In this stunning debut collection, Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two distinct and moving portraits of early womanhood. The first is that of the devoted, caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realities of palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older, compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenek rewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing.

At once sensual, visceral, and dreamlike, No One Knows Us There takes us from the sterility of the hospital into the sumptuous natural world. We face horror in a manicured garden and discover beauty in a suncapped lake. A theoretical mathematician leads us to an elk encounter, the crooked bodies of birds are found in the spring thaw, and we become our own pet snail in a mason jar.

Ultimately, grief is radically transformed through plainspoken yet lyrical language, and this keen examination of trauma evolves into a striking celebration of the inevitability of change.”

elseship: an unrequited affair

by Tree Abraham

Book*Hug Press, April 2025

“When Tree Abraham falls in love with her housemate, who does not reciprocate the feeling, instead of breaking up, they keep going. This story begins where most end.

elseship deftly and compassionately recounts the year that followed a friendship confronted by unrequited love. Abraham details the beauty and mania of this experience, mapping thought pathways, confessing ugly truths, and treading the edges of eroding territory.

In these pages, Abraham interweaves personal entries and research with illustrations, photos, and diagrams, all organized within the eight ancient Greek categories of love. Written with reverence and searching honesty, elseship deconstructs the heteronormative canon to explore the bittersweet, lonely, uncharted archipelago of the heart. This is a deeply specific yet universal story of modern love that will accompany and enlighten anyone who’s been in any kind of complicated ‘ship.’”

The Botanic Age: Planting the Seeds of Human Evolution

by Dean Falk

University of Toronto Press, February 2025

“How and why did humans get to be so clever and thoughtful? The beginning of the Stone Age, marked by the invention of stone tools, has traditionally dominated discussions about the origin and evolution of human intelligence. However, feminist anthropologists have long theorized that the first tools were actually nests, slings, and baskets that would not have survived in the archaeological record.

In The Botanic Age, leading evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk argues that millions of years of weaving botanical materials and woodworking preceded the Stone Age, facilitating the basic neurological underpinnings for humankind's later creative and technological inventions. She further suggests that mothers and infants may hold the key to understanding a series of events that eventually kindled the emergence of advanced cognitive abilities, including language and music.

The Botanic Age takes readers millions of years into the past to a time before our relatives began living full-time on the ground. From stationary hominin sleeping trees in Africa to beached trees on the shores of Indonesia, the impact of the Botanic Age on hominin evolution was far-reaching. Only from this vantage point “in the trees” can we really begin to understand how and why our ancestors evolved – and how we became human.

Identifying a period before the Stone Age that represents a key turning point in human evolution, The Botanic Age provides a fascinating new look at the first three million years of hominin existence.”

Jenny, Eleanor, and Laura, et al.: This Is Not a Book About Marx

By Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher, Translated by Mélissa Bull

Between the Lines, March 2025

“This is not a book about Karl Marx. Rather, it is an investigation of the women in his life. Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher follows a labyrinth of historical letters, traces the branches on an intellectual family tree, and untangles a web of correspondence, to reveal forgotten connections and to map out the negative spaces in the literature. What emerges is not the familiar portrait of Karl alone in his frame, but a group photo of the whole Marx gang. Upturning the picture we have of the early days of modern communism, Jenny, Eleanor, and Laura, et al. calls on us to acknowledge that humans think and create together, not alone.”

She’s a Lamb!

by Meredith Hambrock

ECW Press, April 2025

“A darkly comic suspense in the vein of All’s Well and Yellowface, She’s a Lamb! is an edgy and incisive novel that marches toward showtime with a growing unease about the dangers of magical thinking and the depths of delusion

Jessamyn St. Germain is meant to be a star. Not an actor who occasionally books yogurt commercials and certainly not a lowly usher at one of Vancouver’s smallest regional theaters. No, she is bound for greatness, and that’s why the part of Maria in the theater’s upcoming production of The Sound of Music is hers. Or it’s going to be.

Jessamyn may have been relegated to the position of childminder for the little brats playing the von Trapp children, but it’s so obvious she’s there for a different reason — the director wants her close to the role so when Samantha, the lead, inevitably fails, Jessamyn will be there to take her place in the spotlight.

This must be it. Because if it isn’t, well, then every skipped meal, every brutal rehearsal, every inch won against a man attempting to drag her down will have all been for nothing.

Sharp, relentless, and darkly funny, She’s a Lamb! is a cutting satire about the grotesque pall patriarchy casts over one woman’s delusional quest to achieve her dreams and the depths she will sink to for a chance at the life she’s convinced she deserves.”

Poetry Marching for Sindy

by Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau, translated by Susan Ouriou

Inanna Publications, July 2025

“Dive into the powerful narrative of Poetry Marching for Sindy, Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau’s response to the disappearance of Sindy Ruperthouse, a woman from the Abitibiwinik First Nation who went missing in 2014. In this poignant seventh literary work, Bordeleau navigates the raw emotions of rage and sorrow as she bears witness to one family’s search for their daughter in the ongoing national tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people. Through her evocative longform poem, with profound sensitivity Bordeleau brings readers along on her quest for understanding and justice in the face of inexplicable violence and rampant injustice.

Poetry Marching for Sindy is both a lament for a missing daughter and a celebration of women’s voices and the resilience of communities in the face of tragedy. Join Bordeleau on a journey of grief, longing and hope as she honours Sindy’s memory and amplifies the voices of those demanding justice and closure. Poetry Marching for Sindy is a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit and the unwavering power of collective action.”

Fallosophy: My Trip through Life with MS

by Ardra Shephard

Douglas & McIntyre, April 2025

“A memoir based on columnist, fashion-show TV host, podcaster and MS advocate Ardra Shephard’s award-winning blog, Tripping on Air.

Twenty-three-year-old Ardra Shephard is sleeping with the wrong guy, living in a crappy apartment, and spending money she doesn’t have on designer shoes, boozy brunches and weekends in NYC. She hates her office job, but it pays for the lessons she needs to make it as an opera singer. She isn’t thrilled about her current situation, but she isn’t panicked. She knows she’s got time! Making mistakes while you figure stuff out is what your twenties are all about. But then when a doctor tells Ardra she has MS, those two letters split her life into a Before and After.

While over a million people in Canada and the United States live with Multiple Sclerosis, there is no certainty when it comes to the progression of the disease. By her mid-thirties, Ardra is struggling to walk, and it’s terrifying. When she starts using mobility aids, she faces feelings of otherness and not belonging like never before. As Ardra’s deepest fears keep coming true, she starts to learn the most important lesson: She’s been sold a lie about disability—it isn’t a fate worse than death. Having so far survived all of her worst-case scenarios, she begins to realize that a difficult life doesn’t have to be a joyless life.

Today, twenty years after her diagnosis, Ardra’s journey isn’t over. MS will always be a force to be reckoned with, but the woman Ardra is, day after day, is no longer negotiable.

Fallosophy serves up wisdom like a seasoned bartender who’s seen it all, and doesn’t try to sugarcoat what it’s really like to live with a progressive, disabling illness in a world that would rather not build a ramp.”

Recommended by Vinh Nguyen and Jessica Rose

restaurant kid: a memoir of family and belonging

by rachel phan

douglas & Mcintyre, april 2025

“When she was three years old, Rachel Phan met her replacement. Instead of a new sibling, her mother and father’s time and attention were suddenly devoted entirely to their new family restaurant. For her parents—whose own families fled China during Japanese occupation and then survived bombs and starvation during the war in Vietnam—it was a dream come true. For Phan, it was something quite different. Overnight, she became a restaurant kid, living on the periphery of her own family and trying her best to stay out of the way.

As Phan grew up, the restaurant was the most stalwart and suffocating member of her family. For decades, it’s been both their crowning achievement and the origin of so much of their pain and suffering: screaming matches complete with smashed dishes; bodies worn down by long hours and repetitive strain; and tenuous relationships where the family loved one another deeply without ever really knowing each other.

In Restaurant Kid, Phan seeks to examine the way her life has been shaped by the rigid boxes placed around her. She had to be a ‘good daughter,’ never asking questions, always being grateful. She had to be a ‘real Canadian,’ watching hockey and speaking English so flawlessly that her tongue has since forgotten how to contort around Cantonese tones. As the only Chinese girl at school, she had to alternate between being the sidekick, geek, or Asian fetish, depending on whose gaze was on her.

Now, three decades after their restaurant first opened, Phan’s parents are cautiously talking about retirement. As an adult, Phan’s ‘good daughter’ role demands something new of her—and a chance to get to know her parents away from the restaurant.

In Restaurant Kid, Phan deftly combines candour, wit and insight to craft a vibrant and important narrative on the strength and foibles of family, and how we come to understand ourselves.”

The poilievre project: a radical blueprint for corporate rule

by martin lukacs

breach books, april 2025

“As Pierre Poilievre closes in on power, journalist Martin Lukacs reveals the playbook behind his rise and exposes his radical vision for reshaping Canada.

Masquerading as an anti-establishment firebrand, Poilievre aims to ride anger about inequality and the cost-of-living crisis into office, then hand the keys to the corporate elite.

Drawing on investigative research and first-hand reporting, Lukacs reveals how Poilievre has built a political machine with the backing of tech oligarchs, real estate tycoons, oil barons, and Bay Street billionaires—all poised to profit from a Conservative government in Ottawa.

With sharp and biting analysis, Lukacs traces Poilievre’s trajectory from his early embrace of free-market fundamentalism to later efforts to rebrand his agenda of deregulation, privatization, and cutbacks as worker-friendly populism.

He warns that Poilievre’s commitment to a rapid-fire corporate makeover of Canada could cost the country dearly—from cherished public institutions to hard-won social programs to a liveable planet.”

skin

by catherine bush

Goose Lane editions, april 2025

“In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.

Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.

Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.”

poetry in place: poetry and environmental hope in a southern ontario bioregion

by deborah bowen (editor) and noah van brenk (assistant editor)

guernica editions, may 2025

“Poetry in Place is a curated anthology for readers who love both poetry and the land. The subject matter addresses a very specific territory: the “land between the waters” of Lake Ontario and the Grand River, west of Toronto and east of London, in southern Ontario. The anthology includes poems by more than forty contemporary poets of different ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds. They pondered the natural world around them, and asked themselves, “What is it that the land has to say to us?” In these days of climate disruption, biodiversity loss, a new awareness of the dire history of colonized Indigenous peoples, and the spectre of global pandemic, how can we hear the voices of the natural world? We suggest that poetry offers a powerful mode of attention and analysis, now as it always has done. Contributors are also interviewed about their relationship with the land, their spirituality and worldview, and their motivation in writing poetry about the environment.

Contributors include Madhur Anand, Mia Anderson, Fitsum Areguy, Elise Arsenault, Gary Barwin, Anna Bowen, Klyde Broox, Linzey Corridon, Corri Daniels, Brian Day, Adam Dickinson, Joanne Epp, Jaidyn Fenton, Linda Frank, Marilyn Gear Pilling, Alyssa General, Catherine Graham, David Haskins, Cornelia Hoogland, Karen Houle, Mark Kempf, Greg Kennedy, Paula Kienapple-Summers, Stacey Laforme, Janice Jo Lee, John B. Lee, Sheryl Loeffler, Tanis MacDonald, Daniel MacIsaac, Chandra Maracle, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Geoff Martin, Elizabeth McCallister, Daniel David Moses, Honey Novick, Mariam Pirbhai, Arwen Roussell, Bernadette Rule, Doug Sikkema, Jennifer Tan, John Terpstra, Elizabeth Tessier, and Anna Yin.”

messy cities: why we can’t plan everything

edited by Dylan Reid, Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, and John Lorinc

Coach house books, june 2025

“Crowded streets, sidewalk vendors, jumbled architecture, constant clamour, graffitied walls, parks gone wild: are these signs of a poorly managed city or indicators of urban vitality?

Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything argues that spontaneity and urban work-around are not liabilities but essential elements in all thriving cities. Forty essays by a range of writers from around the world illuminate the role of messy urbanism in enabling creativity, enterprise, and grassroots initiatives to flourish within dense modern cities.

With pieces on guerrilla beaches, desire lines, urban interruptions, and the inner lives of unlovely buildings written by experts from all walks of life, Messy Cities makes the case for embracing disorder while not shying away from confronting its challenges.”

devouring tomorrow: fiction from the future of food

edited by a.g. pasquella and jeff dupuis

dundurn press, march 2025

“An anthology of speculative short fiction imagining the possibilities of our food-insecure future.

Our lives, our culture, our community all start with and revolve around food and eating. Sharing meals with family and friends has been a hallmark of human society from our earliest beginnings. But we are entering an era of unprecedented change. Climate, technology, the global spread of crop diseases, droughts, and the loss of pollinators threaten to change not only how much food we eat, but what we eat and how we eat it.

Devouring Tomorrow explores this strange new menu through the eyes and palates of some of Canada’s most exciting authors. See a world with no bees left to pollinate our crops. Encounter lab-grown meat so advanced that it becomes sentient. Visit a land where diseases wipe out a common fruit and the society of a nation changes around its loss. This is not the world of the distant future — this is tomorrow.

Featuring stories from:
Sifton Tracey Anipare • Carleigh Baker • Gary Barwin • Chris Benjamin • Eddy Boudel Tan • Catherine Bush • Jowita Bydlowska • Lisa de Nikolits • Dina Del Bucchia • Terri Favro • Elan Mastai • Mark Sampson • Ji Hong Sayo • Jacqueline Valencia • Anuja Varghese • A.G.A. Wilmot”