Take 5: A Five-Year Anniversary Bundle

Moldovan Hotel by Leah Horlick

In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women’s lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.

Awâsis: Kinky and Dishevelled by Louise B. Halfe – Sky Dancer

Opening with a joyful and intimate foreword from Elder Maria Campbell, awâsis — kinky and dishevelled is a force of Indigenous resurgence, resistance, and soul-healing laughter.

Grey All Over by Andrea Actis

Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness.

Burning in This Midnight Dream by Louise B. Halfe – Sky Dancer

Many of the poems in Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream were written in response to the grim tide of emotions, memories, dreams and nightmares that arose in her as the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolded.

Tell: Poems for a Girlhood by Soraya Peerbaye

Harrowing and deeply empathetic, Tell: poems for a girlhood traces the events surrounding the 1997 murder of teenager Reena Virk by a group of high school classmates.

First by Arleen Paré

The poems in First, Arleen Paré’s seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings.

Why I Was Late by Charlie Petch

Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, bringing a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing — Petch works hard.

Dream of No One But Myself by D.M. Bradford

Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, D.M. Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can’t quite reconcile.

Fetishes of the Floating World by Don Domanski

Fetishes of the Floating World continues Don’s lifelong exploration of mystical ecology. It is an invitation to experience the sacred dimensions of what-is and to become more intimate with the strangeness that haunts our lively, changeable world.

Autowar by Assiyah Jamilla Touré

Each and every poem in Autowar was written on a cell phone, transcribing an urgent revisiting of old sites of pain, and also a revisiting of one young person’s power and ability—to hurt themself, or others.