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All there is, is light and darkness and wonder.And in that moment, there is no difference, either,between love and the memory of love. – “Up Above the World” In this latest collection Richard Harrison has created a companion to his Governor General Award–winning collection On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. In My Mother Joins the Resistance, Harrison considers his mother’s life – from her time as a child during WWII’s Operation Pied Piper, up until its end, in 2017, when terminally ill with cancer, she chose MAiD – with elegant, deeply felt poetry. These are beautiful poems, ones that piece together a person, a life and a family over generations. These are poems that examine the wounds passed down through a family, alongside the love, and see the echoes of both – the wounds and the love – in the world around us.

My Mother Joins the Resistance

in the garden, you intoxicated on a towel, kicking cooing in the clover, crickets insistent in skitteringheat. Letdown and foxes line the perimeter, perk their ears with appetite. Letdown and every burnerleft on high, door bolted from the inside. In her third collection, Nova Scotian poet Jaime Forsythe has created an elegant long poem with Yield. In these dreamlike lines a mother faces the postpartum void from a porous house by the ocean as the veil between land and sea, and between being lost and being found, grows thinner. With repeated waves of couplets Forsythe brings the reader unforgettable images: a pom-pom that hardens into a sea urchin, an underwater dance club, a coast that melts into the sea. Delicately tracing the disorientation and dark edges of new motherhood, this is a collection that embraces beauty and ambiguity with a baby that roots for milk while what’s ancient – whether history or memory – floods in.

Yield

In the aftermath of a Memory War, society is fragmented into strange new cultures, castes and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories and hyperloop terminals, Whitney French brings us a dazzling novel in verse where memory is the highest currency and love, like all revolutions, is dangerous, unruly and singed with hope. O and Z are two young women searching for purpose in a world where a decades-long earthquake reverberates through the Earth’s crust, and the population scrambles to hide from deadly acid rain. Descended from space pirates, O is drawn to the sky, while Z is earthbound, a skilled forager with connections to the black market. The two become travel companions and lovers until, torn between choosing their values or each other, a fateful decision must be made at the el Corazón space station. In this speculative and intoxicating novel, French offers readers an intricate future-world that resonates so powerfully with our own, as it explores a people gripped in the war-torn politics of migration, memory-keeping, labour and survival.

Syncopation: A Novel in Verse

A wide-ranging mix of activities sure to keep visitors, newcomers to the city and even long-time residents heading out to explore all through the year. Hamilton, Ontario, is a city with a lot of history, a hopping arts scene, a surprising amount of natural beauty and an amazing amount of things to do. In this short, entertaining book, Jason Allen, host of the Environmental Urbanist podcast, shares some his favourite Hamilton places and activities, highlighting something to do every week of the year. Whether it’s enjoying one of the city’s many festivals, finding the perfect hike in the fall, attending a game from one of Hamilton’s great sports teams or figuring out what do on a crisp winter’s day, the Hammer has something to offer everyone.

52 Things to Do in Hamilton: The Insider's Guide to Fun in the Hammer

In 2018, Sunny Dhillon resigned as a journalist with the Globe and Mail. His blog post announcing his departure went unexpectedly viral. It was a decision that had been long brewing and Dhillon posted the piece with the hope that it would lead to “meaningful reflection on the lack of diversity in Canadian journalism and the problems therein.” But he was not optimistic. In this sharply funny memoir, shaped as a series of letters to his daughter, Dhillon explains why he was not hopeful. From his earliest memories, his experience of being Canadian was shaped by race, and as a child he’d often found himself confused by what he should do when the fact he was “different” was raised. His first reaction was to hide – from his skin colour, from his native tongue and even from his name. Until he realized he didn’t feel the need to hide anymore, that he didn’t want to hide anymore. With warmth, honesty and lots of humour, Dhillon shares his journey so that his daughter will not have to struggle through the lessons he took too long to learn, so that she will know who she is and be proud.

Hide and Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin

The Book of Cross 4 I would take the whole world apart to find her. The immortal Cross is back in a wild new adventure – a desperate hunt to find the enigmatic Alice from the Wonderland tales. Alice has helped Cross save the world countless times over since she stepped out of the pages of her book, but now she is the one that needs rescue after vanishing during an apocalyptic battle. Aided by the faerie queen Morgana and her court, Cross journeys to mystical islands populated with murderous immortals and into famous libraries with powerful librarians and magical texts until they reach the chaotic and terrifying Wonder Lands, the dangerous inspiration for the original Alice tales. But they are not the only ones looking for Alice – a rogue group of angels are also hunting her for mysterious reasons of their own. The very fate of the world may rest upon who finds Alice first.

The Wonder Lands War

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