POETRY

Exculpatory Lilies
Susan Musgrave
McClelland & Stewart, Sept.

This new collection from the award-winning poet deals with grief: her partner, Stephen Reid, died in 2018, and their daughter Sophie in 2021 of an accidental overdose. But Musgrave’s sensibility imbues these poems with more – wit and the natural world serve as counterpoints in her scrutiny of both language and emotion. –Cassandra Drudi

The Program
Megan Fennya Jones
Goose Lane Editions, Sept.

Megan Fennya Jones looks back on her time in the fashion industry with poems that tackle body dysmorphia, shame, and eating disorders in this debut collection that is ultimately about how we are seen and how we see ourselves. –CD

Icarus, Falling of Birds
Harry Thurston and Thaddeus Holownia, photog.
Anchorage Press/Goose Lane Editions, Sept.

In 2013, thousands of migratory songbirds perished in the flare of a natural gas plant in Saint John, New Brunswick. Harry Thurston’s poems are paired with Thaddeus Holownia’s photos of their burned bodies to memorialize both the birds and this environmental disaster. –Attila Berki

Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies: 49 Poems and 18 Photographs
Jan Zwicky and Robert V. Moody, photog.
Freehand Books, Oct.

In this collaboration, acclaimed poet and recent Order of Canada inductee Jan Zwicky and photographer and mathematician Robert V. Moody address the fundamental essences of things in words and images, drawing connections that create a conversation between their two art forms. –AB

Scars and Stars
Jesse Thistle
McClelland & Stewart/PRHC, Oct.

Jesse Thistle’s poetry was notable in his bestselling memoir From the Ashes and in this new biographical collection he combines poetry with complementary prose pieces to reflect both on his own history and on the stories of people in his life, as well as to meditate on family, love, parenthood, and community. –AB

Stations of the Crossed
Carol Rose GoldenEagle
Inanna Publications, Oct.

The Cree-Dene author of Bearskin Diary uses the Christian ritual of the Stations of the Cross as the springboard for poems that contemplate the destructive impacts of residential schools, government policies, and church doctrines, while also looking at the ways to reclaim the teachings of Indigenous cultures. –AB

Where the Sea Kuniks the Land
Ashley Qilavaq-Savard
Inhabit Media, Nov.

A kunik is a traditional Inuit greeting and in this debut collection Inuk writer, artist, and filmmaker Ashley Qilavaq-Savard extends the greeting to the Arctic landscape. Her poetry addresses the beauty of the North and the interconnectedness of people and place, both past and present. –AB

CULTURAL STUDIES

Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses
Alex D. Ketchum
Concordia University Press, Nov.

Released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the opening of the famously feminist Mother Courage restaurant in New York’s West Village, Professor Ketchum’s latest title offers a comprehensive study of the phenomenon of feminist and LGBTQ+ eateries, covering more than 200 examples from the ’70s to the present. Ketchum serves up a fascinating cultural history, from the era when unmarried women were denied loans to start such institutions to their role supporting ongoing social justice movements and their innovations in labour and food-sourcing practices. –Andrew Woodrow-Butcher

In Defence of Copyright
Hugh Stephens
Cormorant Books, Nov.

First enacted in the 18th century, copyright laws have been increasingly weakened in recent years. Hugh Stephens explores the history of copyright and the nature of unauthorized use and piracy in the digital age, and reviews some of the latest challenges to copyright, particularly within the Canadian context. –Attila Berki

On Browsing
Jason Guriel
Biblioasis, Oct.

In this latest installment of the Field Notes series, poet and critic Jason Guriel digs through the positives and negatives of the widespread shift to online purchases and streaming. One-click shopping and season-bingeing have their pleasures. But with all our shopping, watching, reading, and listening subtly shaped by algorithms, have we changed something essential about our experience of the world? –AWB

WHAT ARE STORIES FOR?

Humans are storytellers. But what’s the use of all these yarns we spin? This trio of titles investigates the history of our oral traditions and unpacks how the stories we tell each other – and hear, and read – shape our ideas and our world.

Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordions
Tomson Highway
House of Anansi, Sept.

Legendary Cree playwright and littérateur Tomson Highway entwines Christian, classical, and Cree mythologies in his Massey Lecture on the exuberant figure of the Trickster. Centring on five big themes – language, creation, sex and gender, humour, and death – Highway shows how North American story traditions have a unique contribution to make to the way any of us finds meaning in life. –AWB

The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era
Harold R. Johnson
Biblioasis, Oct.

This posthumous work by the late Cree lawyer and writer emerged from a talk he gave to a multi-faith group about the importance of story to all aspects of our lives, from our sense of self to our social structures, and points towards ways that storytelling can be – and often is – a force for positive change in the world. –AWB

Ordinary Wonder Tales
Emily Urquhart
Biblioasis, Nov.

Folklorist Emily Urquhart follows up her earlier hit Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes with a collection of essays on the “wonder tale” – a term she prefers to “fairy tale” because of “its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative.” Urquhart draws connections between the experiences of everyday life – love, grief, pride, fear – and the imaginative universes of the stories we tell and retell. –AWB