Book List
Select from the following books for your book club writing workshop
Skid Dogs
Emelia Symington-Fedy
“I can’t remember the last time I read a book so brave. Maybe never.”
– Ani DiFranco
A raw and riveting coming-of-age story about the wild love of teenage friendships and the casual oppression of 90s rape culture.
Bones of a Giant
Brian Thomas Isaac
"Summer, 1968. For the first time since his big brother, Eddie, disappeared two years earlier—either a runaway or dead by his own hand—sixteen-year-old Lewis Toma has shaken off some of his grief....Their warm family life is almost enough to counter the pressures he feels as a boy trying to become a man in a place where responsible adult men like his uncle are largely absent, broken by residential school and racism."
The Receiver
Sharon Thesen
"More formally various than Thesen's recent books, The Receiver includes the short lyrics documenting the poet's witnessing that readers of her work will recognize, as well as various kinds of found poems, translations, prose poems, alongside some brief essays or memoirs.
Thesen's mother and father, friends, poets in her own life, their poems, might form the immediate subject of the poems here, but above all, The Receiver is about poetic imagination."
Ducks
Kate Beaton
"With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush—part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed."
The Whole Animal
Corinna Chong
"Throughout The Whole Animal, flawed characters wrestle with the complexities of relationships with partners, parents, children, and friends as they struggle to find identity, belonging, and autonomy. Bodies are divided, often elusive, even grotesque. In "Porcelain Legs," a pre-teen fixes on the long, thick hair growing from her mother's eyelid. In "Wolf-Boy Saturday," a linguist grasps for connection with a young boy whose negligent upbringing has left him unable to speak."
Root of Light
Michelle Doege
"The poems in Root of Light time travel among the living and the dead, between the ancestral and family homes of Germany, the US, her wife's native India, and their new home of Canada. These vivid and visceral poems embody how forced migrations and border crossings, whether driven by famine or persecution or love, can leave the migrant feeling severed from the family tree. And yet, these illusive and permeable borders are never as solid as they seem."
Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival
Trina Moyles
"As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Trina Moyles understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats in the siblings’ hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other."
Ladybird
Kerry Gilbert
"Amelia, where did your bones go… Gilbert asks in a rhetorical verse conversation to Earhart – from one poet to another – that takes flight. Lines that zoom, 45 bank, stall, vertical bank/glide, dive 38 spiral, tailspin, side/slip, split ‘ s’ turn, forward slip/barrel roll, loop inside, loop outside into some of the conspiracy theories surrounding Amelia’ s death. Even though it has been more than eighty years since Earhart’ s been missing, Gilbert writes Lady Bird at the same age that Amelia was when she disappeared."
Little Bit Die
Jason Emde
"Jason Emde's poems in little bit die are intimate and haunted recollections of travel and freedom, of friendship and loss, of leaving and getting home. Careening from small-town Canada to Zimbabwe to Mexico to Poland to Tiananmen Square to Gifu, Japan, Emde traces how the heart moves through its spheres of grief and the ways it endures 'in the middle of the noise.'"
More books coming soon!
Grayling
Gillian Wigmore
"After surviving a health crisis, Jay heads to the remote and challenging Dease River in Northwestern BC for a two week canoe and fishing journey, but is unprepared for the mysterious stranger who becomes his passenger. A lean and intense tale that takes the reader to haunting depths. A seminal and brilliant addition to a neglected genre, the novella."