Éric Plamondon

Writer Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural icon of the 1960s. In Mayonnaise, the second novel of Éric Plamondon's 1984 Trilogy, narrator Gabriel Rivages pieces together Brautigan's life starting in Oregon, where he was born, to San Francisco, where he became a poet and satirical novelist, and on to Bolinas, California, where he committed suicide in 1984. Sifting through the ruins of Sixties idealism, Plamondon recasts the American western frontier into a surreal, timeless place of industrial invention, Hollywood glamour and acid-washed hedonism. Originally published in French, Mayonnaise was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal.

Sheila Kindellan-Sheehan

The nightmare began on a warm summer night. A six-year-old boy was found in a park shack, bludgeoned to death in the quiet residential district of Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Soon after, an eight-year-old boy disappeared. Horror and fear gripped the city. Neighbourhoods went silent. Suspects were questioned, suspicion and alarm mounts. No arrests were ever made.

When Lieutenant Detective Damiano discovers the cold case many years later and learns that the three suspects are still alive, she's hooked, on what cops call a Detective's Case. Her partner, Detective Pierre Matte, hesitantly agrees to work with her. They meet Kathryn Flynn, the ninety-year-old mother, who has kept meticulous files throughout the years--her hope has never faltered. Damiano and Matte rediscover what binds them, a reckoning for the murderers among us and justice for the victims who have no voice.

Geoffrey Cook

The belief in translation as an act of self-portraiture drives Afterwords, Geoffrey Cook's ambitious reimagining of German poems by Goethe, Heine, Rilke and Brecht. Cook's versions not only transform these foreign texts into English poems in their own right, but enrich and expand his uniquely prismatic voice. Cook brings a contemporary and Canadian tone to his adaptations, which also showcase the exacting craftsmanship for which his first collection, Postscript, was praised. Afterwords is a book that daringly celebrates authorship as a shared project. "Do you not feel," writes Goethe, "that, in my songs, I am one and the other, too?"

Nyla Matuk

Resisting Canada gathers together poets for a conversation bigger than poetic trends. The book's organizing principle is Canada--the Canada that established residential schools; the Canada grappling with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the Canada that has been visible in its welcome of Syrian refugees, yet the not-always-tolerant place where the children of those refugees will grow up; the Canada eager to re-establish its global leadership on the environment while struggling to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty on resource-rich land and enabling further colonization of that land. In the face of global conflicts due to climate change, scarcity, mass migrations, and the rise of xenophobic populisms, Canada still works with a surface understanding of its democratic values--both at their noblest and most deceptive.

The work included in Resisting Canada--by celebrated poets such as Lee Maracle, Jordan Abel, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Louise Bernice Halfe, Michael Prior, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson--addresses, among other things, Indigenous agency, cultural belonging, environmental anxieties, and racial privilege. These poems ask us to judge and resist a statecraft that refuses to acknowledge past and present wrongs. Think of Resisting Canada as a poetic letter to Canada's politicians and leaders.