The past decade has seen a rise in documentaries, memoirs and podcasts that revisit the legacies of women wronged by pop culture. With movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp challenging long-standing narratives around female celebrities, it’s no surprise so many believe the representation of women in the media has improved. In her scathingly witty collection of essays, Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women, Lisa Whittington-Hill argues otherwise. Pop culture’s treatment of women, writes Whittington-Hill, is still marked by misogyny and misunderstanding. From the gender bias in celebrity memoir coverage to problematic portrayals of middle-aged women and the sexist pressure on female pop stars to constantly reinvent themselves, Girls, Interrupted critically examines how mainstream media keeps failing women and explores what we can do to fix it. A work of searing relevance, this candid and often cathartic debut marks Whittington-Hill as a cultural critic of the first rank.

There are parades and then there is Montreal’s St. Patrick’s parade, which has marched through the streets of the city and into Canadian history for 200 years. The street carnival has outlived the Patriote Rebellion of 1837, Fenian infiltration, Orange animosity, strained relationships among Roman Catholic priests who wanted it cancelled, two world wars, two Quebec independence referendums, and two centuries of howling March winds and chilling sub zero temperatures.

With One Long Line of Marvel veteran journalist Alan Hustak has dug up untold nuggets about the parade and nested them with historical certainty and an imaginative flourish in the setting of a Montreal that he knows. Although the author is not a son of Erin, he is considered an honorary Irishman and in 2006 walked the parade route as Chief Reviewing Officer. With this book he continues to honour Montreal’s Irish community by celebrating its personalities and by telling its stories. One Long Line of Marvel enlightens, entertains, amuses and perhaps above all superbly chronicles a long and worthwhile tradition in Montreal’s history.

In his third collection of verse, Quicker Than The Eye, Joe Fiorito continues to craft short, sharp poems that define the harder edges of urban life. His principal tools are a photographer's eye for detail, and a musician’s ear for the sound of the human voice. Now, in Quicker Than The Eye, Canada’s poet of the streets turns his gaze inward, writing about the influences of early love, family tragedy, and the search for meaning in a world where “the desolate things are mine.”  A master of spare, razor-sharp language, Fiorito manages to strip sentiment from memory in order to find tenderness and enduring truth on the margins of the city.  He has never written more austerely or more beautifully.

National Animal, Derek Webster’s second book of poetry, inhabits a wider public space than his acclaimed debut Mockingbird. In poems that extend beyond the biographical toward the political, Webster’s quiet, sharp-eyed narrator—a man “tripping / my way forward, trying to lead my own life”—watches history being erased in favour of more socially palatable ideas and comforting self-portraits. Uncompromising and substantial, National Animal explores our “civic moment” where "birds sing oblivion / estranged from all things," and meditates, in a final image-rich sequence, on our place in a science-based cosmos.