New Book List

"Meet Bird and Mimi in this brilliant new novel from one of Canada’s foremost authors. Inspired by a handful of old postcards sent by Uncle Leroy nearly a hundred years earlier, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace Mimi’s long-lost uncle and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe. “I’m sweaty and sticky. My ears are still popping from the descent into Vaclav Havel. My sinuses ache. My stomach is upset. My mouth is a sewer. I roll over and bury my face in a pillow. Mimi snuggles down beside me with no regard for my distress. ‘My god,’ she whispers, ‘can it get any better?’” By turns witty, sly and poignant, this is the unforgettable tale of one couple’s holiday trip to Europe, where their wanderings through its famous capitals reveal a complicated history, both personal and political."-- Provided by publisher.

"Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It’s a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities."-- Provided by publisher.

Autumn in New Stockholm tells the story of three (and if we count the baby secretly growing inside Nesrin, four) women who leave — during different time periods — the country where they were born and raised, in search of a better future. Playwrights were inspired by their migratory experiences and observations while living in Canada, New Zealand and Australia since 2014.

"Cedar has nearly forgotten what her family looks like. Phoenix has nearly forgotten what freedom feels like. And Elsie has nearly given up hope. Nearly. As Cedar floats between foster homes, and eventually goes to live with her estranged father, she grapples with the pain of being separated from her mother, Elsie, and sister, Phoenix. From a youth detention centre, Phoenix gives birth to a baby she'll never get to raise, and finds herself trying to--or wondering if she even should--forgive herself for all the harm she's caused. Elsie, struggling with addiction and determined to turn her life around, is buoyed by the very idea of being reunited with her daughters and strives to be someone they can depend on, unlike her own distant mother, Margaret. These are the Strangers, each of them haunted in their own way by the death of Elsie's youngest daughter, Sparrow, a sweet, boisterous 8-year-old who died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving the family reeling from the weight of her loss. Between flickering moments of warmth and support, the women diverge and reconnect, fighting to survive in a fractured system that dares them to succeed, but expects them to fail. Facing the distinct blade of racism from those they trusted most, and a severe ignorance that surrounds them and confines their every move, they urge each other to move through the darkness, all the while wondering if they will ever emerge on the other side"-- Provided by publisher.

Years ago, when plagues and natural disasters killed millions of people, much of the world stopped dreaming. Without dreams, people are haunted, sick, mad, unable to rebuild. The government soon finds that the Indigenous people of North America have retained their dreams, an ability rumored to be housed in the very marrow of their bones. Soon, residential schools pop up—or are re-opened—across the land to bring in the dreamers and harvest their dreams.

"It's 1956, and six-year-old Eddie Toma lives with his mother, Grace, and his little brother, Lewis, near the Salmon River on the far edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve in the British Columbia Southern Interior. Grace, her friend Isabel, Isabel's husband Ray, and his nephew Gregory cross the border to work as summer farm labourers in Washington state. There Eddie is free to spend long days with Gregory exploring the farm: climbing a hill to watch the sunset and listening to the wind in the grass. The boys learn from Ray's funny and dark stories. But when tragedy strikes, Eddie returns home grief-stricken, confused, and lonely. Eddie's life is governed by the decisions of the adults around him. Grace is determined to have him learn the ways of the white world by sending him to school in the small community of Falkland. On Eddie's first day of school, as he crosses the reserve boundary at the Salmon River bridge, he leaves behind his world. Grace challenges the Indian Agent and writes futile letters to Ottawa to protest the sparse resources in their community. His father returns to the family after years away only to bring chaos and instability. Isabel and Ray join them in an overcrowded house. Only in his grandmother's company does he find solace and true companionship. In his teens, Eddie's future seems more secure--he finds a job, and his long-time crush on his white neighbour Eva is finally reciprocated. But every time things look up, circumstances beyond his control crash down around him. The cumulative effects of guilt, grief, and despair threaten everything Eddie has ever known or loved. All the Quiet Places is the story of what can happen when every adult in a person's life has been affected by colonialism; it tells of the acute separation from culture that can occur even at home in a loved familiar landscape. Its narrative power relies on the unguarded, unsentimental witness provided by Eddie."-- Provided by publisher.

"Five generations of Métis women argue, dance, struggle, laugh, love, and tell the stories that will sing their family, and perhaps the land itself, into healing in this brilliantly original debut novel. Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens means. Allie is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother. Lucie wants the granddaughter she's never met to help her join her ancestors in the Afterlife. Genevieve is determined to conquer her demons before the fire inside burns her up, with the help of the sister she lost but has never been without. Mame, in the Afterlife, knows that all these stories began with her, and that she must hold on to the tellings until all her daughters and their daughters find the paths they need to be on. This extraordinary novel, told by a chorus of distinctive, sharp, funny, confused, wise characters that include the descendants of the bison that once freely roamed the land, heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in literary fiction."-- Provided by publisher.

Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.

"From the award-winning author of Black Water and On the Trapline, in his first novel for adults, the story of an estranged father and daughter who must find their way back to one another. Deep in the night, when Matthew paces the house, unable to sleep, he pauses outside his daughter’s bedroom. Hallelujah, who goes by Holly, is only on the other side of the door, but feels a universe away. He worries about her, a young Cree woman, but cannot seem to bridge the gap between them. Claire claims things would be better if he looked up from his phone or showed up to watch her swim meets like he promised. But Matthew cannot shake an emptiness that is leaving him on the outside of his own life looking in. It’s causing him to make mistakes that have the potential to damage his family forever. And Holly has just figured them out. When a tragedy close to home occurs, Matthew and Holly take an unexpected journey out onto the land to search for a long-lost cabin out on the family trapline. But each of them is searching for something more than a place and what happens in the wilderness will test them in ways they never thought possible. Award-winning author David A Robertson, in his first novel for adults, has created a moving contemporary story exploring the bonds of family, the search for identity and the enduring connection to the land."-- Provided by publisher.

"More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vanna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though she and the boy are complete strangers, though they don't speak a common language, she determines to do whatever it takes to save him. In alternating chapters, we learn the story of the boy's life and how he came to be on the boat; and we follow the girl and boy as they make their way toward a vision of safety. But as the novel unfurls, we begin to understand that this is not merely the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world, it is the story of our collective moment in this time: of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair--and of the way each of those things can blind us to reality, or guide us to a better one."

"The first book from Kazuo Ishiguro--one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time--since he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Set in the near future, in a distinct reality of its own but reminiscent of his luminous, bestselling masterpiece Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun is a thrilling feat of world-building and a mesmerizing novel about the human heart, anchored by a singularly unforgettable heroine who has a great deal to teach us about what it means to love."

"Criminal justice inquiries may be the most historically dramatic means for coming to terms with traumatic legacies, but it is in the more subtle social and cultural processes of "memory work" that most individuals encounter historical reconciliation in practice. This book analyzes, within the realms of national literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is "carnivalesque," temporarily overturning discursive hierarchies. Such fictions of reconciliation venture beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization, offering new opportunities for confronting painful histories"-- Provided by publisher.

"Brilliant, jubilant insights into the glory and anguish of life from one of the world's most treasured Indigenous creators. Trickster is zany, ridiculous. The ultimate, over-the-top, madcap lunatic. Here to remind us that the reason for existence is to have one blast of a time, to laugh ourselves to death. Ever the trickster, Tomson Highway brings his signature irreverence to an exploration of five themes central to the human condition: language, creation, sex and gender, humour, and death. A comparative analysis of Christian, Classical, and Cree mythologies reveals how they have given form and substance to Western thought, life, and culture. Yet Indigenous mythologies provide unique, timeless solutions to our modern problems. Tomson Highway offers generous personal anecdotes, including of his beloved accordion-playing father, and plentiful Trickster stories as guides through such crises as climate change, economic disparity, racial intolerance, and all-out unhappiness. Laughter is medicine. Within the endless circle of life in Indigenous mythologies, the Earth is a garden of joy unlimited. A world we must protect as the birthright of future generations. Laugh with the legendary Tomson Highway as he illuminates a healing, hilarious way forward."-- Provided by publisher.

In Raven's Echo, Tlingit artist and poet Robert Davis Hoffmann's poetry grapples with reconstructing a life within Tlingit tradition and history. The destructiveness of colonialism brings a profound darkness to some of the poems in Raven's Echo, but the collection also explores the possibility of finding spiritual healing in the face of historical and contemporary traumas"-- Provided by publisher."In Raven's Echo, Tlingit artist and poet Robert Davis Hoffmann calls on readers to nurture material as well as spiritual life, asking beautiful and brutal questions about our individual positions within the universe and within history. The poems in this collection are brimming with an imaginative array of characters, including the playful yet sometimes disturbing trickster Raven, and offer insights into both traditional and contemporary Native life in southeast Alaska.

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

From award-winning author Cherie Dimaline comes a tale of struggle hope and the kind of magic that can only happen when you mix the Mississippi and the Georgian Bay.

Rudy Bloom has a lot going on; her mother is eating herself to death, a soul crushing museum job, and her flamboyant best friend who humiliates and saves her in equal doses. And then there’s a galaxy of odd planets that spin around her head. When Ruby’s sent to New Orleans for work, she finds an astronomer in an attic that just might be the way out of her chaotic solar system.

Thumps DreadfulWater is a Cherokee ex-cop trying to make a living as a photographer in the small town of Chinook, somewhere in the northwestern United States. But he doesn't count on snapping shots of a dead body languishing in a newly completed luxury condo resort built by the local Indian band. It's a mystery that Thumps can't help getting involved in, especially when he realizes the number one suspect is Stick Merchant, anti-condo protester and wayward son of Claire Merchant, head of the tribal council and DreadfulWater's sometimes lover. Smart and savvy, blessed with a killer dry wit and a penchant for self-deprecating humour, DreadfulWater just can't manage to shed his California cop skin. Before long, he is deeply entangled in the mystery and has his work cut out for him.

"Capricious, big-hearted, joyful: an epic memoir from one of Canada's most acclaimed Indigenous writers and performers Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the 11th of 12 children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family who traversed the tundra by dogsled and lived off the land. In Permanent Astonishment, one of the greatest writers of our time animates the magical world of his northern childhood, paying tribute to a way of life that few have experienced and fewer still have chronicled. Growing up in a land of ten thousand lakes and islands, Tomson Highway relished being pulled by dogsled beneath a night sky alive with stars; sucking the juices from roasted muskrat tails; and singing country music songs with his impossibly beautiful older sister and her teenaged friends. Surrounded by the love of his family and the vast, mesmerizing landscape they called home, his was in many ways an idyllic far north childhood. But five of Tomson's siblings died in childhood, and Balazee and Joe Highway, who loved their surviving children profoundly, wanted their two youngest sons, Tomson and Rene, to enjoy opportunities as big as the world. And so when Tomson was 6, he and Rene were flown south by float plan to attend a residential school and begin the rest of their education. In 1990 Rene Highway, a world-renowned dancer, died of an AIDS-related illness. Permanent Astonishment is Tomson's extravagant embrace of his younger brother's final words: "Don't mourn me, be joyful." Infused with joy and outrageous humour, Permanent Astonishment offers insights, both hilarious and profound, into the Cree experience of culture, conquest and survival."-- Provided by publisher.

In considering the connections between literature and lived experience, this book contemplates four key questions at the heart of Indigenous kinship traditions: How do we learn to be human? How do we become good relatives? How do we become good ancestors? How do we learn to live together? Blending personal narrative and broader historical and cultural analysis with close readings of key creative and critical texts, Justice argues that Indigenous writers engage with these questions in part to challenge settler-colonial policies and practices that have targeted Indigenous connections to land, history, family, and self. More importantly, Indigenous writers imaginatively engage the many ways that communities and individuals have sought to nurture these relationships and project them into the future.

Pencils down--graphite and eyebrow--and eyes to front of the room for this one-of-a-kind lesson. Since debuting over a decade ago, the world of RuPaul's Drag Race has steadily collected both popular and academic interests. This collection of original essays presents insightful analyses and a range of critical perspectives on Drag Race from across the globe. Topics covered include language and linguistics, cultural appropriation, racism, health, wealth, the realities of reality television, digital drag and naked bodies. Though varied in topical focus, each essay centers public pedagogy to examine what and how Drag Race teaches its audience. The goal of this book is to frame Drag Race as a classroom, one that is helpful for both teachers and students alike. With an academic-yet-accessible tone and an interdisciplinary approach, essays celebrate and examine the show and its spin-offs from the earliest seasons to the very start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

National-award-winning poet Lorna Crozier's new collection of poems are peopled by the seasons and their elements, her beloved prairies, sorrow, joy, and the dead. Central to their themes are revisitations of family and marriage, and the land-death that is drought. Universal, deeply moving, crowded with breathtaking imagery, these are darkly resonant poems of middle age: alert to the beauty in loss, cherishing the humanity that is whetted on that stone. This is Lorna Crozier, one of Canada's most highly celebrated poets, at the top of her form. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Winner of the Governor General’s Award, this collection of Donnell’s best poetry pulses with the realities of home, street, and working life. His ironic wit and lyrical passages make for a fantastic read complete with his signature deadpan style and post-modern sophistication. “Making it in the City,” “Lakes,” and “The True Story of Pat Garrett” are but a few of the titles included in this eclectic compilation.

In the stunning poems of Settler Education, Laurie D. Graham vividly explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake -- the death of nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. In ways possible only with such an honest act of imagination, and with language at once terse and capacious, Settler Education reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present.

Thomas King is one of North America's foremost Native writers, best known for his novels, including Green Grass, Running Water, for the DreadfulWater mysteries, and for collections of short stories such as One Good Story, That One and A Short History of Indians in Canada. But King is also a poet, a literary and cultural critic, and a noted filmmaker, photographer, and scriptwriter and performer for radio. His career and oeuvre have been validated by literary awards and by the inclusion of his writing in college and university curricula. Critical responses to King's work have been abundant, yet most of this criticism consists of journal articles, and to date only one book-length study of his work exists. Thomas King: Works and Impact fills this gap by providing an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of all major aspects of King's oeuvre as well as its reception and influence. It brings together expert scholars to discuss King's role in and impact on Native literature and to offer in-depth analyses of his multifaceted body of work

"It's a book of conversations -- interviews with nine Indigenous writers who work in Canada. All have been influenced by colonization and are surrounded by discourses of Indigenization, reconciliation, appropriation, and representation, and all are swept up in the growth of Indigenous publishing and literary studies. The conversations centre on writers' concerns, critiques, and craft, and how they navigate the challenge of storying their communities in politically charged terrain. Moreover, the book considers the pedagogical dimensions of stories, serving as an Indigenous literary and education project."-- Provided by publisherpages.

"Drawing on both lived experience and cultural memory, Norma Dunning brings together six powerful new short stories centred on modern-day Inuk characters in Tainna. Ranging from homeless to extravagantly wealthy, from spiritual to jaded, young to elderly, and even from alive to deceased, Dunning's characters are united by shared feelings of alienation, displacement and loneliness resulting from their experiences in southern Canada. In Tainna--meaning 'the unseen ones' and pronounced Da e nn a--a fraught reunion between sisters Sila and Amak ends in an uneasy understanding. From the spirit realm, Chevy Bass watches over his imperilled grandson, Kunak. And in the title story, the broken-hearted Bunny wanders onto a golf course on a freezing night, when a flock of geese stand vigil until her body is discovered by a kind stranger. Norma Dunning's masterful storytelling uses humour and incisive detail to create compelling characters who discover themselves in a hostile land where prejudice, misogyny and inequity are most often found hidden in plain sight. There, they must rely on their wits, artistic talent, senses of humour and spirituality¬ for survival; and there, too, they find solace in shining moments of reconnection with their families and communities."-- Provided by publisher.

Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award
Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

Carleigh Baker likes to make light in the dark. Whether plumbing family ties, the end of a marriage, or death itself, she never lets go of the witty, the ironic, and perhaps most notably, the awkward. Despite the title, the resolution in these stories isn't always tragic, but it's often uncomfortable, unexpected, or just plain strange. Character digressions, bad decisions, and misconceptions abound.

Essays raise and discuss moral questions concerning euthanasia, suicide, war, capital punishment, abortion, famine relief, and the environment

Set in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, Alistair MacLeod's short stories in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood are conspicuously regional and rural, although the influence of modem urban life appears occasionally and critically, thus offering a comparative estimate of how much and in what direction times are changing.

"As the first book-length study of Indigenous-authored Young Adult literature, this project advances conversations in Native Studies about the meaning of Indigenous sovereignty and expands conceptualizations of power dynamics and genre in YA Literary Studies"--Provided by publisher.

“Taaqtumi” is an Inuktitut word that means “in the dark”—and these spine-tingling horror stories by Northern writers show just how dangerous darkness can be. A family clinging to survival out on the tundra after a vicious zombie virus. A door that beckons, waiting to unleash the terror behind it. A post-apocalyptic community in the far North where things aren’t quite what they seem. These chilling tales from award-winning authors Richard Van Camp, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, Aviaq Johnston, and others will thrill and entertain even the most seasoned horror fan.

Native Foodways is the first scholarly collection of essays devoted exclusively to the interplay of Indigenous religious traditions and foodways in North America. Drawing on diverse methodologies, the essays discuss significant confluences in selected examples of these religious traditions and foodways, providing rich individual case studies informed by relevant historical, ethnographic, and comparative data. Many of the essays demonstrate how narrative and active elements of selected Indigenous North American religious traditions have provided templates for interactive relationships with particular animals and plants, rooted in detailed information about their local environments. In return, these animals and plants have provided these Native American communities with sustenance. Other essays provide analyses of additional contemporary and historical North American Indigenous foodways while also addressing issues of tradition and cultural change. Scholars and other readers interested in ecology, climate change, world hunger, colonization, religious studies, and cultural studies will find this book to be a valuable resource.

"The goal of Read, Listen, Tell is not only to share with readers an incredibly diverse collection of Indigenous stories, but also to transform methods of reading by bringing into the forefront practices in interpreting texts that are grounded in Indigenous knowledge and scholarship. Each of the chapters offers particular strategies for reading the stories in multiple ways, encouraging readers to expand the scope of the "short story" by including a broad range of story forms. The chapters consist of five to seven stories, accompanied by a critical essay that helps contextualize some of the questions and issues the stories raise."-- Provided by publisher.

Poem by Yukon University Instructor, Jamella Hagen (p.59)

"I Am the Rage is a poetry collection that explores racial injustice from the raw, unfiltered viewpoint of a Black woman in America. Dr. Martina McGowan is a retired MD, a mother, and a poet. Her poetry provides insights that no think piece on racism can; putting readers in the uncomfortable position of feeling, reflecting, and facing what it means to be a Black American. This entire collection was created during 2020, many shortly after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, to name but a few"-- Provided by publisher.

"From disability advocate with a PhD in disability studies and creative nonfiction, and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty, an essay collection based on a lifetime of experiences in a paralyzed body, tackling themes of identity, accessibility, bodies, and representation"-- Provided by publisher.Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous, inspirational, or angelic. She longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. Here she writes about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn't fit. Taussig reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. She shows how disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. -- adapted from jacket

"Dissecting herself and the life she once knew living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside as a bonafide drug addict, Blanchard writes plainly about violence, drug use and sex work in Fresh Pack of Smokes, offering insight into an often overlooked or misunderstood perspective."-- Provided by publisher.

Finalist for the 2015 ForeWord INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award in the Anthologies Category.
Bronze Medalist, 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Anthologies Category.
Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, the complex confluence of identities--race, class, gender, and sexuality--systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.

"This book gives students an answer to the question, “What does my professor want from this essay?” In lively, direct language, it explains the process of creating “a clearly-written argument, based on evidence, about the meaning, power, or structure of a literary work.” Using a single poem by William Carlos Williams as the basis for the process of writing a paper about a piece of literature, it walks students through the processes of reading, brainstorming, researching secondary sources, gathering evidence, and composing and editing the paper. Writing Essays About Literature is designed to strengthen argumentation skills and deepen understanding of the relationships between the reader, the author, the text, and critical interpretations. Its lessons about clarity, precision, and the importance of providing evidence will have wide relevance for student writers."-- Provided by publisher.

"This book shares the life story of Anishinaabe artist Rene Meshake in stories, poetry, and Anishinaabemowin "word bundles" that serve as a dictionary of Ojibwe poetics. Meshake was born in the railway town of Nakina in northwestern Ontario in 1948, and spent his early years living off-reserve with his grandmother in a matriarchal land-based community he calls Pagwashing. He was raised through his grandmother's "bush university," periodically attending Indian day school, but at the age of ten Rene was scooped into the Indian residential school system, where he suffered sexual abuse as well as the loss of language and connection to family and community. This residential school experience was lifechanging, as it suffocated his artistic expression and resulted in decades of struggle and healing. Now in his twenty-eighth year of sobriety, Rene is a successful multidisciplinary artist, musician and writer. Meshake's artistic vision and poetic lens provide a unique telling of a story of colonization and recovery. The material is organized thematically around a series of Meshake's paintings. It is framed by Kim Anderson, Rene's Odaanisan (adopted daughter), a scholar of oral history who has worked with Meshake for two decades. Full of teachings that give a glimpse of traditional Anishinaabek lifeways and worldviews, Injichaag: My Soul in Story is "more than a memoir.""-- Provided by publisher."

From award-winning journalist Eternity Martis, a look at race and gender on campuses, and a personal tale of struggle and survival. Eternity Martis thought going away to university would help her discover who she really is--to escape her abusive boyfriend, her nerdy reputation, her coddled life with her doting Pakistani grandparents and rebellious mother, and her complicated feelings towards her absent Jamaican father. When she heads out to the predominantly white college town of London, Ontario, Eternity discovers an entitled culture of racism and sexism. As her boyfriend becomes increasingly violent, Eternity navigates her first parties, her father's continued attempts at a relationship, the revelation that she has several half-siblings she's never heard anything about, and the growing complexity of her friendships. What follows is a memoir of struggle about the difficulty of navigating through white spaces as a young woman of colour. And humour: a grown woman bouncing out the window of an inflatable castle after too much vodka, drugstore cashiers who announce a price check for your pregnancy test for the whole store to hear, extreme growing pains. But most of all, it's a story of perseverance and discovery. As more and more classmates of colour feel driven out of the university, Eternity decides to stay, and in doing so finds a group of likeminded women to support her through discovering who she is in a place that tries to tear her down. What we're left with is a portrait of the work students of colour must do to fight for themselves in spaces where they are supposed to be safe to learn and grow.

"Set in a small-town, sub-Arctic dive bar, this debut poetry collection explores the complexities of addiction and the person beneath, and the possibility of finding home and community in unexpected places. Among Borin’s poems are portraits of the bar’s regular customers and employees—recurring characters, like those who might appear in a dark and unconventional sitcom. The religious night janitor catalogues the day’s sins; the retired barmaid gussies up at the mirror; the regular customers and their regular habits are described to a new employee: “R has a two-drink limit. A likes a coaster. Remember, / Mrs. O takes a chilled pilsner glass / with her bottle of Blue.” In the melancholy atmosphere of the bar and the rooms upstairs, the speakers of Borin’s poems find unexpected solace and belonging. The habits, the routine, the regulars, the predictability of it all brings some kind of chaotic order to chaotic life: We drink without even having to think about it, because it feels good to lose control, feels like regaining it."-- Provided by publisher.

In an effort to keep all forms of magic at bay, Jared, 17, has quit drugs and drinking. But his troubles are not over: now he's being stalked by David, his mom's ex--a preppy, khaki-wearing psycho with a proclivity for rib-breaking. And his mother, Maggie, a living, breathing badass as well as a witch, can't protect him like she used to because he's moved away from Kitimat to Vancouver for school. Even though he's got a year of sobriety under his belt (no thanks to his enabling, ever-partying mom), Jared also struggles with the temptation of drinking. And he's got to get his grades up, find a job that doesn't involve weed cookies, and somehow live peacefully with his Aunt Mave, who has been estranged from the family ever since she tried to "rescue" him as a baby from his mother. An indigenous activist and writer, Mave smothers him with pet names and hugs, but she is blind to the real dangers that lurk around them--the spirits and supernatural activity that fill her apartment. As the son of a Trickster, Jared is a magnet for magic, whether he hates it or not--he sees ghosts, he sees the monster moving underneath his Aunt Georgina's skin, he sees the creature that comes out of his bedroom wall and creepily wants to suck his toes. He also still hears the Trickster in his head, and other voices too. When the David situation becomes a crisis, Jared can't ignore his true nature any longer.

"The third and final book of the brilliant and captivating Trickster Trilogy. From the bestselling author of the Scotiabank Giller-prize shortlisted Son of a Trickster and Trickster Drift. Jared, now 18, wakes up in a hospital bed, feeling like hell. Some of the people he loves--the ones who are deaf to magic--assume he fell off the wagon after a tough year of sobriety and went on a bender to end all benders. They think that's why movers found him naked, dangerously dehydrated and confused in the basement of his mom's old house in Kitimat. The truth for Jared, who has spent two years running from it, is so much worse. He finally knows for sure that he will never be normal because he is the son of Wee'git, a Trickster, and a Trickster himself. He is actually in such bad shape because he was forced into mortal combat with his father's sister, Aunt Georgina, a maniacal ogress hungry for his power. In the struggle, he transported her and her posse of shape-shifting coy wolves to another dimension where the coy wolves all died. Now Georgina doesn't only want to eat him, she wants revenge on his whole family. There's more bad news: the only person in his life who is happy that he's a Trickster is his ex, Sarah. Everyone else he loves is either pissed with him or at risk of becoming an unwitting victim of the darker forces he's unleashed in their world. His mother Maggie, a hard-partying, gun-toting, tough-as-nails witch, resents like hell that Jared has taken after his father, but she is also determined that no one is going to eat her boy. For Maggie it's simple: Kill or be killed, bucko. Soon Jared is at the centre of an all-out war. A horrible place to be for the sweetest Trickster there's ever been, one whose first instinct is not mischief and mind games but to make the world around him a kinder, safer, place. As his cousin Kota would say, Sucks to be you, Jared."-- Provided by publisher.

Do not enter my soul in your shoes is a poetry collection of great sensitivity. Above all it is a cry from the heart, as if empathy and poetry were dazzled by the eruption of a volcano. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine reveals herself as a poet and Innu woman. She loves. She weeps. She shouts... to come into the world, again. The book is first of all a journey deep inside the self, with joy and love, taking the body on a path to expectation and ecstasy, a quest sustained by incisive, inventive writing, which can leap from impressions of nature to references to a Dali painting. The energy of the images and the power of this luminous, concise language amaze us.

"Aboriginal Canada Revisited examines the current political and cultural position of Canada's Aboriginal peoples in a series of interdisciplinary essays. The contributors to this volume explore Aboriginal politics and representation, health, education and other social issues, and look at how contemporary Aboriginals find voice in literature, art, print media and film. While acknowledging the vibrancy and diversity of Aboriginal cultural expression and the developing dialogue between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people this book also draws attention to areas where the colonial legacy is still taking its toll and to the systemic problems that continue to marginalize Aboriginal people within Canadian society."--Jacket.

"Roads, Mobility, and Violence in Indigenous Literature and Art from North America explores mobility, spatialized violence, and geographies of activism in a diverse archive of literary and visual art by Indigenous authors and artists. Building on Raymond Williams's observation that "traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations," this book pulls into focus racial, sexual, and environmental violence localized around roads. Reading this archive of texts next to lived struggles over spatial justice, Rymhs argues that roads are spaces of complex signification. For many Indigenous communities, the road has not often been so open. Recent Indigenous writing and visual art explores this tension between mobility and confinement. Drawing primarily on the work of Marie Clements, Tomson Highway, Marilyn Dumont, Leanne Simpson, Richard Van Camp, Kent Monkman, and Louise Erdrich, this volume examines histories of uprooting and violence associated with roads. Along with exploring these fraught histories of mobility, this book emphasizes various ways in which Indigenous communities have transformed roads into sites of political resistance and social memory"-- Provided by publisher