Sixteen books that helped put 2025 in perspective
What our literary output offers is not a vision of perfectibility but an attempt to reckon with our world in all its contradiction, ambiguity, and fractiousness.
The march of time: In her third collection of poetry, katherena vermette considers our place as descendants and future ancestors
The combined slipperiness and multifaceted aspect of language is all over this volume.
Conor Mc Donnell channels T.S. Eliot in his latest book of poetry
The title of Mc Donnell's book alludes to a newsroom cliché deployed in the early stages of an ongoing crisis or upheaval.
Gillian Sze’s seventh poetry collection searches for meaning in the empty spaces between words
The slipperiness of words is part of Sze's fascination here, as are the empty spaces that require filling.
The debut full-length collection from Christina Shah contains ground-level poetry of the mundane, quotidian world
Shah eschews the elevated pretensions of mock epic or otherwise self-indulgent poetry.
“So much more than I ever bargained for”: Billy-Ray Belcourt’s third book of poetry examines the body through language and history
The extent to which the body, for a queer Cree writer, is tied into an ongoing history of displacement, dispersal, and disappearance is at the centre of Belcourt's writing.
Simon & Schuster to publish memoir by Kamala Harris in September
S&S is no stranger to publishing major political books across both sides of the aisle in the U.S.
Poems of love and protest combine in Claude McKay’s piercingly relevant 2022 collection Harlem Shadows
These poems testify to the range of McKay's emotive field.
“We is all we have”: Science, nature, and politics intertwine in Derek Webster’s National Animal
The poems in National Animal do not cleave to unidirectional pieties about nature or the resilience of humankind.
“Mondays are bait days”: The harsh landscape of Chris Bailey’s rigorously unsentimental second collection
In Bailey's case, his subject is virtually inexhaustible, because the setting is inexhaustible.