Winner of RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers
Winner of CBC Poetry Prize

Re-Origin of Species is a lyric contemplation of our relationship to the environment.

Weaving personal narratives with a poetic study of the insect kingdom, this book looks at the interdependence of all species, drawing parallels between human illness, climate change and the state of peril of the natural world.

Diving into the poet's ancestry, these poems trace the inheritance of poverty, addiction and trauma against the backdrop of Southern Italy and Northern Ontario, to tell a story of grief, loss, adaptation and evolution.

Praise for Alessandra Naccarato:
"Ranging from the sting of personal loss to navigating landscapes full of promise, Naccarato's poetry interrogates the place where the personal meets the wild."
—2015 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Jury

"The women in Postcards for my Sister face challenges, loss and sorrow, but they respond with dignity and resilience," "In beautiful and arresting language, the poem introduces us to matriarchs, 'big-mouthed women, fat/as trees,' and the patterns which join grandmothers, mothers, sisters and their children to the sometimes difficult realities of birth and death, but also to nature and each other."
—2017 CBC Poetry Prize Jury

Alessandra Naccarato is a writer based between Salt Spring Island, BC and Toronto, Ontario. She is the recipient of the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2015 Bronwen Wallace Award in Poetry from the Writers' Trust of Canada, runner-up for Event Magazine?s Creative Non-Fiction Prize, a two-time finalist the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Prize and Arc Magazine?s Poem of Year Contest, as well as The Constance Rooke Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among other recognitions. Alessandra holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in literary magazines across Canada, including Room Magazine, EVENT, The New Quarterly, CV2, ARC Poetry Magazine, Poetry Is Dead, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor of Write Bloody North Publications, a newly released imprint of Write Bloody Publications (Los Angeles). Her debut poetry collection, Re-Origin of Species, is forthcoming with Book*hug Press in September 2019.

Electronic ARCs available in July 2019
Author tour: Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa.

Symphony No. 3 follows the life of renowned French composer Camille Saint-Saëns as he ascends from child prodigy to worldwide fame. As his acclaim grows in Paris, the musical world around him clamours with competitors, dilettantes, turncoats and revenge seekers. At the height of his success, Camille leaves everything behind to embark on a Dantean quest for his dead lover, Henri. At the end of this adventure, still haunted by the holes in his past, he takes up an invitation to journey by ocean-liner to the New World.

Finely crafted in its own unique rhythmic language, Symphony No. 3 is cast in four sections to mirror Saint-Saëns's famous work, popularly known as the Organ Symphony. Written and performed in London England in the infamous late 1880s, this was the composition he hoped would finally destroy Beethoven's stranglehold on the industry and reinvent the form. Though set in the decades surrounding the fin de siècle, Symphony No. 3 speaks directly to our present moment and the rise of political violence.

Praise for Chris Eaton:

"Chris Eaton reaches for the impossible in his writing, creating characters and situations that could never be—and yet you find yourself believing in these texts as deeply as if these were your closest friends." —Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes

"Exciting and experimental writing with intelligence and soul." —The Toronto Star

"Nabokov could write about his back porch and make it interesting; Chris Eaton does much the same." —Macleans

Chris Eaton is the author of three previous novels, including Chris Eaton: A Biography (2013), selected as one of the Books of the Year by Quill and Quire and the Toronto Star. He also spent many years making music in the band Rock Plaza Central. Chris currently lives in Sackville, New Brunswick, with his partner and their two children.

ARCs available in May 2019
Author tour TBC.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Brage Prize

Fanny, a 17-year-old high school senior, has lost both her parents in a car accident. Granted permission to live independently in the family home located on the outskirts of a small Norwegian town, the days pass by as she performs her daily routine: going to school, maintaining the house, chopping and stacking wood, and keeping the weeds at bay. As Fanny grieves and attempts to come to terms with the sad circumstances of her life, a fairy tale-like world full of new possibilities begins to emerge around her.

Written by Rune Christiansen, one of Norway's most exciting literary talents, and masterfully translated by Kari Dickson, Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest is a beautiful, poetic portrait of grief, friendship, independence and transgression.

Praise for Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest:

"An exquisitely written novel of grief. Rune Christiansen shows yet again why he is one of Norway's leading literary stylists. Reading him is a pleasure unlike any other." —Aftenposten

"Christiansen's stylistic confidence and authoritative writing lift the text to a level rarely reached in Norwegian contemporary literature. [Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest] deserves not only literary prizes but also an audience far greater than Norway." —Dag og Tid

"A magnificent novel. Gripping, poetic and thought-provoking. 6/6 stars." —VG

Rune Christiansen is a Norwegian poet and novelist. One of Norway's most important literary writers, he is the author of more than twenty books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. He has won many prestigious awards, including the 2014 Brage Prize for his bestselling novel, The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman's Life. He is also a professor of creative writing. Rune lives just outside of Oslo, Norway.

Kari Dickson is a literary translator. She translates from Norwegian, and her work includes crime fiction, literary fiction, children's books, theatre and nonfiction. She is also an occasional tutor in Norwegian language, literature and translation at the University of Edinburgh, and has worked with BCLT and the Writers' Centre Norwich. She lives in Edinburgh.

ARCs available May 2019.
Author tour TBC.

At the book fair in Rimouski, a woman picked up my first book to read the back cover. She put it back down, avoiding my eyes. It's heavy, cancer and death and all that. I wish books were more interactive. Like video game controllers. They could vibrate at the end of each chapter. But that's not how life works. I wonder what death is like. Do you vibrate? Do the words GAME OVER appear?

In 2012, Vickie Gendreau was diagnosed with a brain tumour and wrote a book narrating her own death. Testament could have been Gendreau's first and only novel, but she kept writing, furiously, until the very end.

Published posthumously after Gendreau's death in 2013 at age 24, Drama Queens continues her exploration of illness and death that began in Testament, but with even greater urgency and audacity. In her singular voice, Gendreau mixes genres and forms, moving from art installations to fantastical little films to poetry, returning again and again to a deeply raw and unflinching narrative of her increasingly difficult days.

With rage, dark humour, and boundless spirit and imagination, Drama Queens, translated by Aimee Wall, records the daily life of a young woman living with a failing body, the end in sight, and still so much to say.

Vickie Gendreau was born in Montreal in 1989. While working in Montreal strip clubs from October 2009 to June 2012, she was also active in the literary community, where she participated in events like the Off-Festival de poesie de Trois-Rivières. She was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2012, and passed away a year later. Her first novel, Testament, written after her diagnosis, was published in the fall of 2012. It was longlisted for the 2013 Prix litteraire France-Quebec, and the English edition was published by Book*hug in 2016. Her second novel, Drama Queens, was published posthumously in 2014.

Newfoundland-native Aimee Wall is a writer and translator. She has previously translated the novels Testament by Vickie Gendreau, and Sports and Pastimes by Jean-Philippe Baril Guerard, as well as Maude Veilleux's Prague, a co-translation with Aleshia Jensen. She lives in Montreal.

ARCs available July 2019.
Translator tour: Montreal, Toronto, St. John's.

Following Surani's previous collection Operations, which excavated the debasement done to language by nations worldwide, how does one return to using language for poetry? Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real responds to this question. Amidst the dangers of figurative language, the coercion of sentimentality and the insidious freight of abstraction, these poems embody the necessity for the critical, the communal, the real. This collection uses conceptual critiques of public discourse and experimental social cartographies, as well as lyrics of intimacy, to defy prescribed ways of being.

Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real is an act of resistance against dangerous and domineering narratives, and the power they inscribe.

Praise for Operations:

"A vast, invisible network of information spiderwebs out from each code word; Surani challenges readers to consider the world beneath this language, and the human toll it both illuminates and obscures." —Maisonneuve Magazine

Moez Surani?s writing has been published internationally, including in Harper's Magazine, the Awl, Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Best Canadian Poetry (2013 and 2014), and the Globe and Mail. He has received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which supported research in India and East Africa, and has been an Artist-in-Residence in Burma, Finland, Italy, Latvia, Taiwan, Switzerland, as well as the Banff Centre for the Arts. He is the author of three poetry books: Reticent Bodies (2009), Floating Life (2012), and Operations (2016), which is comprised of the names of military operations and reveals a globe-spanning inventory of the contemporary rhetoric of violence. Surani lives in Toronto.

Electronic ARCs available n July 2019.
Author tour: Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, Montreal, NYC.

Winner of the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award for LGBTQ Writers

In Vancouver for Beginners, mapping becomes a form of nostalgia, and readers are led through a territory portrayed by real estate listings, childhood landmarks long gone and developers who pace at a city's limits shored with aquariums.

In these poems there are many Vancouvers and and there is no Vancouver, so that the very idea of city is drawn into question. What emerges is a new idea of city, one meant for elsewhere, something left behind after the fire has swept through, something forgotten and hinting at how tourist traps are memory traps. This place of the living and the dead has been re-written, a fiction where forests disappear, condos sink, and the climate has changed. This is the Pacific. This is Home.

Vancouver for Beginners, Alex Leslie's second poetry collection, is a ghost story, an elegy and a love song.

Praise for Alex Leslie:

"Alex Leslie is a tremendously gifted and compassionate writer. This bold and searing collection is a wonder." —Madeleine Thien, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

"A magnetic collection that must be read over and over." —Kirkus Reviews

Alex Leslie was born and lives in Vancouver. She is the author of two previous short story collections including We All Need to Eat (2018), a finalist for the 2019 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and People Who Disappear (2012), which was nominated for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction and a 2013 ReLit Award. She is also the author of the prose poetry collection, The things I heard about you (2014), which was shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroestch Award for Innovative Poetry. Winner of the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers, Alex's short fiction has been included in the Journey Prize Anthology, The Best of Canadian Poetry in English, and in a special issue of Granta spotlighting Canadian writing, co-edited by Madeleine Thien and Catherine Leroux.

Electronic ARCs available in July 2019.
Author tour: Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa.

Mobile is an uncivil feminist reboot of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies and Other Poems; an urban lament about female citizenship and settler culpability; an homage to working and walking women in a love/hate relationship with Toronto, its rivers and creeks, its sidewalks and parks, its history, misogyny and violence. How do we, in Lee's words, see the "lives we had not lived" that "invisibly stain" the city? What are the sexual politics of occupying space in a city, in a workspace, in history? How can we name our vulnerabilities and our disasters and still find strength?

Written in a slippery mix of lyric and experimental styles, Mobile is MacDonald's grouchiest book yet.

Praise for Tanis MacDonald:

"MacDonald offers a virtuoso display of poetic craft. Her poems consistently mix fearlessly intellectual elements with passages rich in lyric resonance." —The Malahat Review

"Fired with a signature intelligence, these shrewdly honed, sometimes volatile poems invoke us to give them our closest attention." —John Barton

Tanis MacDonald is the author of several books of poetry and essays, including Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City. She is the co-editor of GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Uur Times (2018) and the editor of Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt (2006). Her book, The Daughter's Way, was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian Literary Criticism. She is the winner of the Bliss Carman Prize (2003) and the Mayor's Poetry City Prize for Waterloo (2012). She has taught at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and won the Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award from the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs in 2017. Originally from Winnipeg, she now lives in Waterloo, Ontario, and teaches Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Electronic ARCs available in July 2019.
Author tour: Waterloo, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Winnipeg, and TBC.

Is it possible to archive the invisible symptoms of an illness? Is the archive emotional?

Emmalea Russo's Wave Archive moves between essay and poetry while also pondering the mind-body connection and the unreliability of thought patterns and histories. Here, Russo invokes her own experiences with seizures, photographs and art-making, archival and indexical processes, brain waves, and the very personal need to document and store while simultaneously questioning the reliability of memory and language. Drawing upon the history of epilepsy in both ancient and modern brain treatments, Wave Archive disrupts and restores the archive over and over again, exploring the very edges of consciousness.

Praise for Emmalea Russo:

"Russo's writing, a peculiar marriage of compression and splay, embeds a germinal weirdness in the fallow page, and waits." —Anna Moschovakis

"Emmalea Russo is imprinting a new archetype of mystical female poet into the collective, where we can grow of the edges and be made of the Glitches and celebrate the poetic as a means of creative prayer." —Guru Jagat

"Follow it wherever it leads and let go of expectation about what a poem is. It's a scary gift with a complex and intricate structure." —Jen Bervin

Emmalea Russo is an interdisciplinary writer and artist living at the New Jersey coast. Her work has appeared in BOMB and The Brooklyn Rail and she has been an Artist-in-Residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles. She is the author of one previous book, G (2018). She lives in Avon-by-the-Sea, New Jersey.