As the lead singer of the radical duo LAL and co-organizer of the DIY QT2S/BIPOC space, Unit 2, I am so happy to see this important book that highlights some of the amazing work and stories by QTBIPOC/friends in Toronto. More than half of the contributors have shared space or gathered at Unit 2, so this book resonates in my body and soul. Marvellous Grounds is a necessary piece of writing that documents and helps keep our stories alive, in a way that is for us by us. This book will share important perspectives with a new generation of QTBIPOCs and friends, while honouring the stories, people, and places that fought and fight for justice and freedom, in this amazing but complicated meeting place, Toronto.

Marvellous Grounds is a beautiful gathering of QTBIPOC artists, organizers, activists, and cultural workers that achieve the Morrisonian [Toni Morrison’s] task of creating a map outside of the mandates of conquest, specifically its homonormative archival practices. Speaking across time and space, the Marvellous Grounds collective lovingly curates visual art, prose, intimate conversations and tender caresses taking place on Toronto’s street corners that have the potential to heal both the ancestors and the generations yet to come. Creating marvelous ground in Toronto, this stunning collection resists inclusion into normative and homonationalist queer Canadian archives. It also refuses to help repair this archive. Instead, Marvellous Grounds beautifully disfigures the colonial project of archiving as it yearns and reaches for what the co-editors call “the something yet-to-be-done.” Marvellous Grounds is a healing praxis that QTBIPOC communities can bask in as they soak up the sweet balm it tenders. This collection is a gift.

More than simply a static archive, Marvellous Grounds is a call for QTBIPOC to step into a “permanent readiness for the marvellous,” a phrase the book borrows from Martinique-born scholar and activist Suzanne Césaire’s description of surrealism. This archive marvels not only at the love, generosity, and care between QTBIPOC folks of Tkaronto, but also on communal tears shed for lives lost at the hands of structural violence. As such, Marvellous Grounds is romantic, without romanticizing the struggle.

Marvellous Grounds seeks freedom through transformative and reparatory justice by making space to the de-historicized, de-spatialized subjects of queer of colors in Toronto. The coloniality of space and place are turned into Marvellous Grounds by spatializing intergenerational conversations among QTBIPOC and their practices of caretaking and solidarity. The intellectual tightness runs skin deep and unearths the colonial complicity of progressive movements while queer of colour formations dare to live their own decolonial life.

Upending white supremacist, neoliberal narratives of “gay progress,” Marvellous Grounds shows us Toronto’s QTBIOC communities surviving and thriving in the midst of violent forces of erasure. The essays, dialogues, and creative interventions gathered here offer an invitation to remember and learn from rich and resplendent stories—of organizing and activism, of dance parties, reading groups, performances, and everyday life. This is the history we want and the history we need.

Marvellous Grounds makes visible a counter archive of QTBIPOC in Toronto. Through highlighting histographies of activism and alliances created against racism and classism, we see how QTBIPOC have contributed to shaping a strong community of artists and activists that are at the forefront of anti-colonial, black, and Queer/Trans movements in Toronto.

Marvellous Grounds is an incredibly important critical intervention into the ongoing creation and theorization of queer counter archives and their frequent whitewashing. The artists/activists/academics whose work is collected here offer a multilayered, sharp, original, and touching take on queer Toronto past and present that will be relevant to scholars and practitioners far beyond the local context.

Marvellous Grounds is a stunning anthology - love letter after love letter to QTIPOCs to claim place, space, lineage. Amidst a dominant queer archive that deliberately whitens queer art, research and activism as an act of pinkwashing, this collection pierces through and rightfully places racialized queers not as diversity subjects but as the leading architects of queer political organizing and magic-makers of queer life in Toronto.

Marvellous Grounds is a foundational book for gender, queer, postcolonial, and critical race scholarship. Archiving and reflecting on four decades of queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC) historiography, collective organizing, cartographies of violence and building communities of care and healing in the city of Toronto, this inspiring book is a must read for activists, artists, and academics alike who radically question who the subject of queer history is and more importantly dare to ask “What kind of ancestor do I want to be?”

This exceptionally innovative book initiates a whole new era in QTBIPOC research, from the collaborative process of conceptualizing a research project across generations and across racialized and other positionalities, to its totally uncompromising critique of white queer erasures of QTIBIPOC theories, practices, and subjectivities, to its brilliant renderings of QTBIPOC historiographies including creative survival strategies, the construction of new relationalities, and political inventions, throughout. This is radically transformative scholarship at its very best.

A vivid, bold, and inspiring celebration of what it means to love and struggle in difference and community. Written by those who walk their talk, this book evokes the joy and power of creative activism.

Marvellous Grounds is a compelling and transformative site of queer of colour creation and ongoing creativity, collectively confronting and refusing dominant white queer archives. Together, the essays build queer counter-archives as their own form, where writing and genealogies of thought emerge in collective organizing, art practices, abolitionist work, disability justice, poetics, healing justice, performance, anti-racism, and spirituality. In this long-awaited anthology, the authors make possible the kinds of depth and life that come from an effort to pause, and take hold of what emerges in our struggles to find new ways of being with one’s self and amongst others.

Marvellous Grounds describes a Toronto that makes sense and feels right. It doesn’t suffer from impossible racial homogeneity or glib hollow triumph. This gentle, trusting, personal collection lingers over homelessness, racial profiling, protest, worship, and the struggle of queers of colour starting families, and so is a Toronto origin story that feels real.

Marvellous Grounds’ pages will now forever be part of our beautiful, complicated, complex connective tissue. This is essential reading for conversations around QTBIPOC organizing, resistance and resilience strategies. It is a testament to an often-ignored history; a celebration of the often-misunderstood.

Marvellous Grounds showcases the stunning array of queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC) organizing, community building, and space making practices in the Toronto area since the 1970s. This collection will be a resource to QTBIPOC searching for their community, history, and culture; to activists and community-builders looking for effective and innovative organizing models; and to academics seeking of new archives of QTBIPOC activism and culture.

The authors, artists, and activists gathered in this extraordinary book invoke an insurgent and untameable queer and trans history, one which confronts both co-option and self-congratulation. Boldly making space for the silenced, criminalized, and displaced voices of queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC), Marvellous Grounds disrupts queer nostalgia, complacency, and white fragility, and testifies to QTBIPOC resilience, resistance, and healing. Whether you come to this book in search of a radically transformative decolonial theory and praxis, or to reclaim a displaced queer/trans lineage, these stories are guaranteed to move, challenge, and inspire.

"Indigenous People have always had a strong relationship with the sky. Here, Joyal's stark, beautiful illustrations combine perfectly with Haché's voice as she sings a story of loss, and ultimately, reclamation."
--David A. Robertson, author of When We Were Alone (winner 2017 Governor General's Literary Award) and Strangers

"A beautifully designed book housing a strong set of sometimes-furious, sometimes-shy poems, What Fox Knew is a well-rounded debut collection."
-- The Winnipeg Free Press

"What Fox Knew, is a fascinating journey. It is epic in scope, delightfully composed, and rich in detail."
-- Prairie Fire Magazine

"What the Fox Knew is a beautiful collection of poems that lead us to reflect on the essential spaces of beauty, justice, love, home and nation. Barnes' poems are, to quote her, "thick as resin" and also gorgeously clear as amber in the light."
-- Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days, shortlisted for 2017 Pat Lowther Award and won the 2017 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for Poetry

"Mary Barnes' poetry collection, What Fox Knew, is epic in scope, delightfully composed, and so rich indetail, reading it is a fascinating journey. Set in the Southern Georgian Bay area, the characters and theirchronicles reveal a deep past of First Nations peoples which shapes the poet's vision and her narrative. Barnesvividly layers existential questions and quests within her Ojibwa ancestry, drawn from family history andmeditations on the human condition. Ranging from reflective to tragic, from witty to spiritual to sensual, thepoems inhabit that volatile place between the public and the private, making the poems a must read for anyonecontemplating the world we live in, and most of all the matters of the heart envisaged in this thoroughlyengaging debut collection."
-- Bianca Lakoseljac is a novelist, poet, short story writer and essayist. Her latest novel, Stone Woman, (Guernica Editions) won the Book Excellence Award 2017 for Fiction. She is the recipient of the Matthew Ahern Memorial Award in literature at York University.

"Mary Barnes is a fresh new voice in Canadian poetry. Her words flow with grace and certainty, creating images and evoking memories - some ancestral and others as familiar as home."
-- Judith Plaxton, author of Morning Star, nominated for Shining Willow award

"This collection of poems, written during a Synonym Art Consultation residency, is art-making at street level, with eyes on the overstory of an old elm tree in Winnipeg. This is poetry contributing to green with community-driven foliage. And this is how poetry can move, in the wind and rooted, at a time on our planet when trees can use more attending to. That these poems started out as leaves can be felt in the reading. There is a vitality to this work that is verdant. The poems read as if they are still outside, golden-houred. Ariel Gordon has curated a space for herself and for her community in the company of an elm. And we are the fortunate recipients of a collection to share, to read aloud, for the tree of it."
--Sue Goyette

"Ariel Gordon, truly the Jane Jacobs of trees and poetry, has charmed a multitude of strangers and passersby to sing small songs to the urban canopy, to whisper their secrets and confessions to a neighbourhood elm tree. The result is Tree Talk, a celebration of the city-dweller's relationship with trees, but also an elegy to the stress and devastation imposed on urban nature in the course of ""growing"" and developing a city. In Tree Talk, Ariel Gordon not only re-foliates a tree with poems, she adds a startling and crucial layer of leaves to how we might (re)imagine ourselves coexisting with nature."
--Sylvia Legris

Praise for South Away:

"In this empowering memoir, Hackinen, an avid cyclist, recounts her first touring-bike journey.... Teens will be particularly fascinated by how the author found post-grad direction and confidence using the strength of her own two legs."
~ Booklist

"Biking and adventure travel enthusiasts will revel in the author's descriptions and ability to endure such an arduous trip, and find this account restores one's faith in human goodness."
~ Library Journal

"... [T]his book will be a breath of fresh air and a reminder of the hope that lies in the humanity beyond our front door, if we dare to venture beyond it."
~ All Lit Up

"I LOVED this memoir...! Stumped for something to read? NeWest has published this awesome Canadian memoir that'll have you ready to pull out your own bike and set out into the world by the time your done."
~ Worn Pages and Ink Blog

"The body of work about the unique joys of wandering the world on two wheels just keeps getting better and Meaghan Marie Hackinen's South Away is a welcome addition to it.
~ Howard Macdonald Stewart, The Ormsby Review

"Everyone says 'Be careful,' but Meaghan Marie Hackinen wants to live large. South Away will fill your lungs with the fresh air of adventure and restore your faith in human goodness. An exhilarating debut."
~ Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood and Strangers in the House

"Hackinen's journey is the quest of her dreams. Her sharp images of life on the road reveal that the world is more complex than she thought--and that sometimes people will let you camp on their front lawn."
~ Nicole Haldoupis, editor of Grain Magazine and untethered