Finalist for the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction
Finalist for the 2020 Kobzar Book Award
Finalist for the 2019 Ethel Wilson Fiction Award
We All Need to Eat is a new collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolve around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver, chronicling her attempts to come to grips with herself, her family and her sexuality.
Set in different moments falling between Soma's childhood and her late thirties, each story--bold and varying in its approach to narrative--presents a sea change in Soma's life, from Soma becoming addicted to weightlifting while going through a break-up in her thirties; to her complex relationship with her younger brother after she leaves home revealed over the course of a long family chicken dinner; to Soma's struggles to cope with her mother's increasing instability by becoming fixated on buying her a lamp for seasonal affective disorder; and the far-reaching impact and lasting reverberations of Soma's family's experience of the Holocaust as it scrapes up against the rise of Alt Right media. Lyrical, gritty and atmospheric, Soma's stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person's journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment.
Alex Leslie was born and lives in Vancouver. She is the author of two short story collections, We All Need to Eat, a finalist for the 2019 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the 2020 Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the 2020 Kobzar Award, and People Who Disappear, a finalist for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction and the 2013 ReLit Award for Short Fiction. She is also the author of two prose poetry collections, Vancouver for Beginners, winner of the 2020 Lohn Foundation Prize for Poetry, The things I heard about you, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Alex’s writing 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. She has received a CBC Literary Award, a Gold National Magazine Award, and the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers from the Writers' Trust of Canada.
Praise for We All Need To Eat:
We All Need to Eat is a stunning inquiry into the sharpness of the world as it collides with the fragility--the ambiguities and possibilities--of the self. Alex Leslie 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
"Alex Leslie has written a refreshing set of interlocking narratives about family and heartache. A far cry from the self-discovery credos of the millennial age, her protagonist Soma ruminates and broods. And with Soma's painfully careful and wonderfully-crafted considerations, the reader might also weigh the many small, trying moments that connect us to chosen and blood family.” —Amber Dawn, author of Sodom Road Exit
Winner of the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2019 Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards – Transgender Poetry Category
Finalist for the 2019 Publishing Triangle Awards – Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Category
Longlisted for the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans women in expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans experience through autobiographical poems and continues to speak to the legacy of abuse, violence, and colonial erasure that defines Canada. Her sparse lines, interwoven with English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), illustrate the wonder and power of Indigenous trans womanhood in motion. Holy Wild is not an easy book, as Benaway refuses to give any simple answers, but it is a profoundly vibrant and beautiful work filled with a transcendent grace.
Praise for Holy Wild:
"This is a heart wrenching, thought provoking, honest, and graceful walkthrough of trans realities both on the homeland and in urban settings." —Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Full-Metal Indigiqueer
"As the poet says, "they want one thing and I am many." This book is many things, and we are grateful." —Katherena Vermette, author of the award-winning novel The Break
"Benaway conjures trans life in a place that is both prior to and in excess of the violence that mires it. It is the emotional infrastructure for something like freedom. Let Benaway lead you there." —Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound is a World
Gwen Benaway is the author of two previous poetry collections: Ceremonies for the Dead and Passage. She has received many distinctions and awards, including the Dayne Ogilvie Honour of Distinction for Emerging Queer Authors from the Writer's Trust of Canada. Her poetry and essays have been published in national publications and anthologies, including The Globe and Mail, Maclean's Magazine, CBC Arts, and many others. She was born in Wingham, Ontario and currently resides in Toronto.
D. Nandi Odhiambo is the author of three novels: diss/ed banded nations (1998), Kipligat's Chance (2003) and The Reverend's Apprentice (2008). Originally from Nairobi Kenya, Nandi moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in the 1970s. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD in English from the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. Currently, Nandi lives in O'ahu, Hawai'i, with his wife Carmen and two dogs, where he works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, West O'ahu.
Winner of the 2019 Cole Foundation Prize for Translation
Catherine Lalonde lives in Montreal. She writes poetry (books include Cassandre, 2005 and Corps étranger, 2008, winner of the Émile-Nelligan Award) and works as a journalist for the Montreal daily Le Devoir.
Montreal-based writer, translator, and editor Oana Avasilichioaei has published five poetry collections, including Expeditions of a Chimaera (with Erín Moure; 2009), We, Beasts (2012; winner of the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers' Federation) and Limbinal (2015). Previous translations include Bertrand Laverdure's Universal Bureau of Copyrights (2014; shortlisted for the 2015 ReLit Awards), Suzanne Leblanc's The Thought House of Philippa (co-translated with Ingrid Pam Dick; 2015), and Daniel Canty's Wigrum (2013). Her translation of Bertrand Laverdure's Readopolis won the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation.
Before this truly unique and impressive book, one is both utterly transfixed and fully implicated, mystified and illuminated. Its opacity is inviting, its obscurity intriguing. With The Faerie Devouring, Oana Avasilichioaei doesn’t only translate language, she translates a language. A language, because Catherine Lalonde clearly wrote La dévoration de fées in an idiom all her own, specific to herself and her motley cast of spectral characters… In other words, this is a most ambitious translation project. An extraordinary book, and an equally extraordinary translation.
Winner of the 2020 Nelson Ball Prize
Careful attention reveals that, even in moments that seem insignificant, our minds are constantly navigating disjunctions among registers of experience. Our intellect silently reminds our eyes that the car that appears to be moving between leaves is actually behind them and much larger. The sound of the vacuum cleaner in the next room is noise to be ignored. The phrase that arises in mind belongs to a conversation earlier in the day. Clear thinking demands that these navigations remain unconscious. But what if they're meaningful, or productive, in themselves? What if they're necessary to help us find a more meaningful place in the world? Branches explores these questions.
"Branches will change you, and for that, at the very least, it deserves your full attention." —Robin Richardson, author of Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis and Sit How You Want
"Mark Truscott's Branches is a unique and assured meditative work, at once ancient and wholly contemporary, a space where Stevens, Ashbery, and Basho might mingle and discover some as-yet unnoticed path. 'There are smooth surfaces it seems one can only buy,' Truscott adroitly observes. Branches is full of lines ready to take root and reward, allowing perception all its richness but also changing and transforming it with a graceful and almost natural pressure. Reader, these poems are the furthest thing from those surfaces." —Jeff Latosik, author of Dreampad
Michael Nardone is a writer and editor based in Montreal. He is the author of the chapbooks Airport Novel (2015), Transaction Record (2014), O. Cyrus &the Bardo (2012),and Us, People (2011). His poetry has won the Lemon Hound Prose Poem Prize and was a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. His essays, dialogues, and editorial projects have been published widely, and are archived at http://soundobject.net. The Ritualites is his first book.