From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada by Whit Fraser
How fortunate we are to have a Canadian like Whit who experiences such adventures and dares to tell about them.
Culture
Reframing Healing: Indigenous Voices for the Future
Two recent collections, You Were Made for This World: Celebrated Indigenous Voices Speak to Young People and A Steady Brightness of Being: Truths, Wisdom, and Love from Celebrated Indigenous Voices, offer something rare in conversations about Indigenous experiences: a shift away from narratives that confine us to trauma, and toward stories that illuminate healing, agency, and responsibility to one another.
The Return of the Nish by Tyson Stewart
In Tyson Stewart’s debut novel, themes of broken family ties, reconnection, and ethical dilemmas are explored within an Anishinaabe family in northern Ontario.
Truth and Dare: Eric Schmaltz’s I Confess and Hajer Mirwali’s Revolutions
Eric Schmaltz’s I Confess (Coach House, 2025) and Hajer Mirwali’s Revolutions (Talonbooks, 2025), offer the promise of revelation and the certainty of obfuscation, probing the ways that language simultaneously creates and elides truth.
A Steady Brightness of Being, edited by Sara Sinclair and Stephanie Sinclair
A Steady Brightness of Being is a moving collection of letters by celebrated Indigenous Voices from across Turtle Island (North America) with titles like “Dear Relative,” “Letter to Clouds,” and “Dreaming, Listening, Belonging.”
Throwback: Island by Douglas Walbourne-Gough
This is a particularly raw collection of poetry, I felt, the blank verse tumbling across the page in a cry to be read and felt.
Horses by Jake Skeets
Here, Skeet’s invasion of white space picks up where Eyes Bottle Dark left off and begins with the haunting image of a herd of 191 free-roaming horses found dead, thigh and neck-deep at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation, evaporated through extreme drought caused by “decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate”.
On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation by Quill Christie-Peters
It is, for a lack of a better term, a living explanation, one which comes to the reader in images and feelings, delivered with a logic that is not static but flowing. For me, it was an exhausting but beautiful reading experience, intense and unforgettable.
You Will Not Kill Our Imagination by Saeed Teebi
You Will Not Kill Our Imagination is an impossibly patient telling of how the author sees us, seeing him.
procession by katherena vermette
Having returned to the literary scene with her third poetry collection, procession, vermette welcomes readers into the intricacy of genealogy, of honouring one’s ancestors and future kin while navigating one’s identity—both spiritually and through art.
The Story of ii’ taa’poh’to’p: University of Calgary’s Journey Towards an Indigenous Strategy
The Strategy sets out a framework for the actions the University is taking and will take as it decolonizes itself and becomes a more equitable institution.
Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World by Phoebe Bosewell, Saidiya Hartman, Janaína Oliveira, Joseph M. Pierce, and Cristina Rivera Garza, with an introduction by Christina Sharpe
Hosted at York University, the free, public events gather writers, artists, and thinkers from various disciplines and geographies to discuss the most pressing issues of our time. The insights shared at the live and streamed events are later transcribed and expanded in artful books published by Alchemy, a Knopf Canada publishing program, in collaboration with York University.
The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails by Matthew R. Anderson
This is a remarkable book about a remarkable — and ongoing — project.
One Book, Two Reviews: Johnny Delivers by Wayne Ng
Johnny Delivers by Wayne Ng is a top read of this year for me … Family tensions dominate the action in Wayne’s Ng’s pulsating novel, Johnny Delivers.
