Grandview Drive by Tim Blackett
A debut short story collection investigating the strange and unexpected intersections of loneliness and connection.
debut collection
The All + Flesh by Brandi Bird
Brandi Bird’s long-anticipated debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh, explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory that connect its author to their chosen kin, blood relatives, and ancestral lands.
Antonyms for Daughter by Jenny Boychuk
Antonyms for Daughter, Jenny Boychuk’s poetry debut, addresses a harrowing subject: the loss of the poet’s mother to addiction. Deploying a range of forms and techniques astonishing in a first collection, Boychuk creates unsparing scenes of their complicated life together.
Review of Pebble Swing by Isabella Wang and None of This Belongs to Me by Ellie Sawatsky
Two debut poetry collections from Nightwood Editions are reviewed by Catherine Owen, “Pebble Swing” by Isabella Wang, and “None of this Belongs to Me” by Ellie Sawatsky.
Gold Pours by Aurore Gatwenzi
In this debut collection by emerging poet Aurore Gatwenzi, a stunning new voice emerges as she shares the experience of being young and Black in northern Ontario.
The Junta of Happenstance by Tolu Oloruntoba
Tolu Oloruntoba’s The Junta of Happenstance is an impressive debut. It has many qualities I find admirable in a first collection: passion, a large number of poems, and a certain playfulness (of music and tone) that relays poetic confidence.
The Knowing Animals by Emily Skov-Nielsen
In Skov-Nielsen’s thrumming debut, The Knowing Animals, our consciousness is interconnected with the surrounding trees, bugs, rivers, atmospheres, and cosmos.
We Two Alone by Jack Wang
A masterful collection of stories that dramatizes the Chinese diaspora across the globe over the past hundred years, We Two Alone is Jack Wang’s astonishing debut work of fiction.
Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva
In her sure-handed debut volume of short fiction, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, Maria Reva writes with an insider’s familiarity about the last days of the Soviet Union and what followed in the months and years after the Communist regime’s ignominious collapse.
Queen and Carcass by Anna van Valkenburg
[A] rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the multiple contradictions we each embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths, especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable, using Bertolt Brecht’s maxim “Do not …
some conditions apply by Mary Rykov
When I open a book from Inanna I know I have something worthwhile. Strong, independent feminist work, a mosaic of talent and voice. Mary Rykov’s some conditions apply came to me electronically, during isolation. At times a mobile device, laptop or reader, can lack experiential feel, bound paper enhancing a book’s tone. Not so in …
