Happy If You Know it With/out Pretend, $30.00 The poetry, fiction, art, essays, and photography in Happy If You Know It grapple with one question: “What does it mean to trust our intuition?” Women in the anthology answer by sharing their truths, shortcomings, and pain without hesitation. Their voices unfurl revelations that become points of […]

One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada By Joan Sangster UBC Press, $27.95 In One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada, Joan Sangster recounts the complex history of Canadian women’s enfranchisement during the 19th and 20th centuries. Sangster delves into the […]

[i. daughters of triton] Little sister / seventh sister Daddy named us well // mollusk-soft daughters for a great barrel-chested bell /// We don’t chime in unless someone points a stick at us. //// Conductor of daughters, of pearly white belles ///// An empty shell is no way to pander ////// to your pitchfork Daddy’s […]

Time bends on The Bachelor. For one thing, its passage is parsed in weeks, as if love’s progress was some form of gestation hitting developmental milestones, scaling up from lima bean to lemon to dragon fruit. And within this episodic unfurling, contestants suffer the effects of time turned lopsided. Bachelor time is like chewing gum: it […]

Pemmican Wars: A Girl Called Echo, Vol. 1 By Katherena Vermette Portage & Main Press, $18.95 In Pemmican Wars, the first part of Katherena Vermette’s new graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo, we are reminded what comics do best: tell a story through pictures. Illustrated by Scott B. Henderson and coloured by Donovan Yaciuk, […]

In October 2017, WWF-Canada released its “Living Planet Report,” assessing the country’s endangered and threatened species. Their findings paint a bleak picture of Canada’s wildlife: Between 1970 and 2014, half of the 903 monitored species had declined in population—a loss of approximately 83 percent on average. Habitat destruction, climate change, and human activity are the […]

Georgia Straight: A 50th Anniversary Celebration By Doug Sarti and Dan McLeod Rocky Mountain Books, $40.00 Vancouver alternative weekly the Georgia Straight is 50. To celebrate, long-time staff members Sarti and McLeod have put together a beautiful history of the newspaper’s covers. Charting the Straight’s evolution from an underground newspaper to an entertainment weekly, this […]

With the first chord of “Burn Your Village to the Ground,” the song accompanying a burlesque act titled “Not Your Stereotype,” a transformation begins. The figures on stage, dressed in racist caricatures of Indigeneity—feathered headdresses, wearing “Indian” Halloween costumes, carrying “Made in China” dreamcatchers—begin to shed their layers. The commodified image of the “Indian” is […]

Works of art are often able to draw people together and show their connections. Ojibwe artist Jessica Canard thought up the design for her recent mural with this goal in mind. Commissioned by the National Arts Centre in partnership with the University of Winnipeg, Canard combined her years of experience making murals and facilitating art […]

The Truth is Told Better This Way By Liz Worth Book*hug, $18.00 The Truth is Told Better This Way by Liz Worth is a book of piercing poetry that reads like a very intimate confession. Worth’s poems let out their mysteries slowly and deliberately, stringing readers along a path of loneliness and grief. At times […]

Stinging cells tip the tentacles fringing the polyps’ mouths. Family to sea anemone, hydra, and jellyfish, corals live in many-minded masses, anchored to hard surfaces, growing together in sync. They grow over centuries, agglomerating into reefs by secreting exoskeletal calcium carbonate under their derrières (or, they poop the architecture of their limestone foundations). Cities of […]