In Tess Liem’s Obits., we make our way with the poet through the challenging process of mourning as she reflects on her own mortality. Attentive and introspective, these poems draw from contemporary events, psychoanalysis, mythology, television, feminist writing, and other sources in order to ponder death in all its intimacy
In This Woman’s Work, which exists in the liminal space between autofiction and memoir, Delporte finds the words and draws the images to evoke the struggles of women as they navigate assumptions about gender, femininity, and creativity. The book is both deeply intimate and also emblematic of women who are at a time of crisis, opportunity, and, hopefully, progress.
"Daughters, wives, mothers, French Canadians, Roman Catholics, workers.” The millions of women who worked in Quebec’s textile industry for more than a hundred years were sometimes all of these things, sometimes only one. Their bodies were the backbone of Quebec’s industrialization, enlisted in the national project both at home and in the factory. This new study brings them and their voices to light.
Villages in Cities: Community Land Ownership, Cooperative Housing, and the Milton Parc Story tracks the community resistance and solidarity that scuppered Concordia Estates, alongside looking at the efforts and achievements of cooperative housing movements worldwide. It’s an academic guide for communities that want to protect their neighbourhoods from the claws ofreal estate speculation and gentrification, a toxic pollutant that discharges urban renewal at the cost of displacing original inhabitants, according to editors Joshua Hawley and Dimitrios Roussopoulos.
Kent Nagano, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’s music director since 2006, is more than just a conductor; he’s an outreach worker, constantly trying to win over new audiences to classical music, from hockey fans to street kids to Inuit communities in the Far North. He puts this mission in writing with Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected (co-written with Inge Kloepfer) – part manifesto, part impassioned plea, part sincere sales pitch for classical music as a whole
Creating a graphic memoir of your childhood is a daunting task, particularly if it was not picture perfect. In Chicken Rising, D. Boyd pens a series of vignettes that make up the early life of Dawn, D. Boyd’s younger self, in Saint John, New Brunswick in the 1970s.
There are books that have the ability to draw you into their universe, projecting vivid scenes in your mind, making you ruminate time and again on the characters’ actions and reflections. Bad Friends, a newly translated graphic novel by the South Korean comic artist Ancco, is one such book. In her fictionalized retelling of a troubled adolescence, Ancco instills the reader with empathy for her teenage characters and their bleak circumstances.
Are sales of translations at an all-time high? Are national newspapers spotlighting new books from Quebec and profiling the hottest Quebec talent more than ever? Are Christian Guay-Poliquin and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette household names outside of the province? The short answer is that, with column inches, shelf space, and readers’ attention spans all in short supply, I don’t believe that French-to-English translation is experiencing quite the surge in attention that some people might think, although numbers are frustratingly hard to come by.
“Feminism is not a done deal,” Monique Polak writes in I Am a Feminist: Claiming the F-Word in Turbulent Times. She doesn’t need to tell me twice. In fact, I’d argue that we need intersectional feminism more than ever before.
