[sic] thus written, error mine. Sic to incite to attack, especially as a command to a dog: Sic em! Siccingpoetry on you. Thats sick, as in, awesome. Or ill and sickly. Either way, the (gendered, sexualized) body is implicated. [sic] re-writes a feminist lyric within the long shadow cast by neo-liberalism upon the city and its denizens, mis-remembers the lines and re-inscribes the labour and commerce and sexual negotiations that take place there.

No Town Called We writes through the death of elders, social panic, and the climate crisis via the lens of the multiply disabled, female-coded body approaching midlife. Punching through the veils of complacency and greed that shape the cultures of the petrostate, these poems are meditations on an emergency, dispatches from wombat burrows and prairie hospitals. They consider the variegated forms grief can take, both marking and resisting their own decay. Reimer asks: How do you and...

In this quick-witted collection of poems, Nikki Reimer mines the language of new media – hashtags, YouTube comments, Twitter updates – to defamiliarize the very substance of modern life: the Ingram CoreSource of media-enforced ideals that barrage our newsfeeds, daily commutes to #work, and (mostly online) excursions to the (Apple) store. #nuffsaidDOWNVERSE soothes the oversaturated reader. A natural translator, Reimer writes for anyone who has felt overwhelmed by the phrase “never r...

This vibrant collection of expat essays from legendary humorist David Sedaris is a cause for jubiliation.Sedaris's move to Paris in the early aughts inspired hilarious pieces, such as "Me Talk Pretty One Day", about his attempts to learn French. His family is another inspiration—"You Cant Kill the Rooster" is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as r...

In the whirlwind of life with three young sons, an active member in her tight-knit community, Ruth Rakoff felt in supreme control of her wide world. But when a routine mammogram revealed a tumor, that world rapidly shrunk down to the size of one breast.And so begins the journey of biopsy, surgery, chemotherapy, all accompanied by tidal waves of anxiety and grief: how to tell the children? Should she consider having a healthy breast removed, in case the cancer returns? Will food eve...

From an emerging master of short fiction and one of Canada's most distinctive voices, a collection of stories as heartbreaking as those of Lorrie Moore and as hilariously off-kilter as something out of McSweeney's.In Better Living through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner delivers a powerful second dose of the lacerating satire that marked her acclaimed debut, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but with even greater depth and darker humour. Whether she casts her eye...

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year period in the author's life; and, too, a gymnasium, a place where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks Deft with mat...

I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow is the story of Jonathan Goldstein's journey to find some great truth on his road to forty. In a series of wonderfully funny stories, the host of CBC's WireTap recounts the highs and lows of his last year in his thirties. Throughout the year, Goldstein asks weighty questions that would stump a person less seasoned. For example: What is it about a McRib that drives people crazy? Can we replace extending an olive leaf with extending an olive jar? How much wisdom c...

"We all know bad manners when we see them," NPR and Vanity Fair contributor Henry Alford observes at the beginning of his new book. But what, he asks, do good manners look like in our day and age? When someone answers their cell phone in the middle of dining with you, or runs you off the sidewalk with their doublewide stroller, or you enter a post-apocalyptic public restroom, the long-revered wisdom of Emily Post can seem downright prehistoric.Troubled by the absence of go...

**Blazingly intelligent, wickedly funny, and piercingly honest, a memoir that captures the perils and pleasures of girlhood, womanhood, and life itself.“One of my favorite books of the last few years.” —Cheryl Strayed“Sentence for sentence, a more pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think of.” —The Atlantic**At mid-life, Claire Dederer developed a sudden yearning for jailbreak. In this exuberant memoir, she reflects on two periods in her life uncann...

These poems topics range from hate crimes to playgrounds, from international conflict to hometowns, from falling in love to the desperation of loneliness. Gibsons work seizes us by the collar and hauls us inside some of her darkest moments, then releases us out the other side. 

Hamilton Spectator columnist Paul Benedetti’s essays paint a wonderfully funny portrait of family life today.Paul Benedetti has a good job, a great family, and successful neighbours — but that doesn’t stop him from using it all as grist for a series of funny, real, and touching essays about a world he can’t quite navigate.Benedetti misses his son, who is travelling in Europe, misplaces his groceries, and forgets to pick up his daughter at school. H...