news | Friday September 26, 2025

Oana Avasilichioaei Wins Bernard Heidsieck Centre Pompidou International Literature Prize!

We are thrilled to announce that author, translator, visual artist, and sound artist Oana Avasilichioaei has won the Bernard Heidsieck Centre Pompidou International Literature Prize in the annual prize category for 2025! This prestigious award honours artists whose work lifts literature off the page and brings it into other spaces. Oana Avasilichioaei has long had a rich and wide-spanning practice of blending genres and exploring the many arenas where words and poetry can live. Avasilichioaei’s interdisciplinary talents are well showcased in her collections Chambersonic, Eight Track, and many more. You can catch her in conversation with Jeannot Clair in Montréal on October 1 or enjoy Avasilichioaei in performance at Montréal’s Rocket Science Room on October 14! A huge congratulations to Oana for this well-deserved win!

news | Wednesday September 24, 2025

cop city swagger Named a Finalist for the Vancouver Book Award!

We are thrilled to announce that cop city swagger by Mercedes Eng has been named a finalist for the 2025 Vancouver Book Award! Eng’s powerful work of docupoetics juxtaposes the police’s institutional rhetoric with their acts of violence against marginalized people, presenting a panoramic media montage of structural harm and community care in Vancouver. Check out this year’s finalists and winner here!

news | Tuesday September 23, 2025

Talonbooks Authors Take Home Awards at 2025 BC & Yukon Book Prizes

We are delighted to share that Leanne Dunic and Fred Wah both took home awards at the 2025 BC & Yukon Book Awards Gala! ⁠
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wet by Leanne Dunic was awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, given each year to an outstanding book of poetry! wet is a gorgeous work of poetry and photography that follows a Chinese American model in Singapore as she thirsts for fair labour rights, climate justice, and human connection.⁠ Of Dunic’s collection, the jury says, “wet moves with the clarity and patience of water itself, layering observations of place with intimate reckonings of identity. Dunic’s poems are simultaneously tender and unyielding, offering a lens on how the personal and ecological intertwine.” See their full statement here.
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Author, educator, and literary icon Fred Wah received the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence! A prolific author (is a door, Scree), an appointee to the Order of Canada, Canada’s fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and a beloved pillar of community, we couldn’t be happier to see Fred Wah recognized for his tremendous achievements. ⁠The jury notes in their statement that “in a province full of writers and readers with overlapping identities and histories, Wah shows us all how to plumb the hyphen for new meanings.” Read their complete statement here.
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A huge congratulations to Leanne and Fred, and to all of this year’s winners and nominees.

news | Thursday September 18, 2025

Hot Off the Press! The Book of Z Has Arrived!

Rahat Kurd’s gorgeous new collection The Book of Z is here to win hearts and minds. For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha – “the wife of Aziz” in the Qur’an – has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry. As the Biblical “wife of Potiphar” she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in Western traditions. In The Book of Z, Kurd vividly imagines Zulaykha reflecting on what consolations human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.⁠

An excerpt from “Introspective Ghazal”:

“Zulaykha only smiles when posing rivals clutch Yusuf ’s arm

His distracted face in blue phone- glow, though – there’s the sting –

the ever- present interruptibility of sex

No gossip stokes scandal like a supreme court misogynist
To corrode, to its very heart, the incorruptibility of sex

Could what passed between them be called a mere glance
if ex post facto legal jargon hid its a priori guarantee of sex?

I honour the poets and painters in whose mystic hearts
Zulaykha’s fidelity persists, exalting a spirituality of sex

Won’t Rahat bring this bakvaas to some decorous end?
Or will she persist in madness – to look for dignity in sex?”

The Book of Z reconsiders mystical possibilities, longing, above all, for divine union. Order your copy here.

news | Wednesday September 17, 2025

Kuei, My Friend in The Madawaska Valley Current

Kuei, My Friend by Deni Ellis Béchard and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (translated by Deni Ellis Béchard and Howard Scott) is in The Madawaska Valley Current’s list of recommended reading for Truth and Reconciliation Day. Kuei, My Friend is an engaging book of letters: a literary and political encounter between Innu poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine and Québécois-American novelist Deni Ellis Béchard. Choosing the epistolary form, they decided to engage together in a frank conversation about racism and reconciliation.

Check out all of The Madawaska Valley Current’s suggested books to read for Truth and Reconciliation Day here.

news | Monday September 15, 2025

tours, variously Has Arrived!

Hot off the press! Drew McEwan’s new poetry collection tours, variously has landed and is ready to embark on a tour of your bookshelf. Asking how words form spaces of shifting relation, tours, variously dwells on narration as an operation that works on spaces and bodies as they negotiate their place among framed exhibits and pinned specimens ready for misrecognition.

An excerpt from “theory of rooms”:

“Advice:

Lay out the ground lines the length and breadth of the monument proposed.
Collect foliage for the upper tier, browned leaves for flooring.
What remains ever exterior to thought is thought.
Lay bare the concrete while still damp.
Place visionary on paper, anticipate business to come.
The room does not exist before revealing itself.”

The poems of tours, variously saunter through an abstracted network of transformational encounters where bodies struggle with and against a game of follow-the-leader, postured by the series of connected rooms we share, treading always between the sayable and the unsaid. Pick up your copy here.

news | Friday September 12, 2025

cop city swagger and Gaman – Perseverance Featured in Read Local BC Article

Dynamite poetry collection cop city swagger by Mercedes Eng and 2025 Canada-Japan Literary Award winner and in-depth memoir Gaman – Perseverance: Japanese Canadians’ Journey to Justice by Art Miki are featured in Read Local BC’s article about activists and changemakers with ties to British Columbia. Both Eng and Miki have done remarkable work in community and are terrific writers to boot. If you want to learn more about Mercedes Eng, Art Miki, and other amazing people in BC, check out the full Read Local BC list here.

news | Wednesday September 10, 2025

Hot Off the Press! No Depression in Heaven Is Here!

Polish your spurs, because No Depression in Heaven by ryan fitzpatrick has kicked in the saloon doors and is available now at a bookstore near you! Dwelling on whether it is best to look backward to a seemingly better past, longing for a way to make things great again, or to stare into the abyss of the future, gambling that entry into paradise will provide release, No Depression in Heaven riffs on our latter-day anxiety, asking how we respond to bad times and what it means to hold onto something toxic because of the comforts it affords.

An excerpt from “Hollow Square”:

“I’m going to fake a grip on that old gospel ship
Extract a scar across the sky
I’m gonna shit out brinks ’til Heaven sinks
As I surge this world’s goodbye

I’ve leveraged circling to total everything
All your debts with me you’ll square
I’m going to make a line that only knows to rise
’Til we’re bailing out the air

I’m going to crack my whip on that new condo strip
I’m renovicting all the sky
I’m gonna cry critique ’til Heaven tweaks
Our mistakes until they’re crime”

Written during country music’s most recent ascent in popularity, this poetry “LP” features ten “tracks” that each tip language out of key. Order your copy of No Depression in Heaven today!

news | Friday September 5, 2025

The Georgia Straight Shouts Out Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project

Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, the forthcoming play by the award-winning author and playwright Carmen Aguirre, receives a shout out in The Georgia Straight’s fall arts preview. In the theatre critics’ picks, Alisa Prinyarux says that Fire Never Dies “reminds us of the power of creative resistance against oppression and the vital role of artists in shaping social and political change.” Read the full article here.

The world premiere of Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project kicks off on October 16, 2025 at the Cultch Historic Theatre in Vancouver. To learn more about the play and to order your tickets, click here.

news | Thursday September 4, 2025

Tribute to Judith Copithorne

In their current issue, BC BookWorld includes a tribute to the late poetic visionary Judith Copithorne. A key figure in Vancouver’s writing community, Copithorne’s visual and concrete poetry has inspired poets for decades (get inspired yourself by checking some of her pieces out in Another Order: Selected Works edited by Eric Schmaltz). Read BC BookWorld’s words on Judith Copithorne here on page 38 of the autumn 2025 issue.