Shrapnel's Fall Favourites of 2022
Image by Jo Ramsay
The wind and frosts of fall invite us to nestle indoors and commence the ritual of reading the season's newest books. If you’re lost with where to start, our editorial director and poetry editor, Jo and Dessa, have listed the titles that they’re most excited to get cozy with as the days get colder and darker.
Rest assured this list has our diverse mix of the experimental, surreal, and humorous. We’ve briefly explained what it is about each book that has us intrigued, and you can learn more and order the books by clicking on the hyperlinked titles.
FICTION
QUEER LITTLE NIGHTMARES: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry
Edited by David Ly & Daniel Zomparelli
Arsenal Pulp Press
It’s almost as if this anthology was brought into the world with this magazine specifically in mind. Featuring a Minotaur camouflaged in a crowd of cosplayers, a tender-hearted kaiju, and so much more, Queer Little Nightmares is a thrilling collection of both short stories and poetry together under one roof.
It’s been a growing trend in recent years to more closely examine the intersection of horror and queerness when spooky season rolls around, as well as how creatures from movies, myth, and folklore have captured the fascination of queer audiences. Treated with revulsion and hostility, these non-conforming monsters have grown into queer icons in a reclamation of fear and marginalization,
FALLING HOUR
Geoffrey Morrison
Coach House Books
It was an absolute delight to publish Geoffrey Morrison’s whimsical short story “Memorandum,” so it’s a no-brainer that we’re cheering on his debut novel, Falling Hour. When Hugh Dalgarno, a clerical worker, believes his brain is broken, he sits in a park and meditates on a myriad of cultural happenings, political theories, and environmental observations.
André Babyn, author of Evie of the Deepthorn, writes that Falling Hour is “a curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a ‘fake’ country.” Evoking well-known writers and philosophers, Morrison writes in an absurdity that’s steeped with intellectualism and self-deprecating humour, and we’re ready to get lost on Hugh’s train of thought.
Update: Falling Hour is now expected to publish in February 2023, but we’ve kept it on here just cause.
RED RUBY SKIES
Taslim Burkowicz
Fernwood Publishing
There are any number of ideal places to contemplate one’s life, but driving into a B.C. wildfire is definitely a choice. Stuck in a loveless marriage and struggling to connect to her mixed-race daughter, Ruby—a middle-aged Indo-Canadian woman—finds her life monotonous. After discovering that her white husband is cheating, Ruby embarks into the flaming mountains accompanied only by the fantastical stories her mother used to tell about their ancient ancestry.
Taslim Burkowicz’s third novel seamlessly blends the historical and the modern with Rubina—a dancer in seventeenth-century Mughal India—who’s journey juxtaposes Ruby’s through common themes of mixed-race relationships, climate change, and motherhood. Sharing an invisibility and desperation for agency, the two women living centuries apart interrogate their cultural geography as Ruby continues into the fire.
THE ANIMALS
Cary Fagan
Book*hug Press
Twisting together a realist setting with a flair for the absurd, The Animals unfolds like a fable, posing intriguing questions about humanity’s relationship with nature and fauna as well as the chaotic impacts each wreak on one another in a fun yet deeply meaningful tale. Set in a charming tourist village, chaos brews when a government-sponsored project aims to move wolves, rats, minks, otters, and bears into villagers’ homes.
Of course the project goes just as well as you’d think it would, leaving Dorn, our meek protagonist, to step up and help save the neighbourhood from itself. Prepare to ask questions about the fabric of society, the balance of the natural world, and exactly how much damage a large Rodentia can actually accomplish.
MÀGÒDIZ
Gabe Calderón
Arsenal Pulp Press
Think Mad Max, but make it queer and Indigenous. Gabe Calderon infuses their dystopic, steampunk world with cultural knowledge of the Anshienabe people with “Màgòdiz” translating to “a person who refuses allegiance to, resists, or rises in arms against the government or ruler of their country.” In Calderon’s vividly imagined landscape, even the baddies are non-binary as they challenge the idea of the gender binary surviving the apocalypse.
Stories themselves are the most precious of things in this ruined world as the small surviving human population cannot read or write. “Màgòdiz is a powerful and visionary reclamation that Two-Spirit people always have and always will be vital to the cultural and spiritual legacy of their communities.”
POETRY
MONUMENT
Manahil Bandukwala
Brick Books
This collection about both monuments and moments is told through the lens of Mumtaz Mahal, the empress consort whose death led to the building of the Taj Mahal as her tomb. We’ve been loving Bandukwala’s poems for years, adoring her eye for detail in precise and perfect turns of phrase, her knack for enjambment that both comforts and startles, and, above all, her choice to centre love, love, love—even in poems with an edge of mourning or rage to them.
No doubt, Monument will be full of the same determination, care, and joy as this poem in the Indianapolis Review about Princess Jasmine and Esmerelda meeting for tea, or this poem in Peach Mag about AI and cat videos, which are currently vying for top spot as favourite in my heart.
DREAM ROOMS
River Halen
Book*hug
We love poetry collections with an epigraph, and we think the epigraph from Renee Gladman’s Calamities for this collection does a lot to centre the reader for what’s to come:
The field was commotional: it did not allow stasis. To enter it, you had to be in motion, and to see where you were you had to be in motion, and not just moving your body around constantly, frantically naming stations, then moving at varying speeds between them, but also naming with impermanence, seeing objects as in the middle of some process, and understanding your seeing as impermanent as well…
Dream Rooms is about change, but perhaps more about the places we might find ourselves resting before or after change. These aren’t permanent stops, surely, but are they any less real? Halen’s confessional style and clear narration overlap into a kind of journal in places, framed beautifully with real-life objects made both uncanny and comforting by turns. The three poems viewable through the preview on Book*hug’s website were enough to sell us on the collection—maybe they’re enough for you, too?
WOLF SONNETS
R.P. LaRose
Véhicule Press
Confession time: we’re sold on sonnets. There’s no other form of poetry like it, built around the repetition of alternating syllable stresses which feel like nothing so much as a heartbeat. They’re rare these days, so it’s doubly exciting to see them taken up by a Métis writer and turned to the purpose of colonial critique.
LaRose frames his ancestors as wolves and stars these poems with other “symbols of survival and protection” to stand against the current colonial and political realities which have shaped him both as a poet and as a Métis individual and community member. Wolf Sonnets follows LaRose’s chapbook, A Dream in the Bush from Anstruther press, which is now sold out but includes this preview of a poem which we love, down to the infinity symbol as an epigraph, which recalls the Métis flag.
THE BIG MELT
Emily Riddle
Nightwood Editions
Emily Riddle has crossed our dash many times for her journalism about Indigenous issues and governance as well as her refreshingly interlingual poetry, which was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2020. Riddle combines nehiyaw frameworks and urban millennial experience together in a consideration of kinship through non-linear time, stretching back into the past to write about the women who came before her as well as those yet to come.
It sounds like the perfect combination of political and personal to us, spanning romantic breakups and Treaty relationships with the same voice. How can we look both within and without ourselves to create the path forward to an anti-capitalist, feminist, “ndn utopia”? With this research question at their heart, we suspect these poems will spin a fine and intricate web with humour, grace, and power.
THE END IS IN THE MIDDLE
Daniel Scott Tysdal
Goose Lane Editions
We’ve maybe listened to Daniel Scott Tysdal’s TEDx talk “Everything you need to write a poem (and how it can save a life)” too many times in creative writing workshops, but the fact remains: he knows what he’s talking about. This collection seems as though it will be both playful and serious, centred around the conceit of “fold-in poems”—you know, like MAD magazine used to do with its illustrations? It’s difficult to imagine what this will look like for poetry without the book in front of us, but man—we can’t wait to find out.
Non-Fiction
IMMINENT DOMAINS: Reckoning with the Anthropocene
Alessandra Naccarato
Book*hug
In a gorgeous blend of eco-poetry and cultural criticism, Imminent Domains offers up a contemplative and sobering exploration into the decay of Earth’s latest epoch. Alessandra Naccarato’s debut poetry collection, Re-Origin of Species, also centred shifting landscapes and adaptation in the face of ecological change; now we’re looking forward to meeting these themes anew, this time explored through research, lyric prose, and first-hand accounts.
How do we begin to quantify the harm we’ve inflicted on nature as a species, and what will it take to survive not independently, but with the land? Arranged by five central elements of survival—earth, fire, water, air, and spirit—these essays span throughout history and across continents, from the mines of Cerro Rico to the ruins of Pompeii.
TRY NOT TO BE STRANGE: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda
Michael Hingston
Biblioasis
What do you get when you put forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, and Nobel Prize frontrunners on a small uninhabited island together? Sparked and torched friendships, feuds, and all types of mayhem. And yes, this is a non-fiction title… though we definitely had to do a double-take to make sure.
Part literary history, part travelogue, Try Not to Be Strange recounts the bizarre history of the Kingdom of Redonda, an island micronation in the Caribbean that became an international haven for writers. Hingston has clearly done his homework in this incredibly researched and finely crafted retelling that’s as wry as it is sincere. The charming characters are composed of eccentric literati and bartenders who’re eyeing the crown for themselves—what could possibly go wrong?
THE FUTURE IS DISABLED: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Arsenal Pulp Press
“What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing?” With a catastrophic global event happening nearly every month, society as we know it feels like it’s on the way out. Yet over two years of isolation during the pandemic, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has created a love letter to the disabled community that celebrates disabled families, kin who are gone, and “wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death.”
Through climate disasters, pandemics, and fascism, disabled people have been keeping each other—and the rest of the world—alive. Could disability justice and disabled wisdom create a future in which it's not only possible to survive these horrors, but also be free of them?
LETTERS FROM MONTREAL: Tales of an Exceptional City
Edited by Madi Haslam
Véhicule Press
Cities like Montreal are hard to pin down with their perpetual transformation and diverse inhabitants, yet they evoke a strong and complex relationship between place and community. Compiled from the column in Maisonneuve magazine, editor Madi Haslam thoughtfully assembles an archive of experiences from dwellers past and present in Letters From Montreal.
From Parc Laurier to the top of Mount Royal, the stories chronicle memorable interactions in Montreal’s beloved haunts with all the charm and intimacy of journal entries. The anthology is packed with excellent writers such as Eva Crocker, Ziya Jones, and Sean Michaels as they masterfully share their collected reflections on local life. We’re excited to get to know the marvellous city on another level with these humorous and reflective accounts.
MODERN FABLES
Mikka Jacobsen
Freehand Books
Who doesn’t love a little millennial nostalgia? Mikka Jacobsen’s coming-of-age chronicles are soaked with delightfully dark and absurdist quips that dart across the pages. With a helping of teenage drug-slingers and catfishing, this debut collection of interlinked essays examines Jacobsen's experiences as a single woman in her thirties through the lens of cultural and literary criticism.
The precious nature of love and the complexity of navigating relationships in the digital age are central themes to Jacobsen’s essays, as is belonging. After growing up in the deeply conservative Canadian prairies, Modern Fables meditates on the ways in which place molds our understanding of the self and the very concept of home.
GRAPHIC NOVELS
DUCKS
Kate Beaton
Drawn & Quarterly
We can not understate our collective excitement for Ducks as Kate Beaton’s graphic novel feels like a classic even within its first months of release. Needing a way to pay off her student loans, Beaton gorgeously illustrates her displacement from job-scarce Cape Brenton to Alberta at the height of the oil rush. Beaton’s eye for juxtaposing the natural amongst colossal industrial machinery is breathtaking, and her more detailed art style evokes both warmth and loneliness.
Following up after her New York Times bestselling Hark! A Vagrant, Beaton’s more sobering memoir is sure to have bursts of humour while her uniquely individual experiences speak to larger trends of brain drain of the Maritimes, the toxic work culture at the oil sands, and the Canadian tendency to stay silent on trauma. Our poetry editor, Dessa, is convinced Ducks will one day be shortlisted for, and even win, Canada Reads. So if that prophecy does come true, you heard it here first.
SASHA STRONG
Kim Edgar
Conundrum Press
Our hyperbolically athletic protagonist is strong—like really strong—as she’s depicted hoisting a car above her head to help a friendly neighborhood cat and dominating at field hockey. When Sasha is unwell, she is visited by a bird that persistently checks up on her to see if she’s feeling better yet, as though a metaphor for society’s short patience with those suffering from illness.
Award-winning comic artist Kim Edgar brings a lighthearted and gentle approach to illustrating the experience of being told you’re healthy when you know something isn’t right. Shaped from their own experiences with the medical system, Edgar’s minimalist art style brings a surprising intimacy and ease to the comic that explores chronic illness and what it is to be ignored by the people who are supposed to help heal you.
ALBERTA COMICS: HOME
Various
Renegade
This massive anthology is bursting with 224 pages of comics that celebrate artists connected to Alberta as they explore their relationship to the concept of “home.” With everything from short comic stories and cartoons, there is a range of pathos, optimism, humour, and hope, that’s evoked when reflecting on the experience of inhabiting the province.
“While one creator draws love-letter via a run-down of our ‘World’s Largest’ sites, another hunts to feed their family. Teresa Wong drew a map of Calgary’s Chinatown overlaid with personal family history.” Readers can expect a variety of art styles published in full colour in stories from slice-of-life to fantastical fiction.
HYBRID FORMS
CYCLETTES
Tree Abraham
Book*hug
As a collection centred on motion, this text is the very definition of a hybrid work: something that not only refuses to be pinned in place, but which makes exploring space and pushing the boundaries of genre and connection into whole new paths of meaning. Abraham thinks about bicycling but also, we predict, about cycling… about the Fibonacci sequence of the nautilus on the front cover, about seasons cycling around us like a whirling snowglobe, about the hills and valleys of mental health and coming-of-age.
We’re tempted to call this work a bicycledungsroman as a play on the genre of bildungsroman, which describes coming of age. (And we’ve already pre-ordered at least one copy of this for a cycle-loving friend’s birthday, which we will absolutely be reading—and straining to hold ourselves back from underlining the best bits—before we gift.)
SCENES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
Gabriel Choletter and Jacob Pyne, translated by Elina Taillo
House of Anansi Press
Every time we walk into an art gallery, we hope there’s an installation somewhere in a mostly dark room with a projector flashing images on the walls while a pre-recorded voice delivers a poetic message of some kind. While it’s not exactly an art gallery, this book feels like it has exactly the same vibes as that dark room: words suspended alongside images in a way that illuminates both in a new way.
This illustrated work is about a medievalist scholar, so there’s a sense of illuminated manuscripts in this too—an exploration of the text through another avenue, or perhaps a nod to the work of a scribe. One thing is clear: this rabbit hole of academia, queerness, and the dark (or is it light?) side of urban nightlife is not to be missed.
We encourage you to buy these books either directly from the publisher or your local indie bookstore.