Shrapnel's Most Anticipated Titles for Spring 2021
Although flowers haven’t started popping through the snowy earth yet, Canada’s spring titles are already on their way! Our editorial director and poetry editor, Jo and Prathna, have listed the titles that have them most excited for the winter thaw.
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 or pre-order the books by clicking on the hyperlinked titles.
FICTION
THE QUIET IS LOUD
Samantha Garner
Invisible Books
With a union of “Filipino-Canadian and mixed-race identity, fantastical elements from Norse and Filipino mythology, and tarot card symbolism,” The Quiet is Loud looks to be a special treat featuring the occult, selfhood, and a meditation on storytelling itself.
As Freya navigates her prophetic dreams and abilities as a veker, her anonymity and the safety of those around her come into conflict. What can we say? We’re excited for Samantha Garner’s debut book and its unique blend of literary and science fiction.
RETURN OF THE TRICKSTER
Eden Robinson
Penguin Random House
There are very few truths anymore: 1) the Earth is round 2) Eden Robinson is an absolutely darling and a writer not to miss.
The eagerly anticipated final novel in her Trickster trilogy is almost here, and the stakes are at an all-time high for Jared and his loved ones. As his mother Maggie puts it, “Kill or be killed, bucko.”
BOOK OF WINGS
Tawhida Tanya Evanson
Véhicule Press
From acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Tawhida Tanya Evanson comes her first novel, Book of Wings. Tracing a global and wayward trajectory from Vancouver to the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and North Africa, the novel deals with what it means to confront a dissolving relationship between self and lover whilst coming to terms with self-understanding.
MUSIC FROM A STRANGE PLANET
Barbara Black
Caitlin Press
“An awkward child envisions herself as a darkling beetle; an unemployed business analyst prefers water-walking over ‘rebranding’ himself; after being kidnapped, a psychologist rejects the idea of marrying herself; and in the squatters’ district, a biogenetically-altered couple visits an attic to observe a large cocoon.”
This contemplative and drôle short story collection from Caitlin Press sounds to be brimming with all the off-beat, surrealness that Shrapnel thirsts for. Check out an excerpt from Barbara Black’s Music from a Strange Planet right here (we wished we could have published this short story, for the record).
EVERYONE IN THIS ROOM WILL SOMEDAY BE DEAD
Emily Austin
Simon and Schuster
When Gilda—an atheist lesbian—accidentally stumbles into a receptionist job at a Catholic church, she ends up posing over email as the dead woman she’s replaced and becomes engrossed in her mysterious death.
Not only does the title embody the nihilistic ethos most of us are feeling right now, but this queer and hilarious debut novel from Emily Austin promises plenty of existential anxiety, awkwardness, and second-hand embarrassment.
THE LIST OF LAST CHANCES
Christina Myers
Caitlin Press
In an attempt to pull herself up from rock bottom, Ruthie responds to an ad to drive a stranger’s aging mother, Kay, and her belongings from PEI to Vancouver. This intergenerational female buddy road trip unwinds as a comedic and slightly raunchy travelogue, and it could be the charming escapist fiction we find ourselves reaching for right now.
WHITE LIE
Clint Burnham
Anvil Press
“Shorter than a stand-up comic’s joke and longer than a criminal tyrannical president’s tweet.” This collection promises sharp, experimental writing containing paragraph-length super-short fictions.
Part travelogue, part condemnation of modern propaganda and “factual-seeming fictions,” there’s a strange mix of escapism and social commentary at work here that grabs our attention.
SATELLITE LOVE
Genki Ferguson
Penguin Random House
Set in Japan during 1999, a Low Earth Orbit satellite (LEO for short) crashes to earth and looks at Anna, the sixteen-year-old girl who’s willed him into being.
Although Genki Fergon’s debut has the staples of loneliness and yearning for connection that one would expect from a novel staring a sixteen-year-old girl, there is plenty of imagination and aliens to make this story sound fresh.
A NATURAL HISTORY OF TRANSITION
Callum Angus
Metonymy Press
Metonymy Press’s description for a Natural History of Transition is just so dang perfect, we’ve reproduced it here. It is poetry itself:
A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.
POETRY
NEDÍ NEZŲ (GOOD MEDICINE)
Tenille K. Campbell
Arsenal Pulp Press
From the world of online dating to the sensuality of the Northern Lights, Tenille K. Campbell’s nedí nezų (Good Medicine) promises to show what Indigenous life in decolonized desire looks and feels like. Reading “as sharp as a mean auntie,” in the words of Eden Robinson, Campbell offers critiques of the ways bodies and selfhoods are made and unmade without losing sight of the intimacies that bind and sever.
sulphurtongue
Rebecca Salazar
Penguin Random House
sulphurtongue is the debut poetry collection from poet, editor, and scholar, Rebecca Salazar, whose previous publications include the knife that justifies the wound and Guzzle. Exploring diaspora, oracles, doubles, saints, and toxic transformations, Salazar’s book surreally makes manifest the queerness of queerness itself. We’re ready to listen and honour what chemical language sounds like across spirituality, race, and collective catastrophe.
ME, YOU, THEN SNOW
Khashayar Mohammadi
Gordon Hill Press
Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born, Toronto-based writer and translator. His past publications include Moe’s Skin and Dear Kestrel. Working across diverse and divergent forms, Me, You, Then Snow is a dream landscape of amorous missives, poems addressed to arthouse cinema, and midnight reflections.
THE RENUNCIATIONS
Donika Kelly
Graywolf Press
Oprah.com calls Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations “a lionhearted odyssey through the self, a casting aside of old mythologies and traumas in search of new stories fashioned from love and joy.” Kelly’s book attempts to think through the question of how to work with and through living memory, and what delights can be formed in the face of confrontations. We’re eager to see what The Renunciations entails, and what is given up or rejected, in order to make room for a new self.
LETTERS IN A BRUISED COSMOS
Liz Howard
Penguin Random House
The Griffin Poetry Prize-winning author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent returns with a long-awaited follow-up collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos. We’re excited to see what Liz Howard has in store for us—and we can’t wait to discover what her epistolary cosmology has to say.
IRON GODDESS OF MERCY
Larissa Lai
Arsenal Pulp Press
From Lambda Literary Award winner Larissa Lai comes this new book, Iron Goddess of Mercy. Honouring the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching—a Chinese divinatory practice—Iron Goddess of Mercy is a long poem in sixty-four fragments that traverses Hong Kong’s history and ongoing protests, formations of Asian identity, monsters, technology, Achilles, Hannah Arendt, and Kool-Aid.
ONE AND HALF OF YOU
Leanne Dunic
Talon Books
Growing up as biracial on rural Vancouver Island was an isolating experience for Leanne Dunic. Only after moving to the mainland does she finally meet another person who can understand her experience. With vulnerability and surprising humour, Dunic reflects this cataclysmic move as well as her search for completion and love. Upon purchasing a copy of One and a Half of You, the reader will also receive links to recordings of three-song that accompany the memoir.
POSTCOLONIAL ASTROLOGY
Alice Sparkly Kat
Penguin Random House.
Ok. While this is not technically a poetry book, I like to think of astrology as a deeply poetic process. Astrology is full of myths, narratives, signs, and interpretive potential, and it can give us the power to organize symbolic life. I’m excited about Alice Sparkly Kat’s much-needed intervention into the field of astrology. Whether you are a seasoned astrologer, love weekly horoscopes, or simply enjoy being dragged by astro memes, this book can help shape how to navigate the poetics of everyday lives when we look to the stars.
Non-Fiction
BEGIN BY TELLING
Meg Remy
Book*Hug Press
Meg Remy of the Toronto-based band U.S. Girls offers illustrated lyric essays, forming a transgenre memoir that dissects the materialistic and spectacle-driven American hyper-culture.
The layered and highly visual sample pages on Book*Hug Press’ website utterly seduce: “Sesame Street is on top of me. It’s resting against my face. What I thought was squishable proves to be flat and staticky when touched.”
PERMANENT REVOLUTION: ESSAYS
Gail Scott
Book*Hug Press
Gail Scott has long been a treasure and prolific feminist thinker. In Permanent Revolution, she engages a chorus of other writers identified with current queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories. Examine “contemporaneous Fe-male prose fiction” through her eyes and be awakened.
“A writer may do as she pleases with her epoch. Except ignore it,” says Scott.
NORTHERN LIGHT
Kazim Ali
Goose Lane Editions
Where to start? Well, the beginning is always a good place, and Kazim Ali’s first memories are of the temporary town he lived in and the hydroelectric dam his immigrant father worked on. In his memoir, Ali explores the memory of water in poetic prose and transports us to the forests and lakes of northern Manitoba: "It begins to rain as we fly, falling in solid sheets, water from sky to earth — a free system of exchange."
INDIGENOUS TORONTO
Denise Bolduc, Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, and Brian Wright-McLeod
Coach House Books
Toronto is known for much, but too often is the city’s Indigenous history left out of the conversation. Beneath the pavement and before colonialism is “twelve thousand years of uninterrupted Indigenous presence and nationhood.”
With dozens of diverse contributors—including Indigenous Elders, scholars, journalists, artists, and historians—this anthology articulates the traditions and stories of the land as “a significant cultural hub and intersection that was also known as a Meeting Place long before European settlers arrived.”
CARE OF
Ivan Coyote
Penguin Random House
Veteran writer Ivan Coyote explores the displacement of time as they sift through artifacts of their pre-pandemic life — “emails, letters, direct messages on social media, [and] soggy handwritten notes found tucked under the windshield wiper of their car.”
The most affecting of these correspondences have been collected and generously shared in Care Of. Spanning the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic, these affirming dialogues are at once an exhibition of togetherness in an isolating period and a time capsule of a moment in history.
We encourage you to buy these books either directly from the publisher or your local indie bookstore.