Feelings of emptiness, acts of emptying, and physical empties coalesce in these vivid and timely poems. Through a queer lens, Surkan’s speaker scrutinizes masculinity and fatherhood as he confronts the necessary emptiness that comes with becoming someone’s ancestor. Arrays of drained and discarded entities – empty bottles, broken pots and cups – summon a world, husked and untenably extracted, that teeters toward collapse, but even those empty spaces are receptacles for fleeting moments of vulnerability and tenderness. At its core, Empties explores the conditions of life on the verge of hopelessness. It finds, among shadows of doom and despair, unlikely but nonetheless inevitable reasons to hope.

These are poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while still finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.” In direness, there is also awe: one mustn’t forget, Surkan reminds us, that only empty bottles can sing.

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Blending poetic fragment, philosophical inquiry, and spatial rupture, all the time traces queer longing as it moves across language, breath, and time.

all the time is a meditative, genre-blurring work that explores the edges of queer longing, memory, and language. Composed as a durational long poem, Xiaoxuan Huang’s debut moves through fragments, love letters, and lyric essays, where silence is not absence but active presence. Here, language stutters, hesitates, repeats—capturing the rhythm of desire, the dissonance of intimacy, and the complexity of speaking what resists articulation.

Spanning the thresholds of poetics and theory, the text uses spatial interruption and elliptical syntax to mirror the body’s halting attempts at connection. It is a work shaped by breath and time, where punctuation dissolves into pauses, and pages open like quiet rooms.

At once rigorous and tender, all the time invites the reader into a porous, recursive experience of reading—one that unfolds slowly, insistently, and with profound care. A love poem to time, to listening, and to everything language cannot hold.

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Those who speak about the carnage are punished by censure, sanction, smearing and worse. Across Canada—and internationally—journalists are muzzled, academics are stifled, doctors are fired, activists are arrested, and artists are banned. Words such as genocide and ceasefire have been excised from the vocabulary, and criticism of the conflict invites accusations of antisemitism.

Razing Palestine brings together the testimonies and stories of a wide range of individuals across a variety of domains who have suffered the cost and consequences of speaking up for Palestine. As Palestine was razed, the courage and the voices of those who raised the issue must be heard.

With a Foreword by Gabor Maté. Contributors include: Sheima Benembarek, Amy Blanding, Safa Chebbi, Libby Davis, Yves Engler, Yipeng Ge, Fred Hahn, Yara Jamal, Thoby King, Nora Loreto, Ehab Lotayef, Samira Mohyeddine, Kagiso Lesego Molope, Arfa Rana, Sean Tucker, and more.

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Featuring evocative art by Malak Mattar and a foreword by Professor Jamil Khader, this collection is a call to remember, resist, and reclaim humanity. A portion of proceeds will support Palestinian relief efforts.

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Our increasingly nihilistic age is marked by profound sorrow. We are grieving institutions, art forms, the natural world, our communities – even our very humanity. We are overwhelmed by lives lost to war, violence, genocide, poverty, natural disasters, and disease. We live with the knowledge that a random occurrence could bring an absurd end to any life at any time.

In At Beckett’s Grave Robin Durnford gazes at the granite slab marking the resting place of the Irish playwright. In the middle of the ornate tombstones of an overgrown cemetery in Paris, Durnford finds a powerful metaphor in Samuel Beckett – the artist, the exile, the anti-fascist who joined the French resistance. Beckett’s work – and the stark memory of his life – cuts through grandiose self-regard with a razor-sharp message: there is no final meaning. Yet we move forward, regardless.

It turns out that the pause — the stage direction central to so many of Beckett’s plays — may be the answer. Grief for an absent loved one never truly ends. Grief itself will never end. Yet, the poetic pause creates space for grief to breathe. During that lingering breath, abiding sorrow carves a path toward hope, one word, one poem, at a time.

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In its brevity and persistence, This Radiant Life is a material call for action: it asks us to let go, even just a little bit, of our individuality in favour of mutuality, to arrive separately yet in unison at a radiance in which all living beings can thrive.

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