The Real Made Up by Stephen Brockwell
The Notebook of Roses and Civilization by Nicole Brossard, translated by Robert Mazjels, Erin Moure
The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon
At the Bottom of the Sky by Peter Dubé
Long Story Short: a novella and stories by Elyse Friedman
Ovenman by Jeff Parker
Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price
More to Keep Us Warm by Jacob Scheier
Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing Edited by Michelle Tea
Obon: The Festival of the Dead by Terry Watada
The Alphabet Game: a bp Nichol reader edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson

Edited by Darren Wershler-Henrey and Lori Emerson
Coach House Books, 2007

Read by Nick McArthur

Given the breadth and variety of his work, it’s frankly amazing a book like this exists. In a career spanning 27 years, Nichol composed novels, comics, songs, essays, drawings, stories, teleplays, pamphlets, and, most famously and most impressively, thousands of pages of concrete, visual and lyric poetry. To have condensed such an oeuvre into a 300-page “reader” is a feat requiring considerable self-restraint, and the editors should be commended for having represented Nichol’s obsessions and experiments as exhaustively as they have. (more…)

Carroll & Graff/Avalon Publishing
Edited by Michelle Tea

Read by Lateef Martin

Baby Remember My Name explores queer writing and experiences from the pens of 24 women.  The variety of experiences and the distinct voice of each short story keeps things fresh.  Stand outs include: (more…)

Tin House Press, 2007

Read by Mike Spry

In his debut novel, Ovenman, Jeff Parker has created a vivid and honest recollection of a world that exists in the periphery of even the strangest of sub-cultures.  Set in early 1990s Central Florida, Ovenman is the story of When Thinfinger, a skateboarding, poorly tattooed anti-hero who falls from restaurant job to restaurant job, doing his best to stay barely afloat in a society that has no respect or place for him.

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Brick Books, 2006

Read by Aaron Tucker

Within the Canadian poetic tradition there is an amazing history of the long poem, particularly ones like Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which centers around the biography of a mercurial American icon. Steven Price’s Anatomy of Keys carries on in this tradition, weaving a masterfully dense and complex retelling of Harry Houdini’s life.
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House of Anansi Press, 2007

Read by Jenny Sampirisi

At the front of Long Story Short is Elyse Friedman’s tender, funny and emotional novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing.” In it a teen boy, amused by the fermented irony of 80s B-list actors, befriends a former sitcom star. What is striking about this story is its ability to show adolescent cruelty alongside adolescent confusion over what constitutes cool. The main character experiences the world as a series of ironic moments and so, when faced with the raw vulnerability of a sincere relationship with a girl or an emotional investment in his friend, he falters. The tension between the characters is writhingly palpable throughout and succeeds in asking us to question our own cultural filters. (more…)

Coach House Books, 2007

Read by T.K. Murphy

Dumuzi is trying to have sex with Anna. Runner Cogshill is trying to have sex with Dumuzi. Runner likes Anna. Runner would like to be Anna. But Runner is not Anna. You could even say that Runner is the in-Anna. (Dumuzi is in Anna too, but just once. Talking about it makes him kind of anxious.)

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Translated by Robert Mazjels, Erin Moure
Coach House Books, 2007

Read by Hermonie Xie

The romantic title lured me into picking this one up. It suggests the mingling of man and nature – and a notebook, a battered bundle of paper; provenance and tome of ideas that flit in and out of the mind like ecstatic hummingbirds. Before reading, I believed it to be a scrapbook of some sort, filled to the rim with thoughts dictated, both long and short, simple and complex. A mosaic, perhaps. (more…)