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A ragtime team of creatives celebrating amazing literature from within Canada. 📚✨ Join the party, pals!

03/11/2026

Three of the wonderful Canadian published and authored books we’ve been celebrating are on CBC Book’s Spring Fiction list! 📚

🪻Weird Babies (short fiction) by Jaclyn Desforges, published by Gordon Hill Press

🪻Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive (short fiction) by Alison Gadsby, published by Guernica Editions

🪻The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery, published by Palimpsest Press

You can still request review copies of any of these books. Just drop us a DM. 🫶🏼

.jay.gee

03/11/2026

What do all our favourite poets have in common?

And we mean every
last
one of them?

…

All of our favourite poets are voracious readers of poetry. They understand that while writing may often be a solitary art, poetry is part of the ether that connects us. You can see a poet’s love of other poets and the poetry that has shaped them in their dedications. In their acknowledgments. In their interviews and award speeches. And of course, you can see this love in their epigraphs.
.. I am drawn down / break open in your hands / like bread
~ Carolyn Smart

This epigraph is from Canadian poet Kathryn MacDonald’s beautiful collection of poems, The Blue Gate, which is forthcoming with Frontenac House Press on April 15, 2025.

Carolyn Smart, the poet whose work Kathryn highlights, is a beloved Canadian poet who has not only published award-winning literature, but who mentored countless writers during the 32 years she was Director of Creative Writing at Queen’s University. Carolyn is also the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and poetry editor for the MacLennan Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Remember: art brings us together. Nurture it. Support it. Celebrate the people who make creating it possible. ♥️

With:

03/09/2026

✨Coming soon! ✨ We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us by award-winning poet Roxanna Bennett, forthcoming with Gordon Hill / The Porcupines Quill, April 2026.

DM us to request a review of media copy!

The latest collection from award-winning poet Roxanna Bennett marks a striking formal shift from the recombinant sonnets of her earlier work. Infusing disability poetics with concepts of collage, Bennett enacts the improvised experience of disabled persons navigating an inaccessibly constructed world, using whatever comes to hand to make meaning and survive. Her voice remains as singular, incisive, and powerful as ever.

About Roxanna Bennett:

Roxanna Bennett is the author of The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021), Unmeaningable (Gordon Hill Press, 2019), and Uncomfortability (Gordon Hill Press, 2023). Her work has won the 2020 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the 2020 and 2022 Raymond Souster Awards, and the 2021 CBC Best Canadian Poetry. It has also been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award for Poetry, and the Pat Lowther Award. We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us is her fourth collection.

03/08/2026

✨🌸✨Happy International Women’s Day! ✨🌸✨

Here’s a spread of phenomenal forthcoming books by Canadian and Indigenous women authors. Why not add a few to your TBR?

03/07/2026

Many thanks to Sheelagh Caygill for interviewing David Martin about his newest poetry collection NIGHTSTEAD on On Creative Writing. The interview focused “on the craft of experimental poetry"
Check out the full interview here: https://www.oncreativewriting.com/post/david-martin-on-the-craft-of-experimental-poetry

03/07/2026

Literary magazine spotlight! ✨🌈PLENTITUDE MAGAZINE ✨🌈 Featuring Reviews Editor Shawn Syms!

isn’t the only LGBTQ2S+ online literary journal. It’s not even the only Canadian q***r/trans lit publication. But it’s probably one of the longest running (since 2012; started digital, switched to print, ended up online) — and perhaps one of the most prolific, making space online for Canadian poets, authors and critics on a weekly basis.

Plenitude is one of a dwindling number of spaces fostering public conversations about LGBTQ2S+ literary creativity, says book reviews editor Shawn Syms. While the pub is proud to pay contributors, budget constraints limit the number of reviews it can publish, even as q***r lit continues to flourish. “Even with our decision to hone in particularly on multiply marginalized authors published by smaller, independent Canadian literary presses, I could easily triple the number of reviews posted if we had the funding,” says Syms. Donations to Plenitude are gratefully received through their homepage at plenitudemagazine.ca.

is a bi, poly writer and editor, and intermittent social advocate and advocacy journalist. He’s been an editor at Plenitude since 2024 (and had a story published there in 2014), and was previously associate editor of The Winnipeg Review. His short-fiction collection, Nothing Looks Familiar (Arsenal Pulp, 2014), was a National Post Best Of selection, shortlisted for the ReLit Award, and confiscated by the Michigan Department of Corrections on the grounds that it “may facilitate or encourage criminal activity.” He’s started work on something new and unsure whether to call it memoir or auto-fiction — its effect on criminal activity remains to be seen.

Thank you to Shawn Syms and Plentitude Magazine for uplifting so many phenomenal q***r voices.

Follow at

🌈✨🌈

***rlit ***rart ***rpoetry

03/07/2026

ICYMI: The new and forthcoming nonfiction by Andrea Gunraj and Kasia Van Schaik are on the CBC’s 2026 list of anticipated spring nonfiction—and you can still request review copies right here! 🌸

Just drop us a DM.

More about the books:

Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present by Andrea Gunraj explores the under-told legacy of indentured labour and its lasting impacts on descendants across diasporas, from the Caribbean and Latin America to Canada, the United States, and beyond

Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius by Kasia Van Schaik is a lyrical meditation on the enduring obstacles women artists and writers face in a world still unaccustomed to recognizing female genius.

03/06/2026

Congratulations to Alison Gadsby on the wonderful launch of her phenomenal short story collection, Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026)!

What a marvellous event!

Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, catastrophic speculative fiction, and psychological realism in a collection that might best be described as weird fiction. These connected stories offer dark reconstructions of lives brimming with desperate loneliness. They allow us to bear witness to the life-altering love of sisters, brothers, mothers… the life-altering love that buoys them as they struggle to stay afloat in the wake of childhoods they merely survived.

You can pick up Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive from wherever books are bought or borrowed. ♥️
jay.gee

03/04/2026

Today and everyday, we are celebrating phenomenal women’s literature.

Join us!

📚 Follow us here and on Instagram:

🫶🏼 Join our community of reviewers (and score complementary copies of books!): http://www.riverstreetwriting.com/join-river-street-reads

♥️ Share our posts with your community.

Women’s literature published in Canada is some of the best on the planet. Thank you for supporting it with us.

03/03/2026

Showing some love to perhaps our youngest River Street community member, Roo (), who put her new bubble gun to excellent use and sent us this awesome photo of a stack of (mostly) CanLit to share.

Books *do* make becoming subjects. 💅🏼

w/

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