River Street Writing

02/12/2026

If I could see Cora now
I’d see the winding sky has shrunk her,
but we would watch the damp
vectors of mountains.
She would pause in binding worship,
she would pause,
every reef of her bones
would pause.

—from “Sun Gone” by Mallory Tater

Read the full excerpt on our blog at http://www.riverstreetwriting.com/blog/2025/12/12/excerpt-from-lockers-are-for-bearcats-only-by-mallory-tater.

“Sun Gone” is just one of the breathtaking poems you’ll discover in Mallory’s forthcoming collection, Lockers are for Bearcats Only — releasing on February 15, 2026 with Palimpsest Press.

Lockers are for Bearcats Only offers poetry that traces the complexities of grief, the importance of destigmatizing dialogue around su***de, and the beauty and complicated core of girlhood friendships while improving our collective understanding of mental health awareness and su***de prevention in an approachable, concrete, and empathetic way.

The poems spill out from the confluence of grief and water. After losing one of her closest friends, the poet began swimming laps—part meditation, part therapy, part escapism—immersed in the depths of the public pool. There, she found herself haunted by the strange tension between fitness / surrender and memory / motion where ghosts of girlhood, catholicism, and addiction rose to the surface.

These themes haunt Lockers Are for Bearcats Only – a tender, unguarded exploration of loss, embodiment, and the currents that carry us through life with and without those who shaped us.

About Mallory Tater:

Mallory Tater is the author of This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), and Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW Press, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. Lockers are for Bearcats Only is her second poetry collection.

02/11/2026

02/11/2026

Have you read any of these books? Here is what we’re reading right now at River Street! 📚

📕Nicole Mae: Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement, (Broadway Books)

📕Selena: Wonderland Road by Carrianne Leung (HarperCollins Canada); Black Cherokee by Antonio Michael Downing (Simon & Schuster Canada); The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse by Vinh Nguyen (HarperCollins Canada)

📕Hollay: Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg: This is Our Territory by Gidigaa Migizi (ARP Books)

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02/10/2026

“This story begins in 2022, Padua, midwinter. Across the city a debate is raging. It concerns a woman whose name I only recently learned: Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman in the world to earn a Ph.D. City councillors Margherita Colonnello and Simone Pillitteri have proposed to place a statue of Piscopia in the town square — a notable historical woman to join the effigies of notable historical men. This suggestion has sparked outrage across the country.”

—Excerpt from Women Among Monuments by Kasia Van Schaik. Published by Dundurn Press, February 17, 2026.

Read the full excerpt:

http://www.riverstreetwriting.com/blog/2026/2/6/excerpt-from-women-among-monuments-solitude-permission-and-the-pursuit-of-female-genius-by-kasia-van-schiak

To request a review copy of this book—just in time for International Women’s Day next month—drop us a DM.

More about WOMEN AMONG MONUMENTS: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius:

What does it take for a woman to don the mantle of genius — a title long reserved for male artists? From her studies in Montreal to a dead-end job in Berlin, a midnight tour of Paris, a bankrupt art residency on the Toronto Islands, and a mysterious sculpture garden in the Karoo desert, South African—Canadian author and professor Kasia Van Schaik considers what it means for a young woman to call herself an artist and claim a creative life.

Drawing on a diverse web of literary and cultural sources and artistic icons — from Georgia O’Keeffe to Ana Mendieta, Gertrude Stein to Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Marmon Silko to Bernadette Mayer — Women Among Monuments asks, What, beyond a room of one’s own, are the necessary conditions for female genius? Where does the inner flint of artistic permission come from? What is the oxygen that keeps it burning?

In her memoir interwoven with incisive biographies of female solitude, constraint, and perseverance, Van Schaik blazes a trail for more inclusive artmaking practices, communities, and monuments.

02/09/2026

✨COMING SOON ✨Interposition (poetry) by Kaie Kellough, forthcoming with McClelland & Stewart, March 24, 2026

Request a review copy!

http://www.riverstreetwriting.com/join-river-street-reads

Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 Preview

From Kaie Kellough, poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, comes a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd.

Kaie Kellough (Magnetic Equator, Griffin Poetry Prize winner, 2020) returns with a long poem that repurposes the language of the present. Interposition borrows its vocabulary from the news, entertainment, war, advertising, technology, and the everyday tragedies of popular culture. It reveals the morbid humour of our inability to distinguish between the urgencies of personal achievement and climate crisis. It compresses sound and rhythm into paradox, and it conflates absurdity and emergency.

Mapping the continued encroachment of capital and virtual culture upon our psychic space, Interposition examines how, with each click, we are reconstituted online and sold back to ourselves, and asks: How do we uncouple our selves from our avatars?

KAIE KELLOUGH is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer living in Montreal. His previous collection, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a writer and vocalist for the group FYEAR and is pursuing graduate work in English at Queen’s University.



Photo credit: Kevin Calixte

02/08/2026

ICYMI: author and former Globe & Mail journalist Sunny Dhillon was on CTV Ottawa recently to talk about his new book, Hide & Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin (Wolsak & Wynn).

In 2018, Sunny Dhillon resigned as a journalist with the Globe and Mail. His blog post announcing his departure went unexpectedly viral. It was a decision that had been long brewing and Dhillon posted the piece with the hope that it would lead to “meaningful reflection on the lack of diversity in Canadian journalism and the problems therein.” But he was not optimistic.

In this sharply funny memoir, shaped as a series of letters to his daughter, Dhillon explains why he was not hopeful. From his earliest memories, his experience of being Canadian was shaped by race, and as a child he’d often found himself confused by what he should do when the fact he was “different” was raised. His first reaction was to hide – from his skin colour, from his native tongue and even from his name. Until he realized he didn’t feel the need to hide anymore, that he didn’t want to hide anymore. With warmth, honesty and lots of humour, Dhillon shares his journey so that his daughter will not have to struggle through the lessons he took too long to learn, so that she will know who she is and be proud.

Sunny Dhillon is a former news reporter whose viral essay “Journalism While Brown and When to Walk Away” highlighted the significant challenges that journalists of colour can face. Sunny worked as a print reporter for ten years. He has also appeared on television and radio and has spoken at conferences. He is passionate about racial justice and continues to write on that theme. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of British Columbia. He and his young family now live in Ontario, where Sunny attends law school. This is his first book.

02/07/2026

“Whitney French’s ability to blend experimentation in language with an earthy, often documentary-like directness that makes Syncopation a unique genre experience.”
—Alex Good, Toronto Star

Syncopation by Whitney French (published by Wolsak & Wynn) is available wherever books are bought or borrowed!

About Syncopation:

In the aftermath of a Memory War, society is fragmented into strange new cultures, castes and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories and hyperloop terminals, Whitney French brings us a dazzling novel-in-verse where memory is the highest currency and love, like all revolutions, is dangerous, unruly and singed with hope.

O and Z are two young women searching for purpose in a world where a decades-long earthquake reverberates through the Earth’s crust, and the population scrambles to hide from deadly acid rain. Descended from space pirates, O is drawn to the sky, while Z is earthbound, a skilled forager with connections to the black market. The two become travel companions and lovers until, torn between choosing their values or each other, a fateful decision must be made at the el Corazón space station.

In this speculative and intoxicating novel, French offers readers an intricate future-world that resonates so powerfully with our own, as it explores a people gripped in the war-torn politics of migration, memory-keeping, labour and survival.

About Whitney French:

Whitney French (she/her) is a writer, educator and publisher. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter (University of Regina, 2019) and Griot: Six Writers’ Sojourn into the Dark (Penguin Random House, 2022). Whitney is a Black futurist who explores memory, loss, technology and nature in her work. She is a certified arts educator and an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of British Colombia. She is also the co-founder and publisher of Hush Harbour, the only Black q***r feminist press in Canada.

https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/products/syncopation

💜

📸 : Photo of Whitney French: Darius Bashar
***rliterature

02/06/2026

The Unravelling of Ou, Hollay Ghadery's
début novel, "opens with the arresting sight of a frazzled middle-aged woman with frizzy hair, Minoo, running down a hospital hallway, a crudely made sock puppet on her hand," says reviewer . Crudely made or not, it's the puppet who relates the story of "Minoo’s struggle to reconnect with the people she loves and, most importantly, with her true self."

Daughter Roya is fed up with Minoo's "endless dependence on this raggedy support toy, [and] ...issues an ultimatum: cut ties with the puppet, Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter."

The puppet has a more understanding take: Minoo “'created me—all of us—to help her make sense of herself,' he says. 'We have always been an expression of feeling she could not otherwise articulate, or curiosity she couldn’t let herself explore: playfulness, sexiness, authority.'”

So, who will end up pulling the strings? Palimpsest Press https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/p/embracing-life-without-puppets-the-unravelling-of-ou-hollay-ghadery

02/06/2026

Less than a month to go until acclaimed author K.R Wilson’s highly-anticipated new novel, Stan on Guard, is released by Guernica Editions, and we’re stoked to share an exclusive advance review by the excellent Rod Carley!

“Stan is on the run.

And it’s been that way for 3,000 years.

Wise-cracking Stan is back in K.R. Wilson’s new novel STAN ON GUARD (sequel to Call Me Stan), on a century-spanning, outrageous odyssey.

Stan is immortal and while that may sound like a dream life, it’s a far murkier and lonelier proposition, especially when you’re being hunted by your nemesis, an immortal Trojan princess named Tróán, whose vengeance will stop at nothing. Living forever has its challenges.

From hanging out with a do*****ag named Odysseus (Homer got it wrong) to taking long walks in an insane asylum with a mad Nietzsche to fighting for the Germans in World War I and faking his way to Canada, Stan’s historical shenanigans are a treat. He does whatever it takes to evade Tróán, learning the tricks of the survival trade century by century.

Meantime, Tróán takes on Polish Hussars, Lithuanian warriors, and the golden horde of medieval Russia before finding herself a baroness in 19th century Paris hosting salons and crossing paths with the likes of Rodin and Isadora Duncan – all the while obsessively pursuing Stan.

Rollicking.

Riveting.

Remarkable.

STAN ON GUARD is meticulously researched, but Wilson never lets historical fact get in the way of his wildly inventive, absurdist romp — each period pitstop is a novella unto itself. Highly recommended.”

Rod Carley, award-winning author of RUFF

Learn more about Stan on Guard:

https://guernicaeditions.com/products/stan-on-guard

Learn more about RUFF:
https://store.latitude46publishing.com/products/ruff

02/05/2026

What does reading Canadian mean to you?

One of the reasons we uplift small, independent presses in Canada is because these are the publishers who are not only publishing the most authors from within Canada—over 80% of Canadian authors are published by small presses—but they have every part of their production in Canada, from editing to layout to design to printing.

It doesn’t hurt that these presses are also publishing some of the very best (and award-winning) literature in the world. 💅🏼

Do we also celebrate books from multinational publishers and other places in the world? Absolutely—a great book is a great book! But we focus on small press CanLit in hopes of fostering an awareness of the amazing literature being produced where we live, as well as a consciousness around more informed book buying and borrowing practices.

So reading and supporting literature produced in Canada doesn’t mean we never read and celebrate books produced elsewhere, but for us, it *does* mean making more of an effort to support the vibrant and wondrous literary culture being nurtured right here at home.

We hope you’ll join us. ♥️

DM us for more information on joining our community of readers. Or just go to RiverStreetWriting.com and navigate to the River Street Reads page. 📚