Reviewed by Jane Shi Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019), 144 pp., $17.95. My dear trans kindred—weird sisters, brothers grim and gay, siblings-in arms: What kind of world do you want to live in? –Kai Cheng Thom, “How Neoliberalism Is Stealing Trans Liberation” Kai...
Plenitude Magazine mourns the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, and all others whose lives have been stolen by police violence. We condemn the murders of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC), and especially of trans BIPOC at the hands of white supremacist...
Reviewed by Emilia Nielsen Bahar Orang, Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty (Book*hug Press, 2020), 114 pp., $20. I was first introduced to Bahar Orang’s work at Creating Space IX, the Canadian Association for Health Humanities annual conference last year in Hamilton, Ontario. Such a...
Reviewed by Amy LeBlanc Tess Liem, Obits. (Coach House Books, 2018), 88 pp., $19.95. Winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 2019 Obit: the announcement of a death. “It sinks like a stone, this attention to the lives of others.” Obits. opens with the above epigraph from American poet Wendy...
This call for submissions will end on June 30, 2020 All around the world, people are being asked to stay home to stop the spread of COVID-19. Self-isolate. Practice social distancing. Don’t spend time with anyone outside of your household. But how is this affecting members of the Canadian LGBTQ2S+...
Reviewed by Julia Peterson Barrie Jean Borich, Apocalypse, Darling (Mad Creek Books / The Ohio State University Press, 2018), 120 pp., $18.95. Nominated for a 2018 Lambda Literary Award (Lesbian Memoir/Biography category) I remember learning, a few years ago, that Sappho’s poetry wasn’t written...
Reviewed by Katherine Connell Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (Strange Light, 2019), 264 pp., $24.95. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a hybrid memoir that combines the author’s personal experience of queer domestic abuse with reflections on genre, literature, film, and...
Want to know your best bet at getting published? Curious about our history and favourite pieces? Look no further! Patrick Grace, our managing editor, was recently interviewed by Lambda Literary about Plenitude’s history, our focus on queer and trans lit, what we’re looking for in submissions, and...
Reviewed by Ben Rawluk Matthew Walsh, These are not the potatoes of my youth (Goose Lane, 2019), 92 pp., $19.95. I don’t want to have to use the word liminal, but all the spaces in Matthew Walsh’s debut poetry collection These are not the potatoes of my youth are absolutely liminal. Walsh is a Nova...
We are excited to announce that L’Amour Lisik has joined the Plenitude team as our new Associate Prose Editor! L’Amour is an artist, writer, and QPOC who lives on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. She holds a BFA in Writing from the University of Victoria...
Happy New Year from Plenitude! To start 2020 off right, we’re launching a special Youth Spotlight project this month. Stories by young queer and trans authors about teen/YA (young adult) experiences don’t receive as much attention as they should, so we’ve selected two fiction and two creative...
Reviewed by Emilia Nielsen Lucas Crawford, The High Line Scavenger Hunt (University of Calgary Press, 2018), 144 pp., $18.99. Lucas Crawford’s second collection of poetry, The High Line Scavenger Hunt, undertakes to both chronicle and engage with New York City’s High Line, a reclaimed elevated...
Reviewed by Tanya Marquardt Larissa Lai, The Tiger Flu (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 334 pp., $19.95. Winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, Larissa Lai’s novel The Tiger Flu invites us into a lyrical world that melds seamlessly with her rendering of place, telling a much...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner, 2018), 280 pp., $16. Near the end of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee writes: “The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor...
Reviewed by Matthew Walsh Hasan Namir, War/Torn (Book*hug Press, 2019), 114 pp., $18. Hasan Namir, celebrated author of the novel, God in Pink (winner of the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction), is back on the literary scene with his essential debut book of poetry, War/Torn, published by...
Reviewed by Marie-Hélène Westgate Zahra Patterson, Chronology (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), 96 pp., $14. Not by accident, Zahra Patterson grants us entry into her long-form nonfiction essay, Chronology, through failure. The action of the book centers around Patterson’s inability to translate a...
Reviewed by Lucas Crawford Emilia Nielsen, Body Work (Signature Editions, 2018), 100 pp., $17.95. My skin tells non-linear tales: a series of abandoned forays into shrinkage and growth; into sun exposure and cooking burns (reader, do not cook fatty proteins sans shirt); into stretched pores and the...
Plenitude is excited to appear at Open Space’s Small Press Fest on October 5 in Victoria, BC! Managing editor Patrick Grace will be there to speak on a panel discussion about running a small press or literary journal. He will also be hosting a table at the event alongside board member L’Amour Lisik...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Random House, 2019), 368 pp., $28.00. In his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the poet Ocean Vuong creates scenes of magisterial beauty through a heartfelt and earnest exploration of grief, desire, pain, and...
Reviewed by Jeremiah Bartram When I opened Me, Myself, They, I knew nothing about Joshua M. Ferguson. I didn’t know that as a political activist they had pioneered policy changes in Ontario and B.C. that now permit non-binary gender identification on birth certificates and driver’s licenses...
Plenitude is very happy to welcome Patrick Grace to the role of managing editor. No stranger to the literary world, he worked for The Malahat Review as publicity manager from 2013 to 2017, and has acted as one of Plenitude’s poetry editors since 2016. He has also been helping us out with...
Are you passionate about queer literature in Canada? Do you want to support the growth and development of queer literature through Canada’s queer literary magazine? Join the Board of Plenitude Publishing Society! Plenitude Publishing Society (PPS) is seeking volunteers to bring their unique skills...
We are excited to announce that Alison Dowsett has joined the Plenitude team! She will be taking over the roles of reviews editor, and prose editor. Alison’s work has appeared in subTerrain, Xtra! West, Terminal City, and the Science Creative Quarterly. Her piece of short memoir, “Primordial Eros,”...
Congratulations to all finalists announced by the Lambda Literary Foundation this past Thursday, and especially to all the authors who are past contributors to Plenitude. Emilia Nielsen’s work was published in our very first issue and her current poetry collection, Body Work, is nominated in...
Reviewed By Evelyn Deshane There are several moments in Little Fish by Casey Plett where the protagonist, Wendy, tells the readers that she always envisioned herself as more of a woman when she thought of her body from the back. This is a really queer thing to say–as in the original meaning...
Reviewed by Rebecca Snow I came out while reading Greetings from Janeland: Women Write More About Leaving Men for Women, edited by Candace Walsh and Barbara Straus Lodge. It’s the 2017 sequel to Dear John, I Love Jane, which was released in 2010. I hadn’t read the first book when I read...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad The strange beauty and terrifying brilliance of Carmen Maria Machado’s first short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, cannot be overstated. These stories foreshadow and tap into the current cultural conversations around the prevalence and banality of everyday...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane If I could sum up jayy dodd’s poetry anthology A Portrait in Blues in a phrase, it would be “so many, too much.” This utterance is my attempt to put words to a feeling that is—by the nature of feeling itself—transient, which is what many of the poets try...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane Quarry by Tanis Franco hits all of my major interests: poetry written from a gender nonconforming / queer perspective, focused in a Canadian locale, and peppered with numerous references to literary theories, along with pop culture. Oh, and in all of this, these poems are...
Reviewed by Annick MacAskill Joelle Barron’s poetry collection Ritual Lights is an impressive and engaging debut that centres experiences of sexual assault, loss, love, and parenthood in a lyric narrative sequence. The book opens with a series of poems that explore sexual violence and family...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane A black hole infiltrates much of The Videofag Book, a collection edited by William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill about their time running the Videofag art space in Kensington Market, Toronto. Comprising an introduction by Tannahill and Ellis, a roundtable conversation, love...
Review By Asam Ahmad Near the end of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy’s first new novel in twenty years, we find this passage jotted in a characters’ notebook: How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything. It is an awkward fragment...
Plenitude is pleased to welcome our newest staff member, associate editor for poetry Rebecca Salazar. Rebecca has published poetry and non-fiction in journals including Prism, Minola, and The Puritan. Her poetry chapbook, Guzzle, was released by Anstruther Press in 2016. Originally from Sudbury...
Reviewed by Trevor Corkum Building Fires in the Snow took me for a jaunt down memory lane. When I was a university student, I spent a couple of summers working in the Yukon. I hitchhiked the Alaska Highway with a friend, arriving in Whitehorse seven days after we first stuck out our thumbs in the...
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Joshua Whitehead’s debut collection of poetry, full-metal indigiqueer, is a cyberpunk dystopian vision of modern queer Indigenous life. Influenced by the classic Japanese anime Akira, full-metal indigiqueer is one of the most distinctive and original collections of...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane I read Subject to Change: Trans Poetry and Conversation, edited by H. Melt, while on a train going to a conference. Not only did nearly all of these poems mention the restlessness that travel provokes, making it the perfect companion, but the work of these five trans...
We’re pleased to announce the winner of the stuffie, the mixtape, and immeasurable glory—without further ado: Winner: Rachael Jordan, “Transfusion” Runner-up: Bridie Mills, “Inconsequential Man” Choosing a winner from such an impressive longlist was no easy task. Judge...
Hot on the heels of the longlist announced Monday, the shortlist is here: A Quiet Dinner, by Victoria Mbabazi Inconsequential Man, by Bridie Mills Self Control, by Amy Currie Transfusion, by Rachael Jordan Congratulations to the writers shortlisted for the inaugural Rainbow Unicorn Stuffie Mix-Tape...
Here it is, folks! We received so many submissions from writers far and wide, and after much deliberation, we present the longlist! (In alphabetical order.) Congratulations to all of you–and thank you to everyone who submitted. Longlist Balloon People, by Evan Anderson Grandpa’s Last Story...
Review by Asam Ahmad Written and directed by Maysaloun Hamoud, the film In Between is a daring and hilarious portrayal of the lives of three Palestinian women living in Tel Aviv. The film is remarkable for its deft weaving of light-hearted sentimentality with searing multi-layered explorations of...
