Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane I read Kay Gabriel’s Elegy Department Spring in a coffee shop—which, looking back on my experience, seems to be the perfect place to read a poetry chapbook about the life and art of Candy Darling, a trans actress famous for her work in Andy Warhol’s...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane Meanwhile, Elsewhere, a sci-fi and fantasy collection edited by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett, begins with a story about a trans woman who miraculously becomes pregnant after a womb transplant without having intercourse, thereby making her the new Virgin Mary in a...
Yes. That is really what it’s called. Guidelines: Send us your best fiction, non-fiction or prose poetry between 250 and 500 words. A moment, a deft scene, a life story—what can you do with this tight form? Open to all LGBTQ2+ identified writers. Maximum TWO submissions per writer. Submit as a word...
Reviewed by Rachna Contractor Novels by and about queer South Asians in North America will never be what I want them to be; SJ Sindu’s debut novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, helped me let go of all expectation. Set within a comfortably middle-class community outside Boston and filled with...
The Plenitude team is pleased to welcome our two new associate editors for fiction and creative non-fiction, Fatima Amarshi and Derek Warwick! A child of the global South Asian Diaspora, Fatima Amarshi comes from a multi-generational family of immigrants who travelled from India to Tanzania, and...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane About halfway through my PhD comprehensive exams, I hit a wall. My reading list was composed of transgender literary works, meaning that I was reading autobiography after autobiography. As I took notes on these books, I began to wonder how long it would take until people...
Interview by Matthew Walsh Local snowbird, poet and fiction writer, and editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine Daniel Zomparelli’s new book Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person was released this year with Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver to rave reviews, deservedly followed by a shout-out...
Interview by Brett Josef Grubisic Suzette Mayr expertly juggles funny, unsettling, weird, and satiric in her whimsical fifth novel, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall. In it, the University of Calgary English professor creates a hapless, overwhelmed and under-performing barely tenured...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In Scarborough, Catherine Hernandez’s new novel, a cacophony of voices intermingles to create a unique portrait of the many disparate communities that make up one of the largest and poorest suburbs in Canada. Hernandez carefully weaves many different characters from many...
We are pleased to announce that the winner of the inaugural Cornucopia Literary Prize is Rachel Lallouz for her short story “Eyes Like Limpid Pools.” In the words of our 2017 judge, Hiromi Goto: There were so many strong submissions with such a range in style, content, voice, each so...
We are pleased to announce the shortlist for the inaugural Cornucopia Literary Prize for short fiction, judged this year by Hiromi Goto: “Pristine,” by Kristyn Dunnion “Eyes Like Limpid Pools,” by Rachel Lallouz “See You Next Soon,” by Jess Martin...
Reviewed by Michael Lyons One of the most arresting exchanges in Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (originally published as The Price of Salt under a pseudonym) is not with the titular love interest of protagonist Therese Belivet, but with Mrs. Ruby Robichek, a sweater saleswoman at a Manhattan...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In her new book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, Jane Ward makes a compelling and fascinating argument about the significance and role of sex between straight white men as a requisite ingredient that solidifies their masculinity, their sense of manhood, and most...
Reviewed By Evelyn Deshane Perhaps it was because I had finished reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates that I had already been thinking of bodies and how they moved in the world before starting Kai Cheng Thom’s a place called No Homeland. Her first poetry collection conjures...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane During an interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, Laura Jane Grace addressed the title of her recent memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, released in 2016. Her response to Noah was similar to her response on The Late...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In Nick Comilla’s Candyass, a novel that stops tasting sweet about halfway through, an adolescent punk kid from a small town in Pennsylvania narrates his sexual coming of age and various experiences with gay life in Montreal and New York City. Purporting to be a novel that...
Reviewed by Latonya Pennington In C.B. Lee’s Not Your Sidekick, Jessica Tran is a non-superpowered teenager who just wants to live up to her superhero lineage. Despite not having powers, she decides to take a paid internship and work for her city’s most notorious supervillain in order...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane When I teach poetry to my first-year students, they often don’t know what to say. As a genre, poetry seems to be too old, too stiff and formal, or too cavalier and obscene—depending on what student I poll that day. The only other genre that seems as contentious is...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad A sprawling, expansive memoir that spans two continents and bridges different worlds in the process, Daisy Hernández’s A Cup of Water under My Bed revels in the complexities and the chaos of the queer immigrant experience. This is a book that refuses easy answers and...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, her new collection of short stories, Randa Jarrar tackles themes of longing, infidelity, betrayal, and desire, themes the Palestinian-American novelist, translator, and essayist introduced in her first novel, A Map of Home. The stories in this...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad If all poets hope to occasionally make the ineffable speak, Ocean Vuong does so effortlessly in almost every poem from his new collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. It’s hard not to become undone reading many of these poems, and you may find that something...
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Published by Metonymy Press in 2016, Kai Cheng Thom’s first book is titled Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir. The title should be enough to signal to readers that what follows is a conflated narrative of personal...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s new collection of poetry, There Should Be Flowers, is beautiful and needs to be read by everyone. This collection explores our cultural anxieties around body, memory and space without ever falling into a clichéd romanticism or idealism...
Reviewed by K. Astre Joe Okonkwo’s lyrical, sensual, and sensory debut novel Jazz Moon is an intimate look into twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Charles’s timid yet determined metamorphosis into a man bold enough to honour his deepest desires. Readers watch as he reluctantly reconciles himself...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad Near the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, one of the main characters witnesses his roommate in physical pain. Instead of trying to comfort his friend, he goes to the bathroom to start tidying up, waiting for the pain to subside: “he did what they had all...
Reviewed by Latonya Pennington Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova is a fantasy-fiction story about Alejandra Mortiz, a bruja who comes from generations of witches. Alejandra, however, hates magic and wants to be a normal teenager. In an attempt to remove her powers during a ceremonial Deathday...
Reviewed by Latonya Pennington Published in 2014, Drag Noir is an anthology edited by K.A. Laity for Fox Spirit Books. It is also the third in a series of anthologies focused on Noir. Most of the contributors, including the editor, are on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and are successful speculative fiction...
We are thrilled to announce our first-ever contest, the Cornucopia Literary Prize for fiction. The prize is open for submissions from September 15, 2016, until March 1, 2017, and is awarded to the best work of fiction by a LGBTTQI writer. We welcome submissions from writers of any nationality. In...
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Published in 2016, Jia Qing Wilson-Yang’s Small Beauty is a debut novel that explores family connections and the legacy of racism. The narrative’s central character is a young mixed-race transwoman retracing her family history back through generations while living in...
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Published in 2016, even this page is white is Vivek Shraya’s first book of poetry. She is already an accomplished and award-winning prose writer as well as a musician, photographer, videographer, and artist. Her entry into poetry marks other transformations in her...
Reviewed by Sugar le Fae In Sideshow Concessions, Lucas Crawford writes fearless, shameless poetry, born, no doubt, from a lifetime of fear and shame. This is the rare alchemy of Crawford’s writing—no binary is safe (or distinct) from its perceived opposite, no genre or gender unbendable...
Plenitude magazine is co-presenting this month’s Queer Night at the Brockton Writers Series on Wednesday, July 13, 2016 at full of beans Coffee House & Roastery, 1348 Dundas St. W., Toronto (6:30pm, PWYC)—featuring Matt Loney, Gwen Benaway, Kumasi Jay Gwynne, Yaya Yao and a special guest...
Thanks to the generous donors to our recent fundraiser, Plenitude is thrilled to announce that we are increasing our writer honoraria, effective immediately. For fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and articles, we now offer $60; for a poem, we offer $25. We are committed to paying our writers for their...
Plenitude Magazine is looking for queer and trans writers of colour for our reviews section. We look for book reviews which are critical and thoughtful and between 700 and 1,000 words. We feature poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by queers and trans writers, with a focus on Canadian content. We...
Reviewed by Salma Saadi “I’ve read the Qu’ran, and I know the passages you’re referring to. None of them clearly condemns homosexuality.” Does Islam really forbid homosexuality? Can you be gay and still be a practising Muslim? To some, this may sound absurd, but these are some of the...
This article is part of the Queer Press Profiles series by DJ Fraser Arsenal Pulp Press—one of the most recognizable names in queer publishing today—emerged from a palpable surge of artistic activity in Vancouver at the debut of the seventies. At the time, the city was passing from rural Canadian...
Reviewed by Casey Plett “I never thought love was real. I didn’t. And now I think life isn’t real without it———that sounds like a really bad greeting card—” “—Don’t. Don’t make it a joke.” —Comet If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo is a great book, which is nice...
Reviewed by Malaika Alex Leslie’s The Things I Heard about You is an experiment in language, editing, and meaning. The book of poems is divided into thirteen sections. Each section begins with a prose piece that Leslie edits down into a single phrase and in one case, just one word: “Thumbprint.”...
Reviewed by Adam Holman In Andy Sinclair’s debut novel Breathing Lessons, he writes about how people “should do what they want,” whether in hookups or matters of the heart. We are forced to contemplate the repercussions, and Sinclair guides us with a precise assurance, taking us, along with its...
This article is part of the Queer Press Profiles series by DJ Fraser Even before its launch in the summer of 2015, Dagger Imprints was a community venture, responsive to the climate in the BC publishing industry, and run by a few extremely dedicated employees of Vici Johnstone, owner of Caitlin...
