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...
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...
