In Bloom: Eight Books to Welcome Spring
Spring has officially sprung! To help usher in the season, we are proud to present In Bloom: Eight Books to Welcome Spring!
From the more joyful aspects of baseball season and long bike rides, to darker feelings associated with climate anxiety and endless days of rain, these 8 books each capture the complex nature of spring in their own unique way. Read on for more details!
PS) Save 25% off these and all available titles until March 24 as part of our Hello Spring Sale!
Big Shadow by Marta Balcewicz
In an unnamed town in the summer of 1998, Judy is an isolated and inexperienced teenager on the cusp of adulthood struggling to craft an identity for herself—especially as the artist she wants to be. There is little help around her. Her only friends are increasingly obsessed with a cultish belief in a coming “Big Shadow.” Her mother is afraid of life and finds solace in TV shows. At her lowest point, Judy meets Maurice Blunt, a visiting summer poetry class professor who is a “has-been” fixture of the 1970s NYC punk music scene. Judy believes Maurice—a man more than twice her age desperately seeking lost adoration—is the ticket out of her current life. Soon, she begins taking secret weekend trips to visit him.
Why we chose it: Captures the youthful feelings of boredom and the hunt for adventure felt during the warmer months.
Cyclettes by Tree Abraham
Part travelogue, part philosophical musing, Tree Abraham’s work probes the millennial experience, asking what a young life can be when unshackled from traditional role expectations yet still living in consistent economic and environmental uncertainty. Text is interspersed between drawings, scientific charts, ephemera, maps, arcane designs, and diagrams of cycles—of vehicles and of life, from the Buddhist Eightfold path to patterns of depression, desire, and motion. The result is a disarming, welcoming work that asks us to consider what the interflux of exploration and ennui mean to our locality within the universe.
Why we chose it: There’s nothing quite like that first bike ride once the snow melts.
7th Cousins: An Automythography by Erin Brubacher & Christine Brubaker
In July 2015, Erin Brubacher and Christine Brubaker traced the migration route of their Mennonite ancestors by walking 700 kilometres from Pennsylvania to Ontario. Along the way they were hosted by a series of people with whom they had next to nothing in common. They were welcomed into strangers’ homes and treated as family. On their journey through the American Bible Belt they encountered folks with religious and political beliefs very different from their own and learned to question what conversations to enter and how far to take them. They accomplished this and so much more while navigating their own relationship and the challenges of being with another person, on foot, for 32 days.
Why we chose it: Who doesn’t love a good hike?
The Handsome Man by Brad Casey
The Handsome Man is a collection of linked stories that follow several years of the life of a young man as he is drawn around the world: from Toronto to Montreal, New York, Ohio, New Mexico, British Columbia, Berlin, Rome, and Northern Ontario, along the way meeting hippies, healers, drinkers, movie stars, old friends, and welcoming strangers. He isn’t travelling, however; he’s running away. But as far and fast as he runs, the world won’t let him disappear, and each new encounter and every lost soul he meets along this journey brings him closer and closer to certain truths he’d locked away: how to trust, how to live in this world, and most of all, how to love again.
Why we chose it: Captures the desire to hit the road.
One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks
In prose by turns haunting and crystalline, One Hundred Days of Rain enumerates an unnamed narrator’s encounters with that most quotidian of subjects: rain. Mourning her recent disastrous breakup, the narrator must rebuild a life from the bottom up. As she wakes each day to encounter Vancouver’s sky and city streets, the narrator notices that the rain, so apparently unchanging, is in fact kaleidoscopic. Her melancholic mood alike undergoes subtle variations that sometimes echo, sometimes contrast with her surroundings. Caught between the two poles of weather and mood, the narrator is not alone: whether riding the bus with her small child, searching for an apartment to rent, or merely calculating out the cost of meager lunches, the world forever intrudes, as both a comfort and a torment.
Why we chose it: Rain. Duh.
No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol by Liz Worth
When Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel was first published in 1968, The New York Times Book Review declared it “pornographic.” Yet over four decades later, a, A Novel continues to be an essential documentation of Warhol’s seminal Factory scene. And though the book offers a pop art snapshot of 1960s Manhattan that only Warhol could capture, it remains a challenging read. Comprised entirely of unedited transcripts of recorded conversations taped in and around the Warhol Factory, the original book’s tone varies from frenetic to fascinating, unintelligible to poetic. No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol by Liz Worth attempts to change that, by appropriating the original text and turning each page into a unique poem
Why we chose it: We all have seasons we look back on as the time we finally crossed that big book off our list.
Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene by Alessandra Naccarato
Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene invites readers to join a contemplation of survival—our own, and that of the elements that surround us. Using research, lyric prose, and first-hand experiences, Alessandra Naccarato addresses fundamental questions about our modern relationship to nature amidst depictions of landscapes undergoing dramatic transformation.
Why we chose it: The joy of surviving winter is always paired with the harsh reality of climate change.
Walking and Stealing by Stephen Cain
In this triptych of serial poems steeped in baseball and Toronto, Stephen Cain considers urban affairs and culture through playful, revelatory devices. “Walking & Stealing” was composed between innings of his son’s little league baseball games. The sport becomes a site for explorations of duration, association, and subjectivity. The ninety-nine poems of “Intentional Walks” follow mapped routes throughout the city to study the relationship between thinking and walking. The nine cantos in “Tag & Run” are constructed using baseball’s magic number nine, creating a literary puzzle in which the author “tags” a series of moments in time.
Why we chose it: Go Jays!
