Metonymy Press
A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.
Coping with the death of her cousin, Mei abandons her life in the city to live in his now empty house in a small town. There she connects with his history as well as her own, learns about her aunt's long-term secret relationship, and reflects on the trans women she has left behind. Small Beauty explores the protagonist's transness, but it also tenderly yet bitterly unpacks her experiences as a mixed-race person of Chinese descent, cycles of death and loss, and queer and intergenerational community. Small Beauty wanders through isolation, and then breaks it.
A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships-with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band's summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel. The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected-in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley's precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.
Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.
At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age. A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runs away from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood-and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles. There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
The Sacred Heart Motel is a map for lapses in time, for the air between the dust. Poems in a multiverse narrative bring the reader on a tour of the motel, from amenities to rooms to back alleys, through the generations of ghosts and queer love stories, until they are left alone with the heart at the centre of the narrative. Music forms the rungs of this manuscript, from nighttime quiet to an orchestral intermission to a crescendo of exposed interiors. New poet Grace Kwan is ruthless and nimble, guiding us through the recesses of body and roadside space.
Adrian's best friend and his boyfriend don't get along. Oh, and his boyfriend is a ghost. Adrian Yates expected his summer would involve sharing Slurpees with his best friend Zoomer and pretending not to hear his dads' whispered fighting. And that's exactly how it was going, until the night Sorel appeared in the graveyard by Adrian's apartment. Sorel gets Adrian in ways no one else has; the fact that he's not technically alive only makes things exciting. But Sorel can't always control his otherworldly behaviour, and Zoomer's worried he might be hiding something. On stormy summer nights behind the cemetery's iron gates, Adrian and Sorel meet in secret and the pair begin to experiment with consensual possession. Despite the warning signs, Adrian is certain he has everything under control-until suddenly he finds himself fighting for his life.
Dear Black girls all around the world, this one is for you - for us. Dear Black Girls is a letter to all Black girls. Every single day poet and educator Shanice Nicole is reminded of how special Black girls are and of how lucky she is to be one. Illustrations by Kezna Dalz support the book's message that no two Black girls are the same but they are all special-that to be a Black girl is a true gift. In this celebratory poem, Kezna and Shanice remind young readers that despite differences, they all deserve to be loved just the way they are.
Poppy wants to go to college like everyone else, but her father has other ideas. Ever since her twin sister, Lola, mysteriously vanished, Poppy's father has been depressed and forces her to stick around. She hopes she can convince Lola to come home, and perhaps also procure her freedom, by sending her twin a series of nineteen letters, one for each year of their lives. When not excavating childhood memories, Poppy is sneaking away with her girlfriend Juniper, the only person who understands her. But negotiating the complexities of queer love and childhood trauma are anything but simple. And as a twin? That's a whole different story.
The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman's unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island. The experimental form functions at once as a manual for how pop culture can help soothe and mend us and as an exploration of oft-overlooked sources of pleasure, including karaoke, birding, and butt toys. Ultimately, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) reveals with glorious detail and emotional nuance the woman the narrator loved, why she loved her, and the depths of what she has lost.
What was beyond doubt by the time I got back was that a new Transfixion had arrived in the form of Hermia Druitt, the woman in this photograph. This was confirmed by the sensations: flashes from Arcadia. Moonlight, of a kind, sighed up and down the tube of my spine, but above all, that indescribable note which accompanied all my Transfixions was present: humming beneath the high fine rush-probably not dissimilar to holy rapture-was an almost violent familiarity. The feeling of not only recognising, but of having been recognised.
An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex - in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare. Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, and their links become clear over the course of the fragmented narrative. The author playfully traces the portrait of the intertwined lives of a group of Black queer and trans friends as they navigate the social violence, traumas, and contradictions of their circumstances. Originally published in French in 2021 by les Éditions du remue-ménage, as part of the Martiales collection, the stories in Bah's The Rage Letters - set in Montreal and beyond - are sometimes brief, often conversational, and always generative of possibilities through the characters' desire, rage, and acts of rebellion.
A contemporary queer re-visioning of a beautiful feminist tarot deck from the 80s-documenting a conversation across generations and mediums-She Is Sitting in the Night emerges as both a tool for tarot reading and a celebration of queer and feminist cultural production, past and present. By embracing an older deck and simultaneously developing current and re-visioned ways of interpreting its images and the cards' meanings, She Is Sitting in the Night provides a much-needed informed, aesthetically strong, accessible queer tarot book for feminists, queers, and tarot readers new and old.