Category: Stop! Look! Listen!

Ancestral-Wing by Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a collection of poems that provides elegiac pathways to Kanta’s encounters with grief, memory, loss, and family. Her poems fill me with lament and longing for lost lineages and  introduce me to parts of myself that I’ve either disconnected with or forgotten.

A book I have become obsessed with is Denison Avenue, a short novel by Christina Wong, illustrated by Daniel Innes. The format itself is groundbreaking, as one side of the book is the novel in text, and the other side of the book is inked artwork retelling the novel’s story.

One of my favorite reads of the year thus far has been Kala by Colin Walsh. This is a mystery/thriller set in Ireland. This book is full of vivid descriptions that transport the reader to the heart of the novel.

If The Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division eloped to Turkey, She Past Away would be their lovechild. For those of us who came of age in Montreal’s dimly lit sanctuaries like Passeport and Saphir, this band is muscle memory, equal parts black eyeliner and existential dread, and it brings us back to nights under red lights, wrapped in fog, where the bassline thrummed like a pulse beneath the skin, and the dance floor was the only place we belonged. Those nights are long behind me now, but hearing She Past Away’s post-punk sounds in my father tongue feels like a homecoming.