Stolen Plums
Alice Turski Montreal: Vehicule Press 2025 The poems in Alice Turski’s ravenous and playful Stolen Plums explore the ways we consume and are consumed by those we love and the histories they embody. Poignantly navigating uncertainties of self, country, and family, Turski contemplates the precarities of immigration, belonging, matrilineage, and marriage in unsparing language that straddles […]
Proximities: Literature, Mobility and the Politics of Displacement
John Culbert Liverpool: U of Liverpool Press 2025 As the era of high globalization has given way to a time of resurgent nationalisms, the discourse of travel has undergone significant change. The previous era’s keywords of freedom, mobility and connection increasingly vie with a language of borders, security and national identity. In this study of […]
Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance
Vin Nardizzi Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2025 John Gerard’s natural history of plants, The Herball (1597), is considered a failure in the history of science. Despite this reputation, it has endured as an aesthetic resource. Its illustrations were used as needlework patterns, and strewn across its pages are extracts of classical poetry, including Ovid’s […]
Teeth
Dallas Hunt Pender Harbour: Harbour Publishing 2024 This is a book about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines. Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. […]
The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter: Anthropology Upside Down
Richard Cavell Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press 2024 Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922-2011), shaped by an early encounter with Marshall McLuhan, was a renegade anthropologist who would plumb the connection between anthropology and media studies over a thoroughly unconventional career. As co-conspirators in the founding of the legendary journal Explorations (1953-59), Carpenter and McLuhan established the groundwork […]
Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France
edited by Nancy M. Frelick and Edith Benkov Toronto: ITER Press 2024 Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France brings together seventeen essays by established and emerging scholars to honour the exceptionally rich contributions and career of Colette H. Winn. The essays explore multiple perspectives on early modern women, including their writings, translations, reception, […]
Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English
Mo Pareles Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2024 Early English culture depended on a Judaism translated away from Jews. Revealing the importance of Jewish law to the workings of early Christian England, Nothing Pure presents a Jewish revision of the history of English Bible translation. The book illuminates the paradoxical process by which the abjection […]
On Cuddling Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace
Phanuel Antwi London: Pluto Press 2023 Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship’s hold to the racist encoding of ‘cuddly’ toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy. Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his […]
Pragmatics in the History of English
Laurel Brinton Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2023 How were you and thou used in Early Modern England? What were the typical ways of ordering others in Early Medieval England? How was the speech of others represented in the nineteenth-century novel? This volume answers these questions and more by providing an overview of the field of […]
Crip Negativity
J. Logan Smilges U of Minnesota Press 2023 Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows […]