In Ayaz Pirani's debut collection of stories, Death to America, he doesn't try to straighten a dog's tail. His stories are the frays on Empire's fringe, and his colored characters navigate a perennially perfidious Albion.

In the first story, 'Battle of Waterloo, ' Danju is obliged to choose sides in the struggle between disco and rock and roll, and in the last story, 'Brief Survey of Coloreds in the Rift Valley, ' Nunu's feeble crush on his grade-school librarian spins out a second post-colonial yarn. The youngster Aqbal, in 'The Lyric, ' is rescued by racism, and in 'They've Forgotten That I'm Not There, ' the small-time fence, Mohan, observes the narrow path. And sometimes you get to start over, as Gently discovers in 'Kitchener, née Berlin.' Other characters include Arf, Fruq, Eerfal, Salty, the East African dandies Sur and Nur, and the sparring teenagers Umed and Frenni.

With economy and a taste for the oddball's angle, Ayaz Pirani makes the peculiar quotidian. He draws from Ismaili ginans and granths, and the Indo-Pak heritage of story-telling, oral poetry, and old-fashioned one-liners.

Starting with the reflecting pool beneath the Unicorn Amphitheatre on Isola Bella, Poems for a Phantom Lover pairs a selection of short poems with photographs culled from decades' worth of research into the structure and symbolism of historic gardens, a study that has led Jennifer Dickson to question conventional assumptions about the place of gender identity and sexual role-play in the vivisection of an earthly paradise.

In the collection, sunlight caresses the timeworn fountains, pagodas and loggias populated by gods and idols, while ill winds rasp among the altars and monuments whose stones are steeped in blood. These are gardens of desire, of longing and betrayal, where torment festers under the flagstones and the wounds of love / are suppurating stone.'

A traumatized young man steps away from his protective family and embarks on a transformative two-month stint as a tree planter in Northern Ontario. There he seeks comfort and healing in new friends, a mix-tape and letters to his dead brother.

In D.A. Lockhart's Breaking Right ordinary Hoosiers experience extraordinary moments that reveal the complicated correlations between their beliefs, their relationships and the land beneath their feet.

Affect is the surreal love story of a graduate student who, hyperaware of the absurdity of love in a universe where all is finite and death is inevitable, interprets the developing relationship through philosophy.

Bruce McDougall's skilful short stories sketch a warts-and-all portrait of humanity, illuminating the mysterious forces that drive people to behave in unique-and uniquely human-ways.

A story of travail and triumph, Mark Huebner's wordless novel Let Go follows a laid-off ad man struggling to carry the deadweight of his past as he labours through a blizzard toward an unknown future.

Sweet Lechery is Jeet Heer's wide-ranging collection of literary criticism, served with a twist of social commentary.

Tom Smart's Palookaville: Seth and the Art of Graphic Autobiography examines the construction self-identity and the wafer-thin distinction between fiction and autobiography in Canadian cartoonist Seth's Palookaville series of graphic novels.

Unwillingly, I've become part of the story. Questions lie when reconstructing incomplete facts, half-truths, enigmas. What remains is incompletion, interruption. Only the dead know what happened.'

In The Razor's Edge, Karl Jirgens presents a collection of interlinked fictions that inhabit halfway worlds between past and present, dream and actuality, science and divination. Ordinary daily activities and events lead to unexpected slides into lucid dreams and flirtations with the edge of madness. Drawing on literature and pop culture (from Cinderella and Hamlet to Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anthony Bourdain) as well as the history of twentieth-century genocides (including the Holocaust and the Gulag), these complex, magic realist stories suggest that what seems separate is really interconnected, that the distinction between past, present and future is illusion, and that we might all die of the truth if the truth were truly known.

In Anne Baldo's Morse Code for Romantics, patterns of life emerge-and break-in relationships both requited and otherwise. A restaurateur orchestrates a devious punishment for his wife's lover. A desperate mother searches for her missing daughter, a modern-day Persephone who was lured away by a sinister boyfriend. An islander falls under the spell of a visiting researcher, whose insidious smiles and natural sangfroid mirror the serpent-like sea monster he hunts.

These wistful, darkly surreal stories, set in Southern Ontario, suggest that maternal instinct is not just a chemical lie but something bloody and painful; that one person's clouds can rain on generations; and that true loneliness can be as clear as code written on a face, and as ominous as a dark, monstrous shape lurking beneath the surface.

In Out of the Dark, master engraver Wesley W. Bates presents a compilation of wood engravings that bring to life exquisite landscapes and arresting scenes, all rendered simply but powerfully in the deep back and stark white of the storied artistic technique.

The stories in Fordmates ricochet headlong between comedy and tragedy, balancing the tedium and gruelling demands of the automotive assembly line with the workers' gutsy attempts to preserve spirits and some semblance of sanity. Many of the stories revel in some unexpected small victory extracted from the daily routine, from the giddy foolishness of gloveball fights and improbable practical jokes to the terse satisfaction of outsmarting overbearing foremen. The persistent theme throughout remains the unbreakable spirit of the workers in the face of a relentless machine. In these linked stories, Ivo Moravec, himself a twenty-year veteran of the former St. Thomas Assembly plant, characterizes automotive factories as the source not only of Ford Crown Victorias and Mercury Grand Marquises but also of daydreams and paycheques, of philosophers and drug addicts, and of broken families and best mates.

Casting into Mystery celebrates the meditative sport of fly fishing, rejoicing in the camaraderie and quietude to be found not only in the gentle flow of river currents, but also in the community and culture of anglers past and present.

The driving impulse of Amy LeBlanc's new collection of poetry, I used to live here, is an examination of chronic illness, disability, and autoimmunity. The collection also aims to find moments of magic and ritual within the experience of illness and to find new metaphors for illness and autoimmunity that do not rely on militarization, self-cannibalism, or suicide. LeBlanc thinks deeply about autoimmunity and the poetic representations of the body that self-destructs and that cannot recognize itself? specifically, she asks: What does a body feel like when it doesn't feel like a home? What does it look like when a body self-destructs? How do we write through and about bodily doubt?

The second in a series of graphic novels edited for the Porcupine's Quill by wood engraver George A. Walker in which Walker encourages students at the Ontario College of Art & Design to embrace 19th century linocut printmaking techniques to create extended visual narratives which are then scanned, digitized, and subsequently printed offset for publication at popular prices in a format that uses 20th century offset printing technology to replicate the look and feel' of a 19th century letterpress product.

The Essential John Reibetanz provides a compelling view of the work of a deeply engaged poet whose exploratory syntax and probing imagery come together to form intense meditations on the nature of community and the transfigurative power of the imagination.