In her compelling debut poetry collection, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award, Melissa Bull explores the familial, romantic, and sexual ties that bind lives to cities. Rue takes us through its alleys, parks, and kitchens with a robust lyricism and language that is at once inventive and plainspoken, compassionate and frank.
In English, to rue is to regret; in French, la rue is the street – Rue’s poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and motion. Punctuated with neologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the collection explores the author’s upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and loves across North America, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist father’s struggles with terminal brain cancer.
Inspired by powerful Quebec talents like Nelly Arcan, Marie-Sissy Labrèche, and playwright Annick Lefebvre, Melissa Bull brings an unflinching new feminist voice to the Canadian literary scene.
Melissa Bull is a writer, editor and translator based in Montreal. Her writing has been featured in Event, Matrix, Lemon Hound, Broken Pencil, The Montreal Review of Books, Playboy and Maisonneuve. She has translated such authors as Nelly Arcan, Kim Thuy, Evelyne de la Chenliere, Raymond Bock, Alexandre Soubliere and Maude Smith Gagnon for various publications. Melissa has a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She is the 2013 winner of CBC's Hyperlocal Award, and her translation of Nelly Arcan's last collection of writing, Burqa of Skin, was published in the fall of 2014.

When a group of counsellors from the city book the family’s B&B for the summer to prepare for a special wedding ceremony, Lydia’s plans to never thread a needle again are challenged. Through the one thing she cannot live without, the counsellors lure Lydia into a role she did not see coming — her self.
The Incomparables is a novel about ambition, betrayal, “failure,” love, family dynamics, how we deal with societal, family, and personal expectations, and how we come to accept who we are.
Alexandra Leggat is the author of the short story collections Animal (shortlisted for the Trillium Award), Meet Me in the Parking Lot, and Pull Gently, Tear Here (nominated for the Danuta Gleed First Fiction Award). She is also the author of the poetry collection This is me since yesterday. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in journals across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. The Incomparables (Anvil Press, 2014) is her first novel.

Alternating between Emily’s life as a
child and her adult life in the city, Watch How We Walk offers a
haunting, cutting exploration of “disfellowshipping,” proselytization, and
cultural abstinence, as well as the Jehovah’s Witness attitude towards the
“worldlings” outside of their faith. Sparse, vivid, suspenseful, and darkly
humorous, Jennifer LoveGrove’s debut novel is an emotional and visceral look
inside an isolationist religion through the eyes of an unforgettable
protagonist.
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Credit: Sharon Harris |