When I moved to Edmonton, Canada from Jilava, Romania in elementary school, I felt so much pressure to assimilate that within a few years, I almost completely lost the capacity to express myself in my mother tongue. Since then, I’ve felt this desperate dor, or longing, for limba română.

My mother tries to translate it on the phone:

Harnică means you’re vrednică.
You’re pricepută, îndemânatică, dibace.
You work with spor.
Muncești cu râvnă.
Lucrezi cu zel.

For me, a poem is "finished" when it flows so smoothly that lines will randomly pop into my consciousness like catchy song lyrics. I know it's time to step away from the page when everytime I make a change, no matter how minor, I revert back to the original.

Between the day in June when Mrs. Harrison booked her death 

and the day in July when the doctor came, 

she grew heavy in the hospital 

on twelve last suppers.

Love felled her like a tree
a robin’s egg in a windstorm
a pretty blue thing
a gift of spring.

The whole of The Blue Gate weaves threads of love and loss. But in the long central section, where I’m thrust into grief, reality ravels and unravels. Death destabilizes, throws one into a space and time that is unknowable. I move physically into an unknown country but emotionally hold close to what is lost. In this time of transformation, I walk in two simultaneous realities. 

T’oyaxsut’nuun, I really appreciate the question and I would like to answer it but I have to be honest, I, luckily, have not been touched by the loss of a loved one on the highway of tears. I wish everyday for the safety of my family that lives along the highway, my friends, my loved ones. I really wish for the safety of all Indigenous people along the highway of tears.

According to Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine, a periodical currently soliciting online reviews of Canadian books: “it's not really worth your time to write a negative review. What’s the point? It’ll be more enjoyable for you and for us to write a kind and positive review and it may even facilitate a dialogue with the author you’re reviewing.”

Such rhetoric is prevalent in the reviewing realms and shall I say, brutally simplifies the reason why reviews are written, while indubitably patronizing authors who are deemed to be so ultra-sensitive that they cannot handle a real critique of their work, one balanced between grounded praise and articulate and respectful attention to what might need reassessment.

Writing this novel, and thinking about it in the ramp up to its publication date, has done all of these things. Researching forest fires especially, I sometimes felt like River does watching clips and news stories about the fire that puts his mom on evacuation alert, sadness “like a log across his chest,” and I’d struggle with what can seem like an inevitability, that “from now on things [will] just get worse and worse.” There is a lot of climate grief in The Fall-Down Effect. Characters reflect on the increasing frequency and severity of forest fires; activist and government-worker characters alike feel, at times, defeated when they think of the environmental and climate costs of the logging industry; parents worry about the world their children will inherit. And yet, at the same time, each of the characters also tend to and preserve their hope for and connection to the natural world. None of them are going to quit caring for and about the planet. None of them will give up the fight and there’s nothing they can do.

Although a collection of minimalist poems (or one long poem composed of minimalist fragments), Wound Archive has a lengthy origin story. In 2016-2017, I was a Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I was researching instances of Holocaust survivors reading poems as part of their testimonies and was deeply invested in exploring the place poetry held in survivor testimony.

The sea wept with Rhys, each wave breaking like a breath he couldn’t catch. Clouds aglow in pink and orange stretched above the western coast of Lanilia. Dawn over the Wilnayan Sea always echoed the blush of succulent fruit to him. Memories bloomed on his tongue, of the sharp, citrusy bursts of sunpearls and the lingering, spiced warmth of mourningberries. Rhys stood, motionless, clutching the flower bud in his hand, rubbing its soft petals. He wondered if he would soon forget the taste of his favourite fruits as well.

It was like laying beams in the dark, trying to trust that something will hold even though I could not see or understand the entire structure yet. There was a tenacious fear that I was imagining incorrectly, that I was misunderstanding my own creation, and mistaking whim for truth.

2026 is well underway with spring fast approaching, and there have already been lots of great books by small presses released to start off the year. But there are plenty more coming out soon and it’s never too late to add to your reading challenge, whether you’ve set an official one on Goodreads, joining many other avid readers, or something more casual, such as a list of titles you’ve been meaning to get to before the year is out. However you like to enjoy your reading, without further ado, here are 10 books published by Canadian small presses that you should consider adding to your 2026 reading challenge, and why they deserve to be there. 

Fresh loroco, importing banned. Oblong 

little smugglers, edible blossoms, green-

sheathed, pale inside. Insipid. Pandemic 

first date in rain. Sipping cheap white wine from 

a pink plastic cup, SLUT scrawled across the 

bus shelter. I text a friend a selfie. 

Ishtanu (call him Stan) is a Hittite immortal keeping his head down in Toronto and recounting some of his experiences. Tróán is an immortal Trojan princess who thought she’d killed Stan in post-war Berlin but who now knows he survived. Yes, technically Stan can die. He has just managed not to for 3200 years.

Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis,How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2025) re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza’s grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation.

This story begins in 2022, Padua, midwinter. Across the city a debate is raging. It concerns a woman whose name I only recently learned: Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman in the world to earn a Ph.D. City councillors Margherita Colonnello and Simone Pillitteri have proposed to place a statue of Piscopia in the town square — a notable historical woman to join the effigies of notable historical men. This suggestion has sparked outrage across the country.

Let us accept the crowd-fostered confusion of person. Let us precariously enjoy the close-call near-cliché which hugs us with homely familiarity: are we nearly there yet?  Let us reconsider the title: The Character Actor Convention. Convention – is this the only  Convention we may find? Or not?

STAN ON GUARD is meticulously well-researched, but Wilson never lets historical fact get in the way of a wildly inventive, absurdist romp -- each period pitstop is a novella unto itself.

River travelled softly along the boundary line between sleep and waking. Somewhere off to the side, he was aware of Mom and his sisters talking, the motion of the car. But he was also wandering through a deep dark wood, looking for Fern. Someone or something had taken her. He couldn’t see the sky through the tree canopy and didn’t know if it was day or night. He just knew he had to find her. Looking up from the long, shadowy path ahead of him, he watched a giant cedar slowly tip and fall across his way, its roots tearing out of the ground in horrifying silence. He woke with a start. The car was turning off the highway.