Best of Non-fiction, selected by Phillip Dwight Morgan
The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memoir, by Vinh Nguyen
(HarperCollins, 2025)
Borrowing its title from a poem by Lee Young-Li, Vinh Nguyen’s The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse has generated a lot of buzz among bibliophiles and for good reason. Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust for Nonfiction, this memoir recounts Nguyen’s family’s escape from Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War to a refugee camp in Thailand and, later, Canada. Nguyen’s father stays behind in Vietnam, as the family makes their journey, and later disappears without a trace, leaving Nguyen to find answers among many fragmented memories and stories. Nguyen’s prose is delicate and tender, and beautifully showcases the stylistic and narrative possibilities of the memoir genre.
Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
(Alchemy by Knopf Canada, 2025)
For nearly two decades, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg poet, scholar, philosopher and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has produced works that challenge audiences to unsettle their assumptions and to look at the world through fresh eyes. With Theory of Water, Simpson not only reflects upon her own relationship to water, or “Nibi,” but also considers the many lessons that can be learned from it, particularly as relates to Indigenous internationalism. The theory of Nibi, Simpson writes, “asks us to ground ourselves intimately in land and place, and relate that grounding to other movements, geographies, cultures, and lands.” Imagistic, meditative, and personal, Theory of Water combines Simpson’s incisive political analysis with her rich poetics.
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, by Marcello Di Cintio
(Biblioasis, 2025)
In 2023, a UN expert described Canada’s temporary foreign worker program as “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” In Precarious, Canadian writer Marcello Di Cintio collects stories from migrant workers to capture in shocking detail the harsh conditions they face in their daily lives. While Di Cintio expected over the course of his research to learn of the difficult conditions that prompted the workers to leave their home countries, he did not expect Canada to so frequently and consistently be the source of the migrants’ trauma. “Nearly every worker I spoke to had been done wrong. Cheated. Threatened. Beaten,” he writes, adding “the abuse nearly always came at the hands of my fellow citizens.” Carefully researched and well-written, Precarious is an important and sobering look at a fundamental yet often overlooked aspect of Canada’s economy and culture.
Best of Fiction, selected by Liz Johnston
As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, edited by Terese Mason Pierre
(House of Anansi, 2025)
In this anthology of Black Canadian speculative fiction, each story is a world. Some are just a tear in space-time or a flying carpet away from our own. Others transport us to ghost realms or dystopic futures where people have their memories harvested, or are rescued from death only to spend their afterlives enslaved by techno-capitalists. Across this collection, many characters long for their mothers. Mothers die, or have their children stolen, or leave those children behind. In one story, a character named Ravenous awaits her mother’s resurrection. Another begins, “Hallelujah is a ravenous woman.” Hunger takes many shapes across these stories, from a yearning for half-remembered chocolate ice cream to the allure of roasted breadfruit. In story after story, traditions or powers that have been interrupted — the ability to fly or cast spells — are reclaimed. As the Earth Dreams is expansive and moving, a must-read.
To Place a Rabbit, by Madhur Anand
(Knopf Canada, 2025)
Each chapter of the debut novel from Canadian writer Madhur Anand contains three sections: U, where our narrator, a scientist-cum-writer, meets a novelist at a literary festival and decides to translate a novella of hers back into English; Deux, which replicates that translation, also a work of autofiction set in the world of literary conferences and residencies; and Trois, the narrator’s reflections on her romance with a French biologist she met during a fellowship in the Netherlands many years before. Ideas and images bounce between these three different sections; a skirt with overlapping polka dots, a field of poppies, and a reference to Stendhal syndrome triangulate to lead us deeper into these characters’ yearnings and regrets. Intellectually satisfying as it plays with ideas about science, life, art and translation, the novel also explores the shapes of human relationships with deep feeling.
The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien
(Knopf Canada, 2025)
“I want to love this world as a person loves their home,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt thinks in Madeleine Thien’s virtuosic new novel, her first in nearly a decade. Arendt is one of three historical figures — three “adventurers” as Thien put its — along with Tang dynasty poet Du Fu and Enlightenment philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose stories keep young Lina company while she and her father, refugees from China, stay in a mysterious “building made of time” called the Sea. All three figures lived through catastrophe, and their stories of struggle and survival live on through Lina’s neighbours in the Sea. Threaded with many moments of friendship, bravery and kindness, The Book of Record knits these stories together, along with Lina’s own, which is freighted by the betrayal that split her family in two, and gives the reader something beautiful to hold on to, to love.
Best of Poetry, selected by Jody Chan
TERROR COUNTER, by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
(Deep Vellum, 2025)
This emphatic and rigorous collection of poetry by Palestinian performance artist Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is filled with political and ethical critiques — against empire, against genocide, against the publishing industry itself— that ring clear on every page. TERROR COUNTER is a confrontation with every oily, corrupt tenet of the present we live in. Equally, it is a dedication to Palestinians, the people who love them, and the people they love. Frequently irreverent, and undeniably brilliant, TERROR COUNTER tells us: “THE NAME OF THE FEAR IN YOUR HEART IS PALESTINE! LET IT EAT YOUR SPIRIT WHOLE!” In this debut collection, Tbakhi reminds us of language’s limitations and asserts Palestinian liberation as a horizon of struggle; an all-caps, ecstatic futurism.
Crowd Source, by Cecily Nicholson
(Talonbooks, 2025)
In a recent conversation with Michael Nardone, poet and educator Cecily Nicholson spoke of being bored with the self as the sole subject of poetry; of the necessity of grounding poetry in the real. Here, Nicholson applies her capacious, multi-dimensional imagination to the covenly world of crows. Her language dances like light on water, moving from corvid facts to industrial history, from formal play to anti-colonial instruction, ever restless and shimmering. Nicholson employs mischief as a texture of movement; collective responsibility as a pathway to embodiment. This book is not meant to be just read, but practised.
Notes from the Ward, by Steffi Tad-y
(Gordon Hill Press, 2025)
Almost unbearably open-hearted, the second poetry collection from Steffi Tad-y, a disabled artist and writer from the Philippines, cracks open illness’ door to roam its internal truths, its shared intimacies. A series of numbered poems titled “Notes from the Ward” offers crystalline lyrical observations of madness’ daily motions and the care of others, which Tad-y reflects back tenfold. Short lines create a feeling of mental and emotional space, as friends and family members and fellow patients flit in and out of the pages. One of my favourite poems asks: “How do I extend myself some love? When do I rest into the we?”“We laugh,” it responds, “& castigation hums to a close.”
Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, edited by Edmund Ghareeb and Naseer Aruri
(Seven Stories, 2025)
This collection is built around a poem of the same name, “Enemy of the Sun,” penned by Palestinian resistance poet Samih al-Qasim. The poem was, famously, mistakenly attributed to George Jackson after a handwritten copy of it was found in the revolutionary’s cell following his 1971 assassination by San Quentin prison guards and the state. This is your radical organizing group’s next heirloom, a symbol of Black-Palestinian solidarities, revived after decades, dog-eared and passed from hand to hand.
Bios
Liz Johnston’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Poets & Writers, and Grain, among other publications. Her first novel, The Fall-Down Effect, comes out next spring from Book*hug Press.
Jody Chan is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, care worker, and community organizer based in Toronto.
