Arsenal Pulp Press

Staying Power, Zena Sharman''s memoir in essays, is a beautiful and honest journey of care work, grief, parenting, and chosen family in the wake of intergenerational trauma. Exploring the lessons and inheritances of being raised by survivors of complex traumas, the book challenges the notion that one must be healed in order to parent well and celebrates the transformative power of queer family-making beyond gay marriage and assimilation into the nuclear family. The book, which recounts the author''s experiences of raising three children in a four-parent queer family, asks, ''If leaving has helped you survive, how do you learn to stay?'' Sharman finds answers in queer kinship, femme erotics, leatherdyke lineages, and the radical possibilities inherent in doing mother work outside of motherhood, recognizing that sometimes you fight the thing you want most. Staying Power is a moving, deeply personal account of one person''s journey of unlearning independence through an experiment in queer collective care.

A lesbian mother feels out of place taking her daughter to a princess party; a gay couple turns to unconventional means to create their baby; a grieving man winds up on a date with a centaur; an agoraphobic must make an impossible choice before time runs out. This is the unnerving world of Runs in the Blood, Matthew J. Trafford''s story collection, and it pulses with humour, anxiety, and profound disquiet. Darkly satirical and unflinchingly human, the stories of Runs in the Blood unsettle our notions of family, whether biological or chosen. Careening through the space beyond nature versus nurture, its characters - betrayed, wounded, unequipped - wrangle with their own worst instincts and the grotesqueries of the modern world, attempting to create families worth holding on to and to protect the children they love. Delightful and disarming, odd and audacious, Runs in the Blood reveals the work of a bold and fearless writer.

Crohnic is a brilliant and moving collection of poems that asks, what is the landscape of a medicated life? From their convalescence in a room that overlooks the North Saskatchewan River, author Jason Purcell thinks ecologically with medical records, prescriptions, and dosages, staying attuned to place and to what it might mean to live a life relying on something - in this case, an interminable course of medication - that hurts you in some ways to help you in others. How does the terrain of life change? Crohnic charts two years of Purcell''s treatment for Crohn''s disease, journeying from hospital rooms to bogs and muskeg, places where life and death intermingle and create the conditions for one another''s flourishing. This is a world populated by coyotes, ermines, steroids, pine, infusion drips, moss, pills, and ice. These other-than-human beings come together in Crohnic, coalescing into relations that together form a personal narrative of the management of chronic illness.

Navigating life as a neurodivergent, non-binary person, Alex Manley explores their dislocations from the norm as part of a relentlessly personal journey, as seen through the variety of lenses that have defined them. Post-Man delves into the ways in which Manley has always felt apart, alone, and othered, the ways in which they felt there was something wrong with them. In adulthood they came to recognize they were someone with depression, anxiety, ADHD, and possibly more, someone who existed outside the neat binary of gender that modern society imposes on us. These facets of personality have been consistent and undeniable presences in the author''s life, slowly and ineluctably making their way to the surface. Post-Man takes the reader through the stultifying machismo of hockey culture, the thrilling rule-breaking of jaywalking, the improbable job of working for a men''s website, the strange unpleasantness of going bald as a non-binary person, and more, each essay digging down into the meat of these experiences in search for its beating heart.

When it was first published in 2018, Gord Hill''s The Antifa Comic Book was heralded for its searing imagery documenting the history of fascism and anti-fascist movements over the last century. In the years since its publication, the term ''antifa'' has been co-opted by the right to falsely describe far-left political extremism and even terrorism. But the role played by antifa movements in fighting fascism and racism around the world remains as relevant and important as ever. For this expanded edition, Gord Hill adds new material depicting more recent flashpoints of fascist activity, including the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack, the murderous spree by Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, the infamous 2022 Canadian convoy protests, and Islamophobic and anti-migrant sentiment in a growing number of fascist governments in Europe. At the same time, Hill depicts the important work being done by anti-fascist individuals and organizations to combat this worrisome trend, made all the more crucial by Donald Trump''s return to the White House. Powerful and inspiring, The Antifa Comic Book is an important reminder of fascism in our midst and what can be done to stop it. The book includes a new introduction by Mark Bray, historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.

Of Floating Isles is a captivating collection of personal essays that unpack the mystifying and often intimate roles that video games play in our lives. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, Kawika Guillermo explores the subtle yet transformative influences of video games in shaping them as a queer and mixed-race grandson of two preachers; as a traveller, immigrant, and games scholar; and as a father, caretaker, and mourner. Through a mixture of fanciful musing, rigorous inquiry, and unflinching self-reflection, Of Floating Isles reframes the gamer''s retreat from others not as social isolation, but as a quest for a different community, one where they feel seen, heard, and understood. This deep-seated longing to belong, Guillermo suggests, forms the imaginative worlds of video games and the floating isles they conjure. By exploring his own lifelong attachment to video games, Guillermo shows how they can spark rage, confusion, and the desire to escape, but these emotions are not necessarily bad - they are the growing pains that many young people must work through. So too can games provide reflective realms to dwell, to imagine, and to build spaces for queer, trans, racialized, and neurodiverse groups. Envisioning games as forms of poetic interaction, Of Floating Isles boldly conveys their truth-telling powers: their ability to offer guidance in times of loss and hardship, and their power to reveal the oppressive mechanisms of our ''real'' world.

When Eddy meets his grandfather for the first time, he''s surprised by Yeye''s colourful personality. Without warning, Yeye takes Eddy on an adventure to show him the magical world of shadow puppets, exploring this ancient art form and how it brings joy to people even today. Eddy lets go of self-doubt as he learns to make his own shadow puppets and then teaches his classmates how to do so, as well. With Yeye''s help, Eddy and his friends begin to appreciate the rich history and power of art. Eddy''s Shadow Puppets is a heartwarming tale about how we can all be artists, sharing our passion with others.

Lotus flowers, youthful hunger, and other temporary beauties intertwine to tell this coming-of-age story, a set of pulsating poems that move toward a distant memory or a flaming future. Kyo Lee''s intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope. i cut my tongue on a broken country explores the Asian American diaspora, queerness, girlhood, and the relationships between and within them, pushing and pulling on the boundaries of identity and language like a story trying to tell itself. i cut my tongue on a broken country documents a search for love. It''s a eulogy for the things we gave up to get here. It''s an ode to tenderness. It blossoms and bleeds in your hands.

Sixteen-year-old Mira Durand has just been checked into the Residency Adolescent Treatment Centre for obsessive compulsive and comorbid disorders. Four years of being passed around different psych wards like a hot potato have only worsened her OCD and anorexia. Her brutal, religious compulsions, which she believes keep her mom safe, make her less of a clean freak and more of a freak freak. No wonder her only friend is her journal. At the Residency''s Ward Two, Mira discovers that her shrink is a fellow fantasy nerd and that her wardmates have enough of their own high-risk behaviours to tolerate hers. The complex friendships she forms with them, including a first love, the slow trust she builds with her treatment team, and the outside and family visits she earns give her things to look forward to beyond the drudgery of her compulsions. But it takes visiting Gung-Gung, her dying maternal grandfather, for her to realize that to truly live, she must fight the cognitive distortions at the heart of her compulsions.

On May 28, 1914, the RMS Empress of Ireland began her 192nd trip across the Atlantic from Quebec City, Canada, en route to Liverpool, England, carrying 1,057 passengers and a crew of 420. In the early hours of May 29, fog descended on the St. Lawrence River, and the ocean liner was rammed by the Storstad, a Norwegian coal ship. In the fourteen minutes it took for the Empress of Ireland to sink, there was time to launch only four of the forty lifeboats, and rather than women and children first, it was everyone for themselves. Over a thousand people died that night, claiming the lives of more passengers than either the Titanic or the Lusitania, and the tragedy stands as the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history. Investigative journalist and author Eve Lazarus draws on a trove of historical documents, including small-town newspaper reports, the Wreck Commissioner''s Inquiry, and first-hand accounts passed down through personal letters and family lore, to tell the story of the wreck and its aftermath through the eyes of the Canadian survivors. Through these records, as well as interviews with experts and descendants of the passengers, Lazarus recounts the story from both a Canadian and a Norwegian perspective and investigates why many of the stories regurgitated in newspapers and books for over a hundred years are wrong. The result is an absorbing and utterly stirring narrative that uncovers stories of heroism and sacrifice, human endurance, and modern-day shipwreck hunters. Beneath Dark Waters is an epic narrative that restores the Empress of Ireland - largely forgotten in the shadow of the Titanic disaster - as well as its survivors and victims to their rightful place in maritime history.

a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery. In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.

In Islamabad in 2018, Pakistani investigative journalist Taha Siddiqui is kidnapped at gunpoint and barely escapes being killed. He flees the country on the first plane to France with questions left unanswered: What motivated the attack? Was the tyrannical Pakistani military involved? The Dissident Club is an action-packed graphic memoir about Islamic politics, complex family dynamics, and one man''s dedication to truth and principle. With illustrator Hubert Maury, Siddiqui, winner of the prestigious journalism award Prix Albert Londres, tells the story of his intriguing life and career, beginning with his childhood in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan under the stern gaze of a fundamentalist Islamic father. Taha rebels against his religion, but his personal freedom is constrained by strict Islam, especially after his father joins a jihadi mosque. Following the Gulf War and then the shock caused by 9/11, Taha enters university and begins his personal emancipation. He becomes a journalist, but as he reveals the crimes of the Pakistani military, he learns the hard way that journalists are moving targets. Once in Paris, he opens the Dissident Club, a bar dedicated to helping political dissidents from around the world. An expansive Pakistani coming-of-age story, The Dissident Club documents Taha''s experiences as a young man fighting for truth and justice against the harsh backdrop of Islamic fundamentalism and corruption.