Caitlin Press Summer Reading List

Lot
By Sarah de Leeuw

In Lot, award-winning poet and essayist Sarah de Leeuw returns to the landscape of her early girlhood to consider the racial complexities of colonial violence in those spaces. Following loosely as a companion to Skeena (Caitlin Press, 2015), Lot is written entirely of couplets, mirroring the two main islands of Haida Gwaii. 

Murders on the Skeena: True Crime in the Old Canadian West, 1884-1914
By Geoff Mynett

Part history, part true crime, Murders on the Skeena: True Crime in the Old Canadian West, 1884–1914 contains the true accounts of murders, crimes, and scandals—some of which remain unsolved to this day—in small-town northern British Columbia.

Deadly Neighbours: A Tale of Colonialism, Cattle Feuds, Murder and Vigilantes in the Far West
By Chad Reimer

Deadly Neighbours is a revealing and thoughtful examination of one of Canada’s most shocking and misunderstood moments of violence—the lynching of Louie Sam. Reimer reveals a complex and disturbing chronicle of the deadly grip the leading white settlers in Nooksack and Sumas held over the area—and most notably, over their Indigenous neighbours.

Breath, Like Water: An Anticolonial Romance
By Norah Bowman

Breath, Like Water blends poetry and natural history to simultaneously express a critique of colonial land ownership and celebrate the spirit of Okanagan Mountain. The narrator, a settler-colonial hiker, grapples with her attachment to the Okanagan Mountain alongside her desire to honour the LANDBACK movement of Indigenous peoples and the harmful history of white colonizers.

Worth More Growing: Young Poets and Activists Pay Homeage to Trees
Edited by Christine Lowther

Forthcoming in fall 2022! In Worth More Growing, youth from kindergarten through grade 12 share their love and respect for trees. Speaking to our changing climate, this new generation of old-growth defenders expresses their observations, anger, kinship, hope, and sorrow. Worth More Growing is a necessary anthology highlighting the importance of nature to a generation that will experience the ongoing consequences of climate change.

Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homeage to Trees
Edited by Christine Lowther

Poets, both settler and Indigenous, pay tribute to trees through reflections on the past, connections to the present, and calls for the protection of our future. Themes of connection, ecology, grief, and sustainability are explored through poems about trees and forests written by an impressive number of influential poets, several of whom have attended the recent Fairy Creek blockades and still others who defended old-growth ecosystems in Clayoquot Sound nearly 30 years ago.