Love is a many wonderous thing—familial love, friendships, confidants, mentors, aromantic, and intimate relationships. So in celebration of all types of love, hunker down with a book about love.
Body Music (Arsenal Pulp Press) by Julie Maroh, is 21 vignettes that create a beautiful and moving meditation on love and desire as expressed in many different forms—between women, between men, between women and men and gender non-conformists alike, all varying in age and race. From the author of Blue Is the Warmest Color, Body Music is a beautiful, bittersweet graphic novel on the complexities of love.
In Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups and Downs of Marriage (Caitlin Press), edited by Fiona Tinwei Lam & Jane Silcott, 37 contributors explore how marriage and committed relationships have challenged, shaped, supported and changed them. From everyday conflicts to deep philosophical divides, the wide-ranging personal stories and poems in Love Me True are sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, and always engaging as they offer their intimate and varied insights into the complex state that is marriage.
Catch Fiona Tinwei Lam, Jane Silcott, Kevin Chong, and Mandy Len Catron at the Vancouver Writers Fest’s Incite event tonight, February 14.
Save the date on February 28 for the Vancouver book launch of Love Me True, with more than a dozen of the contributors.
A Queer Love Story: The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout (UBC Press) edited by Marilyn Schuster, showcases not only two incisive minds in intimate dialogue but also, more largely, how members of the queer community worked together to build ties of love and friendship amidst intolerance and outright hostility.
Read an exclusive excerpt here
Rom Com (Talonbooks) by poet dream-team Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli mine the conventions and content of romantic comedies to create playful, weird, and comedic poems. These poems deconstruct as well as engage in dialogue with rom-coms in all their pop-culture cliché goodness.
You Hold Me Up (Orca Book Publishers) by Monique Gray Smith and illustrator Danielle Daniel, is a beautifully illustrated picture book that encourages children to show love and support for each other and to consider each other’s well-being in their everyday actions. Monique Gray Smith wrote You Hold Me Up to prompt a dialogue—among young people, their care providers and educators—about reconciliation and the importance of the connections children make with their friends, classmates and families.