Véhicule Press

States of Emergency

Yoyo Comay

States of Emergency is a book-length poem about the apocalyptic present, written in a language whose meaning is liquid and full of slippage, always spilling out from its container. In Yoyo Comay’s hands, words roil, churn, and surge. By taking on different mood and modes, from the prophetic to the colloquial, he has created a form that is a constant unravelling—a leap of faith into intuitive meaning, a letting go into ongoingness. “I am catapulted into where I am,” he writes, “and the air concusses around me.”

Comay sees poetry as a visceral experience: a state of immanence, embodiment, emergence, emergency. This is poetry as diary and seismograph, an infinite scroll for the end of days. It is a debut like no other.

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One Long Line of Marvel

Alan Hustak

There are parades and then there is Montreal’s St. Patrick’s parade, which has marched through the streets of the city and into Canadian history for 200 years. The street carnival has outlived the Patriote Rebellion of 1837, Fenian infiltration, Orange animosity, strained relationships among Roman Catholic priests who wanted it cancelled, two world wars, two Quebec independence referendums, and two centuries of howling March winds and chilling sub zero temperatures.

With One Long Line of Marvel veteran journalist Alan Hustak has dug up untold nuggets about the parade and nested them with historical certainty and an imaginative flourish in the setting of a Montreal that he knows. Although the author is not a son of Erin, he is considered an honorary Irishman and in 2006 walked the parade route as Chief Reviewing Officer. With this book he continues to honour Montreal’s Irish community by celebrating its personalities and by telling its stories. One Long Line of Marvel enlightens, entertains, amuses and perhaps above all superbly chronicles a long and worthwhile tradition in Montreal’s history.

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Whiteout

George Elliott Clarke

In Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness, his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke’s range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, “Africadian” community whose last home was razed in 1970.

For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”

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The Beginner’s Guide to Making Wine from Juice and Grapes

Daniel Pambianchi

From the author of Modern Home Winemaking and Techniques in Home Winemaking, Daniel Pambianchi’s The Beginner’s Guide to Making Wine from Juice and Grapes is for novices keen on making their own wine at home. It guides aspiring winemakers through the process, from crush to bottle, with step-by-step instructions using simple, modern techniques to craft consistently great wine. The book includes many illustrations, tables and examples to highlight the use of equipment and tools, and a comprehensive chapter dedicated to solving common winemaking problems.

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Because

Andrew Steinmetz

An engrossing punk-rock novel about teenage daydreams and sibling dynamics

Teenage brothers Hombre and Transformer spend their days locked up in their suburban Montreal bedroom, writing songs and dreaming of stardom. Hombre, the younger one, is quiet, contemplative, and talented, a poet in the making. His older brother Transformer is stubborn, domineering, and secretly struggling with mental health issues. Their sequestered world is broken open one summer when their mother hires Spit, a girl from the local guitar shop, to help the boys improve their modest skills. But these good intentions set off a chain reaction with tragic consequences.

Set in the early 80s, in a local music scene brimming with post-punk ethos and a disdain for classic rock, Because is a wry and charming depiction of a sibling relationship founded on feverish angst, unspoken admiration, jealousy, and the pursuit of the greatest song they can write from their own room.

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