Anxious Kid Makes Pretty Good (Rona Altrows) is a candid, often wry collection of essays tracing one woman’s life with high anxiety, ADHD, and recurring depression-and the winding, determined path that eventually leads to a vocation as writer and editor. After years of earnest but unfulfilling jobs, she discovers that the very traits that once felt burdensome have become part of her creative engine. Told in two parts, the first offers a memoir-“All Day Long I Wondered”-chronicling the author’s struggles, stumbles, and small triumphs. The second, “Messy Process Does Not Mean Messy Result,” gathers hard-won reflections on writing and the writing life, delivered with clarity, empathy, and humour. Both writers and non-writers alike will find insight, encouragement, and recognition in these pages.

In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick’s “accidental memoir of a sort,” the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions—volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high school plays, Christmas villages, love—out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminiscent of the three Davids—Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace—these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life—quiet and desperate as it may at times be—worth celebrating.

In never-before-collected essays and new poems, poet and kêhtê-aya (Elder) Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer tells the story of how she woke up from the trauma of separation and found the source of her inspiration: her culture and the land. In Cree, inspiration is described as a sudden insight. It can come from visits from spirit, from the charged reciprocal experience of being taught by Elders and teaching the next generation, from speaking Cree, which allows the poet to “somersault into memory,” and from the practice of observing and being in relationship with the land as it “constantly gives birth to itself.” wîhtamawik/ Tell Them is a stunning love song to nêhiýaw ways of knowing—ways which Halfe has spent her life working to reclaim from the violence of colonization—to celebrate their survival and share their enduring teachings with future generations.

Stock photographs are everywhere. With their contrived poses, unusual angles, and bizarre visual metaphors, they’re instantly familiar – and familiarly narrow in their vision of our society. Their ubiquity shapes and reinforces the biases, privilege, and stereotypes of their distinct aesthetic. From found poems using metadata and keywords to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like ‘Good Mother Morning Family Happy,’ ‘Beautiful Woman Eating Salad,’ and ‘Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded,’ Delisle’s ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography’s clichés and delight in all its strangeness, while casting a critical eye on its representations of women.