ZED Press

"The heart. Beats."

Hanan Hazime's chapbook "Aorta" searches every definition of heart, explores the meaning and method of the object and the symbol, hoping to find an answer to the way pain and pleasure digs its way into people. Hazime re-maps the heart, re-explores the rhythms, and leaves the reader listening to their own heart beat.

Bound tête-bêche (head-to-toe, like reversible bilingual books), ERE creates a strange loop of regret & reflection.

Simina Banu is a Canadian poet whose interests lie at the intersection of consumerism, technology and mental health. In 2020, she published her debut full-length collection, POP (Coach House Books), which won the 2021 ReLit Award for poetry. She has published several other chapbooks: where art (words(on)pages), Tomorrow, adagio (above/ground), and harmony in Beach Foam (Anstruther Press).

Amilcar John Nogueira is a poet and settler from Windsor, Ontario. They received their MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor. Their short story “Felix and the Light” won the 2018 Canadian Authors Association Niagara Region 10 Stories High Contest. ERE is their first chapbook.

"your ashes have been reassembled into your descendants.
[…]the birds lift your blood 
while taking flight"

Some people bury their grief; Rena Su excavates hers, digging up bone after bone to assemble the skeletons of the dead. In "Preparing Dinosaurs for Mass Extinction," Su explores death as an extinction event that buries the living as well as the dead.  Read as Su digs herself out, examining the monuments we create to the dead, observing how memories turn to sand with their bodies, and sending fruitless warnings back through time.

Rena Su is a writer from Vancouver(ish) and writes a little too frequently about dinosaurs, cyborgs, and offbeat pop culture references. Her work has been recognized by the Pulitzer Centre, The Poetry Society of UK, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, among others. When not writing, Rena enjoys coding impractical things, watching documentaries, and playing the ukulele. She thanks you for stumbling across the vast expanses of the literary world and landing on her debut chapbook.

"First we deprive the host of lilac
And turmeric until her antibodies
Dwindle and shrink"

A body at war is a beautiful terrible thing, a body at war with itself even more so. Both grotesque and picturesque, Amy LeBlanc’s "Undead Juliet at the Museum" laces together the weight of isolation, a healthy skepticism of “miracle cures”, and portraits of the “monstrous” women who have come before into a folkloric rendering of one woman’s journey with chronic illness. The delicate bodies of LeBlanc’s poems leave the reader with an ache in their ribs and a taste for the sublime.

Amy LeBlanc is the Managing Editor at filling Station magazine. Amy’s debut poetry collection, "I know something you don’t know" (Gordon Hill Press 2020) was long listed for the 2021 ReLit Award and was selected as a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Her novella, "Unlocking," was published by the University of Calgary Press in June 2021. Her work has appeared in Room, CV2, PRISM International, and the Literary Review of Canada among others. Amy is a recipient of the 2020 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and has been a finalist for an Alberta Magazine Publishers’ Association showcase award for poetry. "Undead Juliet at the Museum" is her third chapbook.

"I enter the lighthouse
megalamp beam loop. There is care in illumination. I think illumination
is loving. I think
I’m sweeping for something
in the wide hidden ocean."

In Cristina Holman’s "Repeater," words are both escape from and reinforcement of anxieties. Holman navigates through thought loops constant and unending, and images that return back over and over. Fear is at the forefront, but by the end this fear is a pathway out, is washed away as we are washed away by the words.

Cristina Holman lives and writes on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She was a participant in the 2017/18 Artspeak Studio for Emerging Writers and the 2018 Banff Centre Emerging Writers Intensive. Her debut chapbook, published with Artspeak Gallery in 2018, is titled "Stop Wincing/We’re Fine". Her work can be found in Bad Nudes magazine and Poetry is Dead.

"I am twenty six but still
unborn my umbilical cord a root
when I’m ready slice release
me into our one dream"

From the streets of Selkirk to the “malevolent prairie,” Shawn Adrian’s Metis "head birth & one hundred heads hydra" merges mythology, religion, and the Manitoba landscape to explore the slice of life of its narrator. Adrian leans into the land’s uneasiness and violence seeking moments of peace and calm, those “highs/ lined with laughter.” In these poems, Adrian shows spaces where we can find resilience.

Shawn Adrian is a Metis writer currently living in Selkirk, Manitoba. In 2018, he graduated from The University of Winnipeg, where he worked toward a B.A. in English with a specialization in creative writing. During his time in university, he received the Joan Baragar Scholarship in English. He was also selected for the Sheldon Oberman Mentorship Program by the Manitoba Writers Guild. Among other identities, he’s been called a student, an athlete, an employee, a friend, an uncle, a brother, and a son.

Where does one go from here? Where does one start? Jess Nicol’s "Can I Ask You a Question?" shoots through the scattered questions of two women waiting waiting waiting in a healthcare centre, trying to figure out the answer when all they can do is continue questioning. Swept away thinking about everything in their lives, this chapbook bounces and introspects, interrogates the choices that led up to their moments in the centre. Their thoughts blend and fly into one another barraging unrelentingly.

Some boys howl. Some boys wake up in liquor stained hotel rooms. Some boys find themselves bathed in neon. And some boys don’t. "bottle rockets," a chapbook by Orlando based writer Ryan Skaryd, weaves a non traditional coming of age narrative which confronts the crafting of self within the queer community and today’s volatile cultural climate. From childhood bathroom, to college dorm bed, to club entrances; Skaryd paints an evocative portrait of the oft messy and always electric road one walks to settle into their own skin.

“Some questionnaires can only be taken together.” Bechdel, Turing, Draize, Rorschach, Uhlenhuth, are just names of a series of tests used to question, quantify, and label the world. In "Test Centre," these and more pose deep questions as its poems crack open and peek into your soul, and perhaps you will even pose a question to what you find there. "Test Centre" is a chapbook by MA|DE, the collective voice of Toronto-based creators Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace.

This peach sweats under fragrant summer sun. "It splits." Slipping your fingers into damp flesh, you pluck out nostalgia, its weight resting on your palm. "You can feel it finding new ways to touch you." Terrence Abrahams writes of boyhood romance in the peach poems, tangibly constructing a summer that will leave you sunburnt and craving.

"Ticker taped by rain we strode,
counting down to the promised flood:

two boys dipped in the absurd;
two mystery men in blue."

Khashayar Mohammadi’s vivid and rhythmic poetry sequence paints a doomed affair between two young Iranian men through a haze of jazz, liquor, and an oncoming flood. Mohammadi weaves together images of self-discovery, immigration, and tradition to create an exploration of emotion which is cigarette scented and blue stained in its beauty. Teeming with life and motion, Mohammadi’s verse beats with the visceral pulse of having loved and the faith that you will love again.

Whose version of history gets told? What interpretation of truth makes it into our consciousness? Jon R. Flieger’s "all the great and terrible" explores these questions anchored in the life of William Wallace Denslow, Wizard of Oz illustrator and self-proclaimed King Denslow I of Denslow Island. The work blends biography, lyricism, and image; it incorporates crossing out, overlapping, and intersecting text into a polyvalent inquiry of what it means to write and rewrite history.