Coach House Books

05/22/2026

THANK YOU for launching our Spring/Summer 2026 slate of books with us last night!

We celebrated with readings from Maggie Helwig, Jordan Abel, Geoffrey D. Morrison, Sina Queyras, and Lisa Robertson. Thanks to all who came out and purchased a book, and to for hosting us.

There are many more events to come this year – sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date on all things Coach House, and to hear about individual book launches in Toronto and beyond. 💌

05/21/2026

Join us on July 18 at 3 p.m. for One Day Wonder featuring Souvankham Thammavongsa, Kate Carley, and moderator Charles Foran

What can a single day reveal? New novels by Souvankham Thammavongsa and Kate Cayley tackle the complex inner lives, connections, and conflicts of, respectively, nail salon workers and residents of a Toronto neighbourhood.

Souvankham Thammavongsa is the winner of the 2020 Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award. Her stories have also won an O. Henry Prize. Pick a Colour, her first novel, won the 2025 Giller Prize. The novel offers a wry glimpse into the life of a salon, narrated by its owner, Ning over the course of a business day. Thammavongsa peels back the veneer of the transactional world of commerce to reveal labour conditions, class hierarchies, cultural divides, and the ultimate value of intimacy. It is a brilliant and subtle novel that leaves the reader with many well-considered options rather than a few straightforward answers.

Kate Cayley is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright. Property is her first novel. Her plays have been performed in Canada, the US and the UK, and her awards include the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Poetry and the O. Henry Prize. Her novel Property is set over the course of a single day in an “up-and-coming” Toronto neighbourhood. The book follows the inner lives of interconnected residents as they stumble through their errands, with each seemingly inconsequential exchange tightening until finally tragedy strikes, leaving the neighbourhood forever changed. It is “an unflinching tale of a community’s fragile bonds,” according to Publishers Weekly.

Charlie Foran is an award-winning writer of fiction, nonfiction and journalism and has written and presented documentaries for radio and TV. He has served as president of PEN Canada and Executive Director of Writers’ Trust of Canada. He is a senior fellow at Massey College and teaches at the University of Toronto. Member of the Order of Canada, he was awarded the Writers’ Trust Fellowship for his contributions to Canadian literature.

Tickets are available online at https://lakefieldliteraryfestival.com/ or in person at Happenstance Books and Yarns



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05/21/2026

TONIGHT IN TORONTO! We launch all of our Spring/Summer titles and hear readings from five wonderful authors.

More info here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-books-spring-group-launch-tickets-1987949847508?aff=oddtdtcreator

THE COACH HOUSE BOOKS SPRING GROUP LAUNCH!

Join us on Thursday, May 21, from 7 to 10 PM, at Society Clubhouse as we launch a number of our Spring 2026 titles. Readings from Lisa Robertson, Jordan Abel, Geoffrey D. Morrison, Sina Queyras, and Maggie Helwig.

All of our Spring titles will be for sale, including:
✨Riverwork by Lisa Robertson
✨Dad Era by Jordan Abel
✨The Coffin of Honey by Geoffrey D. Morrison
✨On Occasion: Poems for the People ed. Sina Queyras
✨Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance by Maggie Helwig

Full event details (and the ability to RSVP) can be found at the link in our bio or at chbooks.com/events!

Society Clubhouse is a fully accessible venue, and will have alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks for sale.

05/20/2026

Occasional poem postcards! To read and enjoy and, most importantly, to send to others so they can read and enjoy them too.

Postcards of nine different poems selected from On Occasion: Poems for the People, edited by Sina Queyras, will be at the Coach House Spring Group Launch tomorrow night at Society Clubhouse! Please join us for readings from Lisa Robertson, Jordan Abel, Geoffrey D. Morrison, Sina Queyras, and Maggie Helwig. ✨

05/19/2026

Happy pub day to Nebulas by Meghan Kemp-Gee!

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Poems that look at our little world from space.

In Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee positions these giant clouds of glowing space dust, often the ‘nursery’ where new stars and planets are born, in an interconnected web of lyric form. As dazzling masses of matter and energy, fleeting, exploding and collapsing, creating connection across incomprehensible distances, these poems use constellations and light-years to reconfigure how art, mortality, loss, death, and afterlives are miraculous echoes and patterns in a gorgeous, chaotic universe.

Included in this dazzling collection are an extraterrestrial fox who works at a gas station, meditations about living across from a hospital during the Omicron surge, weathering climate disasters in North Vancouver, strange deep-sea ecosystems, conversations with a space-god who may be Walt Whitman, and multiple retellings of a Zen koan about tigers and strawberries. Here, respiration and repetition – literally, verse – acts as an outstanding formal feature, a way of creating connections and shared breath across spacetime.

05/19/2026

Tonight in Toronto, Lisa Robertson launches her new book, RIVERWORK! Robertson will be in conversation with Derek McCormack at Standard Time (165 Geary Ave.) from 7 PM.

More info & RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/riverwork-by-lisa-robertson-launch-with-derek-mccormack-tickets-1987948022048?aff=oddtdtcreator

On Tuesday, May 19, Lisa Robertson launches RIVERWORK, in conversation with Derek McCormack!

Join us at Standard Time (165 Geary Ave., Toronto) at 7 PM to celebrate the publication of Riverwork. For more information and to RSVP to this launch (and all forthcoming CHB events), head to the link in our bio or chbooks.com/events.

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A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary life: from the cult-favourite poet and author of The Baudelaire Fractal comes a glittering and erudite new novel of Paris. 

Some ruins are invisible. 

Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, Lucy Frost has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris’s academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt’s youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers – and laundries. 

She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river’s laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.

Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.

05/15/2026

‘For her, form is everything –  form is the problem, and style can be as serious as life and death.’ Alex Tan reviews Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork in The Baffler.

'Riverwork’s apparent arc is one of oblivion –  like pressing an ear to the murmur and purl of an undercurrent. But its narrative premise is almost an alibi, for the textual disjecta that accrete around it are seemingly endless, aleatory digressions into everything from film criticism and medical trivia to literary biography and leftist history. Call it hybrid, genre-bending, unclassifiable –  those totemic labels of the contemporary literary zeitgeist fall short. There is no story, Lucy Frost protests repeatedly – part lament, part apology, part political statement – in case we should expect otherwise.’

Read the full review at the link in our bio, and celebrate Riverwork with us at Lisa Robertson’s book launch in Toronto this Tuesday, May 19, and at our Spring Group Launch on Thursday, May 21. RSVP via the link in our bio as well, or at chbooks.com/events

05/15/2026

A fantastic event this week with John Lorinc, co-editor of The Ward and The Ward Uncovered, alongside Arlene Chan, contributor to both books, at the Toronto Reference Library!

Chan and Lorinc discussed Toronto's overlapping Chinese and Jewish civic narratives, in The Ward and beyond.

The civic narratives of Toronto’s Chinese and Jewish communities have overlapped since the days of The Ward in the early 20th century, through to the present day. Aided by artefacts from the Chinese Canadian Archive, historian and author Arlene Chan and journalist John Lorinc explored both the pleasure and the importance of cultural connection in the world’s most diverse metropolis.

Thanks to both Arlene Chan and John Lorinc, as well as the Toronto Public Library, for this interesting and important conversation!

05/14/2026

'[P]oetry is, at an occult or clandestine level, infinitely capacious.'

A fantastic interview with Lisa Robertson, on Riverwork, with minor literature[s]:

Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork is a novel that traces the disappearance of a family member in tandem with the disappearance of a buried river that once ran through the city of Paris, the Bièvre. …

05/14/2026

on his poem, 'Reading “Having a Coke with You” at My Best Friend’s Wedding', included in On Occasion: Poems for the People.

How is your poem best enjoyed?

Misha Solomon: I suppose my deepest, darkest truth is that I believe my poems are best enjoyed hearing me read them aloud.

Third slide is Misha doing just that, at On Occasion’s official book launch in Montreal earlier this week! Continue celebrating On Occasion with us through occasionalpoems.ca, where you can read full contributor interviews and view their occasional poetry recommendations, and at our Spring Group Launch in Toronto, where editor Sina Queyras will read from the book. 🧡