Geist

Behind every issue of Geist is a remarkable group of volunteer readers whose insight, curiosity and generosity help shape the magazine. Over the next few weeks, we’re introducing you to members of our Reading Collective, who devote their time to reading submissions and sharing their perspectives with the editors. If you’ve found a piece you loved in a recent issue, there’s a good chance it was one of these readers who recognized its potential from the very beginning.

Join Geist on Tuesday, July 21 to officially launch issue 132! This issue is about having the type of face that urges strangers to ask for directions. Uncovering the anatomical layers of a garden island. Oh, the skateboarder’s spiritual connection to a DIY quarterpipe. The point where the moon and morels intersect. Japanese street photography and the act of looking. It’s about many other things, too—discover it all here. Readings by Geist authors Alex Leslie, Christine Lai, and more.

Expressions that have been ruled unparliamentary during various sittings of the Canadian House of Commons. From Beauchesne’s Rules & Forms of the House of Commons of Canada by Alistair Fraser, W.F. Dawson and John A. Holtby, published by the Carswell Company Ltd. in 1989.

Before I get to the contents of George Bowering’s memoir, Pinboy (Cormorant Books),  I’d like to credit the interior text design. Pinboy’s chapter headings are like minimalist neon signs from the early 1950s, skilfully replicated and entirely suited to this tale of growing up in small-town British Columbia (specifically, Oliver, in the sizzling desert of the Okanagan). The narrator, to earn a little pocket money, sets up pins at the local bowling alley.

Write a story that unfolds in two or more Canadian time zones. Deadline: June 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PST How it works: Send us a story, 500 words or less, fiction or non-fiction, that spans two or more Canadian time zones. This could mean a physical transition across time zones (like a road trip), or an implied transition between them (like a phone call).

Also in GEIST 132 “Street Haunting” by CHRISTINE LAI “Ragnar” by HOLLAY GHADERY “Shadow Price” by FARAH GHAFOOR “We, the Kindling” by OTONIYA J.

My first “book as Bible” was Jack Kerouac’sOn the Road. I once donated a hardcover copy—soon stolen, I imagine—to the reading room of Shakespeare & Company, George Whitman’s Paris bookstore, in the belief that I was evangelizing for some sort of poetic truth and a vagabond way of life. Kerouac’s 1956 summer as a fire lookout in the North Cascades formed the basis of two later books, The Dharma Bums (1958) and Desolation Angels (1965).

At age ninety-five, Gary Snyder is the last survivor from the group of writers known collectively as the Beat Generation. In 2022, Snyder’s work became part of the Library of America, one of the few living writers so honoured. Gary Snyder: Collected Poems (Library Of America) is a handsome volume of over a thousand pages that includes all eleven of his books of poetry, plus a generous selection of previously uncollected poems.

The Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House), draws on Robertson’s own journals from the mid-198s, a period when, wanting to change her life, she (and/or her protagonist, Hazel Brown) flew from Vancouver to London, travelling from there to Paris by boat and train, carrying “used paperback copies of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees and a beautifully bound volume of translations of...

What drew me to Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (HarperCollins) wasn’t the author or her bylines (I’d never heard of Ann Powers), it was of course the subject—Joni Mitchell. After reading Traveling, my question is: what (apart from money) compelled Powers to write it?