Fungal is a wide-ranging collection from Ariel Gordon where she explores her fascination with all mushrooms, not just those you can eat. In these engaging essays she takes the reader through ditches and puddles in search of morels, through the hallways of a mushroom factory, down city sidewalks and beside riverbanks as she considers things found and fungal. Along the way there are entertaining stories of the perils of mushroom identification, including mailed mushrooms that have liquefied, or terrifying thoughts of Canadian geese being fed hallucinogenic mushrooms as well as thoughtful analysis of the ways mushrooms knit our ecosystems together and the ways we knit our lives and communities together. Smart, funny and poetic, Gordon moves seamlessly from the natural world to the personal in these essays, examining the interconnectedness of all things and delighting in the rich variety of the world around her.

• June 13: Winnipeg launch at McNally Robinson Booksellers

• June 23: Hamilton launch at Mills Hardware

• June 24: Toronto launch at Tranzac Club

“Fungal is a perfect companion for anyone curious about not only mushrooms but the complexities of ecosystems of all kinds, natural and human-made. Every page is animated by wild energy and muddy joy. How lucky we are to have this excellent forager’s guide not only to mushrooms and their possibilities (culinary, medicinal, psychotropic) but also to big ideas, to happiness and to community.”

— Theresa Kishkan, author of Blue Portugal and Other Essays

February 2021 to March 2022 was a period of great reflection for two of Canada’s most celebrated poets. Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt wrote collaborative poetry, formatted like a call and response. Ariel intended to write about urban Manitoba, the city and its trees, and Brenda was to write about rural Saskatchewan and birds. Over the course of the year, the matter of place took over and the intentions branched and flew apart. The poets wrote about the natural world and people making their way through it all. They wrote home as they found it, observing climate as it manifested in drought-stressed trees and stunted crops covered in grasshoppers, in wildfires and wildfire smoke hanging over the prairies. Survival, struggle, keen naturalist perception, and endless wit, bring forward the idea of hope, rejuvenation, and the generative power of community.

• Shortlisted for the 2024 Poetry Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards.

“Siteseeing poses an urgent question: what does it mean to be a steward of the contemporary world? Its wry observations of the interrupted rhythms of nature (in both urban and rural lives) do not demonize technology, but rely on computer and camera to record losses, focusing on repurposing and adaptation. Hunting as coyote and badger, the authors offer a radical lens through which to really see—and thus value—the world, howling and growling, desperate for regeneration.”

— Beatriz Hausner, Barbara Langhorst, and Hoa Ngyuen, 2024 poetry jurors, Saskatchewan Book Awards

“City and country, Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt voice the extraordinary in the ordinary — the blackbird singing backup to a front-end loader, the garden waiting for rain —as the world slouches toward apparent apocalypse. These poems will have you wondering if it is okay to laugh when we should be crying. (And, yes, it is.)”

— Trevor Herriot, author of Towards a Prairie Atonement and Grass, Sky, Song

During the heatwave of July 2017, Ariel Gordon spent two days sitting on the patio of downtown Winnipeg’s Tallest Poppy, writing snippets of poems which she hung from the boulevard tree using paper and string. Passersby were invited to TreeTalk too — their secrets / one-liners / meditations / haiku were also hung from the tree. By the end of the weekend, the elm had a second temporary canopy of leaves: 234 poems, 111 written by Gordon, 107 written by passersby, and 16 from other sources.

Gordon has assembled all these voices into a long/found poem that asks: what does it mean to live in the urban forest? What does it mean to be in relationship with each other but also with the more-than-human? The book also includes pen and ink illustrations by Winnipeg artist Natalie Baird.

• Shortlisted for the 2021 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award at the Manitoba Book Awards.

• Shortlisted for the 2021 Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher at the MBAs.

• Shortlisted for a 2021 Manuela Dias Design Award at the MBAs.

“Ariel Gordon, truly the Jane Jacobs of trees and poetry, has charmed a multitude of strangers and passersby to sing small songs to the urban canopy, to whisper their secrets and confessions to a neighbourhood elm tree. The result is TreeTalk, a celebration of the city-dweller’s relationship with trees, but also an elegy to the stress and devastation imposed on urban nature in the course of “growing” and developing a city.” 

—Sylvia Legris, author of Garden Physic

“The book prompts readers to contemplate the meaning of living in the urban forest and the relationship between human and nature.” —Vicky Qiao, CBC Books

With intimacy and humour award-winning poet Ariel Gordon walks us through the streets of Winnipeg and into the urban forest that is, to her, the city's heart. Along the way she shares with us the lives of these urban trees, from the grackles and cankerworms of the spring, to the flush of mushrooms on stumps in the summer and through to the red-stemmed dogwood of the winter. After grounding us in native elms and ashes, Gordon travels to BC's northern Rockies, to Banff National Park and a cattle farm in rural Manitoba, and helps us to consider what we expect of nature. Whether it is the effects of climate change on the urban forest or foraging in the city, Dutch elm disease in the trees or bats in the walls, Gordon delves into our relationships with the natural world with heart and style. In the end, the essays circle back to the forest, where the weather is always better and where the reader can see how to remake even the trees that are lost.

• Honourable Mention, 2020 Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize for the Environmental Humanities and Creative Writing.

• Shortlisted for the 2020 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award at the Manitoba Book Awards.

“The personal is political, but the personal is also trees, urban forests and our own microculture of interaction that speaks to larger histories, spaces, ecologies and cultures. In these charming essays, Ariel Gordon examines with wit, sensitivity and insight the living and breathing environments she finds herself living and breathing in. Rich with detail and engaging anecdote, Treed considers how modern life, writing and family take root in the specifics of geography.” 

—Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates

In GUSH, more than 100 women and nonbinary writers from Canada and around the world take apart the bloody instruction of menstruation: its cultures, its lessons, its equipment, and its lexicon. 

Co-edited by Rosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon, and Tanis MacDonald, GUSH offers menstrual manifestos for our time that question the cultural value and social language of monthly blood loss, with rage, humour, ferocity, and grief, and propose that the ‘menstrual moment’ is as individualized, subjective, personal, political, and vital as the ‘feminist click’. 

With work from emerging and established writers in poetry, cartoons, flash fiction, personal essays, lyric confessions, and experimental forms, this anthology features the voices of Indigenous writers, writers of colour, writers with disabilities, rural writers and urban writers, representing four generations of menstruators: writers who call down their bloodiest muses. 

Including work by Yvette Nolan, Mini Aodla Freeman, Sheri-D Wilson, Sonnet L’Abbe, Pamela Mordecai, Susan Holbrook, and many more.

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves."

—Courtney Dickson, Herizons

"I expect GUSH will be passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves.”

—Katherine J. BarretT, Understorey

"We love GUSH!" —Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener

In poems that are smart and gorgeously funny, Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways careens between life as we-know-it on the Canadian prairies and the frayed yet familiar edges of what-if. What if a beluga from Churchill hooked up with a Gore-Tex-ed tourist? What if knowing Morse Code would save your bacon during the zombie apocalypse? Half survival guide, half invasive species list, these are poems that stick to your socks.

• Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry at the Manitoba Book Awards. 

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."

—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose

"Adept & assured, Stowaways swaggers."
—Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

Hump is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to adequately represent the wonder and devilment of being-with-child. Hump is a love poem written simultaneously to a father and child, to a lover and the glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty, faded, but still greener-than-most.

• Winner of the 2011 Aqua Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

• winner of the 2010 John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed."

—Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch