Incidental Reflections on the Urban in Taizo Yamamoto’s Carts, Hedges, Lions

Incidental Reflections on the Urban in Taizo Yamamoto’s Carts, Hedges, Lions

Carts, Hedges, Lions reads as an urban archival project featuring detailed illustrations by Taizo Yamamoto that render moments and decades of Vancouver’s landscapes. Complimenting his drawings, Aaron Peck, Kevin Chong, and Jackie Wong bookend each collection of illustrations with an essay, rooted in their own relationships with the titular images. Yamamoto, an architect by trade and Principal of Yamamoto Architecture, has his works interspersed throughout the landscape of the Lower Mainland, representing perhaps, what may be ambivalently considered “modern builds.” Knowing that Yamamoto plays a role in the construction of Vancouver’s future urban landscape, these drawings in reverence to the Foo Dog, hedges, and shopping carts evoke a particular nostalgic effect. In an email exchange, Yamamoto speculates that this nostalgia is activated because these drawings “[record] moments that are already passed and lost.” I am one to agree.

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The Potentialities of Queer Cree Love in Billy-Ray Belcourt's coexistence: A Testament to Queer Indigenous Lovers Everywhere

The Potentialities of Queer Cree Love in Billy-Ray Belcourt's coexistence: A Testament to Queer Indigenous Lovers Everywhere

As a queer Indigenous person, it’s rare to come across books that I resonate with. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s (Driftpile Cree Nation) books have been profoundly important to me for this reason. Belcourt’s writing has made me feel seen in ways I did not know were possible in the constraints of conventional publishing houses. His recent collection of short stories titled coexistence–featuring many queer Cree narrators and characters from Northern Alberta–not only enriches but also weaves together his previous work in its exploration of loneliness and its embrace of care and love.

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