New Books at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library
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Poems Without Borders at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library
We are delighted to showcase a selection of entries and award-winning works from Poems Without Borders: A Contest to Celebrate World Poetry Day, organized by the EDI Committee of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, with support from the Arts Opportunity Fund.
This exhibition brings together a vibrant collection of poems by McGill Faculty of Arts students, highlighting the richness of linguistic diversity and creative expression across cultures. The works on display move fluidly between languages including English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, and Turkish, often accompanied by thoughtful translations that open new pathways of understanding.
From meditations on memory, identity, and loss to reflections on love, faith, migration, and belonging, these poems demonstrate the many ways poetry can transform both personal and collective experience. Some contributors engage as original creators, while others reinterpret existing works—revealing how poetry continues to evolve across voices, media, and traditions.
Visitors will encounter pieces such as Gefei Zhang’s Redpath Museum, a quiet reflection on time and material culture; Mariana Monsalve Orozco’s visceral A hundred deaths and lyrical Mi gran amor; and Serena Chouery’s award-winning L’ombre et la passion, which explores light, longing, and emotional intensity through richly layered imagery. Also featured are Jiayuan Cao’s prize-winning creative interpretation of Jorge Luis Borges’ El enamorado and Mariane Cousineau Rousseau’s Packing List, a free-verse work that adds another dimension to the exhibit’s engagement with voice and form, alongside intimate portraits, elegies, and collaborative pieces.
Together, these poems affirm the enduring and transformative power of poetry to connect us across languages, disciplines, and lived experiences.
We invite you to explore the exhibit and experience the many voices that make up this year’s Poems Without Borders along the ground floor Redpath hallway.
Reading Plays by Asian Canadian Playwrights in May
Celebrating this year’s Asian Heritage Month, the Humanities and Social Sciences Library (HSSL) showcases a variety of stories by contemporary Canadian playwrights of Asian Heritage through the Redpath Book Display (also, browseable online).
Why read plays?
In “Why Plays Should be Seen—and Read,” Isaiah Stavchansky points out that reading a play, rather than watching a stage performance, enables us to have a more intimate interaction with the storyteller and to “partake in a shared experience of the text.”
Stavchansky, who edited and published a collection of American plays on the theme of immigration, also raises a practical question. Access to theatres is limited to people living in big cities. Given the underrepresentation of Asian Canadian theatre artists on stages,1 opportunities to watch Asian Canadian drama performances are even more limited.
Unlike the cultural traditions imported and enjoyed by early immigrants, such as Cantonese operas popular in Victoria’s Chinatown blocks in the 1860s,2 Asian Canadian plays today consist of “home-grown” stories that reflect Canada’s multiethnic and multicultural social fabric.
Some of the plays on display explore themes such as immigration, racism, stereotyping, identity, generational tensions, assimilation, and upward mobility.
Some plays depict the lives of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people around us, including but not limited to Asian Canadians.
In addition, some plays depict historical events and fictional stories set in Asia.
- Chang, Eury Colin. “Unraveling the History of Asian Canadian Theatre“. UBC Public Scholars Initiative Blog. Retrieved 29 April 2026. ↩︎
- Rao, Nancy Y. (2018). “Inside Chinese Theatre: Cantonese Opera in Canada”. Intersections. Vol. 38, No. 1-2, 2018, p. 81-104. https://doi.org/10.7202/1071675ar ↩︎