The Emily Valentine Poems is an innovative book that challenges the impossible notions of femininity that permeate our culture. The texts within include self-portraits, prose poems, fake fan letters, and confessional lyric snapshots. These are pharmaceutically enhanced tributes to the hangovers of twenty-something love and to the pop icons from an unconventional 1980s childhood. With The Emily Valentine Poems, Zoe Whittall provides us with the perfect soundtrack for the culturally literate rebel in all of us.

“Zoe Whittall might just be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler.”—The Globe and Mail

“This reminds me that I would like to know everything about this person.”—Eileen Myles

ZOE WHITTALL’s third novel, The Best Kind of People is currently being adapted for limited series by director Sarah Polley. It was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, named Indigo’s #1 Book of 2016, a Heather’s Pick and a Best Book of the Year by the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life and the National Post. Her second novel, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, won a Lambda Literary Award for trans fiction and was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her debut novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize and is being adapted for screen. In 2014 Whittall sold her first sitcom, Breaking, to CTV, and recently optioned the half-hour comedy Wellville to CBC. She has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy Award–winning comedy Schitt’s Creek and the Baroness Von Sketch Show, for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award. She has written three volumes of poetry, most recently an anniversary reissue of The Emily Valentine Poems, about which Eileen Myles said, “I would like to know everything about this person.” Zoe Whittall was born on a sheep farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, has an MFA from the University of Guelph and has called Toronto home since 1997. 

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“Zoe Whittall might just be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler.”—The Globe and Mail

"Whittal is able to compactly reveal the sadness, anxiety, madness, and desire of her poetic subjects, using potent imagery and dark humour."—Montreal Review of Books

“Zoe Whittall’s book of poetry begins with a sense of frustration: ‘You have love and the word love, but the two will never meet.’ Once into this attractively packaged collection, you can quickly deem Whittall’s frustration with language unnecessary. Her words, dense with meaning, flow in such a serene manner that they beg to be read aloud. With these words, Whittall transforms you into a shameless voyeur, peering into the speaker’s strangest emotions and wildest weekends.”—Broken Pencil

"Zoe Whittall’s works in The Emily Valentine Poems will have you smiling, sneering, smirking, and just plain irking in no time at all."—Black Heart Magazine

“This reminds me that I would like to know everything about this person.”—Eileen Myles

“Zoe Whittall’s poems are snake bite cures masquerading as candy.”—RM Vaughan

"Whittall's big sense of humour is the under-coat on all these poems but it doesn't take much reminding that the serious side of Zoe Whittall is stone cold."—Michael Dennis

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