Metatron Press is thrilled to open pre-orders for all the time: poems & traces, the newest collection from Shanghainese-Canadian poet and scholar Xiaoxuan Huang. Today, we’re also revealing the book’s official cover and announcing its national Spring 2026 launch tour.
A durational, intimate, and formally inventive work, all the time is a rigorously crafted meditation on queer longing, language’s limits, and the beauty—and ache—of what remains unsaid. Blending autotheory, fragmented lyric, and the delicate architecture of silence, Huang asks:
If language never arrives exactly where we want it to, do we still dare to speak?
Pre-Order Your Copy
Pre-orders directly support the author and help sustain the work of small presses. Reserve your copy of all the time today—and for readers wanting Huang’s full body of work, a discounted bundle of all the time + her debut Love Speech (2019) is also available.
→ Pre-Order all the time
→ Pre-Order Bundle: all the time + Love Speech
About the Book
Moving between love letters, aphoristic fragments, and poems punctuated by breath, all the time explores intimacy as both closeness and distance. Recurring motifs of light, touch, echo, and pause create a layered portrait of queer temporality—where memory blurs time, and desire becomes a form of thinking.
Minimalist in design and expansive in feeling, the book invites readers to linger in its open spaces. This is poetry that thinks and feels in equal measure: a text for those who love experimental form, philosophical inquiry, and lyric fragments that hum long after they’re read.
Advance Praise
“A cascading fantasia of the cut together-apart.”
— Fan Wu
“Everything holds the potential of poetry, even the gaps, especially the gaps.”
— Klara du Plessis
“Here is a book that helps us take solace in the space between.”
— Rachika Nayar
Author Bio
Photo by Tomasz Wagner
Xiaoxuan Huang (she/they) is a Shanghainese-Canadian writer, scholar, and educator whose work bridges poetry, queer theory, and autotheory. Their debut Love Speech (Metatron Press, 2019) was celebrated for its intellectual and emotional clarity. Huang teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Capilano University and lives in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
Book Details
Title: all the time: poems & traces
Author: Xiaoxuan Huang
Release Date: April 17, 2026
Format: 5″ × 7″ paperback with French flaps
Pages: 84
ISBN: 978-1-988355-74-0
Spring 2026 Launch Tour
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Vancouver — April 18 — Unit/Pitt Society for Art & Critical Awareness
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Kelowna — May 2 — Alternator Centre for Contemporary Arts
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Toronto — May 21 — Type Books (Queen)
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Kingston — May 22 — Many Moons Studio
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Montreal — May 23 — Rocket Science Room (Presented by Metatron Press)
Pre-Order Your Copy
Pre-orders directly support the author and help sustain the work of small presses. Reserve your copy of all the time today—and for readers wanting Huang’s full body of work, a discounted bundle of all the time + her debut Love Speech (2019) is also available.
→ Pre-Order all the time
→ Pre-Order Bundle: all the time + Love Speech
