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Wild Madder
by Brenda LeifsoPoems that stride bravely into the day-to-day, recovering the misdirected intensity at its core. Brenda Leifso’s Wild Madder is about way-finding—through those moments in which you no longer recognize where you are. It’s about not knowing—who you are anymore, how to be in the world, how to love. It’s about what’s unspoken and about what speaks—conversation with the wild and animate world. It’s about marriage, family, motherhood—the drudgery in them and the quiet beauty. This is lyric poetry wracked with pain, rage, and longing. In the beginning, the collection may read as though it’s been steeped in bitterness. Family can ask everything of a partner and parent and then turn around and take even more; Wild Madder feels like a note in a bottle washed up on the shores of a rough sea. But Leifso is not one to stand still or cling to darkness; in fact, we end up so far into the darkness that when she breaks through into light, it’s a conflagration of all the things that make us human. These frank, bracingly recognizable poems will be irresistible—and cathartic—for anyone who has ever felt their life chewing them into little pieces.
Technologies/Installations
by Kim MaltmanThis extraordinary sequence of prose and free verse poems explores the postures, styles, and rhetorics of our culture and its history -- not with the predictable aim of criticism and rejection, or the fashionable aim of recombinant word-play, but in the service of an unflinching, and thereby real, passion. This is humane vision of great breadth, depth, and particularity.
Combustion
by Lorri Neilsen GlennLorri Neilsen Glenn’s poems welcome the reader into a place where the strange is made familiar and the familiar reveals its own magic. Here the combustible materials of childhood and old age are always potentially present, and the attention paid them multi-dimensional. Her poems engage their subjects with wits and senses on full alert, whether the occasion is an encounter with the full moon during a lonely drive across the prairies, a raucous community dance at the oldest dance hall in the Maritimes, or the opening of the door into “the small town inside”. Reaching from nature to human nature, often drawn by the long line and the hum of loss, Neilsen Glenn explores a full range of poetic possibilities.
Trailer Park Shakes
by Justene Dion-Glowa2023 Indigenous Voices Awards ShortlistThe poems in Trailer Park Shakes are direct and vernacular, rooted in community—a working-class Métis voice rarely heard from. These poems, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice—how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. Trailer Park Shakes is a book that seems to want to hold everything—an entire cross-section of lived experience—written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words' embrace. Dion-Glowa's poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic. "Dion-Glowa's voice crackles with frank, startling insight." — Sachiko Murakami, author of Render "A collection that should and will rattle your cage and shine a light where it is needed." — John Brady McDonald, author of Kitotam
Afloat
by John ReibetanzAfloat, John Reibetanz's eighth collection of poetry, focuses on water in many manifestations. The centerpiece, a sequence on the Three Gorges Dam and its cultural and environmental implications, brings ancient Chinese sources (Meng Chiao and the painter Dong Yuan) together with modern ones (Edward Burtynsky's photographs and violent video games) to create an elegy that is moving and meditative. Although water is everywhere present as a subject, it is song that provides the motivating power, the vehicle of longing that animates the book. "We thirst for song"—the closing words of the Lament for the Gorges sequence—could really serve as the book's epigraph. This is poetry exercising its full range of possible functions (to observe, to enquire, to elegize, to imagine, to think, to commemorate, to yearn and to feel), all in the service of that "thirst for song."
Reunion
by Deanna YoungPoems that unfold like liturgy, confronting old violence with a trembling, dignified restraint.
Habitat
by Sue WheelerIn her third collection of poems, Sue Wheeler writes of the ephemeral with an eye trained on the eternal questions. "Who are you?" she asks at the outset of her search for fresh and more telling names for the human in the lush natural landscape of her West Coast island home. The answers she gives us are always surprising. Wheeler names for us this place she knows intimately, where, despite its natural wealth, human sorrows grow as abundantly as the rich flora of the forest understory. She takes us down and into the riches of the moment, until the green on green of resplendent existence becomes an extension of our most essential selves.
Letters From A Long Illness With The World: The D.H. Lawrence Poems
by Barry DempsterTuning a fine ear to Lawrence’s letters from 1906 until his death in 1930, Barry Dempster’s poems uncover the man within the myth and give voice to Lawrence’s passionate mortality. Dempster’s act is one of imagination and homage, a kind of lyrical readership which traces the life-and-death line in a great writer’s life, with its constant illness and energy, a line “green as the vein of a young man’s desire.” In this book, Barry Dempster, acclaimed as a writer of short fiction and novels as well as poetry, extends his range and the genre of poetry itself.
The Artemesia Book: Poems Selected and New
by Colleen ThibaudeauGranddaughters, asters, Medea cakes, para pom tandle, Mrs. Roker raking, Caraquet, angelic recurrence, Neruda, zupzupzup, the high bush cranberries, the Somme, a waterfall in Iceland that cries by the thousandsful, the Strawberry Shaman and the Japonica Bushelful Bountiful Lady: you would never mistake a Colleen Thibaudeau wordscape for any other. Her poems might have been written just after the imagination was invented. So lithe and playful, so naturally leaping even in elegy, they would seem like fabulous accidents if Colleen hadn't been making them, with no loss of freshness, for over forty years. There is a lifetime of poems in this book.
Rediscovered Sheep
by John B. LeeRediscovered Sheep takes its origin generations ago when an ancestor of John B. Lee began to raise Lincoln sheep in Ontario. John B. may never take up his inheritance as Master of the Flock, but his understanding of sheep husbandry is woven into the woolly fabric of his work. The first poems in Rediscovered Sheep are about real modern-day shepherds and actual sheep. Then the sheep get loose. They spill out into human roles -- policeman, guest speaker, ballerina -- which they occupy exuberantly and sometimes with a disquieting naturalness. Rediscovered Sheep is a realistic/fantasy pastoral for contemporary times, with the true pastoral’s wise innocence that never forgets the wolf.
Everything, now
by Jessica MoorePart lyric, part memoir, Everything, now, Jessica Moore’s heart-rending debut, describes an untimely death and the journey of going on alone. The book stares down loss and struggles to transform that loss into language that can pass through boundaries of intricate sorrow; the act of translation here is not about two different languages—although Moore uses her own translation of Jean-François Beauchemin’s Turkana Boy as a template for translating death into life, past into present—but about the necessity to put the inexplicable into words that might hint at its intensity.
Moldovan Hotel
by Leah HorlickMoldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora. In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women's lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations. With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick's poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. "No one ever thinks they might be the dragon," Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together. "If Leah Horlick's second book invited us to witness, this time she draws from her Jewish heritage and takes us back to show us how to read the landscape and mind-scape and tell us what the texts left out. This is an accounting, a calling, an invocation, a return, a skilful mediation on how to remember when the ‘names of the oppressors are blotted out’." — Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days "Every poem in Moldovan Hotel is a room thick with ghosts. Here, Horlick takes the language of the past—used to dehumanize and unmoor—and crystalizes it around revelation after revelation. A graceful, striking collection." — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
The Vicinity
by David O'MearaWinner of the 2004 Archibald Lampman Award (National Capital Region -- Ottawa) and shortlisted for the 2004 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the 2004 ReLit Awards In The Vicinity David O'Meara gives us a new kind of cityscape, one that brings its unseen, and usually unsung, materials to the foreground. Brick, concrete (that "not-so-silver screen / our walk-on parts are posed upon"), glass, steel, wire: they step boldly from anonymity into fresh focus, backdrops goaded into stardom. Full of casually-worn wit and humour, often using intricate forms that deftly reflect their subjects, these poems probe our conventional attitudes while walking us down present or remembered streets -- "Some-such Avenue / Rue Saint Whatever."
Bearings
by Rhonda BatchelorThe poems in Bearings are arranged in the stressful rhythm of alternation between the intense states of being in love and/or with someone or being alone. Loss refines the vision. For Rhonda Batchelor's poetry that means a gain which shows, for example, in occasional tender lyrics about experiences not governed by love and in the tang of the west coast in her poems, though setting is never the central thing. The centre is love, particularized with an art that revitalizes the ancient subject.
Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments
by Ulrikka S. GernesFrayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments is a collection of poems that zooms in and out of places and states of mind, from a lit bicycle shed in the back yard to a root canal in November, from a typhoon in Hong Kong to instincts astray in various Copenhagen neigborhoods. Elegantly translated by Canadian collaborators Per Brask and Patrick Friesen, these dreamlike poems attempt, with honesty and humour, to fathom what it is to inhabit a specifically unspecific point in life -- not to mention in the Universe.
Sotto Voce
by Maureen Hynes*Finalist 2020 Golden Crown Literary Society Awards *Shortlisted 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial AwardPoems that give full attention to a world in shambles, a world in which “mercy is failing.” Maureen Hynes, in her fifth book of poetry, speaks tenderly yet vehemently about the threatened worlds that concern her. From Toronto, where she lives and walks the city’s afflicted watershed, she turns her attention to the near and far, shifting it from the First Nations’ stolen lands to Syria and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean; from the deaths of family and friends to the newborns into whose care our endangered planet will pass; and from love’s transient regrets to the sustaining love two women share. Hynes’ is a gaze that grieves quietly, delights humbly, and, in the search for solace, never rests. Each poem in Sotto Voce is a recitative of healing. Hear the music in every word and, despite the damaged environments Hynes gives voice to, be restored. This is a book that bears witness to the “dynamite stick of injustice,” one that balances fear and hope, misfortune and renewal, calamity and natural beauty. Sotto Voce carries the complexity and seriousness of its themes lightly—it’s important to know when to speak loudly, and when to whisper. “…Sotto Voce is the sound of one of Canada’s most accomplished poets writing at the height of her powers.” —Jim Johnstone "Whether speaking about nature, or politics, or love, Maureen Hynes does so with candor and compassion. These poems are generous and assured, and the world they circumscribe is the urgent, beautiful, dangerous place where we all live. Read Sotto Voce. Maureen Hynes is a poet at the top of her game.” —Helen Humphreys
Noble Gas, Penny Black
by David O'MearaWinner of the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region) and shortlisted for the 2009 ReLit Award Lucid accurate detail and music at every turn.Many of the poems in Noble Gas, Penny Black explore the subject of departure and arrival, an ongoing theme in David O’Meara’s work. Travel – being between places, in stations and airports and unfamiliar cities – creates a psychological, emotional space rife with reassessment, where the individual dwells simultaneously in the future and in the past. At the same time O’Meara imbues the domestic with a similar compelling transience, in poems on love and current events, where “History’s narrowed eye” roams landscapes “felt / but never held, like wind over water.” O’Meara give us lucid, accurate detail and music at every turn, and is entangled enough with the world to make us ache. "[There are] lines from Noble Gas, Penny Black, where the syllables are, let me incautiously say, near-perfect."-Don Coles
Blood
by Tyler PennockLonglisted 2023 ReLit AwardLonglisted 2023 First Nations Community READS AwardBlood follows a Two-Spirit Indigenous person as they navigate urbanity, queerness, and a kaleidoscope of dreams, memory, and kinship. Conceived in the same world as their acclaimed debut, Bones, Tyler Pennock's Blood centres around a protagonist who at first has difficulty knowing the difference between connection and pain, and we move with them as they explore what it means to want. Pennock weaves longing, intimacy, and Anishinaabe relationalities to recentre and rethink their speaker's relationship to the living—never forgetting non-human kin. This book is a look at how deep history is represented in the everyday; it also tries to answer how one person can challenge the impacts of that history. It is a reminder that Indigenous people carry the impacts of colonial history and wrestle with them constantly. Blood explores the relationships between spring and winter, ice and water, static things and things beginning to move, and what emerges in the thaw. "A music as sensitive as it is revelatory." — Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst
The Cyborg Anthology
by Lindsay B-EPoems written by Cyborgs in the future – this collection melds sci-fi and poetry, human and machine. The Cyborg Anthology takes place in a future where there was a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs living peacefully beside Humans, but a disaster destroyed all Robot and most Cyborg life. The book is organized like a typical anthology of literature, split into sections that include a biography of each poet and a sample of their poetry. It covers early Cyborg poetry, political, celebrity, and pop culture poets, and ends with the next generation of Cyborg poets. The narrative takes place in the time after a cataclysmic event, and the collection wrestles with this loss. Through the lives of the poets, the book chronicles the history of personhood for technological beings, their struggle for liberation, and demonstrates different ways a person can be Cyborg. The poems and biographies together tell the story of a complex and enthralling world-to-come, exploring topics that are important in the future, and also urgent right now. “With mordant wit and a playful satiric touch, these Cyborg poems showcase a dazzling range of poetic forms and ideas: imaginative and charmingly subversive. Move over Norton Anthology of Poetry, there’s a new force in town, and they are a delight.” —Renée Sarojini Saklikar, author of Listening to the Bees and Children of Air India "The premise of this collection alone is fabulous. The poems are potent and powerful. With echoes of Le Guin, Brunner and Monáe, Lindsay B-e’s debut is layered and smart, provocative, and deeply satisfying. I was moved and fascinated. Speculative poetry at its best." —Hiromi Goto, author of Chorus of Mushrooms and Darkest Light
Two Hemispheres
by Nadine McInnisShortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award, the 2008 Lampman Scott Award and the 2008 ReLit Awards Imagining the lives of nineteenth-century women asylum patients, Nadine McInnis charts her descent into, and recovery from, depression. In the afterword to Two Hemispheres, McInnis describes her first encounter with the remarkable photographs that illustrate this moving volume. Patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, these women's names and stories are lost to history. McInnis imagines their experiences of mental illness as she explores her own journey through clinical depression, and finds in these haunting photographs solace and community. I used to embellish an impressive picture of the woman whose palms I mysteriously possess, describing her right down to her mismatched shoes: her gait, stiff and shuffling, from nights spent sleeping under the bridge near the off-ramp, her hair, a tangled nest of leaves and dead grass. -- from "Entertainment: a dramatic spectacle" "In the medical world, the body is often described metaphorically as a machine. Physician-poet William Carlos Williams invoked a similar metaphor when he noted that a poem is a machine made of words. What intrigues me about Nadine McInnis's insightful collection of poems is how the mechanics of poetry serve to explore what can happen when we as human machines break down. Equally captivating in these evocative and sometimes disturbing poems is the historical impetus for their creation-Victorian medical photographs. Two Hemispheres truly acts as a causeway between past and present, health and illness, and the supposed vastly different worlds of arts and biomedicine." - Dr. J.T.H. Connor, John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland
Household Hints for the End of Time
by Ken HoweWinner of the 2001 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2001 Regina Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards). Shortlisted for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards. A wide-ranging reckless intelligence, verbal audacity and irrepressible humour -- all these combine with a large-hearted embrace of existence in Ken Howe's poems. Whether they are observing, with fine ironic wit, the vagaries of domestic life, elegizing lost ones, or raised in celebration of musical compositions, they remind us of the need to address the world with all our faculties alert, including a language alive with its native energy and luminosity.
The End of Travel
by Julie BruckWith crisp, elegant language, sharp wit and resonant images, Julie Bruck's new book gentles the largesse of life out of its many smallnesses. The way a straw buoys up in a can of pop, or a friend’s dress holds her shape, even on its hanger: Bruck textures her poetry with a life "you could close your hand around." Bruck's is the urban world so many of us walk through, eyes closed. But Bruck's eyes are wide open, keen and collecting. With teeth and heart, she cracks open the ordinary to reveal life’s love and loss, joy and fragility, its extraordinary fullness.
The Authority of Roses
by Ross LeckieNo postmodern gimmickry, no tricks except all the old ones that every good poet must learn: these lucid, evocative poems put the reader so clearly in the picture that you taste the blackberries of your childhood, shiver at the chill of rainwater down your neck in a western forest, or rake the dust from your hair as you trudge home from the Trojan War. Ross Leckie can capture the fleeting moments when we fully enter the world and believe we belong. At this low point in our country's cultural history, when more and more writers have become topical "content providers" for the ever-gaping maw of the society of the spectacle, those few artists like Ross Leckie who carefully craft their work within the poetic tradition, and who show respect for all the needs -- aural, esthetic, and intellectual -- of the most discerning readers, are more than ever to be valued.
Ink Monkey
by Diana HartogInk Monkey is Diana Hartog's first book of poetry in more than thirteen years and her patience is the reader's reward. In these spare and elegant poems -- not a word out of place, not an unnecessary syllable -- Hartog turns a perceptive eye toward the stories of seemingly ordinary things, of overlooked moments and long-closed rooms. Whether she is writing about jellyfish, the desert, awkward silences that end a relationship, struggles of creativity, or Japanese prints, her poems are astute and beautiful.
outskirts
by Sue GoyetteWinner of the 2012 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Winner of the 2012 Atlantic Poetry Prize Sue Goyette's outskirts is a tour de force. Its originality lies in Goyette's refusal of despair, her conviction that the connections among people, their conversation, curiosity, empathy and awe, can help us see a way forward. Her aim is to find energy in human love, a way to walk the darkness rather than hide from it. This book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.