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Thin Moon Psalm
by Sheri BenningWinner of the 2007 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and the 2007 City of Saskatoon Prize and nominated for Book of the Year (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards Fierce and delicate poems from a young poet reminiscent of Jane Hirshfield and Jan Zwicky Rapt, musical, passionately engaged, the poems in Thin Moon Psalm move towards their own inner stillness, while also bearing witness to the power of relatedness -- to family, lovers, and the prairie landscape itself. Many of them are poems of remembrance and deep grieving, recalling in etched details the rigours and joys of life on a prairie farm, and those iconic moments which are alive with the unspoken -- moments between father and daughter, mother and child, sister and sister, lover and lover, poet and friend. Especially they take on the burden of what is lost, knowing "There is always a room we will never return to" and "we return only through loss: the place where we began."
Other Houses
by Kate CayleyFrom acclaimed fiction writer and playwright Kate Cayley—poems that illuminate the deep strangeness of the familiar. In Other Houses, Kate Cayley’s second collection of poetry, objects are alive with the presence of the people who have handled them. Myths and legends are interwoven with daily life. Visionaries, mystics, charlatans, artists, and the dead speak to us like chatty neighbours. An imaginary library catalogues missing people. Reading becomes a way of remembering the dead. Home is an elsewhere we are “called to,” a mystery that impels children to wander off, and adults to grow in unexpected directions. Cayley couples a rich, meaty lyricism with the intimacy of direct address, creating a poetry that is at once embodied and spectral. She directs us to wonder, “Did light and dark have a taste and texture, like food?” At the same time, her command of voice and narrative is masterful—each of these poems unfolds with the sweep and precision of a compressed novel. …Walking alone, you come upon a single glove, or shoe, pressed into the light snow. Or find a handprint on the wrong side of a windowpane. Or find a collection of marbles, still grouped carefully together in the backyard. Messages.(from “The Library of the Missing”) Praise for Other Houses: "Beware of Kate Cayley. With an agility stolen from some other world she flicks this one open and invites us to watch our certainties scuttling away. Predatory and unsettling, these exquisitely crafted poems suggest that we are at our most human when yearning to reach beyond the visible.” —Martha Baillie
Tell
by Soraya PeerbayeA collection of poems partially based on the Reena Virk murder case. Virk was an Asian adolescent whose drowned body was found in the Gorge Waterway in a Victoria, BC suburb, in 1997. Some of the poems use found material from court transcripts. The murder made international headlines due to the viciousness employed by Virk's assailants: seven girls and one boy between the ages of 13 and 16, five of whom were white. The poems examine in part the poet's remembrances of girlhood, the unease of adolescence, and the circumstances that enable some to pass through adolescence unhurt.
Rack of Lamb
by Michael KenyonMichael Kenyon's Rack of Lamb is a compelling study in voice. Organized loosely around various foods, the book brings together the voices of several women and a young girl, all from the same community but representing various social and cultural groups, subtly but powerfully joined by major social and political events. The power in Kenyon's book, however, lies not only in his uncanny ability to articulate strongly developed characters in one or two brief passages, but also in his ability to evoke a re-examination of the relationship between the individual, the mundane and the worldly.
Slow Moving Target
by Sue WheelerShortlisted for the 2001 Pat Lowther Award and the 2001 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes) In her second book, Slow-Moving Target, Sue Wheeler unwraps more than the Fifties. She unwraps a whole shopful of environments and events, and winds them up and sets them down to delight her readers. There is no sentimentalizing here -- either of people or of other places and times -- and yet the writing is so consistently sharp, perceptive, and clear, that the overall direction is always towards hope, towards the light.
Familial Hungers
by Christine WuPoems that reckon with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food.Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungersis a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs - the reader's appetite is satiated with these poems' complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.
Mowing
by Marlene CookshawAn award-winning poet’s day-book of poems, where both bounty and loss are tenderly assigned value. Marlene Cookshaw, in her first collection of poetry in more than a decade, invites her readers to partake in a long-anticipated harvest that comes in many forms. Whether she’s haying June-high grasses, relishing a neighbour’s gift of new potatoes with her husband, logging fragments of poetry she’s read in a notebook, or honouring the deaths of her parents, Cookshaw works an open field. Through this pastorale wander dogs, horses, chickens, and donkeys in counterpoint to farm labourers and long-time residents who share in her abiding connection to the land they mutually watch over and tend. The power grid may fail while every monthly expense is brought to account, but observation as careful and particular as Cookshaw’s more than weighs the seasons that it seeks to bring into balance. Each day I plan how the next will differ, will more resemble what I want a life to be. “These poems can confront quotidian life in plainspoken language because, like an extraordinary pencil drawing, there is so much subtle cross-hatching and shading. Cookshaw observes her mother’s death, for example, both directly and aslant, half turning away, as if unsure which is the more truthful. Mowing requires that you sit and visit for a good long while.” —Ross Leckie
Daughters of Men
by Brenda LeifsoShortlisted for the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region) Brenda Leifso’s first volume of poetry is a stunning debut: haunting, disturbing but resolutely beautiful. With an unflinching eye, Leifso explores the uncertainty of memory, the legacy of place, the powerful dynamics of sexuality and secrecy, and the violence inherent in family relations. Her central section, “The Theban Women,” is a multi-voiced re-imagining of Euripides’s The Bacchae; this drama in verse gives voice to women long silent, and together with Leifso’s more personal poems, it forms a book of exceptional power from a poet whose voice is as honest as it is beautiful.
Clinic Day
by Diana Fitzgerald BrydenDiana Fitzgerald Bryden's second book of poetry, Clinic Day, (choreo)graphs the experiences and thoughts and feelings of three characters (The Secretary, The Surgeon, and a wanderer named -- not inaptly -- Blake), who perform a pas de trois of yearning and loss and occasional moments of grace. If at times the dance has a fevered quality, it is also, always, electrically alive and exquisitely shaped. In the clinic that lies at the heart of this unravelling day there is no panacea and no placebo, but there are the consolations of attending with clarity and honesty, and the healing powers of image and metaphor and wit.
By Hand
by John ReibetanzPoems that examine the creative achievements of the human hand, from cave art to contemporary photography. John Reibetanz’s twelfth collection, By Hand, begins with an epigraph from Lewis Mumford: “Until modern times, apart from the esoteric knowledge of the priests, philosophers, and astronomers, the greater part of human thought and imagination flowed through the hands.” Reibetanz’s new poems investigate human creativity as a visceral interaction with the world: our imagining hands finding the music implicit in the stuff of earth, a “duet// of earthbound songsters,” of mind and material, each shaping the other. Centered on this duet, the book encompasses the wide-ranging aspects of our humanity—hands used for good and ill—portrayed in the examined paintings and sculptures, gardens, tapestries, photographs, and carvings. And they explore in particular the relationship in these artifacts between the “givens” of nature and the modifications and contributions of human culture. As Roo Borson says of the collection, “the poems are shot through with moments in which language’s particular dexterity comes into its own and real objects are remade, as when these lines from ‘The Installation’ celebrate the ‘commonality of clay’ in a relief by della Robbia:” the light-quickened humus of the eyes that, for hundreds of years, have read the notes inscribed on the banner an angel is unscrolling…
Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios
by Helen HumphreysAlcuin Citation in 1991 for excellence in book design in Canada. Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios is a work in the hazard of retrieval. What sticks in retrospect? Seldom what you would expect, not always the happiness. Otherwise you could train for life, you could actually learn from grandmothers, mothers; poems -- those bodies of lines and spaces -- would not appear unbidden bearing news you hold your breath to hear. Helen Humphreys comes through the rich reproach of the past into the present, a bruise, a beautiful bloom.
The Burning Alphabet
by Barry DempsterThe Burning Alphabet confirms and extends Barry Dempster’s reputation as one of Canada’s most respected poets. Underpinning these poems, as in his previous work, there lies an unswerving dedication to emotional and spiritual honesty, clear-eyed recognitions rendered without pomp. In one section, "Sick Days", he focuses on that "other place" of chronic illness. Other poems present arguments against suicide, and explore the tropical wonders of a woman’s closet. The closing section renders, with great candour and poignancy, the powerful love-hate relationship with an aging father. Dempster writes as though it were simply natural to have speech and song cohabit with such grace. In the thick of night, when we're dreaming of corridors and Dali clocks, the soft brown bodies of bucks and does are basking in our moonlight, nibbling on the last of our lettuce leaves, scratching impressions in our sand. They are the children we wish we'd had, fleeting images of ourselves before inner lives grew blotchy, eyes heavy with 10 p.m. cop shows and those blessedly nonsensical dreams. …From "Deer""In The Burning Alphabet, mood, with all its elaborate subtleties and manifestations, both in sickness and in health, constitutes a metaphysics. I feel as though I've lived an entire inner life in these pages, wrenching, dark, and amazingly sweet." – Roo Borson. Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry 2005; Winner of the CAA Jack Chalmers Poetry Award.
Unidentified Poetic Object
by Brian HendersonAstonishingly deft poems that highlight an excess, an emptiness, and a wilderness on the other side of use. In Unidentified Poetic Object, his twelfth collection of poetry, Brian Henderson strikes from language an “alphabet of lightning,” an animacy and urgency in which every object is potent with actions, past and present; every action is alive with the potential of what it might move in the world. And since every object is more than we know in our eagerness to turn it to human use, Henderson wants us to dive into that unknown space.
Cartography and Walking
by Adam DickinsonShortlisted for the 2003 Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book (Writers Guild of Alberta Award) In Cartography and Walking, Adam Dickinson charts his own listening -- an acute listening of eye and ear, a listening with both body and mind. "Cartography" is more than a metaphor for him, it's a way of being. It is how we dwell in the world, and how intimacy enriches such dwelling. Yet "cartography" is the presiding metaphor, the structure of this book; in giving it such a place, Dickinson reminds the reader of that very human impulse to plot, to imagine. Each poem is itself a kind of mapping, through language and sound, through minute observation, until land, love, and everyday life are given new embodiment, are newly discovered, and a reader finds new countries in strangely familiar settings.
Romanian Suite
by Kenneth RaduIn linked poems of great individual power, Kenneth Radu addresses the matter of Romania, the country of his ancestors, summoning figures from myth, distant and recent history, and the arts. The cast of characters includes Dracula, Prince Vlad the Impaler, and the devil -- all related to Ceausescu himself -- as well as an immigrant and his wife, and the great Romanian pianists Dinu Lipatti and Radu Lupu, and a bride who courageously battles the devil for control of her wedding. These interweave with a narrator in the present -- a gardener-pianist -- to create a long poem that is both an exorcism and a celebration, an enactment of the human capacity to survive and regenerate spiritually.
Tabako on the Windowsill
by Hari AlluriAn altar is a door; wonder is the key.What losses and intimacies bring you to this threshold? Tabako on the Windowsill contends tenderly with such questions, initiating through them the work of transformation. To shape an entire book around portals and thresholds is to search for living myth. Hari Alluri’s poems build from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. Following an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, Alluri offers multiple lived and ancestral spacesin India, the Philippines, Nigeria, the U.S., and Canada. Guided by a burning attention – to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings – Alluri creates moments where we can expand through the personhood of perception into wider, overlapping worlds of perspective and possibility.
Secrets of Weather & Hope
by Sue SinclairShortlisted for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award Sue Sinclair's poems speak from that precise place where our perception of the world and our capacity for language meet and embrace, where our sense of experience goes to get sharpened and refreshed. That experience might involve the inner lives of clouds, the flourishing and passing of a tulip, the evocative scent of wolf willow, or the intricate arts of Bach and Virginia Woolf. These poems are deft, musical, and quick in the moment, alive to the sensuous surface and the meditative depth, their antennae fully extended.
Cries from the Ark
by Dan MacIsaacA pitch-perfect debut and a call to act in the service of Earth through radiant attention. Humankind, at present, has breached floodgates that have only been breached before in ancient stories of angry gods, or so far back on geologic and biological timelines as to seem more past than past. Against this catastrophic backdrop (at the end of consolations, at the high-water mark), and equipped with a periscopic eye and a sublime metaphorical reach, poet Dan MacIsaac has crowded his debut vessel with sloths and auks, mummified remains and bumbling explorers, German expressionists and Neolithic cave-painters. With the predominant “I” of so many poetic debuts almost entirely absent, Cries from the Ark is catalogue and cartography of our common mortal—and moral—lot.
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
by A. F. MoritzShortlisted for the 2000 Governor General's Award for Poetry From the outskirts of the fevered empire, and the embers that were its heart, Moritz sings us to our selves -- our failures, our cruelties, our stupidities, and beauty which even now astonishes and leaves us breathless. Genuine political poetry is immensely difficult. Moritz succeeds, not because his list of atrocities is longer or more shocking, but because his vision is underwritten -- not whitewashed – by an ecstatic lyricism that knows evanescence is the only enduring truth.
Baby Book
by Amy Ching-Yan Lam2023 Governor General's Award for Poetry FinalistLonglisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award"God is personal," the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby. Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death—how everything is constantly, painfully remade—offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.
Mahoning
by A. F. MoritzFew artists (one thinks of Rilke and Hopkins) have presumed to evoke the spirit of embodied Nature. A. F. Moritz not only succeeds in thus animating a living world, but he deals with our human presence and assault on it with sympathy and a larger vision than the misanthropy such injuries easily summon. This is nature poetry with a difference: through Moritz's landscapes, from the abandoned industries of the Rust Belt to the decaying monuments of vanished civilization, move the vivid and engaging characters we have come to expect from this clear-eyed and open-hearted poet.
Museum of Kindness
by Susan ElmslieA meditative and piercing collection that explores traumas both ordinary and out of the ordinary. Museum of Kindness, Montreal poet Susan Elmslie’s searching second collection of poetry, is a book that bravely examines “genres” familiar and hard to fathom: the school shooting, PTSD, raising a child who has a disability. In poems grounded in the domestic and in workaday life, poems burnished by silence and the weight of the unspoken, poems by turns ironic and sincere, Elmslie asks “What, exactly, is / unthinkable?” Candid, urgent, celebratory, and wise, this is a book for all of us; in it, we encounter a sober and unflinching gaze that meets us where we really live and does not look away.
Meditatio Placentae
by Monty ReidFrom yoghurt tubs to pop-up books to bobcats, from cement trucks to lost socks to the products of conception, Meditatio Placentae, Monty Reid's twelfth collection, is a book about unruly stuff. Stuff that functions but also stuff that exceeds, stuff that dreams. A gathering of short poems wrapped into longer sequences, this is a book that pays attention to the world, in all its dizzying forms. The poems in Meditatio Placentae cluster around certain ideas, experiences, narratives; sometimes they cohere, sometimes they only assemble, but they are always at crossroads where people and objects collide. In these poems matter itself--including the placenta of the title poem--is vibrant, and argues for its rightful recognition.
False Spring: Poems
by Darren BiffordPoems about commitment and catastrophe, / from a voice of intense lyrical skepticism and wonderful tonal mobility.
Peony Vertigo
by Jan ConnPoems emerging from deep memory and shifting landscapes to joyously engage flora, fauna, and self. In her latest collection, Peony Vertigo, Jan Conn's poetic sensibility disperses and gathers, careens and slides, in and out of relation with the endangered world. Through poems ranging from global to microscopic scales, Conn's beholden, fluid sense of self dissolves into fog and river, and reconstitutes as bright orange newt, prehistoric horse, painter, and mourning daughter. Her voice is vulnerable, ecstatic, and elliptical, a tender exploration of liminal consciousness and the urge to identify with environments in crisis.