Assembly Press

A radically liberating collection of essays, ideas and approaches to writing and teaching poetry

Do It Wrong is a short, snappy series of provocations and suggestions designed to help poets think outside the box and foster creativity.

It’s a permission slip to take a path others reject, to do the counter-intuitive thing, to embrace the weird.

It's a guidebook designed to bring poets together, to question our assumptions, and to move past the “business as usual” educational models into the new, the strange, and the “wrong.”

And it's a playful, purposeful contribution toward the building of stronger, more resilient writing communities.

For readers of Beth Pickens’s Make Your Art No Matter What and Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, Derek Beaulieu distills 20 years of experience teaching creative writing into a joyfully mischievous manifesto on how to write and teach poetry with meaning.

A prose/poetry sequence concerning the hanged man of London, Ontario, by the award-winning author of Birding, or Desire; Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night; Night Field; Apparatus and Another Gravity.

A pinball wizard stars in this urban romance, set where the blues meet jazz in London, Ontario's historic York Hotel.

In this collaboration, which can be viewed as two visions in dialogue, Shantz and Lilburn each focus on the story of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who descends from her throne in heaven to the underworld. After being killed there by her sister, Inanna is reborn to return transformed, with her adornments no longer external but "formed by the scars of her healed wounds" (Shantz), a new Inanna who is also "a new physics" (Lilburn). By dramatizing the myth of the female dying-and- rising divinity in Lilburn's poetic sequence and a series of colour photographs of Shantz's room-sized constructions, the book offers us all access to the roots of feminine power in our lives.

Don Gutteridge approaches his home town of Point Edward, Ontario, with an array of listening and recording devices, mixing poetry, documentary newspaper collage, interviews and photography. A milestone in the documentary poem.

Ed Dyck finds that you cannot say "piss" on the radio in Saskatoon. There wasn't very much radio promotion of his book. That's a shame. Everybody should know about the cat Jack and the world Dyck compacts around him in 15 "sonnets."

Readers of Colleen Thibaudeau's selected poems, My Granddaughters Are Combing Out Their Long Hair, will feel at home in The Martha Landscapes, where domestic dearness and the exotic, like strangers, "make their first acquaintance....in a blur of words." The cross-relationships that occur, in a poetry of technical virtuosity that feels as easy as breathing, are sensed to be permanent.

In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.

Marlene Cookshaw is a Cheshire cat of a poet whose naturally realized details illuminate a shifting wholeness on the "singing edge" between dream and waking.

Hers is a quilted language at once covering and revealing our fascinating ordinariness. The long poem "In The Swim" subtly captures the desperate and humourous beauty of a seemingly plain life closely observed. Other poems leap with deftness and daring across the open plain of our lives, leaving images so strong, so strange, they verge on myth.

A sequence of fifty dated poems, four quatrains each; lyrical arguments; quick thinking amid the rational absurdity of everyday machinery; intuitive explorations of unknown energies; a diary of the unconscious.

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.

Granddaughters, 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.

Naomi Guttman's first collection of poems marks the appearance of a deeply emotional, highly intelligent new voice.

Its theme is intimacy-ours, especially women's, experience of intimacy in many forms, how it marks us, how we long for it, the ways in which it is both our fulfilment and our undoing. The personae range from children to old men and women, jailbirds to schoolgirls; the language is chosen without ever becoming deliberate, precise but always musical. These are poems from and of the heart, chastened by experience, taut with craft.

Tiny Courts in a world without scales is a collection of 50 poems, probes of contemporary language and life, cool vessels for social engagement, modulations of irony orchestrated towards a critical presentation of our artificial lives now.

Bilingual Traveller's Edition: Edition pour Voyageurs. French translation by Lola Lemire Tostevin.

Instructions: An elimination dance begins with a crowded dance floor. At a signal, the band stops playing and the announcer reads an elimination, say, "Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine's Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis." Any dancer answering this description must sit down, and his partner is also disqualified. The process continues (e.g. "Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board") until a single couple remains. And now, the post-Meech Lake edition.

Brick Books reaches out to Quebec: "Tout amant qui, à la Saint-Valentin, est entré dans une boutique de fleuriste et a demandé pour un clitoris au lieu d'une clématile."

Variations on Herb is the latest in a lengthening series of books that emanate from the south-western Ontario farm of John B. Lee's childhood.

The focus of Variations is Herb Lee, John B's grandfather (and an absolutely unforgettable curmudgeon) but the background of rural Ontario is also made palpable entirely without indulgent explanation. This grain, this rich vein that appears in book after book, may well be inexhaustible; the cumulative effect certainly has few parallels in Canadian writing.

Maureen Harris's first volume of poetry evokes "a possible landscape," where the stories that subtly shape us blend with the moments that we are.

Here is an Eden where Eve longs for the serpent's "green quiver," his "sibilant caress," where a snake tires of his lover "wearing/the same skin day-out, day-in." The poems in the first section of this book are sharp new takes on old stories, at once angry, witty and thoughtful. With grace, compassion and sparkle, the rest of the book explores the self in the world of the late twentieth century, the seeming contradictions of the third world, and the ordinary magic of an evening spent with friends.

In The Woman Downstairs, eloquence joins intimately with an attentive and hungry eye.

Julie Bruck explores the accidents and acquaintances of life, its small coincidences and occurrences, its unexpected meetings. With a passionate distance, Bruck blends the outside observer's cool embrace with a desire to know intensely life's eccentric smallnesses, to gentle the beautiful out of the mundane. By turns witty and thoughtful, Bruck's writing is always graceful, always a delight.

Reading Julie Berry's poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined.

"like marie d'oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this," Berry writes in "Touching Ground.""Like this" is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues. Her images are so completely unexpected and yet so thoroughly right that you are left wondering why you never imagined "the minute hand [falling] into the refrigerator and breakfast/...clattering across the lawn/ its spoons and bowls and burning toast." Her eye is keen and quirky; its wide embrace enfolds the highways and cemeteries of southwestern Ontario, flying pianos, her lover's ex-neck, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, furniture cleaners, suicides and mass strandings. And of course her reader. Here is a poet whose honesty and wry humour loosen the tangles of the heart.

Before his tragic death in 1992, Greg Curnoe had submitted to Brick Books a manuscript based on extraordinarily detailed research into the history of 38 Weston, his address in London, Ontario. The result is a journal/collage that traces the occupancy of that one small plot of land hundreds of years back into aboriginal times when land in this country was not plotted according to the laws of geometry. Deeds/Abstracts is an intensely concentrated and particular cross-section of Canadian history, layer upon layer upon layer. Brick Books is proud to offer this exemplary work-in-progress (a 500-year diary can never be complete) assembled by a much-loved and keenly-lamented Canadian artist of the first importance. Greg Curnoe was born in London in 1936. He was a founder of the Nihilist Spasm Band, the Forest City Gallery, and Region magazine.

Front and back covers are after paintings by Greg Curnoe. The text includes 12 colour plates of photographs and Curnoe paintings.

Year Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along songlines as though following passages of Koto music.

In Brian Henderson's poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed by awareness of the paradoxes at the heart of language, that language wants you for itself, and that what is named, falls. Whether focusing on the dying of a parent or fellow poet, or on the coming-to-be of a child, this poetry is alive with the truth that "The dead burn through us/ the not yet born."

"What a wonderful book this is! Henderson tells the old story how dear ones die, and new lives come to be. In a world that's dense, opaque, yet lit with random hints of something being uttered. The result is a marvel of passionate, glancing eloquence. I wanted it never to end."--Dennis Lee

In her third book of poetry The Perils of Geography, Helen Humphreys charts a world that opens under the prodding and promise of language.

With the wit and eye for evocative detail which gained readers for both Gods and Other Mortals and Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios, Humphreys probes the immediacy of now, the intensity of this, the residue of then. Don't be deceived by the spare appearance; her poems are resonant and full, "all angles and confidence." Light falls slant across them. She maps "what surrounds not what's made still" - "the moving line." The line she traces connects the pull of memory and moment, open roads and winter aconite, transcendental basements and ornamental shrubbery. In "Singing to the Bees," the ten poem sequence which makes up the second of three sections in Perils, she slips inside folk wisdoms, wears them with an easy grace, all flesh and wit and possibility: dancing shoes, gifted pigs, swarming bees, airplane nuns and spectre ships. These poems make superstition delicious.

Near the centre of Marrying the Animals, Cornelia Hoogland's new book of poetry, is the sequence "In the Meantime: Elizabeth Smart Poems" Hoogland's exploration of Smart's obsession with the poet George Barker is an apt heart for this volume, for its abiding spirit is passion. With feather touch and "kelp green longing," Hoogland pauses over the minutiae of the daily, of the loved. Her lyric intensity embraces family, friends, lovers and literature. Yet she never ignores the untameable passion that circumscribes both love and language, and shades the familiar into wilderness.

"With time, I got better at seeing him off at the gate, the harbour; all the exits. It took days to rid the chair, cup, windowlight of his image. And then the long in-the-meantime learning chair, cup over again."—from "In the Meantime: Elizabeth Smart Poems"

Reading John Reibetanz, one is struck with the way language, closely attended to, kept oiled and sharp, can give experience back its bite. And conversely, how experience can be the whetstone for language, chastening its presumptions and requiring from it fresh exactitudes of music and insight. Whether the subject is a cord of wood, a painting, or the New York Times (deeply and dancingly read) John Reibetanz brings a nearly invisible craft into close attunement with the details of life, hearkening with words. Again and again the glass slipper fits the foot.

The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen years. Deeply centred in domestic life, Goyette's work is informed by a muscular lyricism. These are poems that push the limits, always true to their roots.

Deluxe redesign of the two-time Griffin Award winner's first poetry collection. Includes new material.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the first of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of Short Talks features a foreword by the poet Margaret Christakos, a "Short Talk on Afterwords" by Carson herself, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

First issued in 1992, this is Carson's first and only collection of poems published with an independent Canadian press. It announced the arrival of a profound, elegiac and biting new voice. Short Talks can comfortably stand alongside Carson's other bestselling and award-winning works.

The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare. —"Short Talk on the Youth at Night"

Praise for Short Talks: "Short Talks is a unique form of slag-like poetic address that arises from the full formative force of Carson's young embodiment of a northern Ontario mining-town winter of mind."—Margaret Christakos, from the Introduction.

Deluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada's former Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Includes new material.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

The Grey Islands is the story of one man's pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland's northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.

Bent, I circle the building grubbing and rooting. Every shingle and stick I lift yields bait. Things Carm ate and didn’t eat, turned to worms. A kind of organic shadow of the man.

Praise for The Grey Islands: "[The book] illustrates how the outsider becomes an insider by becoming a supplicant, renouncing the role of saviour and honouring the culture of the people among whom he has decided to make his home."—Adrian Fowler, from the Introduction.

Riffs is the story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style—with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs.

We hear Bach, Bo Diddley, Bird; the news is heartache and being. Celebratory, catastrophic, the poem tracks ways in which eros and our lives are made mutually accountable. Riffs is a landmark achievement from the poet of Civil Elegies and The Gods.

Deluxe redesign of the Gerald Lampert Award-winning classic.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fourth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of A Really Good Brown Girl features a new Introduction by Lee Maracle, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

First published in 1996, A Really Good Brown Girl is a fierce, honest and courageous account of what it takes to grow into one's self and one's Métis heritage in the face of myriad institutional and cultural obstacles. It is an indispensable contribution to Canadian literature.

I am looking at a school picture, grade five, I am smiling easily...I look poised, settled, like I belong. I won an award that year for most improved student. I learned to follow really well.—from "Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl"

"No other book so exonerates us, elevates us and at the same time indicts Canada in language so eloquent it almost hurts to hear it."—Lee Maracle, from the Introduction

New light on Michael Crummey's classic depiction of Newfoundland and Labrador's past.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fifth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Hard Light features a new Introduction by Lisa Moore, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

In Hard Light, first published in 1998, Crummey retells and reimagines his father's and others' stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery. These deeply felt poems are rooted in the places where "human desire comes up against rock" (John Steffler).

I have a fair trial on the fishing line now,
being three summers out from home, two summers on
the French Shore, four down on the Labrador,
and three trips this year to the Banks of Newfoundland,
and this is what I have learned to be the price of fish
—"'The price of fish.' (September, 1887)"

"In these stories and poems, an intimate, bright world flares up, glowing in the darkness of recent history, full-blown and vivid."—Lisa Moore, from the Introduction

Remember Bonnie & Clyde? A complex, dramatic rendering of a familiar story made new.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are the stuff of legend—why tell their story again? Chances are you don't know the nuances—their love story and that of their accomplices Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche; their aspirations, conflicts and prayerful natures; and ultimately the sources of their tragedy. At its core, Careen is a long poem spoken by the characters, though the voices are companioned by newspaper articles often ironically at odds with the inside story. Smart lets the principal actors relate their own tale—a book of voices speaking out of the desperate dirty thirties.

"we come shinin from the tray as real as fleshed-out fine-boned forms
even our shoes flashin, we are some fun jokers
are not coarse, cannot lie, do not limp or bleed
are kind & funny, desperately in love
we are you but better, no denyin

fix us there, that moment when you like us, want to be like us"
—from "like us: the photographs left behind at Joplin"

Praise for Carolyn Smart:
"always moving, sometimes chilling "—University of Toronto Quarterly
"[Smart] understands loneliness in all its forms, and writes with a clarity and compassion that is powerfully affecting."—Anne Michaels

Under the sugar maples of Montreal, family life is given mythic dimensions in this sweeping novella-in-verse.

If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L'Orfeo? Would Ariadne's thread be fashioned into tapestries of furious elegy in the face of environmental catastrophe? Would their marriage survive?

Amid a fictional marriage in a state of malaise and a real world on the edge of environmental disaster, Guttman lays open moments of vexation and tenderness, of grief, guilt, betrayal and love. Sounding through these moments are the harpsichord and the loom, drawing Donny and Ari, their sons Stephan and Onno, their corgie and their parrot, into the long weave of myth, art and human history.

Donny envies her the order of her threads, neatness of the loom, palettes of skeins piled high. Compare this to the score he must unwind, ingest, to play by heart. The orchestra accompanying the voices is Orfeo's lyre.

—from "Rehearsals: Mastery"

Praise for Naomi Guttman: "Richly detailed, passionate, witty, despairing, and brave, the lyric force of these poems conveys most of all a deep knowledge and love of a complex but recognizable world."—Peter Meinke

New and revised edition of an early work by the Governor General's Award–winning poet.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the last of our six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Wittgenstein Elegies features an expansive Introduction by Sue Sinclair, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

First published in 1986, Wittgenstein Elegies is a polyphonic poem in five parts. It establishes the parameters of a long conversation between logic and the lyre that has continued over multiple books and in multiple genres. Long out of print, this revised edition is both a must-have for Zwicky's readers and a perfect introduction to her work.

"Here was the one guy in recent history who appeared to have got it right and he was being taught all wrong. I wrote Wittgenstein Elegies in an attempt to respond to this state of affairs. I wanted to draw attention to the unity of Wittgenstein's life and work. I hoped to show how profoundly he experienced the moral dimensions of language's relation to the world."—Jan Zwicky, from the Afterword

"Zwicky shows us that there is a way of speaking that leaves room for what cannot be spoken."—Sue Sinclair, from the Introduction

A turbulent, celebratory flight from an accomplished witness and journeyman.

Antony Di Nardo's third collection of poems occupies the air between Canada and Lebanon, viewer and painting, victim and triggerman, reader and page. Blending a bohemian ebullience with a reporter's obligation to witness, the poems in Roaming Charges are a heady and celebratory bouquet of jet fuel, camaraderie and muezzin music. They look long and hard at their subjects, but also speak of the trails those subjects leave across the skies.

I look for contraband from the infinite
in the work of others, ducks in a tree,
tales of mishaps/shipshapes, insincerities
at gloss the fugitive crickets and their happiness,
slip-ups at the marvels of a spirit world
still stuck in the land of vapours, a sound
like distant thunder from the back of the plane...

—from "James Tate, Son of a Jet"

Praise for Roaming Charges:

"This latest collection is luminous with the undeniable self in lyrical surrender to the dramas of mankind."—Robin Richardson

"This is poetry that aches...that matters."—Michael Mirolla

A razor-sharp eye for detail roams and redeems imperfections both personal and collective.

The world in Carolyn Marie Souaid's latest collection is both an act of the imagination and a responsibility. Souaid's poems zoom in and out, shifting focus to accommodate varied dimensions of experience. We move from the breakdown of a relationship to primordial ooze to a suicide bomb to a son doing his math homework. In a disarmingly personable voice, Souaid investigates our darker moments, faces up to losses and failures both intimate and public, often with wry humour. If our world is an imperfect invention, it is also, for Souaid, a source of wonder—where "the trick was not to fall asleep but to notice everything / in its brevity."

"I've no idea what it is to be moss or jade
in the spectrum of green. There are no patterns;
there is no good light to measure anything by.
The laws of physics drop like an ax.

In the end, the body doesn’t keep."

—from "Where Night Takes Me"

Praise for This World We Invented:

"These bold, important poems have grappled with beauty and chosen honesty...[T]hey offer no easy consolations, but because they are made things...they reflect a hope for change."—Stephanie Bolster

Dazzling collection of masques from Manitoba Book of the Year and Walrus Poetry Prize-winning author.

Monologue Dogs is a series of contemporary dramatic monologues. Every "voice" has its own imagined rhythm and nuances of poetic speech that are as vibrant, wayward, mournful, errant, or unruly as the characters who speak. Setting the lyric against street argot, archaic language against deflating or ironic feints, metaphors against declarative sentences, the elegiac against the ribald, classical or literary allusions against anachronistic references, these monologues reflect our own disordered subjectivities. In the words of Molly Peacock: "Read her for a fresh, contemporary and knowing sensibility—not to mention an unforgettable sense of humour."

Suddenly the car drops down on all fours
and will go no further. Arrival is neither here
nor there, mother says, searching for her key.
But her key is in the last lost pocket of the world's
overcoat and tonight—tonight the forest is ajar.

—from "The Hunger Artists"

Praise for Monologue Dogs:

"Again Méira Cook proves herself to be one of Canada's most compelling poets."—Molly Peacock.

"These are poems to read and reread with growing pleasure and admiration."—Steven Heighton

The English translation of new work from a celebrated Danish poet.

Frayed 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 neigbourhoods. 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.

"In my pocket I have
the photo of the house, I have to stop continually, put
the suitcases down, take the photo from my pocket
and compare the house in the photo with the houses
we pass. In this way seventeen years go by."
—from Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments

Praise for the work of Ulrikka S. Gernes:

"airy and abstract, like pinching smoke...risky and intriguing."—The Antigonish Review

A remarkable debut that expresses a humanism grounded in physiology.

At the heart of Karyotype is the Beauty of Loulan, a woman who lived four thousand years ago, her body preserved in the cool, dry sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Karyotype's poems range from the title sequence, which explores the DNA and woven textiles of this woman and her vanished people (a karyotype is the characteristic chromosome complement of a species), to the firebombing of the National Library of Sarajevo, from an abecedarian hymn on the International Red Cross "Book of Belongings" to the experience of watching the televised invasion of Iraq in the dark of a Montreal night. The Beauty of Loulan becomes a symbol of the ephemerality of human genetic and cultural texts, and of our chances for survival.

"And then there was Liu Baiqiang
sentenced to 18 years for "Counter-Revolutionary Incitement"
who attached words to the legs of locusts

Tyranny! Long Live Freedom!

and flung them over the walls
of his prison, into the air."
—from "On the ordering of chaotic bodies of poetry"

"Karyotype is for me a crucial text in the work of re-imagining what it is to be human...I am grateful, as well as inspired, to find an artwork performing this essential task."—Don McKay

WINNER OF THE 2017 PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD

Lyric poems built with consummate skill by a poet at the peak of her powers.

Heaven's Thieves is a collection engaged with the big questions—What are bodies for? What does it mean to be alive? What is beauty and why does it have such power over us? What is the point of art?—and the urgent ones—how to live in a shattered ecology, what to do about grief, illness, betrayal. Sinclair turns her attention to these questions with fearless curiosity, economy, and an originality born of her willingness to pursue her own line of inquiry to its limit. These poems get close and cut deep, mixing subject and object, surface and soul: "Red mud glistens / like cut fruit—or like the knife / that did the cutting, laid down."

In this, her fifth collection, Sinclair knows that nature is both "done to death" and "inexhaustible"; that art is an elegy for experience, but even so,

"...to die
is not to wash through the body of a deer like a ghost;
it isn't to skulk under a living skin.
It's a change in the value of things." (from "The Dead")

Experience and its value are changed in these poems. They are as wise as they are disruptive, and they change us as surely as they remake the world.

Praise for Sue Sinclair:
"a poet who looks long and hard at the world to draw existential meaning. Her studious gaze is insightful, even—dare I say it in this secular age—soulful."—Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star

"vivid, lively, crisp, and packed with delicious surprise metaphors."—Anita Lahey, Arc Poetry Magazine

A beloved poet explores why life is so rich, even at the worst of times.

Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster's fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck—the "three-leaf clovers" so much more plentiful than the four.

Dempster's wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to life's ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities. In these poems, a forty-year-old man dons a pink plastic crown on his niece's order; a solitary man watches a Nicole Kidman rom-com with his cat; an aging Aphrodite, more mortal than god, suffers hot flashes. Like the mystic poets he addresses in the book's final section, Dempster respects the unknown as he comes to terms with the ups and downs of the all-too-human condition.

Shifting effortlessly from light-hearted ode to solemn elegy, Dempster offers no touch-up jobs; instead we find a love of the flaw, a generosity toward it even as he exposes it. This is a poetry of inclusiveness, engaging both our better and worse angels, baring its Achilles' heel and trusting us to do likewise.

"...Heaven

is a still life in a Motel Six

non-smoker...Tonight

you'll sleep in a clearing

that won't be there come dawn." (from "Lao-Tzu")

Poems that form an eloquent, searching contemplation of "the warp and weft of being and nonbeing."

All the Names Between is Nova Scotia poet Julia McCarthy's meditative and crackling-with-dark-energy third collection. From her observation of "long-horned beetles...rearranging the landscape" to an apperception of "part of me /...seeded by dust / of meteors and asteroids," McCarthy makes palpable, in richly layered imagery and with attentiveness that unfolds stillness, the "Singing Emptiness" that informs and quickens the crow's flight, the stones' weight, and our own being as we move in "the defined world both elegant / and maimed." Concerned with both the inadequacy and the necessity of word to convey world, the poems move through a shifting landscape of seasons and creatures, of the remembered dead, and of scattered stones reading the Akashic field.

Grounded in the experience of presence, where the external and internal meet, a crossroads of consciousness where "a language without a name / remembers us" and the poem is a votive act, All the Names Between reflects the shadow-light of being, of what is and what isn't, the seen and the unseen, the forgotten and the remembered where

"every elegy has an ode at its centre
every ode has an elegy around its edges."
(from "Ode with an Elegy around its Edges")

Praise for All the Names Between:

"It is Julia McCarthy's incomparable eloquence as a poet to, as an experienced photographer might, wield darkness as an ever more powerful lens to reveal the intricate beauty of the world as she finds it. And it is with this extraordinary vision, that McCarthy ushers us into her newest collection, All the Names Between, 'where the dead gather like trees in their white coats' and bats hover overhead, 'lucifugal as ashes from invisible fires.' These are poems scintillate with vision and stunningly intimate—showing us page after page the full, and exquisite measure of 'night's worth.'"—Clarise Foster, Editor, Contemporary Verse 2

"Here is a book of meditations for even those immune to poetry, a poetry with no comfort zones. McCarthy takes readers to a world where the marriage between solitude and nature gives birth to memorable, haunting lines, where the mystery of poetry lies just between the words. I have no doubt readers will embrace this book as their own."—Goran Simić, author of Immigrant Blues and From Sarajevo, with Sorrow

Poems that echo Satie's haunting music and refract the ironies of the Parisian Dada movement.

A man who might be Erik Satie floats, à la Magritte, above Paris rooftops, thinking of a newly-extinct species of songbirds, "contemplating grief in the absence of song." By turns tender, wry, playful and fierce, the poems in Dean Steadman's second collection, Après Satie–For Two and Four Hands, use surreal imagery, recurring characters and cyclical themes to evoke the repetitive nature of much of Satie's music, as well as the artistic and intellectual temperament of Paris during Satie's most creative years.

The prose poems in the collection borrow titles from Satie's piano compositions, and all of the poems are annotated in a manner similar to Satie's published scores, using a selection of his performance instructions (for example, "like a nightingale with a toothache").

From the affair of Satie and painter Suzanne Valadon to the glimpsed lives of a contortionist, a French cowboy, a Falling Man and a Floating Woman in the Dada-inflected prose poems, to the musings in other poetic forms that draw us forward in time, to a present-day hospice, or back, to the gallop of a mounted huntress, Après Satie involves us in the ongoing muddle of pain, sorrow, compassion, passion, joy and curiousness that is our human condition.

"When he died, Erik Satie left twelve grey suits hanging in his closet. With surreal virtuosity Dean Steadman has pulled eighty-four sinuous poems and prose riffs out of their velvet pockets."—William Aide, renowned classical pianist and poet

"Shifting geography and perspective as easily as form, [these] poems beguile the senses as deftly as a menagerie of circus contortionists."—Sandra Ridley

A wide-ranging meditation by an accomplished poet on the uncontainable materiality of the world.

From 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.

"When the time comes, the broken water disappears
into the seam of itself, and then the carry-on full of small bones

articulated as an I will also disappear.
They will be expecting me then.

And what would be the point of hanging on?
Just to be the lining of belief, after belief itself is gone?" (from "Meditatio Placentae")

Linked poems that uncover the ache and whimsy of raising children on the autism spectrum.

Through public judgments, detouring dreams and unspoken prayers, Tell Them It Was Mozart, Angeline Schellenberg's debut collection, traces both a slow bonding and the emergence of a defiant humour. This is a book that keens and cherishes, a work full of the earthiness and transcendence of mother-love. One of the pleasures of this collection is its playful range of forms: there are erasure poems, prose poems, lists, found poems, laments, odes, monologues and dialogues in the voices of the children, even an oulipo that deconstructs the DSM definition of autism. From a newborn "glossed and quivering" to a child conquering the fear of strange toilets, Tell Them It Was Mozart is bracing in its honesty, healing in its jubilance.

"Michelangelo slept in his clothes and seldom ate Newton lectured to empty rooms at scheduled times if no one showed up to hear him...Only staying where room numbers were divisible by three, Tesla tested turbines in his mind, would not touch round objects...Charles Darwin formulated the theory of natural selection, the foundation for our understanding of the diversity of life on earth: advantageous traits survive Mozart meowed on tables" — from "Posthumously diagnosed"

A long poem that limns the incremental mourning of living with a person who has frontotemporal dementia.

Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk — to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould's second poetry collection, is a sequence of fragments written in dialogue with all of these meanings. Stitched together, these fragments form a poem that runs from the ranch land of Alberta into the heart of a shared house and a shared life.

Selah is about living with a husband recently diagnosed with dementia; it's about the looking back and the imagining forward, about saying what cannot be said—the wayfaring bush and its shadow. It's about finding a way through all this: "The palette darker than I'd planned," yes, but also shot through with humour and care, crafted with both frankness and decorum.

In her award-winning previous book, I see my love more clearly from a distance, Gould wrote, "When Zoë finishes high school / I'll be on this horse of marriage as if riding after freezing rain: / muscles tensed to lift me in the saddle." In many ways this book is that ride. It pares away anything that does not immediately, albeit subtly, get to the aching muscle of the matter.

A powerful grief book—poems that are not so much elegiac as visionary.

Stomata, Genevieve Lehr's second collection, asks that language shoulder loss, that it reach out centrifugally, at full metaphorical stretch, calling upon all its narrative and lyric resources to be adequate to human tragedy. These losses include immediate deaths, Alzheimer's, abuse, cancer, and—in a remarkable poem—residential schools, and they activate a potent spirituality that calls on a full range of imagistic resources.

As a grief book, Stomata is remarkable for its energy and range. While it honours and remembers the lost, it is always charged with a sense of a mystic power deriving from them. "In a conversation between Homer and Hermes, loss was found to be a gift," writes Lehr. The result is the poetic experience of a vitalistic universe in which "Metamorphosis is everywhere": a grief-enhanced rather than a grief-stricken vision. In Lehr's poems, one keeps being struck by a simultaneity of mundane and cosmic, as can be see in the first lines of her opening long poem: "In the latter half of the third quarter of the waning moon / I sit at the table drinking tea."

This is a book that is constantly provocative, alive with spirit and a restless energy in the face of disaster.

Praise for Stomata's opening long poem:
"One can return again and again and still discover new insights. The range of reference is wide and surprising—Nâzim Hikmet, Bobbie Gentry, Milarepa, St. Francis—the language dissociative, the rhythms often raw and out of order. There's something elevated, germinal, fascinating here."—Jury Citation from The Malahat Review's 2015 Long Poem Prize

Whether speaking of erotic love, domestic life, spiritual wilderness, or family entanglements, the poems of Auguries, the much-anticipated second collection from Yukon poet Clea Roberts, are saturated with their northern landscape.

Roberts is well versed in the distances and dynamics between tedium and ecstasy, light and dark, isolation and solitude, freeze and thaw, flow and stillness. Her poems are spare and clean, each like a single larch in an immense white plain; their exactness startling and arresting. As the Gerald Lampert Award jury citation for her celebrated first book noted, "Her images are not only crisp and precise, but manage to speak about the physical conditions of this place and its emotional landscape in one and the same lyrical breath"

Written during a period in which Roberts both became a parent and lost a parent, the poems in Auguries lend themselves to prayer, surrender, celebration, reconciliation, meditation, and auspice.

"Tell me
how to breathe
between
the painful
and the beautiful,

my lips,
my eyelids
slow with cold." (from "Cold Snap")

"Clea Roberts writes poems of clear, quiet beauty. They contain the silence of perception: alive to the world with open eye and open heart."—Anne Michaels

What does it mean to be a man now? The answers in these poems are bold and deeply moving.

The poems in Degan Davis's debut collection, What Kind Of Man Are You, move between the title's societal taunt (prove yourself) and its more tender and inquisitive question (how to be a man in this era?). Davis has guts; he trusts the voice of a poem to draw out those truths that in lesser hands might render us mute. The writing navigates the spaces between traditional male archetypes and 21st century possibilities, through the lenses of music, tribes, war, divorce, sex, and love.

Davis is both impish and an old soul, and his poems are as comfortable riffing on big topics as they are when he's maneuvering language with a musician's cadence. As a result, the work is instantly engaging and thoroughly human. Why read Degan Davis? Because his work is full of joy. Because, to him, poetry matters.

"Rejecting both rhetoric and brute force as supreme, this book lives as equally in the heart as the mind. It's had a drink or two with Lowell, Bly, and Carver. It's found a church of sorts in jazz and blues. As readers, we find ourselves witnessing this sensitive exploration during an historical moment in which What Kind of Man Are You may emerge as one of the most urgent questions."—Stevie Howell

"If you could strip us of our insolent and taciturn practices, deny us our drunken and garrulous escapes, and encourage our tongues to talk the truth, these are some of the things men might say about what, and how, they feel."—Michael Winter

From 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

An elegiac and incisive debut that blends poems of social justice with poems of ordinary life.

In her first collection, Thin Air of the Knowable, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa's life—West Coast, Caribbean, prairies—ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations. A road-trip poem moves from prairie winter, "an icy scatter of gravel / the moving centre of this unpeopled world," past a cattle liner on its way to the slaughter house, but it also passes beneath the sky's "blazing scroll of light," and magpies "flashing black and teal in the sun." Landscape also functions metaphorically to suggest how historical settings play out in the exigencies of individual lives.

Other preoccupations include poems that reflect on poesis itself—the strange poem-making compulsion to capture that which is largely inexpressible (hence "the thin air of the knowable"), and the role of dreams, memory, and intuition in shaping a poem's knowledge.

Donawa is, in many ways, a political poet, yet manages to put flesh and blood into everything she writes. In the end,

"Perhaps there is only the demonic journey.
Small beauties by the roadside, and
such love as we can muster."
(from "Pu Ru Paints Zhong Kui the Demon Queller on a Mule")

Praise for Thin Air of the Knowable:

"Wendy Donawa's poetry rests at the very edge of beauty where a wild delicacy resides."—Patrick Lane

"Like the watchmakers of old, Wendy Donawa puts a spyglass to her eye and fixes her vision to the minute, to all that carries on beneath our imperfect sight—worlds upon worlds brought into the sharpest focus."—Pamela Porter

A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.

Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award-winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada's greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery's walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists—and most importantly their work—to appear in Canada in many years.

Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré's collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.

"Like the sculpted female figures she describes as 'tacking their bodies against the history of storm,' Paré has positioned her own graceful, finely chiselled lines to recast the history of women in art, in society, in love."—Anita Lahey

"A distinctive and memorable book, sympathetic and gloriously questioning."—Stephanie Bolster

A 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. It is a collection about thresholds big and small. 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?" Confronted by "the mismatch / between our need for meaning / and our inability to find it," the poet reflects on the possibility of the miraculous in hard-won insights, in "a comparatively / uncomplicated joy."

Of the "Museum of Kindness" evoked in the title poem, Elmslie writes, "There isn’t one." This and many other poems in the collection confront that absence and emerge from the silence to consider the duality of loss, the gift of "ordinary comfort," and the transformative possibilities of art. Candid, forthright, 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.

"...These poems are so acute, so clear-eyed in their brutal wisdom, that I had to put the book down to rest between poems, like a woman in labor, entirely wrung out. Museum of Kindness is a masterpiece of loss transformed by love into some of the most greathearted, lyrically daring poems I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Susan Elmslie has written a brilliant, unforgettable book."—Rachel Rose, Vancouver's Poet Laureate

A 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 gipsy-birds, mummified remains and bumbling explorers, German expressionists and Neolithic cave-painters.

MacIsaac knows that in order to render a thing in language, description itself must be open to metamorphosis and transformation; each thing must be seen alongside, overtop of, and underneath everything else that has been seen. 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.

"These poems are fecund as black dirt, as carnal and joyous. Each piece is an owl pellet, a concentrate of bone and tuft, of bison, auk and Beothuk. Not since Eric Ormsby's Araby have I read a book so empathic and so glossarily rich. Fair warning, MacIsaac: I'll be stealing words from you for years."—Sharon McCartney

"MacIsaac sings a raven's work, sings the guts from our myths, sings our world with the breath that 'for a century/ of centuries / only the wild grass / remembered.' Present but acquainted with antiquity, MacIsaac's instrument is our own breathing as we say these poems of reverence to ourselves."—Matt Rader

Poems about commitment and catastrophe, from a voice of intense lyrical skepticism and wonderful tonal mobility.

False Spring, Darren Bifford's second collection of poetry, is a book largely concerned with various forms of collapse and cultural disintegration. These are poems of considerable weight and great energy at once, so that the impression is of a large-muscled animal that is also nimble. They are the work of an engaged moral imagination, alive with the conceptual issues of the times embedded in experience; their "philosophical" import speaks out of the poetic act itself.

Bifford seems always in active conversation, dialogue, dispute with figures from literary and classical traditions. There is also a set of "translations" of a Polish poet of Bifford's invention, which permit him to write, Pessoa-like, in another voice—even if it shares a few features (as a disillusioned Pole writing of general collapse) with his own.

While non-confessional in intent, the poems do attend to the inner pitch—like a white noise—which the events of the world sound. The book thus contends with a nostalgia for old forms without belying any sustained confidence in their veracity.

"It's like in a cartoon, all the forest fires
Leapfrogging fires. Small civilizations caught
In the dirty, say they're sorry and plead their cases
Ad hoc and brilliantly. "Scared as shit"
Is my summary."
(from "Habitable Earth in the Last Analysis")

Poems that skitter between life and death, "sleep and hurry," at their heart a kind of tender panic.

By turns funny, frank, mysterious, and heartbreaking, Standing in the Flock of Connections, Heather Cadsby's fifth collection of poetry, is one hundred proof associative thought. These poems testify to the human mind's capacity to "do"—taking into account all of the performative, causal, athletic, and sexual connotations of that verb. Many of them come in on an overheard conversation or monologue—mid-fight, mid-stride—and the absent details and specifics often function to open up a space for things to become other things, for the flock of connections to swarm.

I love a pentagram. You can draw that thing
all day freehand, sloppy. Five-star
hotels, movies, generals. Throw it around
like it was a love number, which it is.
Cut an apple horizontally, there it is.
Draw one inside its centre pentagon and so on
nesting smaller forever. Till you call it quits
and start singing Holy etc.
(from "Sunday geometer")

Praise for Heather Cadsby:
"...verse that demonstrates wit and levity as well as a seriousness at its heart...capable of blasphemy...an honest inquiry into life and the inherent duality of the moment."—Gillian Harding-Russell, Prairie Fire Review of Books

Anxious, twitchy, urgent poems—a collection that's at once sardonic and "chronically wishful."

Reckon, Steve McOrmond's first book of poems since his acclaimed 2010 collection The Good News about Armageddon, hones in on those fugitive moments when the parts of ourselves that have not been entirely subsumed by consumer capitalism escape their cages and come out to play—a photographer's lifelong desire to collect snowflakes, an adolescent's game of show-me-yours, the small, defiant act of letting a cellphone call go to voicemail. "The whole world has gone straight to voicemail," McOrmond writes a line later.

With one foot in the physical world and one in the virtual, these poems embody the often-tense negotiations between "I" and a collective "we." Concerned with the sweep of history and the rush of the now, McOrmond demonstrates a knack for bringing the vast and amorphous down to human size, making it personal: "How gone? Real gone. All our gift cards unredeemed."

Responding to a poem from Reckon that appeared on Poetry Daily, comedian Patton Oswalt tweeted a perceptive one-liner review: "Steve McOrmond's new poem, Pure Outrage,' is really funny and, if you read it right, kind of scary." While at times these poems reach out from a place of isolation, across a distance greater than words, one always senses an earnest desire for connection and engagement: Here, take my hand. Maybe it's not too late.

"Creeping dread, bemused wonder, and a species of headlong incredulity inform Steve McOrmond's processing of the new century's prodigious cultural jetsam, its 'wilderness of signs'. Reckon apprehends the strangeness in the commonplace, and the anxiety humming in everyday chatter, fact and argument, whether it be live or digitized. 'What do they open, the keys that come rotoring down from the maple trees?' Turns out it's complicated."—Kevin Connolly

"The isolation and confusion of the modern age come to life in Steve McOrmond's new book Reckon in a way that is disquieting and strangely comforting at the same time."—Ron Sexsmith

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD FOR POETRY

Poems that unfold like liturgy, confronting old violence with a trembling, dignified restraint.

Reunion is a parable, an origin story, a cautionary tale. It is also a time machine in which poems commune with ghosts in an attempt both to reckon with and subvert their legacy. It is a tale of the impossible quest for the original, unhurt self. A girlhood is re-inhabited and oddly transformed as the adult becomes ally of her younger self.

Young's writerly range extends through language both candid and stylized, and to forms from ballads to prayer to Biblical sermons. The voice is often interior, but at times it gains a public character—often through the use of religious language and song forms—and we sense that the child's suffering is in many ways a community failure. The emotional and psychological landscape of these poems seems at once near and far, familiar and strange, uncanny in Freud's sense. Young has created a distinctive pastoral-gothic hybrid; her daring spirit shapes a collection both deeply generous to and demanding of the reader.

"As I lay there on the couch
I bargained feebly,
weighing each thing I thought I loved
against the ache."
(from "Lamb")

"Each of Deanna Young's spare, pitch-perfect poems seems to contain a novel. Young weaves in and out of time, playing with perspective, to illuminate experience...This is a poetry that makes memory sharper, consciousness larger, life longer in all directions."—Jury, Trillium Book Award for Poetry.

Both "grave and brave, serious and hilarious"—new poems from a Governor General's Award-winning poet.

How to Avoid Huge Ships, Julie Bruck's fourth collection of poetry, is a book of arguments and spells against the ambushes of age. This is, of course, a pointless exercise with a rich history. Bruck's new poems excavate a middle zone as old parents wither and regress, while the young declare their independence. Parents grow down, children up, and it's from the uncomfortable in-between that these poems peer into what Philip Larkin describes as "the long slide." But what if we haven't reached the end of the infinite adolescence we thought we'd been promised? We're still here in this world of flying ottomans, alongside a middle-schooler named Dow Jones, and the prehistoric miracle of a blue heron's foot. We may be afraid, but we're still amused—sometimes, even awed.

Looking squarely at the way things are, glossing over none of the absurdities and injustices of contemporary life, Julie Bruck pays ardent attention to it all. This is a subtle art, restrained. Its power often lies in what is not said right out but which fires up in a reader. The touch is light, even when the subject is heavy. One has a steady sense of being trusted to catch and feel the intangible muchness housed in deceptively plain poems.

"She is the poet laureate of aftermath, of what we do in the wake of things. She picks up the broken pieces of what's left, and these she patches together, as she can, into beautifully-wrought poems that bear eloquent witness to what remains."—Seán Kennedy

"Alert and precise, perceptive and measured, Julie Bruck's poems calibrate situations both grave and brave, serious and hilarious, whilst avoiding the 'large ships' of heavy-handed conclusion. Here are genuine smarts, mature talent, and a wide-angle vision."—Sharon Thesen

JURY SELECTION FOR LE GRAND PRIX DU LIVRE DE MONTREAL 2019

Inviting, human, capacious poems that grapple with ideas while also lightly grieving our capacity for ruin.

Yellow Crane, Susan Gillis's fourth collection of poetry, is a book of many views, many voices. A long look at the changing landscape of a Montreal neighbourhood becomes at once a lament and a love poem. A sequence of poems inspired by Japanese tanka take on the cultural weather, core-drilling into the contradictions and uncertainties of the everyday. Writers, artists, thinkers, cooks, and others congregate in a hammock on the edge of a hayfield to compare notes on what we value. A bear turns up on a path near a quarry.

The poems of Yellow Crane study, with a lover's tender yet critical eye, the world we occupy and the way we occupy it: art, industry, environments both built and natural; the simultaneous flux and agelessness of our daily habits; the long human story of appropriation of wilderness; the fragility, resilience, and questionable worth of what we make, especially under political, economic, and social pressures; concern about our changing times; grief over what we leave behind.

This is a book that argues with itself, then rests. At once precise and loose, wise and nimble, it will make you both feel and think — and care about the world along with it.

"We know the tree stands for promise
and for the desire, which comes much later, for atonement.
We stand at the west-facing window
and let the buildings opposite turn gold, then back to brick."
(from "Morning Light")

A new edition of a hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.

"Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it's their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves."
—from "One of You"

In compact, conversational poems, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate upper-body equipment and no player representation. But no summary touches the searching intensity of Maggs's poems. They range from meditations on ancient/modern heroism to dramatic capsules of actual games, in which the mystery of character meets the mystery of transcendent physical performance. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is illustrated with photographs mirroring the text, depicting key moments in the career of Terry Sawchuk, his exploits and his agony.

This 10th anniversary edition of the book marks both the 50th anniversary of the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup and the 100th anniversary of the Leafs as a team. With rich reflections on the book by novelist Angie Abdou and Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean, as well as excerpts from scores of reviews by the likes of Gord Downie and Dave Bidini, this new edition of Night Work is a must-have for lovers of hockey and poetry alike.

Poems of serious wordplay—an affirmation and celebration of the spectacles we make of our lives.

On-stage in Matthew Gwathmey's debut collection are agitated 19th century horsemen, 80s comic book beetles, plaid-clad suburban grunge enthusiasts, Korean aunts turned traffic cops, Parisian mimes — in short, "a multitude of horns." Meanwhile, the "understories," the sub-spectacles of these poems, are the everyday trials and thrills of marriage and family, the search for meaningful love and friendship, and the palpable relief at being able to perform not as a primary character in the cultural narrative, but as a member of an elemental audience, as "water/ at the bottom of the wind."

Working a hand-mixer in one hand and a spade in the other, Gwathmey writes formally accomplished, linguistically playful poems with deep roots. He couples an implicit understanding of the stories passed down to us as necessary blueprints, with an occasionally nihilistic (in the spirit of the modernists) and occasionally giddy (in the spirit of the New York School) pull toward embellishment and reinvention, making these folktales rhythmic, humorous, and full of unexpected turns.

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.

The world is composed of astonishing things, but we are obsessed by their use, their categorization, their systemization, their exploitation—a way of being in which every thing, every body, even the future, can be made available as raw resource. The words in these poems are perturbations or seductions rather than representational resources, are equivocal rather than instrumental; they seek to disrupt the order of the discursive, to trouble the elaborate plans humans have for managing and controlling the earth we abuse. Here words open to produce surprising ephemeral hybridities, things without theory or history or a notion of progress. They elide and interpenetrate, shout and are silent, and in those material interactions there emerges a resonant attention and a politic of tenderness.

"Prismatic, at times apocalyptic, always sharp, Brian Henderson's poems range through physics, visual art, philosophy, history, and, of course, poetry, to probe the locales where worlds slip into other worlds...these rich riffs evoke deconstructed landscapes that expose the ruptures caused by settler colonialism. Laced with wit and a voracious mind, these poems are 'unsettling' in the best possible sense."—Jeanette Lynes

A collection of letter and prayer poems in which an Indigenous speaker engages with non-Indigenous famous Canadians.

D.A. Lockhart's stunning and subversive fourth collection gives us the words, thoughts, and experiences of an Anishinaabe guy from Central Ontario and the manner in which he interacts with central aspects and icons of settler Canadian culture. Riffing off Richard Hugo's 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, the work utilizes contemporary Indigenous poetics to carve out space for often ignored voices in dominant Canadian discourse (and in particular for a response to this dominance through the cultural background of an Indigenous person living on land that has been fundamentally changed by settler culture).

The letter poems comprise a large portion of this collection and are each addressed to specific key public figures—from Sarah Polley to Pierre Berton, k.d. lang to Robertson Davies, Don Cherry to Emily Carr. The second portion of the pieces are prayer poems, which tenderly illustrate hybrid notions of faith that have developed in contemporary Indigenous societies in response to modern and historical realities of life in Canada. Together, these poems act as a lyric whole to push back against the dominant view of Canadian political and pop-culture history and offer a view of a decolonized nation.

"Because free double-doubles…
tease us like bureaucratic promises
of medical coverage and housing
not given to black mold and torn-
off siding. Oh Lord, let us sing anew,
in this pre-dawn light, a chorus
that shall not repeat Please Play Again."
(from "Roll Up the Rim Prayer")

Poems 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..."

"These are the words of a real craftsman, writing about other makers...Through acute seeing, [Reibetanz] communicates to the reader the nowness of things made centuries ago and the humanity of their creators."—Robert Lemay

Poems 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.

"Brenda Leifso writes fearless poetry. Wild Madder turns the domestic inside out, revealing the 'promise of thunder' in the familiar. Hers is a generous voice, yet at the same time it is a charged one, calling us into the 'long-toothed sun'. This is a book of fierce delights."—Anne Simpson

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD

An extraordinary debut set in Toronto, unfurling against the backdrop of an ancient Persian love story.

The story of Layla and Majnun, made immortal by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi in the 12th century, has been retold thousands of times, in thousands of different ways, throughout literature. Against the backdrop of this story, to the sound-track of modern hip-hop, and amid the struggle of an immigrant family to instill an old faith under new conditions, Irfan Ali's Accretion hurtles towards an unsustainable, "greater madness." Majnun, one of the foundational literary characters who haunt Accretion, is also an Arabic epithet for "possessed." In this tradition, Ali has written a book from the places where the self is no longer the self; places where, in order not to shut down forever, the debris must be cleared, and the soul must inch towards love and hope, "on memory's dusty beams."

Accretion is written in a contemporary lyricism that honours ancient poetic traditions. It is a familiar story, imbued with a particularity and honesty that only Irfan Ali could bring to the table.

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 GOLDEN CROWN LITERARY SOCIETY AWARDS

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD

Poems 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.

An 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."

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARD

Poems about a young two-spirit Indigenous man moving through shadow and trauma toward strength and awareness.

Bones, Tyler Pennock's wise and arresting debut, is about the ways we process the traumas of our past, and about how often these experiences eliminate moments of softness and gentleness. Here, the poems journey inward, guided by the world of dreams, seeking memories of a loving sister lost beneath layers of tragedy and abuse. With bravery, the poems stand up to the demons lurking in the many shadows of their lines, seeking glimpses of a good that is always just out of reach.

At moments heartrending and gut-punching, at others still and sweet, Bones is a collection of deep and painstaking work that examines the human spirit in all of us. This is a hero's journey and a stark look at the many conditions of the soul. This is a book for survivors, for fighters, for dreamers, and for believers.

Griffin Award-winner returns with new poems that are spacious with interiority, alive with a hard-earned lightness.

Waves carried a glass float—designed to hold up a fishing net—across the Pacific. Beached it safely. Someone's breath is inside it.

In Glass Float, her seventh collection, award-winning poet Jane Munro considers the widening of horizons that border and shape our lives, the familiarity and mystery of conscious experience, and the deepening awareness that comes with a dedicated practice such as yoga. This book is about connections: mind and body; self and others; physical and metaphysical; art and nature; west and east, north and south.

In "Convexities," the book's opening poem, Munro quotes the grandfather who taught her to paint: "art is suggestion; art is not representation." No concavities, he said. Only the "little hummocks" that her pencil outlined as she did contour drawings. Munro's deft suggestion, her tracing of convexities, conveys underlying complexities, not by explication, but by looking with eyes and heart open to where mysteries almost surface.

"US"

bubbles
says the baby, looking
out the window at snowflakes

the old man tears up

two
characteristics
of the human animal—
to speak, to weep

both
move me
are you moved
by words—by tears

Precision-built poems that attempt CPR on their own irregular meter, on their own unreliable meaning.

Vancouver poet Shaun Robinson's If You Discover a Fire is a debut collection of poems that make a virtue of their failure to communicate. They forage through the syntax and vocabulary of late-night voicemails, letters to the editor, songs invented in the shower, professional jargon, "Witness Wanted" signs, technical manuals, and text-message typos to assemble verbal collages that raise more questions than they answer. In settings ranging from Montreal's Mile End to a commercial flight above the Midwest to a wildfire in the mountains of British Columbia, these are poems rooted in working-class Canadian experience, poems that flirt with both safety and danger, that drone on like drunken strangers in a bar. Gathering reference from weather reports, football announcers, aerial disappearances, and the movie Groundhog Day, these poems sound their forlorn yawp through the alleys of East Vancouver.

"Out on the porch, between shots, he tells you
things you've always known, how the past
and the future are lovers spooning
in bed, and the present is how they don't
quite fit together"
— "Carpe Dos and Carpe Don'ts (ft. Panda Bear)"

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 VMI BETSY WARLAND BETWEEN GENRES AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 ELGIN AWARD

Poems 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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 NEW BRUNSWICK BOOK AWARDS

Poems that sing, in various notes of female voice, the human being as an embodied, contemplative, feeling animal.

In Skov-Nielsen's thrumming debut, The Knowing Animals, our consciousness is interconnected with the surrounding trees, bugs, rivers, atmospheres, and cosmos. Here, flowers escape Victorian domestication and ally with girls' green powers of attraction. Here, the social politeness of motherly domesticity and the raw dangers of adolescent sexual awakening are shot through with blood pulsing under the skin, with oxygen exchanged in gasps of breath. Here, everything tender and petalling is also raw and mothervisceral.

This is a book of entanglements: the poems twist and turn through a plurality of metaphorical associations involving botany, zoology, astronomy, biology, psychology, and mythology to complicate and expand human conceptions of nature. At the same time, they explore themes such as motherhood, pregnancy and birth, sexuality, adolescence, and the rise of technology, all the while shifting through a variety of tones: romantic, mythological, religious, scientific, wistful, and playful.

WINNER OF THE 2021 A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY

A love story to the emotional self—this heart is tender, but it also has a savage bite.

What does it mean to be the big heart? Or to hope to be the big heart? Or to fail to be that big heart? How far can a heart stretch? How does being a parent stretch it further? How does a heart manage under the pressure of children, of self, of hospital technician, of partner, of death? In this collection, big heartedness is both demand and desire. It emerges from family life—the kid who says to your face that she prefers her other parent; the father monkeying around in the art gallery; the mother who "gets on with it" in silence; the husband, distant and intimate under the marriage yoke. There is also in this collection the stirring of wilder desires than family is supposed to nurture, feelings more fiercely self-assertive than a parent—a mother particularly—is supposed to admit. This collection asks how to rise to the occasions that family presents and also how to let oneself spill over the bounds of familial roles.

Venart's poems reach into the past but don't get lost there; they look the present in the face—they have to: the clock is ticking, the children calling, there are hot dogs to be sliced and the dog won't walk itself. The title is ironic. And also kind of secretly stoically hoping that it's not ironic. But it is:

"...And now everyone is arrow
arrow, arrows. Everyone harpoons.
And I am the big heart, aren't I?
When my black dog was being put down, in her last
second I whispered, Squirrel."
— "Epiphany"

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 CITY OF VICTORIA BUTLER BOOK PRIZE

Governor General's Award-winning poet Arleen Paré combines the story of two first best friends with questions of the mystery of cosmic first cause.

The poems in First, Arleen Paré's seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings.

This layered evocation of the past—of childhood in 1950s Dorval, "a green mesh of girls friendships and fights"—and the intensity of the desire to know, give First its haunting beauty. "[T]he word though old fashioned," Paré writes, "is whence ...unconditioned origins" when "no worthy question is ever answered on the same plane that it was asked; how to frame the question not knowing the plane on which I must ask it."

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 RELIT AWARDS

"Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment..."

Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness. An assemblage of "evidence" recovered from emails about paranormal encounters sent and received by Jeff (greyallover@yahoo.com), junk mail from false prophets, an annotated excerpt from Laura (Riding) Jackson's "The Serious Angels: A True Story," and transcripts of Actis' dreams, conversations, and messages to the dead, Grey All Over not only celebrates a rare, close, complicated father-daughter bond, it also boldly expands the empathetic and critical capacities of poetry itself. In pulling us outside the comfort zones of received aesthetics and social norms, Actis asks us to embrace with whole seriousness "the pragmatics of intuition" in all the ways we read, live, and love.

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 VINE AWARDS

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 WESTERN CANADA JEWISH BOOK AWARDS

Moldovan 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.

WINNER OF THE 2022 SK ARTS POETRY AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 HIGH PLAINS BOOK AWARDS

A gender-fluid trickster character leaps from Cree stories to inhabit this racous and rebellious new work by award-winning poet Louise Bernice Halfe.

There are no pronouns in Cree for gender; awâsis (which means illuminated child) reveals herself through shape-shifting, adopting different genders, exploring the English language with merriment, and sharing his journey of mishaps with humor, mystery, and spirituality. Opening with a joyful and intimate Introduction from Elder Maria Campbell, awâsis — kinky and dishevelled is a force of Indigenous resurgence, resistance, and soul-healing laughter.

If you've read Halfe's previous books, prepared to be surprised by this one. Raging in the dark, uncovering the painful facts wrought on her and her people's lives by colonialism, racism, religion, and residential schools, she has walked us through raw realities with unabashed courage and intense, precise lyricism. But for her fifth book, another choice presented itself. Would she carve her way with determined ferocity into the still-powerful destructive forces of colonialism, despite Canada's official, hollow promises to make things better? After a soul-searching Truth and Reconciliation process, the drinking water still hasn't improved, and Louise began to wonder whether inspiration had deserted her.

Then awâsis showed up—a trickster, teacher, healer, wheeler-dealer, shapeshifter, woman, man, nuisance, inspiration. A Holy Fool with their fly open, speaking Cree, awâsis came to Louise out of the ancient stories of her people, her Elders, from community input (through tears and laughter), from her own full heart and her three-dimensional dreams. Following awâsis's lead, Louise has flipped her blanket over, revealing a joking, mischievous, unapologetic alter ego—right on time.

A deeply scouring poetic account of the residential school experience, and a deeply important indictment of colonialism in Canada.

Many of the poems in Louise Halfe's Burning in This Midnight Dream were written in response to the grim tide of emotions, memories, dreams and nightmares that arose in her as the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolded. In heart-wrenching detail, Halfe recalls the damage done to her parents, her family, herself. With fearlessly wrought verse, Halfe describes how the experience of the residential schools continues to haunt those who survive, and how the effects pass like a virus from one generation to the next. She asks us to consider the damage done to children taken from their families, to families mourning their children; damage done to entire communities and to ancient cultures.

Halfe's poetic voice soars in this incredibly moving collection as she digs deep to discover the root of her pain. Her images, created from the natural world, reveal the spiritual strength of her culture.

Originally published in 2016 by Coteau Books, Burning in This Midnight Dream won the Indigenous Peoples' Publishing Award, the Rasmussen, Ramussen & Charowsky Indigenous Peoples' Writing Award, the Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award, the League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award, and the High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writers. It was also the 2017 WILLA Literacy Award Finalist in Poetry. This new edition includes a new Afterword by Halfe.

WINNER OF THE 2016 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE

A 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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR POETRY

An expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family.

Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it's-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, D.M. Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can't quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself, Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness.

More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one's own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.

WINNER OF THE 2022 RELIT AWARD FOR POETRY

With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch's debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.

Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, brings a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing—Petch works hard. And whether it's as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject—grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence—is off limits.

A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.

"Charlie Petch's Why I Was Late is a poetic debut with the wisdom of a sage and the emotional range of an expert comedian. Do yourself a favor and read this book. This is a master at work."—Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

A visceral, vital, unblinking debut collection of poems exploring kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site.

We're often told that we are given only what we can bear. For some of us our first lessons are in how much pain we're made to think we deserve— and the resulting scars are always meant to be kept secret. Assiyah Jamilla Touré's debut collection is a record of those scars—not those inflicted on us by the thousands of little wars we live in everyday, but those that come afterwards, those we inflict upon ourselves to mark the path.

Each and every poem in Autowar was written on a cell phone, transcribing an urgent revisiting of old sites of pain, and also a revisiting of one young person's power and ability—to hurt themself, or others. These poems are powerful evocations of how even our scars have worlds and lives.

here in the dark, me-space
"i am insatiable for my flesh
i just can't get enough
of tiny after-wounds
that's me giving, still too soft
for my own teeth"

Governor General's Award-winning poet Don Domanski's posthumous last collection once again melds perception-expanding environmental poetry and metaphysics into a seamless, moving lyric whole.

Fetishes of the Floating World continues Don's lifelong exploration of mystical ecology. It is an invitation to experience the sacred dimensions of what-is and to become more intimate with the strangeness that haunts our lively, changeable world. Here is a spirituality that doesn't turn its back on the material and immerses us in earthly being.

The sustained apprehension of deep time underlies every moment of this work; every moment is held up against that more-than-human span and is relinquished to it. Domanski's full-bodied, incantatory language will penetrate your very marrow, calling you out of yourself to testify to the world's "inclement graces."

"Domanski's poems are intimate, but intimate on a grand scale. As far as I am concerned, there is no better poet writing in English." —Mark Strand on All Our Wonder Unavenged

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

MONUMENT is a conversation with Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, which moves her legacy beyond the Taj Mahal.

MONUMENT upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mumtaz Mahal's story. The collection layers linear time and geographical space to chart the continuing presence of historical legacies. It considers what alternate futures could have been possible. Who are we when we continue to make the same mistakes? Beyond distance, time, and boundaries, what do we still carry?

"A profound evocation of unbelonging."—Bhanu Kapil

"Bandukwala is a lyric truth-teller."—Farzana Doctor

"A sensitive, urgent, astonishing, masterful, and necessary debut."—Doyali Islam

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

Anne Marie Todkill's debut recalibrates the anxiety of the present. It gives doubt a hearing, finding resilience in fragility and grace in unexpected places.

The poems assembled in Orion Sweeping take nothing at face value. What are we to make of a radioactive souvenir, a shape-shifting dog, landscapes made strange by time? The speakers gathered here seek to set the record straight: a mink gives advice; a wolf disputes a rumour; a photographer zooms in on a kill; a military strategist gives lessons in peace. But the sum of the evidence is not bleak. A baby arrives as robustly as a whale; the solidarity of marriage is enacted in surprising ways; father and daughter share a gift for reprieve. Under the penetrating gaze of these poems, beauty and tenderness come quietly into view.

WINNER OF THE 2023 J.M. ABRAHAM ATLANTIC POETRY AWARD

Nanci Lee's debut explores 4th Century Su Hui's palindrome of longing. Hsin arises from an ancient Chinese ethical philosophy, less a set of moral standards than an appeal to tune.

Heart-mind and nothingness are fair English translations of Hsin, but their tidiness risks losing some of the sharper, wider sides of absence and appetite. As a historical process, according to Hang Thaddeus T'ui-Chieh, Hsin frustrates, "the psychological fragmentation and compartmentalization of the West."

Born to a Syrian father and a Chinese mother, who gave her up for adoption, Lee explores her origins in a compendium of poem fragments where form embraces the process of its unfolding. These are Koan-like poems, resonant with tones at turns ageless and contemporary; Hsin holds silence in ways that both claim and keep at bay.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 FIRST NATIONS COMMUNITY READS AWARD

Blood 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

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD

A brilliant poetic debut about gender-based violence that dismantles received definitions of both gender and violence, Horrible Dance is an accomplished addition to transfeminist thought and theory.

By turns darkly comic, emotionally connected, playful, incisive, lyrical and irreverent, Lake's poems navigate a harrowing personal and political terrain with understated, expansive wisdom. Lake persistently returns us to the search for love that lies at the core of relational trauma, even as she shows us how catastrophically such a search can be derailed.

This is a rare text able to hold the full velocity of a survivor's hurt and rage alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the extent and complexity of harm. In their honest accounting of a wide array of bad encounters, these poems point us, again, toward compassion, tenderness, and solidarity.

"can you forgive me

for how you hurt me so bad"

—"On Shame"

WINNER OF THE MILTON ACORD PEOPLE'S POET AWARD

In this new edition of her powerful debut, Plains Cree writer and National Poet Laureate Louise B. Halfe – Sky Dancer reckons with personal history within cultural genocide.

Employing Indigenous spirituality, black comedy, and the memories of her own childhood as healing arts, celebrated poet Louise B. Halfe – Sky Dancer finds an irrepressible source of strength and dignity in her people. Bear Bones and Feathers offers moving portraits of Halfe's grandmother (a medicine woman whose life straddled old and new worlds), her parents (both trapped in a cycle of jealousy and abuse), and the people whose pain she witnessed on the reserve and at residential school.

Originally published by Coteau Books in 1994, Bear Bones and Feathers won the Milton Acorn People's Poet Award, and was a finalist for the Spirit of Saskatchewan Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR POETRY

"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.

WINNER OF THE 2023 A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY

Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart.

"Erin Robinsong's Wet Dream is an erotic epistemology of humors, the vital fluids linking bodies to cosmos. What does liquidity know?"—Lisa Robertson

"Wet Dream is brain lube for an insurgent language—creaturely poems that remake your body and relation to the world. I want to smear them all over."—Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARD

The 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

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 FRED COGSWELL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN POETRY

A radiant collection that employs the lyric poem as a tool for scientific and emotional exploration.

Erin Noteboom's A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen takes exact and exquisite measurement of what carries a voice through illness, grief, loss, and through the failures and triumphs of work and love. Various theories and hypotheses are tested in these poems: sadness is knowledge and science "is only half a turn from love." Whether Noteboom is examining the life and work of physicist Marie Curie or compressing imagistic gems from plaintive, important questions like "What lasts?", there is everywhere in these poems a shadow-scratching curiosity, vital research, and an acknowledgement of the long waits in a life between discoveries. An essential marriage between the arts and science, A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen is full of poems that readers will savour long after closing their eyes and raising the vial.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 JM ABRAHAM POETRY AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 BMO WINTERSET AWARD

Poems using fervent whimsy and wordplay to examine photography and seeing.

Peering inside eyeballs, pondering the paradox of absent stars, and meditating on street scenes by André Kertész, these poems squint sidelong at our ways of seeing the world. Through playful poems about photography and visual perception, Hollett dissects auroras and quarks, atmospheric phenomena, potatoes, bomb craters and peat bog cadavers. This darkly comic collection is shadowed by entoptic paparazzi, haunted by peripheral visions. Born of attentive walking and looking, of footsteps and snapshots, it bears witness to art history and alluvial light, portable keyholes, the pandemic, climate change, and the sheer strangeness of seeing everyday things with ecstatic eyes.

WINNER OF THE 2023 JOHN GLASSCO PRIZE FOR LITERARY TRANSLATION

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR LITERARY TRANSLATION

A meditation on the wiles of depression, illuminated by queer and diasporic experience.

"We, nosotros, nosotras: somos sobrevivientes." Weaving prose poetry, essay, autobiography and photography in mutual contamination, Nicholas Dawson relates his own deep depression, a state never fully gone, always cohabitant. Amidst this persistence, "the body and the pen bring a plural syntax of alternative knowledges into being, one which allows us to know the world better, to know ourselves better, to better love daybreak and this sun obstinately piercing the curtain with its brazen rays."

House Within a House, in a luminous translation by D.M. Bradford, tells the story of what walls the depressed person in, what keeps them wandering inside, and what finally gets them, somehow, out of the house. The original book, Désormais, ma demeure, received the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 A.M. KLEIN POETRY PRIZE

A rolling call and response between antebellum Black history and the present that mediates it.

Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sets off a mediation between the complications of legacy and selfhood. In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, award-winning poet D.M. Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of his own life. Amidst echoes and complicities, roots and flights, lineage and mastery, it's a story of stories told in knots and asides, held together with paper trails, curiosities, and hooks—a study that doesn't end.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD

WINNER OF THE 2024 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD

Poems for and about the incarcerated.

Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters' debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters' own days "caught between the past and nothing" and to the structures that sentence so many "to lose." Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace. Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.

Poems 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.

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 OTTAWA BOOK AWARD

Part family history, part scientific exploration, Elementary Particles examines the world through the lens of a daughter grieving the loss of her beloved father.

Through keen, quiet observation, Sneha Madhavan-Reese's evocative new collection takes us from the wide expanse of rural India to the minute map of Michigan we carry on the palms of our hands. These poems contemplate ancestral language, the wonder and uncertainty of scientific discovery, the resilience of a dung beetle, the fleeting existence of frost flowers on the Arctic Ocean.

The collection is full of familiar characters, from Rosa Parks to Seamus Heaney to Corporal Nathan Cirillo, anchoring it in specific moments in time and place, but has the universality that comes from exploring the complex relationship between a child and her immigrant parents, and in turn, a mother and her children. Elementary Particles examines the building blocks of a life—the personal, family, and planetary histories, transformations, and losses we all experience.