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 timeless expression of ancestors’ voices as they transmit stories and witness truths for future generations.

In Lightning in Our Roots, Avis Blackbird invites the reader on a journey to feel Indigenous fluidity of space and time, the impact of colonization, enduring connections to the land, lived urbanized experience, and finally the rising hope of Indigenous communities and cultures to thrive. Blackbird’s poetry is wholehearted and defiant. She soars in the company of birds and reconnects to her ancestral Coast Salish heritage. As she imagines a rightful place for youth waiting in the wings, the ancestors dance with her.

"madness resists mastery yet, to attenuate the violence / of a colonial system"

With gentle fervour and precise language that speaks to the nonverbal, the gestural, the sonic, Jody Chan’s third collection of poetry mobilizes the intimate, the historical, the revolutionary, and the mundane to confront the instrumentalization of disability as a surplus class. Chan’s multidisciplinary poems are a lyrical account of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist psychiatric survivor- and patient-led movements, from Germany to Japan. This is an investigation of madness as resistance, in which we experience “listening as a form of touch,” and the future as a change of form.

"home is a confluence of stories that continue / home is a low hum"

Skin is a haunting, genre-blurring collection rooted in Treaty 8 territory, where memory, place, and loss intertwine. Meditating on the difficulty of belonging, especially when shaped by both colonial and communal wounds, Pennock lets spectral inheritances speak. Through lyrical, found, and experimental forms, Pennock excavates what—and who—is remembered, grieved, and built upon in the violent memoryscapes of the prairies. Here, haunting is methodology: ghosts are kin, time loops, and memory scratches at the walls. Rather than resolving, Skin conjures. It listens. It offers poetry as a kind of skin—porous, protective, remembering—for those still finding their way home.

Experimental visual and prose poems that reimagine Greco-Roman mythology through a feminist lens.

The poems in Whispering Gallery explore the tensions between analog and digital poetics, language, and materiality. Each poem, first typed on a typewriter and then digitally manipulated, is named for a female or feminine figure (wives, daughters, monsters, mothers, muses) stalled, subdued, or caught in moments of suspension rather than heroic resolution. Paired prose poems translate these mythic figures into contemporary, intimate registers, tracing the quiet violences, care, and survival that shape lived experience.

Drawing on personal and domestic ephemera (thread, spice, old print artifacts), the collection explores repetition, distortion, and persistence as formal and thematic tools. Equal parts intimate diary, scholarly engagement, and playful experimentation, Whispering Gallery offers myth as a site of shared vulnerability, radical care, and connection.

Part cultural critique of why we bother or don’t bother or are bothered, and part memoir that flies in the face of boredom, for readers of Jenny Odell, Moyra Davey, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Deborah Levy.

Boredom and bother are uncanny twins, two points on a continuum of what it is to be a human in the late stages of capitalism. Erin Wunker asks how boredom changes as we age, what moves us from inertia to action, and how being a woman in middle age might require magical thinking. Memories of unbelonging are given meaning when held alongside the fashion statements of iconoclastic women artists. The boredom of childhood summers is held in tension with the tedium of caregiving and intense love for one’s child—and the anxieties and hopes of being alive in a hyper-mediated, always-agitated world.

Shifting between autotheory, memoir, literature, and shrewd cultural analysis. the essays in All the Waking Hours eflects on some of what Sianne Ngai might call “ugly feelings” in hopes of finding—amidst a heap of boredom, bother, concern, and care—a way to build a life of sustained curiosity.