First issued by Tsunami Editions in 1993, XEclogue is an exploration of the pleasures of the pastoral poetry from a late–twentieth–century feminist perspective. Robertson, the Governor General’s Award finalist, plays in a neo–classical landscape with equal doses of iconoclasm and erudition. This new and revised edition is sure to win new devotees for her rich and exuberant work.

Light and air, greenery and earth take on unaccustomed qualities in the poet’s deft hand in this long poem from Lisa Robertson. Seven sections — "Sunday" to "Saturday," alternating prose and verse, repattern quotidian conversations and atmospheres: "bright and fresh," "brisk and west," "streaky and massed," January to December. A constellation of radical women is invoked to pass, elegiac, among clouds: Violette Leduc, Patty Hearst, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, Shulamith Firestone, Ti–grace Atkinson. This is exhilarating poetry, wild and trouble, that seamlessly integrated lived experience with the play in mind. It is sure to entrance.

Lisa Robertson has applied her rhetorical skills to the epic, and what emerges is a spectacular, subversive vision of the world through female eyes. This is an act of sheer writerly bravado, taking and tweaking the form, enlarging the world between the covers of a book. The language is lush, the concept superactivated, growing over the page at an astonishing clip.

Poems that look at our little world from space 

In Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee positions these giant clouds of glowing space dust, often the “nursery” where new stars and planets are born, in an interconnected web of lyric form. As dazzling masses of matter and energy, fleeting, exploding and collapsing, creating connection across incomprehensible distances, these poems use constellations and light-years to reconfigure how art, mortality, loss, death, and afterlives are miraculous echoes and patterns in a gorgeous, chaotic universe.

Included in this dazzling collection are an extraterrestrial fox who works at a gas station, meditations about living across from a hospital during the Omicron surge, weathering climate disasters in North Vancouver, strange deep-sea ecosystems, conversations with a space-god who may be Walt Whitman, and multiple retellings of a Zen koan about tigers and strawberries. Here, respiration and repetition — literally, verse — acts as an outstanding formal feature, a way of creating connections and shared breath across spacetime.