Award-winning poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen explores her strongly personal responses to the landscape, culture, and people of Greece in this exquisitely written travel diary, which was originally published in 1978.

Originally published in 1978, beloved poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen’s first work of nonfiction explores her strongly personal responses to a complex civilization. Partly written during a trip to Greece in 1971, MacEwen moves from the urban tumult of Athens to the radiant simplicity of an island in the Aegean. In this intimate and exquisitely written travel diary, she evokes the very spirit of Greece — the exuberance of the people, the sun-drenched landscape, and the shaping power of ancient traditions and myths in modern Mediterranean life.

Uplifting stories, vignettes, and reflections to inspire gratitude, love, joy, and hope in navigating life in a changing, challenging world.

This beautiful and welcoming book can be read cover to cover or used as a daily source of guidance, providing gentle wisdom that inspires and empowers. Through the lens of five transformative practices — gratitude, love, joy, happiness, and hope — bestselling author Monique Gray Smith weaves together short stories, poignant reflections, and thoughtful questions that invite readers to pause and reconnect with their inner light. And as an Indigenous author, Monique brings her cultural wisdom and unique perspective to each offering. 

Sharing the Light is a powerful reminder that when we embrace our light and share it with the world, that energy not only transforms us but ripples out to uplift everyone around us.

A.F. Moritz’s twenty-third book of poems originated with an impulse, beginning in April 2019, to write a series of continuous poems. The first goal was to keep them short. The second was to make them separate, in the process reflecting the whole of human life, stable in moments and bodies. In The Wren, Moritz arranges 70 short poems in a sort of galaxy: an apparent scatter, not of stars but of poems, of feeling-thoughts. What is the unity of these active “states” of ours, given that they do not simply follow, or hook onto, or neighbour, or echo one another in a chain of resemblance that seems to have gaps and missing links that reappear later, healed? The title was chosen partly to speak to Moritz’s The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018), but also because, among the many short poems of this collection, one of them asked to be central: a poem about a small bird that hops from within a thicket of stems to peer out at the poet for a second and then disappears back inside. This tiny story of a tiny fellow creature is the narrative, the “novel,” of this book: a little story that is nonetheless one of the great and ever-retold stories.

Graeme Bezanson’s debut collection, Monster Energy / Ultra Blue, is a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary constructions of masculinity.

“The truth no one wants to name,” writes bell hooks, “is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within.” These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson's struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence. This is work in dialogue with existing texts of boyhood and masculinity, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. The book’s three main sections make up a kind of fractured reader’s diary, broken up by two interludes of “divinations” – sparser erasure poems made using the changing positions of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to pick words from the transcript of an interview between self-proclaimed proponents of toxic masculinity Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. By processing existing texts and recasting them into a present, personal moment, Monster Energy / Ultra Blue navigates the joy, despair, vivid arcana, and routine violence of boyhood under Western patriarchy.

“This poem begins where Bulimia ends

or maybe, just maybe, when it started. Where

the differential diagnosis is confused

by decades of self-made violence. Poverty,

colonialism, god, all prisms that will shatter

one day, if not now…”

Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons. These challenging poems investigate the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders as well as how the voyeurism of religion (the idea of being eternally watched) intersects with both of those spheres. They also raise questions about body shaming and body sovereignty—a failed sovereignty in this case, as "sovereignty" itself is a communal concept. In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful also lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.