Poetry

With links to intense poetic works like John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Corrosive Sublimate and Erin Mouré’s Furious, Jon Paul Fiorentino’s new collection is a whip-smart poetic investigation of anxiety in all its many manifestations. Anxiety caused by geography, anxieties of influence and looming worries about loss inform the poems as they weave narrative threads and associations that highlight both the treachery of language and its necessity in shaping human experience: 'All roads, side roads/all text, signage/All seasons, autumn/ all memories, winter.'

The poems here build on Derrida’s ideas about the psychological implications of memory and the archival impulse and on philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics of 'the index.' Indexical Elegies is a rich, emotionally charged work that showcases Fiorentino’s talents at their feisty, engaged best. From its Post-Prairie pamphleteering and its comic Montreal musings to its moving elegies, this is provocative poetry that never loses touch with the reader’s pleasure.

The Artist Formerly Known As Death Waits christens his new public persona with the release of 'a series of theatrical proposals to be repeated, discarded, performed simultaneously and/or recombined in any and all possible combinations – all vaguely relating to the topic of the author's moral ambivalence.'

Alexandra Leggat, the author of Moondogging and numerous book and music reviews, puts on the page the remarkable texts that she is renowned for performing at spoken word events all over Toronto.

Dan Farrell's second volume of poetry is an examination of a discourse that everyone knows about but few people have examined in detail: the response of people to Rorschach inkblot patterns. By turns profound and hilarious, this book is an insightful statement about the relentless drive to make meaning out of nothing.

The online version features a dynamic inkblot, designed by Brian Kim Stefans, to test your own poetic/psychological state of being.

Jay Millar's second collection of poems looks at the world of mushrooms through a kaleidoscope ofperspectives and styles, ranging from innovative and constraint-based writing to visual and concrete poetry. This book makes a unique contribution to the poetry of science and nature; if mushrooms have a language that is spoken to us or through us as hallucinogenic experiences, Millar has managed to tap into that language and refine it into potent poetic form.

'As readers,' says Millar, 'we witness that which occurs on and above the surface of language. Meanwhile, the fungal threads themselves, lying beneath or between the letters, faithfully connect each piece of the whole to all of the others in a particular order forever unknown to the reader.' Mycological Studies is an uncanny book, one that suggests that the divides between the sentient and the unconscious are frequently bridged in subtle and mysterious ways.

A beautiful conjunction of the late Douglas Clark's minimalist poetry and photography, this book transforms the mundane detritus of our collective past into a series of contemporary illuminations. Articles of Faith are found, given, fought for, hoarded and cherished ... They are the marks we leave in passing.' – Douglas Clark

"No other writer of our time and place was so diverse, attempted so much, and never lost sight of his intent."—Michael Ondaatje

a book of variations collects three difficult-to-find bpNichol texts—love, zygal, and art facts—which exemplify Nichol's signature eclecticism, a wondrous amalgam of fiction, concrete verse, comics, translations, and collage—this collection of ephemeral work may prove his most lasting contribution to contemporary literature.

bpNichol (1944–1988) was one of Canada's most adventurous, entertaining, and enigmatic poets. He is best known for his nine-book poem The Martyrology and his work on the TV show Fraggle Rock.

Stephen Voyce is an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Louise Bak's second book, Tulpa (in Buddhist mysticism, a magical entity created by intensely concentrated thought), continues her challenging exploration of a broad range of themes and uses of the global lexicon. Combining a visual artist's flair for colour with a performance artist's transgressive interventions, Bak is a unique voice in post-colonial Canadian writing.

Book, or laboratory? Reader, or specimen?

Wide slumber for lepidopterists is a poetic fantasia, a disorienting yet compelling dreamscape of butterflies and caterpillars and killing jars, where the waking mind’s prose transforms into the sleeper’s poetry. Each poem unfolds with precision, tracking the stages of sleep and pairing them with the life cycle of Lepidopterae. Insomnia is mirrored in the birth of the egg, narcolepsy in larval hatching. And when the caterpillar starts its final moult, dreams begin, weaving around us as tightly as a cocoon until we are somnambulant, a chrysalis ready to emerge as a moth.

Reading the act of sleep through pupae and moths seems incongruous, but from this unlikely premise comes a darkly erotic text that takes cues from the scientific fascination of Christopher Dewdney, the linguistic experimentation of Gertrude Stein and the aural environments of Björk to explore science, sexuality and language in equal parts.

Wide slumber for lepidopterists contains luminous illustrations by artist and bookmaker Matt Ceolin, who has managed to capture the spirit of the poems with his beautiful and disturbing treated photographs of butterflies, moths and dessication.

Why, it's a whale of a book! Here comes Moby Jane - again! Originally published in 1987 and long out of print, Moby Jane contains ten years' worth of Gilbert, poem by poem, that literally spill out over its edges - the book begins on the front cover and ends on the back! Eli Mandel calls Gilbert 'an extraordinary, intelligent experimentalist,' and Coach House has just gotten wind that this classic tome has been chosen for National Poetry Month 2004 as one of the ten all-time must-read books of Canadian poetry.

Hide under your bed! Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret meets South Park in The Lillian Lectures, a collection of short poems and cheerfully nasty illustrations that will turn your universe on its head.

Remember how strange you thought sex and God were when you were little? Six-year-old Melanie is weirder and naughtier than you ever were, and now she's passing her wealth of wacky wisdom on to her little sister, Lillian. Your mom would never let you play with them, but you sure would have wanted to; Melanie is the ultimate bad influence.

bronchia think
form a bombsight
think periosteum singing
particle falconry workpiece
two lowcut hills seeking
what stone is
for body
is herd
alliterations

Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative.

‘A fierce, ladderlike cri de cœur – at times a cri de cur – Night & Ox pulses with sawblade nocturnes that gnaw through the very rungs on which they’re wrung. One part Jabberwocky-talkie, one part fatherhood ode, the poem seeks a threshold, where the “mondayescent” gives way to ardour, splendour, even love. Scott is a cosmoglot of the throat’s ravine, and this is his manic, pandemonic article of faith.’ – Andrew Zawacki


Praise for Blert:
‘Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft. Blert is a strange and gorgeous work of linguistic materialism.' – Dennis Lee

"Alphabetic dismantling, syntactic play, essaying words backwards and 4words (as she might say), Christakos manifests forensic clarity and telegraphic fortitude in this unsettling work."—Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Revelling in the value of social polyphony from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Multitudes looks at its contemporary theatres of Facebook and Twitter, post-riot police surveillance, protest culture and poetry itself. With wit, perceptiveness and her trademark linguistic sonar, Margaret Christakos keenly examines intimacies and banishments, as well as intergenerational grief, self-display and social hope.

Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption.

Deeply inflected by the polyvocality and encoded rhetorics of the screen, Human Resources is perched at the limits of language, irreverently making and breaking meaning. Navigating the crumbling boundaries among page, screen, reader, engine, writer and database, Human Resources investigates wasting words and words as waste – and the creative potential of salvage.

Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013)
Shortlisted for the Gerard Lampert Award (2013)

Inspired largely by the poet's experiences as a young man working in the Saskatchewan oilfields, Mathew Henderson's The Lease explores masculinity and the roles morality, violence, and hard labor play in it. Equal parts character study, cultural documentary, and coming-of-age narrative, Henderson's poems make it clear that however we may try to stay apart from them, the stubborn and often unflattering realities of masculine culture persist, not just in isolated, dangerous environments like this, but in our very idea of what work is.

No mark survives this place: you too will yield
to unmemory. Give everything you are
in three-day pieces. Watch the gypsy iron
move, follow its commands.
Tend the rusted steel like a shepherd.

Shortlisted for the 2013 Gerald Lampert Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets

Mathew Henderson lives in Toronto, Ontario, writes about the prairies, and teaches at Humber College. The Lease is his first collection of poetry.

The bright, taut, explosive poems in Jordan Scott’s Blert represent a spelunk into the mouth of the stutterer. Through the unique symptoms of the stutter (Scott, like fifty million others, has always stuttered), language becomes a rolling gait of words hidden within words, leading to different rhythms and textures, all addressed by the mouth’s slight erosions.

In Scott’s lexicon, to blert is to stutter, to disturb the breath of speaking. The stutter quivers in all that we do, from a skip on a CD to a slip of the tongue. These experiences are often dismissed as aberrant, but in Blert, such fragmented milliseconds are embraced and mined as language. Often aimed full-bore at words that are especially difficult for the stutterer, Scott’s poems don’t just discuss, they replicate the act of stuttering, the 'blort, jam, and rejoice' involved in grappling with the granular texture of words.

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook’s poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these poems import shapes and source texts from elsewhere – home inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca – in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word. This is not merely a book, it is a chocolate-covered artificially intelligent virus with an impish sense of humour that will continue to replicate in your mind long after initial exposure.

His body, like yours, would lie
mute as a plum
until a vigilant limb came
to a decision. As you might have guessed
I’ve come to one myself.

Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know ‘you’ is you? What good is it to decorate a headstone? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-­old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers.

‘Ladouceur writes with an awareness of queer history, documenting it faithfully, but with his own twist … This is poetry motivated by an honest wit.’
— John Barton, Arc Poetry Magazine

Ben Ladouceur is a writer originally from Ottawa, now based in Toronto. His work has been featured in Arc, The Malahat Review, PRISM international and The Walrus, and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. He was awarded the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2013.

In two massive volumes, Steve McCaffery, Canada's most challenging, experimental and innovative poet/critic amasses the best of his previously published and ungathered work.

From the early concrete and visual poems of Broken Mandala and Transitions to the Beast to the Ludwig Wittgenstein-inspired philosophical investigations of EVOBA, from the innovative novel Panopticon to the Governor General's Award-nominated Theory of Sediment and the recent The Cheat of Words, this comprehensive edition covers all phases of McCaffery's vast and heterogeneous poetic oeuvre. Many works that have previously only been available in small, privately circulated editions, such as Shifters and Every Way Oakly, are available in perfect-bound form here for the first time.

Volume 2, following in the wake of the extraordinarily successful first volume, collects the best of McCaffery's ungathered work. Along with selections from his concrete and visual poetry, this book contains sound poem and performance scores, excerpts from early chapbooks, 'pataphysical essays and sections of the often-discussed but rarely seen text The Abstract Ruin. For new readers and long-time fans of McCaffery alike, Volume 2 of Seven Pages Missing is essential reading.

In Outside the Hat lies a landscape of CanaDada and SurRielism, populated by dancing medieval woodcuts, Franglais-speaking dogs, sadistic provincial politicians and melodious bison. Including work culled from a plethora of micro-press chapbooks such as Mike Harris Made Me Eat My Dog, The Irridescent Phlegm of Bagpipers Glorious with Flu, and The Stars Are a Pale Pox on the Sky's Dark Chicken, this is the definitive Gary Barwin collection: stranger than you (can) think.

You've heard of The Big Sleep, right? Well, it's sixty years later and time for The Ubiquitous Big. This book, the second from Calgary poet Ian Samuels, explores the language of certain influential aspects of early to mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Yes, folks, you get Arcana, based on the cultural fascination with war drawn from a kaleidoscope of incidental sources and overheard conversations; Personality, a take on the fashion cycle accessed through an old cosmetology textbook; and The Ubiquitous Big, which takes on cinema and gender through a scrambled, augmented and mythologized series of quotes from classic film noir. The result is a playful and humorous book of poetry with a serious trigger finger. So shut up, get in the car, and sit back for a romp through some of the funniest language to pass through time and expose the myth of its own mythos.

Yet another book of poems from the ubiquitous poet, playwright, actor, director, visual artist and standardized patient (yes, standardized patient), Stan Rogal. This is the first of Rogal's books to feature samples of his collage work.

'I know the owner of the laundromat,' reflects the narrator of this extended poem, 'but can’t remember his name (which could be for many reasons).' The poem is then swept up in narrative tangents and detours as the narrator, also nameless, tries to navigate the consequential absurdities of living in a city that is fracturing around him; he needs to get out of the city and back, through airports and restaurants and a whole city’s worth of staircases, all in one night and without leaving the closed laundromat. As his narrative breaks up around him, he entertains distant relations, old friends, and a recurring cast of disguised animal characters, all of whom are misremembered and who participate in the construction of the narrative. He never does recall the laundromat owner’s name.

The Laundromat Essay is spiralling poem about the pathology of forgetting, a poetic narrative of credible absurdity and dazzling interest.

Although firmly rooted in the real, Lillian Necakov's evocations of 'movie magic' prove irresistible in these forty poems and five collages. Ranging across dozens of films – from Wim Wender's Wings of Desire and Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law to Hitchcock's Rope and Hawks's To Have and Have Not -– Lillian Necakov's language, steeped in the comic of the banal, has absurdity for breakfast.

Nothing slips by Brecken Hancock's deft ear as she seductively plumbs the depths of the evolution of bathing, doppelgangers, the Kraken, and the minutiae of family with all its tragic misgivings. The poems in Broom Broom pervert the rational, safe parts of the world to extoll and absorb the sweep of human history.

What I mean to say is, the evidence is always there.
From where we stand, we confuse lampposts for ghosts.

Brecken Hancock's poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in several journals, including Event and Fiddlehead. She is reviews editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.

Broom Broom won the 2015 Language Trillium Book Award for Poetry (English Language), which comes with a $10,000 cash prize. The Jury's citation for Broom Broom read:

"Personal history and private pain are made public, historical, mythological, science fictional, and monumental in this eerie, resonant debut. Hancock's poems astonish with their breadth of reference, their dense soundscapes, their terrifying wisdom, and their centrifugal emotional force."

The first collection from a new voice in Toronto poetry. 'To read Helen Tsiriotakis is to know the scalding appetites of morning without recourse to shade ... Dear reader, take the exquisite risk.' – Robert Kroetsch.

In two massive volumes, Steve McCaffery, Canada's most challenging, experimental and innovative poet/critic amasses the best of his previously published and ungathered work.

From the early concrete and visual poems of Broken Mandala and Transitions to the Beast to the Ludwig Wittgenstein-inspired philosophical investigations of EVOBA, from the innovative novel Panopticon to the Governor General's Award-nominated Theory of Sediment and the recent The Cheat of Words, this comprehensive edition covers all phases of McCaffery's vast and heterogeneous poetic oeuvre. Many works that have previously only been available in small, privately circulated editions, such as Shifters and Every Way Oakly, are available in perfect-bound form here for the first time.

Volume 2, following in the wake of the extraordinarily successful first volume, collects the best of McCaffery's ungathered work. Along with selections from his concrete and visual poetry, this book contains sound poem and performance scores, excerpts from early chapbooks, 'pataphysical essays and sections of the often-discussed but rarely seen text The Abstract Ruin. For new readers and long-time fans of McCaffery alike, Volume 2 of Seven Pages Missing is essential reading.

Finalist for the 2014 Archibald Lampman Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry!

Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices into a stitched song propelled toward the next century. Haunted by "time's frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas," David O'Meara sifts culture, art, war, rebellion, and technology, offering defiance amid decay, while singing with the conflicting impulses of reflection and dissent.

David O'Meara has authored three poetry collections and a play. He's been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Prize, the Trillium Book Award, a National Magazine Award, four Rideau Awards, and he won the Archibald Lampman Award twice. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott left copies of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species to decay in five distinct ecosystems in British Columbia. A year later, they photographed what remained, reading poetry into nature's "rewriting" process and documenting the gorgeous detritus in Decomp, a long poem in prose and color photographs.

Darwin is an eye amidst graphed genera seeing the web it is woven thereof. A matted scrap of printed material, shit, soil and leaf rot—all dried, bleached and curled up at small edges.

Stephen Collis is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of essays, Dispatches from the Occupation.

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt and Blert, which explores the poetics of stuttering.

Deliciously wicked satires about local and international celebrities, the poems in Portable Altamont evince an irrepressible grasp of the zeitgeist, its machinations and manipulations, its possibilities and puerility. Who other than artist and raconteur Brian Joseph Davis could have imagined Margaret Atwood as a human beatbox, Jessica Simpson applying for arts grants or the Swedish Chef reciting T. S. Eliot? Davis uses every literary form available to revel in and rearrange pop culture. Even the index turns into a short story about Luke Perry’s descent into a shadowy underworld of Parisian intellectuals and terrorists.

A word of warning: this book is a complete and utter fiction. Philip Roth is not David Lee Roth’s brother. Reese Witherspoon is not a Communist cell leader, and Don Knotts has never been a New Age guru. The stuff about Nicole Richie, however, is absolutely true.

Portable Altamont is that rare book that is both incendiary and compulsively readable. Get to it before the lawyers do!

'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.’ – Frank Davey

In a Paper City write nothing down. So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, the author's two mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the letters characters n and b, and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences. Beneath this thin narrative runs an undercurrent of horror that decries the deliberate plunder of the City resulting from an absolute disregard for history's relationship to the body's fictions – what n and b term 'art lost to numbers.'

"The empire's missing links are found deep in this poet's ever-astonishing states of multiple consciousness—astutely attuned to the pressured, violent, mass conformities forced upon us—brilliantly formed into poems as ambitious and achieved as any written in the English language today."—Lawrence Joseph

In these dramatic monologues, Walid Bitar delivers variations on the theme of power: in politics, in the subjugation and abuse of other cultures, and in our divided selves. Using satire, parody, koan, and riddle, Divide and Rule struggles with the mendacity of language and identity.

They have no maps. Ours, I'll redraw.
Isn't itself, their neck of the woods,
needs a rest—something more than a nap,
and less than death, though death wouldn't hurt.

Walid Bitar's poetry collections include 2 Guys on Holy Land, Bastardi Puri, and The Empire's Missing Links. He was born in Beirut and lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Steve Venright, the true heir to the literary legacy of Henri Michau, Christopher Dewdney and Jorge Luis Borges, is the only surrealist ever to come from Sarnia, Ontario. Spiral Agitator, his fourth book, is a sumptuous assortment of prose poems and visual art from beyond the Turbulated Curtain.

'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.’ – Frank Davey

Juxtaposing the seemingly benign names of Europeans that permeate our geographies with the details of their so-called discoveries and conquests, Dead White Men turns ideas of exploration, discovery, finding and keeping back upon themselves. Engaging with exploration and scientific texts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries – texts wrapped up in the history and ongoing present of colonization – this collection builds a fascinating poetry of memory out of histories that are largely forgotten.

‘A provocative and galvanizing read … Riveting and dazzling invention is visible on almost every page: fonts shift size, language cascades and cleaves, and images disrupt order. Dead White Men should be widely read and taught.’

– Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning

‘Dead White Men is not only a searing indictment of colonialism but also a painful reminder of the violence that underpins the logic of exploration. Each poem strikes at the heart of the issue: there are often unarticulated, unacknowledged Indigenous presences here that have been flattened over by the lies and mirages of empty landscapes. Dead White Men is a stinging and difficult journey, and one that continues to remind us that stolen land has always been the most pressing concern for Indigenous peoples and settlers. This is an absolutely essential book.’

– Jordan Abel, author of Injun

Shane Rhodes is the author of five books of poetry, and has won awards including an Alberta Book Award and the National Magazine Gold Award for poetry. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

"This is a wonderful new edition of the Poetic Edda. It captures the language, vitality, and rhythms of the original."—Jesse Byock, PhD, UCLA

Gods, giants, the undead, dwarves, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, and a giant wolf are just some of the stars in these Norse tales. Committed to vellum in Iceland around 1270, The Poetic Edda has compelled the likes of Richard Wagner, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jorges Luis Borges, and W.H. Auden. Jeramy Dodds transmits the Old Icelandic text into English without chipping the patina of the original.

Jeramy Dodds's Crabwise to the Hounds was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award for poetry.

If you tore off the tops of canola —
yellow canola flowers — would you
jump in a tub of canola margarine
just to make the best of despair?

Implored by concerned readers to be ‘classy’ and ‘real’ for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical note­books on all things ‘poetic’ and ‘poetical.’ Birds! Flowers! History! Sad leaders! The word ‘aubade’! They’re all here, in a serial, State Fair–bound collection of lyrics set in the working­class belvedere of Asbestos Heights.

Among the refreshing lemon­lime sodas of the world and the rousing lyrics to ‘Bootylicious,’ Asbestos Heights amps up McGimpsey’s trademark sideswiping of formal rhetoric and prosody with pop savoir faire to ?nd his boldest collection. Imagine Petrarch in a Tweet war about where to buy a good pair of dad jeans. Imagine Yeats but with a lot fewer swans. Imagine a poet who was told long ago that nothing good ever comes out of a place like Asbestos Heights.

'David McGimpsey is unfuckwithable, poetry-wise, and I'll stand on John Ashbery's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.' — Michael Robbins

David McGimpsey is the author of several books of poetry and short fiction. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the A.M. Klein Prize. He is also a musician, a fiction editor for Joyland, and his travel writing is a regular feature of enRoute magazine. He lives in Montréal, where he teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.

"White Piano holds an acute sense of what poetry is, its danger. . . . Brossard knows well that 'life is only good for living' and that living is incarnated in the material of language, that sounds, those carriers of sense, can propel it in front of the world." – Le Devoir

Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. Pronouns and persons, poetry and prose: White Piano, superbly translated from the French, narrates a constellation of questions and offers a "language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie."

Nicole Brossard is one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.

"Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it's all good."—Peter Gizzi

"The flavor of this poetry is complex—it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge."—Ange Mlinko

With poems on perfect blue and a sonnet sequence situated on a derelict NSA surveillance station on a Berlin hill, On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, prayer, and perverse chatter into poems that enact our paranoia. Channeling Walter Benjamin's son, William Hazlitt, John Donne, and Dick Cheney, they are lyric in their sonic and affective register but coldly methodological in their invented structures and illusions.

You finish reading it. You cannot
finish reading it. Ice caught
in the can, later, the well. What

shall I be worried about,
the coward well and the ice does
such a lot. They know nothing

of cantilevered blown-out shells
who feed their worry
like veal barns. The dome's aerial

my lodestar and icon, the squirrel
at dusk in the post-informational gloaming
can never not finish reading it as song

Ken Babstock is the author of Methodist Hatchet, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His previous titles, Mean, Days into Flatspin, and Airstream Land Yacht, hold nominations for the Governor General's Award and the Winterset Prize. Poems from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

In Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake, they rage against despair, they speak against death and wrestle with the fateful spirits of Armageddon to loosen their choke-hold on humanity. Perhaps we won't figure it out and the horizon is already on fire, and our best love will never be more than an approximation of regret, but grass still grows between the cement blocks of the sidewalk to 'grin of the wild.'

Shortlisted for the Manitoba Book Awards in the category of Most Promising Writer

Talented newcomer Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce – plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience, and the laws of physics are flagrantly violated. The poems in one sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks both 'clocks' and 'fire' and thus fails to offer its audiences immediate, violent engagement. They sometimes resemble the scores for Fluxus 'happenings,' but they replace the casual aesthetic and DIY simplicity of Fluxus art with something more akin to the brutality of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Italo Calvino as rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft, Ball’s 'plays' break free of the constraints of reality and artistic category to revel in their own dazzling, magnificent horror.

Contemporary Canadian poetry got you down? Well, we'd like to prescribe a little Hello Serotonin, the latest in mood-enhancing poetry anti-depressants. This new book of poems from Jon Paul Fiorentino operates within the constraints of what he terms 'synaptic syntax' - poetry that performs the very nature of neuronal activity from the point of view of a mood-enhanced Human Comedy, which, with a quick turn of phrase, or missing neurotransmitter, could become Human Tragedy. Filled with a witty, self-deprecating and often Andy Kaufmanesque sense of humour, Hello Serotonin is today's generation of pharmaceutical poetry, and will alter your perception of therapeutic poetics. Get your prescription filled today!

A member of the sound-poetry collective, The Four Horsemen, winner of a Governor General's Award for Poetry and writer of Fraggle Rock, bpNichol was one of Canada's most important poets.

All of Nichol's writing is distinguished by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. The astounding range of Nichol's practice included musical theatre, children's books, comic book art and collage/assemblage. Broadly spanning the history of Nichol's work, The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader includes both classics and esoteric treasures. From the early typewriter poetry of Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer and Nichol's life-long work of poetry The Martyrology, to the heartbreaking prose of Journal and the whimsical autobiography of Selected Organs, this collection maps the literary career of this enigmatic poet.

For first-time readers of Nichol, this comprehensive collection is a perfect introduction to his groundbreaking work; for loyal Nichol fans, this reader is the the long-awaited compilation of his less readily available work.

"Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully."—The New York Times

What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating color? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun "you"? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture, and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema?

These and other questions are answered in the new collection from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley+Maxwell.

A quorum of crows will be your witness.

And if you discover you were bought?

You note the smell of rain, bread, and exhaust mixed with tiredness.

And if you yourself are incompatible with your view of the world?

And what is the subject but a stitching?

Once again you are the one who promotes artifice.

At 2 am on Friday, you burn with a maudlin premonition.

And rankings and rankings and badges and repetitions.

Lisa Robertson's book Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010 and was longlisted for the 2011 Warwick Prize. Her other books include Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. She is the 2014 Bain Swiggett Professor at Princeton University.

Dulge, rageous, couth, chalant—we think of prefixes as a few letters that change a word, but what if a word is lost without one? Each prose poem in Whelmed features a word that has been unhinged from its prefix, allowing new meanings—radically unfamiliar, yet uncannily intimate—to emerge from these prefixless word deposits. Part prose-poem sequence and part encyclopedia of unpredictably irregular terms, Whelmed is at times deranging, almost disturbing, sometimes detached, and ultimately joyfully disrupting.

Nicole Markotic is a poet, novelist, and critic. She is currently a professor of creative writing, children's literature, and disability studies at the University of Windsor in Ontario.

Karen Mac Cormack's At Issue is a sequel of sorts to Fit to Print (also from Coach House Books), her collaborative poetic examination of the newspaper with British poet Alan Halsey. In At Issue, Mac Cormack examines the format and contents of the lifestyle magazine.

Utilizing the vocabulary and spelling found in Vogue (both British and American versions), Self (a health/fitness magazine geared to female readership) and Prevention (another health magazine), the poems in At Issue reflect and refract the experience of reading these magazines. (Mac Cormack notes that an interesting – if frightening – fact is that there are fewer typos in Vogue than in most scholarly books published in North America.) As an alternative to the 'mined' creativity of the magazine poems, Mac Cormack also includes a number of texts from other sources.

Rachel Zolf’s fifth book assembles a pirate score of error-ridden historical and current documents – missionary narratives, immigration pamphlets, settler writings – to decry the ongoing violence of Canadian colonialism. It stars Janey Settler-Invader, a foul-mouthed mutant slouching toward the Red River Colony, along with a host of cacophonous, carnivalesque appropriations.

Praise for Janey's Arcadia:

'That poetry can be forcefully consequential is not a safe assumption in our contemporary crisis of sustainable attention. To deploy an intricately political poetics as Zolf’s performative texts do is a wager on expansion of the genre with no small risk of misreadings. The driving courage of Janey’s Arcadia is in fact its digital-age enactment of an allegory of misreading. Subjecting Canadian settler texts (in which indigenous peoples’ humanity can be casually or fervently dismissed) to Optical Character Recognition software, a chilling and ludicrous display of misreadings occur, inescapably charged by the cultural politics of non-recognition. A reader’s encounters range from the philosophically profound “Each person is an asking…” to the OCR mutated government questionnaire. Q: ‘Do you expei'ience any dread of the Indigns?’ A: I have no fear of Indigns, for I never see one.'
– Joan Retallack

'Few poets embody stress like Rachel Zolf. Pain most poets cannot imagine exposing with such exacting affliction. Janey’s Arcadia recommends we reconsider the weak arguments of “post-identity politics” because this poet sees how we will lie to hide the brutality of our collective suffering for civilization’s advancement. If you read this without waking your emotional intelligence, well, I’m glad I’m not you with that stick so far up your ass. This is the real poetry. I know it is because it changes me.'
– CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE

'I’ve been locked up in this room so/ long, mon dieu, whatever desires arise in me are rampaging/ as fierce and monstrous as gigantic starving jungle beasts.” A great hunger, ravenous as Canada, and filled with rage and hurt, animates Rachel Zolf’s splendid new book. On one hand Janey’s Arcadia brings us a few hundred years of western colonization, and on the other, these poems speak to everyone who’s living on someone else’s land or those forced to speak in someone else’s tongue. Whether it’s Cree or English, French or Cobol, there’s always a man and a machine happy to misprise you. “C’est bien. By every fair means. In Manitoba....”'
– Kevin Killian

Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare the tricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange trees with bark and leaves. As the dream world and the waking world blur, the body and the dimensions it inhabits become a series of overlapping circles, all acting as containers for both knowledge and uncertainty. At times disarmingly plainspoken, at others, singing with lyric possibility, these poems make huge associative leaps. Taken together, they present the argument that to truly 'know' something, one must first recognize its traces in something else.

At long last, this double-barrelled collection of visual poetry, sensory deprivation and dream poetics, by damian lopes is now in print. Considered visual essays by the author, sensory deprivation explores the visual noise and overload of contemporary culture, while dream poetics offers an argument for a poetics in this culture. The print book is the companion to the online edition.

Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates, and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender, and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculation, Jenny Sampririsi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end.

'As invigorating and idiosyncratic a collection as this reviewer has encountered in some time. A must-read.' – Seth Abramson, Huffington Post

A lyrical wilderness of power, wealth, leisure and desire, the poems of Country Club freewheel across state lines with panache and flagrant feeling. In this bold debut from Andy McGuire, all passions — even unpleasant ones — stare down the barrel of a world in which freedom is the fifty-first state, and love is the eleventh province.

The manatee wades out of the water and roars at the sightseers
That one of them owes him a drink.
From the beach below the boardwalk, cock-a-doodle-do!
What about a Christmas bowlcut over by the mangrove manatees!
Because in Florida there are Floridians
And they are born Floridians at large.
Every motion
Can’t stop its own ocean.
The oceans’ motions make mistakes.
Some of the dying are unspeakable
In their thinness, poorly disguised meat mannequins.
The mosquitoes are so big
They bleed you like a pig.
Being eaten alive is an acquired taste.

Andy McGuire's poems have appeared in Arc, CV2, Vallum, Riddle Fence and Hazlitt. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Eschewing prevailing poetic fashion, Sooner reimagines poetry as a kind of cubist fascination, at times even a fascination with fascination itself.

In Sooner, Christakos’s most tender, lucent book to date, we find the delusory spiral reasoning of artistic schools; the fluid politic of desire, gender and domesticity; the recurrent trials of revulsion and arousal – all shined through Christakos’s unique prismatic style to emerge in new, striking and often dissonant syntaxes.

This is the music of a keenly tuned mind listening to all of its stations at once, a poetry of menace and possibility, clear sight and ambiguity, love and darkness, jealousy and light. If to know is to feel precisely, as another poet once suggested, Christakos makes it clear the opposite may be just as true, and that the devil is still in the details: You don’t know what you think or feel. You only think and feel you know, and wave from the window...

Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and "natural" spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire while they scan scenes as an outsider or camera eye to unsettle and fray familiar settings. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focus to worn detail, asking us to seek pattern and possibility in a hyper-paced present tense. These are little ominous films, documenting the minutiae around us that can be our undoing.

Let their ribs stretch out – there is no figure
which is not also a ground in

its arctic plane. Cutting rooms as luck
would have it have academic sincerity.

Touch to Affliction is a text of ruins: ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body, of the barbarism of the twentieth century. At once lament, accusation and elegy, this work articulates the crumbling of buildings, the evisceration of language, the inhumanity that arises from patrie.

Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Górecki, Simone Weil. In the end, this work considers what we are left with – indeed, what is left of us – as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.

Touch to Affliction is political but never polemical. It lives at the interstices of thought and the unnameable. It is a book for our times.

Warning: this book may encourage a series of ungrammatical thoughts!

Welcome to the poetic landscape of Mark Truscott, where less is more than you bargained for. Said Like Reeds or Things is a book of micropoetic and linguistic koans. With a quirky, off-centre sense of humour, these poems uncover a language that has malfunctioned only to find itself in the form of a gesture.

Minimalist in form, these small gatherings of words, a.k.a. 'poems', seek strangeness in familiar language; their effect is harmonic dissonance within the mind – like an overturned toy box in your path to the television set, these poems are a fresh and amusing diversion from the everyday from which they are derived. Mysteriously entertaining and precise, these succinct, visual lyrics say as much about the world as they do about their own status as objects for reading, and they persist in the hilarity and contemplation of their own enigmatic possibilities.

'Mark Truscott's Said Like Reeds or Things is the work of a mischievous conservationist with a shadow of Basho in the mix. It's sometimes snappy, sometimes calm, and always an exhilarating tease. This is the place where little pieces of perfection ride along a sublime horizon line.' – Lisa Jarnot

Better break out your sledgehammer – it's time for a little concrete! Concrete poetry, that is. Concrete what? Well, it's poetry that's a lot like art – its meaning comes from what it looks like instead of the order of the words, so it's full of great visual puns and word puzzles. And one of its foremost practitioners is bpNichol, one of Canada's best experimental writers. Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer is Nichol's very first book. Originally published in England by Bob Cobbing in 1967, and then in Canada in 1973 by Nelson Ball's Weed/Flower Press, it has been unavailable for a dog's age. This new edition, curated by poet and antiquarian bookseller Nelson Ball, redresses this wrong. One of the few Nichol books that is dedicated entirely to concrete poetry, Konfessions is, like all of Nichol's work, playful, sincere, explorative, intelligent and human.

"[Nicole Brossard] is a wholly singular writer, part of a larger movement of Québec Women's writing, part of feminist writing, avant-garde writing, part of lesbian writing, but wholly, unequivocally, herself."—Sina Queyras

something like wait for me
in the braille of scars
tonight can i suggest a little punctuation
circle half-moon vertical line of astonishment
a pause that transforms
light and breath
into language and threshold of fire

Even as vowels tremble in danger and worldly destruction repeats itself on the horizon, Ardour reminds us that the silence pulsing within us is also a language of connection. In these poems, intimacy with the other is another astonishment—a pleasant gasp, a "pause that transforms light and breath into language and threshold of fire." Since her first book appeared fifty years ago, Nicole Brossard has left us breathless, expanding our notion of poetry and its possibilities.

Nicole Brossard is a poet, novelist, and essayist who has published more than thirty books since 1965 that have been translated into several languages. She has received two Governor General's Awards for poetry, the Canada Council's Molson Prize, le Prix Athanase-David, and the prestigious Chevalière de l'Ordre National du Québec. She lives in Montreal, Québec.

Angela Carr is a poet and translator. Her most recent book is Here in There. Originally from Montreal, Québec, she currently lives in New York City.

Her acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in Jen Currin’s new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark cunning wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new and more personal territory. In a style that regularly pushes life’s barely hidden strangeness into the light, Currin’s poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography – only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds … This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life.

With the prisms of varied vocabularies refracting detail and language, Sarah Lang illuminates the intricacies of communication, of the moments and gaps between action and reaction, and, as she does, announces herself as a commanding and rhythmically captivating new poetic presence.

The first section of this extended meditation borrows from The Farmer’s Almanac, while the second is infused with the language of the occult. In the third part, Lang invokes the vocabulary of the institution – the airport, the hospital. In the end, these linguistic pillagings accrete into a poignant shadow under the letters of Lang’s own words, pulling them into a stark and alluring focus. With echoes of Virginia Woolf, Lang has given us a constellation of poems as delicate and relentless as pure light.

Hartog's first collection of poetry is a marvellous, luminous book from a writer with a sure wit, an abundance of feeling and a profound sense of the absurdity and rightness of life. Winner of the 1983 Pat Lowther Award.

The surrealist antics of Gary Barwin will run the predictability of your universe through a particle accelerator. Watch as your right eyebrow turns into you as a child. Watch Jeff connect the mower to the Internet to cut other people's lawns. Hear the sploosh as Barwin drops some extra syllables in Basho's frog pond.

Funny, smart and as unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, Raising Eyebrows is divided into four mind-boggling sections - dirty dogs, my life in the salad spinner, ukiah poems: frogments from the frag pond, and bassoon throng blues. Raising Eyebrows will make you do just that.

The World Is a Heartbreaker inaugurates a new subgenre: imposter poetry. This collection is a set of 1600 pseudohaikus, bite-sized chunks of poetic goodness shotgunned at the distracted masses.

What’s a pseudohaiku? It’s the poetry of pure indulgence, a three-liner without the constraint, the pretension or the 5–7–5 syllable form. The subject matter? Relationships, cats, insecurities – themes recur and build into a kind of non-linear narrative.

These micropoems are easily digestible yet remarkably acute, a catalogue of scattered thoughts and pointed observations that go down like potato chips – betcha can’t read just one.

Sometimes sexy, sometimes scandalous, sometimes sentimental, but always three lines long, these pseudohaikus are the future of poetry in a world awash with sound bites, news clips, catchphrases. There are no pleasures like the guilty ones.

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work 'so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.

The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade – in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning.

Nicole Brossard, one of the world’s foremost literary innovators, is known for her experiments with language and her groundbreaking treatment of desire and gender. This dextrous translation by the award-winning poets and translators Erin Moure (Little Theatres) and Robert Majzels (Apikoros Sleuth) brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossard’s remarkable syntax and sensuality.

Busted is a book about governance, and a catalogue of possible relations. It explores a litany of genres concerned with allegiance and refusal, and inhabits the array of ways we do or don't jive with self, group and governing relations. It is a polemic, it is a collage that interrogates how language and linguistic discourses contribute to shaping the relationship between the subject and polity.

Quill pen, linotype, computer: does how you write affect what you write? In with wax, derek beaulieu spurns the sentence and woos the phrase, the image and the language of printing, weaving fragments together to address the question of how publishing and printing affect writing.

The result is a series of poems – marvellous hybrids of visual, Language and lyrical poetry – that are sure to impress.