A Dream of Sulphur

From childhood scenes in Deep Creek to the restless migrations across Canada, A Dream of Sulphur explores the relationship between memory, language, and geography. As a grandmother battles memory loss, a Hungarian is exiled to Canada, the Tofino fishing industry collapses, or August fire in the S...

Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature

A rich collection of writing - poetry, prose, and drama - from some of the greatest Australian Aboriginal authors.

Franklin's Passage

Ripping down half the trees

One out of every twenty students in the adult education classes Evan J teaches in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, dies every year; the surviving students are often afflicted by severe racism, poverty, addictions, and violence. Ripping down half the trees engages with these struggles, offering a catalogue...

Fresh Strange Music

A new approach to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art through the music of her poetry and its social and political implications.

Flexible Design

Vala or The Four Zoas is one of William Blake's few surviving manuscripts and affords a unique opportunity to examine a significant evolution in his poetic practice. While the poem itself exhibits a consistent thematic interest, the modes and methods of representing these interests underwent a ra...

Coleridge and the Inspired Word

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the central figure in the dissemination of higher criticism, the analytical and historical study of the Bible begun in Germany in the late eighteenth century by Lessing, Herder, and Eichorn.

Small Fires

Poems that illustrate the stories that lie buried in landscapes and in human lives.

The Shapes of Silence

The Shapes of Silence examines fiction, memoir, and autobiographical writing by marginalized women whose stories give voice to the gendered dimensions of colonial violence.

Hurt Thyself

Between The Sexes What is the chance she smiles on this rivalry declared in the unspoken as chivalry, even one glance shot in the glass, while ahead he waits holding the door half-open, half-closed. Andrew Steinmetz's second collection of poetry turns a clinical eye on his favourite subjects - lo...

Essays for Richard Ellmann

Richard Ellmann's scholarly work is notable for its striking liveliness and clarity and its genuine illumination of the writers and works with which he dealt. His life of James Joyce, published in 1959, received more commendation and critical praise than any previous literary biography.

Outside, Inside

A humble admission that while we can't know it all, we keep asking.

Some Dance

Some Dance is a meditation on stories, the intersection of stories, of things made up, of things imagined, and of things perhaps lived.

Dust Blown Side of the Journey

Global migrations and music create a symphonic journey where nature ignites wildfires and love fully lived.

Chaucer, Spenser, Milton

The Art of Dying

A satirical look at the euphemistic practices of dying today.

Short Histories of Light

Vivid, haunting, and rhythmical, these poems illuminate the struggles of mental illness and uncover the sinister side of religion.

TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

A cutting-edge feminist study of borders and transnational ethics in Canadian literature since the turn of the twenty-first century.

What's the Import?

Two conspicuous features of the radical transformation of literary studies over the past three decades have been the dominance of theory-based interpretative discourse and cultural studies contextualizations. Both have greatly energized literary studies - but they have done so at a cost.

Giving My Body to Science

I bow and hand Sensei her arrows. All but one that I can't find, though I combed the long grass with my fingers. One arrow gone. Perhaps underground you hold it in your hand against the broken dawn. You are the wandering arrow, the bow unstrung. Your sudden absence has startled the partridges fro...

First Crack

This collection comes from an alternate world of poetry running close beside our own, one which is always chugging away at shaping meaning and adding substance to our feelings. These poems are usually a study in near-solitude: domestic scenes, Michelangelo's Last Judgement, the myths of Egypt, sk...

Canadian Crusoes

This absorbing story about three children of Scottish and French origin who become lost on the Rice Lake Plains in the late eighteenth century provides the author with an opportunity to contemplate important themes of Canadian literature and identity.

Ganymede's Dog

A collection of prose poems that mingles tales from the classical past with contemporary sexuality and timeless dogs.

The Winter Count

Challenging the "official story" about the role of First Nations in the 1885 Rebellion and the medical commission that sealed Louis Riel’s fate.

Tablature

Dazzling poems about landscape, music, and the course of love that go straight to the heart.

The Mirror of the Worlde

An authoritative and comprehensive edition of the first known English translation of the first atlas of the world.

Knots

Poems sculpted from the persuasive mind, erratic heart, and enigmatic art of love’s most devious puzzles.

The swailing

Firmly rooted in frostbitten, fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness.

The Complete Poems of George Whalley

The poems of a Canadian modernist best known for his investigations into poetic process.

Nuclear Family

Jean Van Loon’s father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada’s Cold War intelligence service. Rooted in memory and history, Loon carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and th...

Full Moon of Afraid and Craving

Confronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, this collection explores the combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Melanie Power’s poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters – a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle’s hooch – tracing the...

Devouring Time

Exploring the way filmmakers who adapt Shakespeare’s plays are fuelled by nostalgia.

The House You Were Born In

In this elegy for lost ancestral farms Tanya Standish McIntyre gives voice to theunspoken, shining a light into the dark corners of our collective memory toreveal an indelible past that gleams with clarity, empathy, and humanity.

This Strange Loneliness

This Strange Loneliness is the first comprehensive account of the poetic relationship between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth. Peter Mackay explores how Heaney repeatedly turns to the Romantic poet's work for inspiration, corroboration, and amplification, and as a model for the fortifying po...

Around 1945

How novels expanded human and legal rights in the age of the atomic bomb.

Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete

A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-clas...

A Different Wolf

A critical, poetic celebration of Alfred Hitchcock's life and work.

Take the Compass

A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey – through cities and their outskirts, to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into childhood, and into our perilous collective futu...

Kingdom of the Clock

Set in a vibrant yet ragged coastal city, Kingdom of the Clock is a verse novel whose interwoven storylines begin with one dawn and end at the first light of the next. Within the cycles of that single day, the lives of the city's inhabitants unfold in Cowper’s clear, flowing lyricism.

Rush of Wingspan

Along woodland trails and on the shores of essential bodies of water, these intimate poems by Eleonore Schönmaier reveal beauty and loss in equal measure.

Side Effects May Include Strangers

Poetry that explores the beauty of themes often considered undesirable - pain, disability, and the aging body.

On High

Poems on the hunt for something to believe in.

The Night Chorus

Poems that give voice and agency to marginal figures in rural places and cityscapes.

act normal

These poems are inquisitive, desiring to evade the grasp of the normative, as endured by those institutionalized by, and through, the concept of normalcy. act normal invites readers to re-orient from the normative task of assuming the safety of consensual interpretation, while risking, cherishing...

Where We Live

Poems that focus on our relationships with the places we inhabit and that inhabit us.

hook

Poems based on witnessed and lived experience that bridge literary and activist worlds.

Rail

Lyrical, meditative poems that span time and continents with insight and musicality.

Time in Time

A look at experiment and continuity in North American poetry since the 1960s.

The Poetic Imperative

A fresh look at poetry's vital role in exploring, and extending, our sense of what it means to be human.

General Consent in Jane Austen

Readings of Jane Austen tend to be polarized: she is seen either as conformist - the prevalent view - or quietly subversive. In General Consent in Jane Austen Barbara Seeber overcomes this critical stalemate, arguing that general consent does not exist as a given in Austen's texts. Instead, her t...

Chess Pieces

But never underestimate the powers of the pawn who can promote into a queen and put a kingdom on, or moving humbly up the board, killing on the side, outpriest the priest, and leave the knight without a horse to ride, and trip the elevated rook to bring it crashing down, and nudge the misanthropi...

The Little Yellow House

Silent echoes of memories forgotten.

Look Here Look Away Look Again

To look is to fill our thoughts and consciousness with an experience of the other.

Race Riots

From Black Mischief to The Buddha of Suburbia, twentieth-century British fiction is rife with racial humour. Challenging the common reluctance to take such comedy seriously, Michael Ross shows how humour directed at ethnic "others" exposes deep-seated national attitudes. Race Riots explores the d...

unfinishing

This dream book of kaleidoscopic, holographic, mutagenic poems is haunted by the loops, aporias, and entanglements of time. With imagery both striking and nuanced, and language rich and strange, Brian Henderson presents mesmerizing poems that celebrate the strange and vertiginous musics of a kind...

Grotesque Tenderness

Resonant poems that find beauty in intimate failures and regrets.

D.H. Lawrence and Attachment

Using concepts from attachment theory, D.H. Lawrence and Attachment presents innovative readings of Lawrence’s fiction. Ronald Granofsky teases out hidden patterns in Lawrence’s work, deepening our understanding of his fictional characters and revealing new significance to key thematic concerns l...

Reading Nelligan

The first in-depth study in English of one of Canada's finest French poets.

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

In Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dyst...

Collected Poems of Bronwen Wallace

A new collection that includes all of Bronwen Wallace's published poems, as well as a selection of previously unpublished early work.

D.H. Lawrence and Survival

Although Darwin's ideas about evolution were dominant in D.H. Lawrence's day, little scholarly work has been done on the influence of these concepts on his work. In D.H. Lawrence and Survival Ronald Granofsky argues that Lawrence employed ideas based on evolution in his fiction, particularly duri...

The Rules of the Kingdom

Warm-blooded, curious, and playful, these poems hunt for meaning in history, home, and family.

The Danger Model

Evocative poems about art, illness, identity, and the paradoxes of authenticity.

The Ancient Books of Ireland

Ireland's ancient books are among the most fascinating and beautiful in the world but, with the exception of the magnificent Book of Kells, little is known about them. Michael Slavin lifts these ancient volumes from the obscurity of library and museum vaults to bring them into the public domain f...

Orwell, Second edition

"It is doubtful that any book provides a better foundation for a full understanding of Orwell's unique and troubling vision." Washington Post.

Daily Modernism

In contrast to autobiographies, which are intended for a public audience and can be read as a novel, diaries have traditionally been thought of as the private record of a person's life. In Daily Modernism Elizabeth Podnieks shows that the diary can and should be read as both autobiography and fic...

Waterglass

Waterglass is wishful thinking. The word won't be found in the dictionary, nor will you come across the thing itself in any shop of curios. But there it rests, nonetheless, as an imagined possibility, among and between the lines of Jeffery Donaldson's second collection of verse.

Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature

A comprehensive and nuanced analysis of how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English Renaissance literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.

rushes from the river disappointment

Lyrical field notes exploring tests of courage in relationships from a bold emerging voice in Canadian poetry.

Reimagining Illness

Reimagining Illness analyzes works by eighteenth-century British women writers alongside contemporaneous medical texts to argue that the circulation of medical knowledge in this period was not determined only by scientific rationalism and male expertise but rather shaped in part by women’s accoun...

Bridestones

The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.

Empties

The varied meanings of empties coalesce in vivid and timely poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.”

twofold

The form of the diptych shapes language and meaning, symmetry and difference. Edward Carson’s twofold delivers a liminal gathering of short diptych poems exploring themes of love, relationships, myth, art, language, math, physics, geometry, and artificial intelligence, framed within Ovidian and H...

watching for life

From a balcony overlooking an urban back lane, a poet watches those walking below – their identities unknown and yet grasped through details of habit that reflect the strangers’ inner selves. In watching for life David Zieroth ponders questions about how to live and how to continue.

Unbecoming

"Neil Surkan's new poetry collection articulates a fierce vision of reality, in which human lives are small and fragile because they exist at the edges of a great natural world in which death is simply a neutral fact. Surkan's poems are surprising, often witty Surkan's poems are surprising, often...

Water Quality

In lush and vivid poems, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool that simmers through a family’s veins, wate...

The Rough Poets

A rallying cry for climate justice, The Rough Poets introduces the reader to poetry that is ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest, and to oil-worker poets who grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the future of their communities, and desire job...

Without Beginning or End

Without Beginning or End is Jacqueline Bourque’s final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Deeply inspired by her Acadian upbringing along the ocean shores of New Brunswick, these are poems populated by aerialists, painters, and the spirit of Charle...

Batten Down

These are poems of Dorothy and the Witch in Oz, of cinematic mythologies and fractured fairy tales, inviting us to witness acts of grim revenge and reconsider the folkloric forests lodged in our collective minds.

The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields

Carol Shields received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. Yet she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. This collection includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging...

openbound

Poet Jeffery Donaldson explores the puzzles of poetry and marriage: How to hold on to what you also release? How to protect love when other loves are put between?

Earth Words

In Earth Words, John Reibetanz breaks bread with three earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles, moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through the nineteenth century of Henry Thor...

Delivering the News

A rich gathering of lyric poems by anative of Prince Edward Island.

North American Gaels

A groundbreaking exploration of the literature and folklore of North America's Irish and Scottish Gaelic-speaking diaspora since the eighteenth century. North American Gaels shines new light on the ways Irish and Scottish Gaels have left an enduring mark through speech, story, and song.

Bitter in the Belly

Bitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. In his most personal book, Vincent moves from stark innocence through awful events and losses, to something like acceptance ...

Vlarf

In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and ...

aboutness

Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, aboutness is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, ...

Check

Poems about confirmation bias: expect it to be true, it's true.

The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire

Chatty Cathy, while not the first talking doll, was certainly the most widely known, and the only one elevated to idiom. The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire chronicles her later career and luridly illustrates the perils of reaching such linguistic heights with so very little to say.

Cast from Bells

Subtle and surprising poems connecting the use of bells in wartime with shifts in the nature of affection.

Of Lost Cities

In Of Lost Cities Nizar Hermes explores the poetic representation of the Maghribī city and sheds light on the Maghribī manipulation of the classical Arabic (sub)genres of city elegy and nostalgia for one’s homeland.

Beyond Intimacy

Beyond Intimacy explores the relationship between art and justice through an analysis of works by three Mexican poets: Abigael Bohórquez, Myriam Moscona, and Gloria Gervitz. Establishing lyricism as an invitation to social dialogue, the book recognizes poetry’s potential for justice through the r...

Trio

One woman. Two lovers. It's a complicated dance.

At Beckett’s Grave

In poems of loss and hope, Robin Durnford dares to pause for a moment, finding meaning in the metaphor of the life and work of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett.

Slow War

remember your body again / how cedar smells of god / and a Bach cantata / makes you almost / forgive / your hands.

White Lily

John Emil Vincent’s White Lily offers a meditation on Louise Glück and Laurie Anderson, two artists inspired and bedevilled by white lilies.

Murmuration

In a photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation and, for perhaps a singular moment, assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-chang...

To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss

A powerful reappraisal of radicalism in the life and work of William Morris.

SCAR/CITY

SCAR/CITY steps outside binary conversations and poetically interrogates a system that results in depravity and scarcity leaving us homeless literally and metaphorically. These poems walk streets and take snapshots of the impact financialization of our homes has on our sense of community and belo...

Canada to Ireland

Canada to Ireland explores the poetry and prose of twelve Irish writers and nationalists in Canada between 1788 and 1900. The book demonstrates that Canadian cultural nationalism left its mark on both countries. Contemporary decolonization movements in Canada and cultural exchanges between Irelan...