Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisFirmly 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.Trade Review“Radiant in its ache and teeming with beauty, the swailing absorbs the haunted geographies of home, forest, field, fire, and snow while delivering a stunning introspection through poems steeped in the winter of their own grief. So many of the last lines blew me away, and I found myself continually returning to savour their longing.” Mai Der Vang, author of Afterland and Yellow Rain“The swailing is a powerful, unstintingly honest exploration of memory, loss, the subtle play of presence and absence, and the risks to selfhood that longing poses, explored in poems shot through with dark humour, urgency, and exemplary precision.” John Burnside, author of Black Cat Bone“Among the many virtues of Patrick Errington’s impeccably constructed debut is its nearly forensic attention to the minutest particulars: ‘Last night’s rain is pearling the spruce, the timothy.’ What is most astonishing about this exactitude is that rather than dispelling the mystery of being in the world, it fills the reader with renewed marvelling and reverence.” Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many“Patrick Errington's poems are conceived in attention, crafted in grace, and finished in wisdom. ‘They told me as a child to be exact with pain,’ Errington writes, and his poems are true to his credo, leaping wildly through the mysteries of mourning while extending to us the compassionate hand of form. Here is a poet who knows that form and freedom can be one, that sorrow can have an ecstasy within it, that hope might just be ‘loss finding what form it can keep.’ Here, in poem after poem, is truth.” Joseph Fasano, author of The Swallows of Lunetto“Gorgeous poems which seem to shimmer on that constantly shifting border between the body and the landscape.” Andrew McMillan, author of pandemonium“From the beginning of the book to the end, the poet sets the reader’s mind on fire with the luminous language, lyric intensity, and emotional heat of these poems. Patrick Errington’s gorgeous, superbly crafted gems each shimmer under the poet’s fierce gaze, and taken together achieve something grand and powerful.” Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House “The slow burn of these poems culminates in evocative and expansive lyricism.” Poetry Foundation

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Book SynopsisWritten largely in the words of a fifteen-year-old survivor, these poems provide historical entry into the Holocaust. Put simply, the poems explore the reality of the events experienced by Judith Sherman in her determination to survive.Table of Contents Foreword Arthur Kleinman Preface Poems of Before This Time I Too Have a Dream Because My Grandfather Serious Men Poems of the Holocaust My Village of Kurima It Is the Law The Law of the Land My Suitcase and I Morning Mass Toothbrush Gestapo Prison Mirjam's Letter from Hiding Unhiding in the Forest Hiding in the Forest Karpu in Auschwitz Such Good Taste Wagon Train Auschwitz Lord SS Man Knew You Then Morning Prayer During Appell Appell Guard Magda Speaks kein Deutsch Come Messiah Hunger Hunger, Do Not Intrude Let Not Flowers Here The Invitation An Apple in Ravensbruck My Ravensbruck Love Song I Know a Dog Ravensbruck Jesus, Tell Your Father Stand Still, Sun The Roma Girl Ravensbruck Friend Shoes for Life The Mirror in My Right Shoe A Brief Reprieve You Are Invited to My Funeral Reluctant Witness Resistance of Prisoner 83,621 Death March I Say Damn You Liberation Trees I Say Death, Stand Aside at My Liberation Time Poems of After Once You Survive No More Hide-and-Seek Tell Me This This Year in Jerusalem That You Should Know Legacy Poem Do Something Accountability 9/11: Has Anybody Seen My Dad? My Darfur Mother Bosnia Boy To Walk in My Shoes I Smile, I Smile Fresh Washed Sheets Sunrise Summer Woods If God Is Dead Are Things Changed in Heaven How You Are? Oversight If You Apologize Let Me Win A Ladder for God We Should Talk Survivor's Voice Today Survivor's Message Say the Name Afterword Ilana Gelb Acknowledgments Contributors

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Book SynopsisThe poet William Waring Cuney (1906-1976) hails from an illustrious Afro-Texan family whose members include the charismatic politician Norris Wright Cuney (1846-1898) and his daughter, Maud Cuney Hare (1874-1936),the concert pianist and writer. Waring Cuney's maternal line, after whom he was named, was equally eminent.Cuney was born and raised in Washington D.C., just a few blocks from Howard University where three generations of his family studied. Despite his privileged upbringing among the city's Black elite, Cuney embraced his family's passionate commitment to racial uplift and civil rights; in exploring the relationship between African Americans and their environment, he was thus able to transmute into two books of poetry a broad cross section of African American life; his poems and songs explore the lives of jazz musicians, athletes, domestic and railway workers, women and children, blues singers, prisoners, sharecroppers, and soldiers. In addition, Cuney published in all the major Harlem Renaissance journals and anthologies alongside the luminaries of the period, many of whom were good friends.Through 100 of his best poems, many never collected or published, and a detailed biographical monograph, Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney introduces readers to a newly recovered Harlem Renaissance poet, and to the history of a remarkable American family.

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Book SynopsisThe poetry of Dylan Thomas has long been heralded as amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and along with his play, Under Milk Wood, his books are amongst the best-loved works in the literary canon. This new selection of his poetry contains all of his best-loved verse - including 'I See the Boys of Summer', 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and, of course, 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night' - as well as some of his lesser-known lyrical pieces, and aims to show the great poet in a new light.Trade Review'[Then] the greatest living poet in the English language.' (Observer) 'He is unique, for he distils an exquisite mysterious moving quality which defies analysis.' (Sunday Times)

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Book SynopsisJohn Cooper Clarke shot to prominence in the 1970s as the original people's poet'. Since then his career has spanned cultures, audiences, art forms and continents. Today, Cooper Clarke is as relevant and vibrant as ever, and his influence is just as visible on today's pop culture. His new poems were collected in The Luckiest Guy Alive, which was followed by a bestselling autobiography I Wanna Be Yours and poetry collection WHAT. Aside from his trademark look' continuing to resonate with fashionistas young and old, and his poetry included on the national curriculum syllabus, his effect on modern life is huge.Trade ReviewA big-hearted poet of boundless humour and unmistakable style -- Kit Fan * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING POETRY COLLECTION*Donna Ashworth's new book Wild Hope is out September 2023*In this fast-paced world, I Wish I Knew is a collection of poems to guide us through the wilderness of life, navigating body image, emotions, mental health and personal growth.With honest lessons learned from rock bottom, Donna Ashworth's writing helps us to find courage in chaos and rise to every challenge.Sparking joy, surprise and gratitude on each page, this collection will soothe your soul, strengthen your spirit and help you find your own unique voice.'Donna's much-needed words will no doubt empower and lift our young people today.'Lisa Faulkner'A little corner of calm within life's storm - wonderful.'Cat Deeley'Donna has a rare gift of being able to put into words how we all feel. Her writing is like a hug from a wise friend.'Samia Longchambon'Donna's wise and beautiful words help us reach a place of peace and acceptance. I would love to have read them many years ago.'Lisa SnowdonTrade ReviewDonna's much-needed words will no doubt empower and lift our young people today. -- Lisa FaulknerA little corner of calm within life's storm - wonderful. -- Cat DeeleyDonna has a rare gift of being able to put into words how we all feel. Her writing is like a hug from a wise friend. -- Samia LongchambonDonna's wise and beautiful words help us reach a place of peace and acceptance. I would love to have read them many years ago. -- Lisa Snowdon

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Book SynopsisThese poems arose from the depths of incarceration, from the throat and intellect of Mohsen Mohamed (sentenced to five years of harsh imprisonment after a campus protest) and went on to win Egypt’s two most significant literary prizes. They speak of dislocation and the wrenching of the heart, of a found (and forged) community, of the bare lineaments of humanity disclosed in the throes of suffering. They are works of provocative witness and searching tenderness.

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Book SynopsisWinner, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry AwardIn this experimental long poem sequence, Alyda Faber transforms the portrait poem into runic shapes, ice shelved, sculpted, louvered on a winter shoreline. Twenty years after her mother’s death, Faber untethers herself from the mother she thinks she knows with wild analogies: depicting her mother variously as King Lear’s Kent, a Camperdown elm, a black-capped chickadee, Neil Peart, Pope Innocent X, and a funnel spider. While embodying the passionate relationship between mother and daughter, Faber’s poems also expose the thorn in the flesh — the inability of mother and daughter to give each other what they most want to give. Endlessly discovered, yet ultimately unknowable, the poet’s mother is complex, mystifying, and unwavering: courageous in her decision to leave all that she knew behind; bewildering in her fidelity to a damaging marriage; steadfast in her devotion to a God who is at once adamant and the source of ephemeral beauty.Trade Review“Each poem in Poisonous If Eaten Raw is a portrait and an ecosystem that makes meaning from memory and of a relationship that is the origin of longing and is singular to each of us. How do we make sense of our mothers? The pain they endured, the pain they created? This is a poet pushing past memory into a present and deeper understanding that’s brimming with empathy and a way forward. And this is remembering in motion: vivid and audacious, moving into and out from its source.” -- Sue Goyette“There is no way for a daughter to know her mother as anyone other than a mother. But in Poisonous if Eaten Raw, Faber creates evocative portraits that attempt to bridge this gap of knowing through a process of surreal re-imagination.” -- Manahil Bandukwala * The Fiddlehead *

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Book SynopsisCarol 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 from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003.Trade Review"The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields will send Shields's followers back to her novels with a new understanding of their metaphoric and imagistic richness. Scholars and those familiar with her work will be grateful that the book has awakened them to another side of a writer of such renown." Lorna Crozier, University of Victoria and author of Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)"The poems in this book are witty, sparked by Shields's signature interests in gender, class, and the frames of subjectivity; they are smartly formal and, like her novels, often subversively feminist. It is intriguing to see the kind of breadth that Shields brought to multiple projects throughout her poetic practice and this book has the ring of a well-kept secret." Tanis MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier University and author of Mobile“Nearly twenty years after [Sheilds’] death, we have the welcome edition of her Collected Poetry. With the annotated addition of unpublished poems, Stovel’s volume reveals the intricate web of Shields’s humane creative intelligence.” British Journal of Canadian Studies

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Book SynopsisA diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from identity to current events. At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau’s poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo’s imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau’s poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard. Trade Review"Yau’s latest brilliant (after Bijou in the Dark) brims with social critique and the linguistic play for which the poet is known, while also being suggestive of a writer and artist eager to situate his multifaceted work in the context of a collapsing society. . . . Self-aware yet self-effacing, these necessary poems testify to the power of language to transform reality." -- Starred review * Publishers Weekly *"Yau considers history, poets of the past, aging, personal and political identity, mass shootings, and stereotypes of Chinese citizens in poems that address various crises of the times." -- Top 10 Poetry Books for Fall 2021 * Publishers Weekly *"Even knowing that John Yau is a prolific and adventurous poet, one can’t begin to anticipate the work in Genghis Chan on Drums... This poet-scholar... has gifted us with a lot to ponder." * On the Seawall *“Once again Yau delivers a spectacularly tantalizing book of poems, recent and relevant to exigencies and booby traps of the times: PC culture, identity politics. A poet’s aging body as he’s turning 69, and other twilight musings, razor sharp curmudgeonry, meditations on Gumshoes, Piero di Cosimo’s Sister, Carole Lombard, the language of Philosophers. All masterfully pulled off with sleight of hand, deft language, gleeful irreverence. As devil’s advocate, Yau mercilessly torques all the cliches about being Chinese, in the ‘O Pin Yin’ series. . . . Each section of this generous book has a particular intensity of shape-shifting personae. Surreal prose poems sit comfortably with ‘A Painters’ Thought,’ an especially winning section from a poet who has written expertly, profusely on art. Two pieces movingly invoke artist Tom Nozkowski, close friend who passed in 2019. . . . Genghis Chan on Drums arrives on time with a drumming shout-out for the human comedy, a perfect antidote for the enormity of our world’s woes. Yet Yau also has the heart of a humble Taoist philosopher as when ‘we become our own destiny: military sardines side-by-side sliding together in the dark.’” -- Anne Waldman, author of Sanctuary: (Addenda)“By turns gorgeous, hilarious, and enraged, this astonishing collection takes the reader on a mineshaft-deep descent past the nuanced multiform measures of racism I am humiliated to admit I had never before fathomed. Then, in short poems suggesting the richness of dreamt novels, Yau discloses his enormous inner life in a virtuosic redeployment of language that blooms on each passing page, in wave upon wave of buoyant wonders, in mischievous self-cancelling miracles of speech, until we reach the depths of English I never thought possible. This is a beautiful book in which I finally found my feeble self. It understands me and I want to stay here forever!” -- Guy Maddin“It’s hard to overstate the profound influence that Yau’s poetry has on my work, and on so many other poets and artists across generations. I’ve followed his sometime OG alter-ego Genghis Chan across many decades, many books, and it’s glorious to see him finally slouch into the spotlight for this long-awaited extended solo—a mashup of speed metal plus free improv plus paigu with the occasional brassy rimshot. But in this latest book, the propulsive beat of war-drums underlies even the vaudeville, the exquisite, the slyly cantankerous. Yau’s shots have real targets, real firepower, even when his targets hold his own consciousness hostage. From a collage of other people’s stereotypes, myths, and dissimulations, these poems emerge with breathtaking clarity and gut-wrenching force. Perhaps Yau’s most powerful book to date, this is essential reading.” -- Monica Youn, author of Blackacre: Poems

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Book SynopsisBright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours." A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact--tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limon has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limon's work is consistently generous and accessible--though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.Trade ReviewLong list selection for the National Book Award for poetry Best Poetry Book of 2015: New York Times and Buzzfeed Praise for Bright Dead Things "Effortlessly lyrical."--New York Times "These poems are, as my students might say, hella intimate. They are meticulously honed and gorgeously crafted. They marry the lyric poem's interior emotional intensity with its exterior mode of social conveyance and aesthetic beauty... The best compliment one can give a book of poems is that the book loves the reader. Bright Dead Things doesn't just love poetry; it loves the reader. My hunch is, Reader, you'll love it too."--The Huffington Post "Bright Dead Things, the fourth book of poems by Ada Limon, breeds a particular mixture of wildness. The mixture is by turns melodious and tight. Limon's poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book."--The Millions "Limon's work is destined to find a place with readers on the strength of her voice alone. Her intensity here is paradoxically set against the often slow burn of life in Kentucky, and the results will please readers."--Flavorwire "Poet and Critic Stephen Burt says, 'Prose sense is to poetry as tonality is to music.' And I see that sense of prose cushioned in each poem included in this leguminous compilation. The works wear complexity on their sleeves with reassuring accessibility on their faces; to say it more succinctly, there's a tough grilling of the soul and champagnes served to the measure of each one?s taste."--The Rumpus "In Ada Limon's Bright Dead Things, there's a fierce jazz and sass ("this life is a fist / of fast wishes caught by nothing, / but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug.") and there's sadness--a grappling with death and loss that forces the imagination to a deep response. The radio in her new, rural home warns "stay safe and seek shelter" and yet the heart seeks love, risk, and strangeness--and finds it everywhere."--Gregory Orr "Ada Limon doesn't write as if she needs us. She writes as if she wants us. Her words reveal, coax, pull, see us. In Bright Dead Things we read desire, ache, what human beings rarely have the heart or audacity to speak of alone--without the help of a poet with the most generous of eyes."--Nikky Finney "Limon does far more than merely reflect the world: she continually transforms it, thereby revealing herself as an everyday symbolist and high level duende enabler. At the end of one poem she writes, "What the heart wants? The heart wants/ her horses back," and suddenly even this most urban reader feels wild and free."--Matthew Zapruder "Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix."--Richard Blanco Starred Review "In her newest volume of poems, Limon (Sharks in the Rivers) delves into the divided self--self separated by geography, by loss, by change, by circumstance. VERDICT Generous of heart, intricate and accessible, the poems in this book are wondrous and deeply moving."--Library Journal "A poet whose verse exudes warmth and compassion, Limon is at the height of her creative powers, and Bright Dead Things is her most gorgeous book of poems."--Los Angeles Review of Books "Richly written and felt."--Publishers Weekly

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"In this comprehensive volume, Mazur demonstrates a remarkable mastery of poetic technique as she depicts human relationships in all of their ambiguities. . . . Here, as elsewhere, the speaker boldly and sensitively proclaims her own lack of understanding. It is this vulnerability, equipped and complemented with extensive erudition, that makes Mazur’s poems as poignant as they are accomplished in their craft." * Publishers Weekly, Starred Review *"In her honed and arresting new collection of poetry, Land’s End, Gail Mazur rightly observes that the sycamores along Memorial Drive in Cambridge do something different than the showy blaze of other trees in fall, 'patterning the road and the old river/with their own kind of darkness and light.' . . . In these new and selected poems, Mazur, who lives in Cambridge and Provincetown, writes with sensual specificity of the Cape, its mussels and sand flats and sandpipers, a hummingbird moth, turnips grown in Eastham, the humble and sublime." -- Nina MacLaughlin * The Boston Globe *"In Land’s End, Mazur has done the hard work, building a palette of primal elements, the metaphors of place — gulls, sand, pebbles worn by tides — to express the yearnings of mortality." * Provincetown Independent *"Before I had received Gail Mazur’s Land’s End, it had already been praised to me as an artifact, a book that looks and feels handsome. In this day of cookie-cutter template publication and undistinguished design, that’s already a quality to celebrate, and not simply incidental to the poet’s own work." -- Jim Kates * Arts Fuse *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsNew PoemsHall Mirror At 4 A.M. That Was Then My American Poem At Land’s End Walking Barefoot, August Thoreauvian The Conversation Nostalgia End of Summer Eastham Turnips, November Rest Stop The Breakwater * Josef Albers The High Line Snapshots There Came a Time Blue Work Shirt * Early Morning Walks More, More from Forbidden City (2016)Mount Fuji Forbidden City My Studio Believe That Even in My Deliberateness I Was Not Deliberate * Shade Age On Jane Cooper’s “The Green Notebook” Philip Guston The 70s Elephant Memory To the Charles River * We Swam to an Island of Bees Instance of Me The Self in Search of the Sublime Things Family Crucible Grieffrom Figures in a Landscape (2011)Figures in a Landscape Hermit The Age Poem Shipwreck To the Makers Borges in Cambridge, 1967 To the Women of My Family History of My Timidity Dear Migraine, Isaac Rosenberg Inward Conversation Post-Pastoral Concordance to a Life’s Workfrom Zeppo’s First Wife (2005)Blue Umbrella The Mission September Queenie Dana Street, December Zeppo’s First Wife Seven Sons Waterlilies American Ghazal Rudy’s Treefrom They Can’t Take That Away from Me (2001)Five Poems Entitled “Questions” Michelangelo: to Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel Poems Maybe It’s Only the Monotony Young Apple Tree, December I Wish I Want I Need The Weskit Evening Girl in a Library Air Drawingfrom The Common (1995)I’m a Stranger Here Myself In Houston Whatever They Want Bluebonnets Poem for Christian, My Student Foliage Ice Poem Ending with Three Lines of Wordsworth’s Bedroom at Arlesfrom The Pose of Happiness (1986)The Horizontal Man Jewelweed Reading Akhmatova Hurricane Watch Fallen Angels Listening to Baseball in the Car To RTSL, 1985from Nightfire (1978)Baseball

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Book SynopsisViolet in Some Places is the life of a man enveloped in the raw, nurturing magic of matriarchs. If ever there was a guide toward masculine vulnerability, power through listening, a rosetta stone for empathy— it is here in the silky, poetic prose beautifully woven throughout this empowering collection from Cebo Campbell.

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Book SynopsisLONGLISTED FOR THE JAMES CROPPER WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2022 ___ A year of looking, listening and noticing across four unique seasons and thirty-five beautifully illustrated poems. 'Dazzling, moving... A book that will touch many, and be given often: here, take this, you must read this.' ROBERT MACFARLANE 'So vivid... A call out to our elemental relationship with love and nature. Beautiful.' WILLEM DAFOE ___ The world changed in 2020. Gradually at first, then quickly and irreversibly, the patterns by which we once lived altered completely. The Heeding paints a picture of a year caught in the grip of history, yet filled with revelatory perspectives close at hand: a sparrowhawk hunting in a back street; the moon over a town with a loved-one's hand held tight; butterflies massing in a high-summer yard - the everyday wonders and memories that shape a life and help us recall our own. Across four seasons and thirty-five luminous poems and illustrations, Rob Cowen and Nick Hayes lead us on a journey that takes its markers and signs from nature and a world filled with fear and pain but beauty and wonder too. Collecting birds, animals, trees and people together, The Heeding is a profound meditation to a time no-one will forget. At its heart, this is a book that helps us look again, to heed: to be attentive to this world we share and this history we're living through, to be aware of how valuable and fragile we are, to grieve what's lost and to hope for a better and brighter tomorrow. ____ 'The Heeding speaks to us all, guiding us through the emotional journey the nation has gone through during the past year, with humour, pathos and forensically sharp portrayals of people and nature at a time like no other.' Stephen Moss, author of The Robin 'Poignant and exquisite' Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden 'Vivid, beating, aching. The Heeding feels like both a eulogy and a defiant, wild challenge to go on. I loved it.' Josie George, author of A Still Life 'It is rare to find a writer that is able to tease apart the threads that make up the fragile fabric of our loves, hopes and despairs with such care and humility. An exceptionally good book for an exceptionally bad time.' Matt Gaw, author of Under the Stars Trade Review'So powerful, and rich, and true. Every line in The Heeding feels freshly discovered, full of urgency and clarity. This is an exceptionally moving and beautiful book.’ Nick Drake, poet and author of Out of Range ‘A dazzling collection of words and images.’ Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings‘Poignant and exquisite.’ Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden‘It is rare to find a writer that is able to tease apart the threads that make up the fragile fabric of our loves, hopes and despairs with such care and humility. An exceptionally good book for an exceptionally bad time.' Matt Gaw, author of Under the Stars‘Writing that finds light in the dark... Poignant, powerful, pressing.’ Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment‘A raw, dark and tender, visually stunning, emotionally unravelling distillation of the year in which minutes were endless but whole months disappeared. It’s all here.’ Dr Amy-Jane Beer, author of The Flow

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Book Synopsis“Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture” collects two of Antonin Artaud’s foremost poetic works from the last period of his life. He wrote both works soon after his release from the psychiatric hospital of Rodez and his return to Paris, and they were published during the flurry of intensive activity and protests against his work’s censorship. The Indian Culture is the first and most ambitious work of Artaud’s last period. It deals with his travels in Mexico in 1936 where Artaud sets aside his usual preoccupations with peyote and the Tarahumara people’s sorcerers to directly anatomize his obsessions with gods, corporeality, and sexuality. Here Lies is Artaud’s final declaration of autonomy for his own body from its birth to its imminent death, won at the cost of multiple battles against the infiltrating powers amassed to steal that birth and death away from him. Both works demonstrate Artaud’s final poetry as a unique amalgam of delicate linguistic invention and ferociously obscene invective. “Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture” was translated by the award-winning translator Clayton Eshleman, widely seen as the preeminent translator into English of Artaud’s work, with its profound intensity and multiply nuanced language. For the first time since its first publication, this bilingual edition presents the two works in one volume, as Artaud originally intended. This edition also features a contextual afterword by Stephen Barber as well as new material, previously untranslated into English.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. Arrow is a debut volume extraordinary in ambition, range and achievement. At its centre is 'Dear, beloved', a more-than-elegy for her younger sister who died suddenly: in the two years she took to write the poem, much else came into play: 'it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper,' following the example of the great elegists including Milton, to whose Paradise Lost she listened during the period of composition, also hearing the strains of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's Song, of Alice Oswald and Marie Howe. The poem becomes a kind of kingdom, 'one that is at once evil, or blighted, and beautiful, not to mention everything in between'. As well as elegy, Chakraborty composes invocations, verse essays, and the strange extended miracle of the title poem, in which ancient and modern history, memory and the lived moment, are held in a directed balance. It celebrates the natural forces of the world and the rapt experience of balance, form and - love. She declares a marked admiration for poems that 'will write into being a world that already in some way exists'. This is what her poems achieve.Trade Review'This powerful and endlessly mysterious collection of poems is a book of fables, of spells, of revised narratives, and of realigned songs, brightly lifted above our bodies by music that is as unpredictable as it is marvelous. The lyricism is everywhere apparent as Sumita Chakraborty addresses us, our bodies and their stories, our planet, and our sense of time itself. How does she do it? Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry, W.H. Auden wrote about Yeats, and as the hurt enters Chakraborty's language, we see that in speech violated, sounds and meanings - and even the oldest of human mysteries, like 'the etymology of love' - are redefined. All one can do is repeat: this is an endlessly compelling book. Bravo.' - Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic; 'About a quarter of the way through Sumita Chakraborty's Arrow, the reader encounters an impossible poem called 'Dear, beloved.' It's impossible because who could write it? It's as large, in its way, as any epic, but as compressed as any lyric, and as beautiful as any lyric, but as foundational as any epic, but it seems to come after all things, though it seems, also, diurnal. And it's impossible also because it's a highlight, not the highlight, of Arrow, a debut as assured as any first or last book, as compelling as any, as well-made.' - Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block; 'I stand in awe of Sumita Chakraborty's visionary collection, by turns epic and compressed in scope, weighty in its tapestry-like materiality and sleekly dynamic as an arrow... Seamless and diverse in form, cosmic in subject and image.' - Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewPraise for S O S: Poems 1961-2013 A New York Times Editors' Choice "The most complete representation of over a half-century of revolutionary and breathtaking work." --Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review "S O S provides readers with rich, vital views of the African American experience and of Baraka's own evolution as a poet-activist... Baraka is as adept with spare, imagistic lines as with lyrical realism. Racist, provincial ideas earn his angry unmasking as he sings, shouts and shakes a fist at corruption and ignorance." --Washington Post "A big handsome book of Amiri Baraka's poetry [that gives] us word magic, wit, wild thoughts, discomfort, and pleasure." --William J. Harris, Boston Review "Amiri Baraka's S O S sparks a living flame. Bodacious and tenacious, he remains a realist rooted sometimes in the political, sometimes in the avant-garde. His voice is made in America; his poetry is an action. Baraka's poems live on and off the page and demand that we feel language as music and meaning. This poet and his work are always slipping the yoke, determined to be free--yes, aesthetic freedom lives within S O S. The collection wails out from recent history through a masterful signifier whose fierce certainty holds grace notes with a backbeat." --Yusef Komunyakaa "[S O S is] a signal of blunt urgency ... this is undeniably the work of the kind of poet we will not see again; Amiri Baraka was one of the last of the 20th century's literary lions. This momentous collection exhibits his abiding resistance to almost everything, but subversiveness." --Terrance Hayes, Publishers Weekly (boxed review) "One of those rarest of things: poetry that combines a rigorous intellect, high-voltage aesthetics, and a revolutionary's need to confront his subject... Those who believe, as Baraka did, that art could surpass simple beauty and act as a force for social change will cherish this remarkable volume... Highly recommended." --Library Journal (starred review) "In a climate of renewed outrage over injustice, the voice of the recently departed Amiri Baraka is more relevant than ever, his volatile lyric poems ringing as true today as they did fifty years ago. A career retrospective that captures not just a man, but a movement." --Barnes & Noble Review "What's best about Baraka's verse is that his historical sensibility and sense of historical dread bump elbows with anarchic comedy... S O S is the best overall selection we have thus far of Baraka's work." --Dwight Garner, New York Times "These poems cover the ebbs and flows of the modern African-American struggle for freedom and identity ... There may be no better time than now to experience the lyrical, funny, dynamic, and provocative poetry of Amiri Baraka ... S O S is the perfect place to hear the voice that influenced, if not defined, decades of black political struggle when few were listening--and even fewer were doing anything. Baraka did something. Man, he did plenty." --Shelf Awareness "Throughout his writing life, [Baraka] crafted some of the most potent, thoughtful, and even sublime lines of any poet of his generation and beyond." --Gawker

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Book Synopsis'Maybe the polluters will purify our streams. Purify our waterways? In your bloomin' dreams! All will be rewilded, all will be renewed, The country will look lovely, But we won't have any food. Our stocks will be sustainable, The French will be our friends, We shall live in harmony, until the bitter end.'Hidden beyond the bluebell woods and babbling brooks, there is great unrest in our countryside. In this lyrical satire, Pam Ayres highlights the undercurrents simmering beyond the patchwork of fields. We meet the angry fishermen who can't afford to live in their own villages, the indignant farmers who get the blame for everything and the old man grieving for the unspoilt village of his youth. The animals have their say too, from the persecuted grey squirrel who didn't want to leave America anyway, the barn owl mourning his now-converted ancient barn, and the humble maligned mole, all of whom come together and demand to know: Who Are You Calling Vermin?

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Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*'A raw, tender, potent collection' - JESSICA ANDREWS'Gorgeous poems - profound, exploratory, wild, playful - and completely now' - RUTH PADEL________The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen MortLet me kneelbefore the sky and let me be humble, untidy,let me be decorated.Here are women's bodies. Hungry adolescent bodies, fluctuating pregnant bodies, ailing aging bodies. Here are bodies as products to be digitized and consumed. Here is the body in nature, changing and growing stronger. Here are tattooed women through history, ink unfurling across their skin.The Illustrated Woman is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body - from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland, Helen Mort's remarkable poems transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience.'These are poems that will leave their indelible mark' - ANDREW MCMILLANTrade ReviewMort's language is visceral, holding space for the complexities of experiencing pain * Guardian, *Books of the Year* *Marvellous and tender poems... beautifully achieved... Mort's poems shine with bright risk throughout -- Kate Kellaway * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *A wonderful, endlessly re-readable work * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* *The Illustrated Woman celebrates the female body... Her deft poetry mesmerises as it troubles -- Daljit Nagra * New Statesman, Books of the Year 2022 *The title sequence is a complex, cohesive and at times dazzling analysis of another kind of writing - that inscribed directly on the poet's skin * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisIn Emily Bilman’s The Undertow, the reader is taken on an infinite voyage through memories of love and loss. Gustave Flaubert wrote: Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears. To be caught up in the under-currents of the sea is to be driven deeper than one might feel comfortable and to risk going beyond what the conscious mind can bear and control. We are told that life first began in the sea and perhaps we are involved in its darkness shot through with sudden gleams of light like the glow of precious pearls. Emily Bilman has found that the sonnet form has the power to distil the deepest human experiences. Many of the poems in this book are sonnets alternating between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean traditions. The small box of the sonnet becomes a stage in which the inner conflicts arising out of life and love are dramatised and resolved. To read The Undertow is to undertake an exhilarating poetic voyage and discover the poet’s quest for light.

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Book SynopsisIona Lee’s debut collection charts the journey of the writer, artist and performer into adulthood. Written in a unique voice, Iona playfully toys with thematic devices in this entertaining exploration of art and artifice, absence and impermanence, truth and tale telling. Characterised by a deep love of language, its music and its magic, these poems reflect on memory, the future and other hauntings. Wittily observed, this collection is an attempt to connect the stars into tidy constellations, and to join the tiny, inchoate dots of self into something traceable and translatable. Humorous and self-aware, gentle and philosophical, Anamnesis is written in the knowledge that in telling one’s life-story, one creates it.Trade Review'Dazzling. Witty. Playful. Wild. Ingenious. It’s easy to run out of adjectives when you’re describing Iona Lee’s astonishing first collection. ‘Is all fire the same fire?’ she asks. Definitely not. These are poems of such energy and brilliance they will continue to burn in the memory long after the book is closed.' -- John Glenday, poet'She writes elegiacally, hopefully... [the collection's title "Anamnesis"] is, like her poetry, clear and complex: remembering, an epiphany and not forgetting, as if the three were the same thing' -- Stuart Kelly * The Scotsman *'Her mindful treatment and adoration of language are like that of a chef handling their most cherished ingredients... deftly distils the collective consciousness into something precise and pleasurable' * SNACK Magazine *'A door, a window, a rupture? The familiar openings and outpourings of Anamnesis are made strange and sacrosanct by Iona Lee, a skilful poet with a mastery of language. This startling debut is equal part stained glass as it is blood-stained' -- Dean Atta'Iona's collection is a marvel. Full of beauty, wit, wisdom and surprise, delivered with the assurance of a poet who knows exactly what they are doing, it is to be treasured' -- Hannah Lavery, Edinburgh Makar'I was intrigued and delighted by the originality and wit, the here-and-now "peculiar Eden" of the world she creates. Youthful, sexy, sharp, ferally female, funny' -- Liz Lochhead'Iona's poems hatch plucky, ponderous and pulsing; or do I mean louche, lithe and lasering? They're all of that, maybe more' -- Michael Pedersen'Iona Lee is an exceptional poet; her work is articulate and perceptive and brimming with tenderness and authenticity. Anamnesis is compelling and beautiful, it is an exquisite poetry collection' -- Salena Godden'The standout voice of her generation, Lee performs open-heart surgery on the English language' -- Darren McGarvey'Artist and writer Iona Lee has long been considered one of the finest spoken word and live poetry performers around' * Snack Magazine,10 Best Scottish Books for 2023 *'the gorgeous, long-awaited debut collection from beloved poet and performer Lee... these poems are reflections and teachings, imbued with gentle humour and musicality' * The Bookseller *'a stunning debut... a collection that dissects memory, remembrance and the minutiae of life in ways that are equally eviscerating and elegant' -- Matt Macdonald * Glasgow Review of Books *'its craft is confident and assured... an immensely rich volume of poetry doing what poetry does best' -- Calum Rodger * Gutter Magazine *

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Book SynopsisMalcolm Guite’s eagerly awaited second poetry collection includes poems that seek beauty and transfiguration in the everyday; sonnets inspired by Francis and other outstanding saints; poems centred on love, parting and mortality. A further group, ‘Word and World’, searches for the life of the spirit in the midst of modernity and includes an ode to an iPhone, while others wrestle with the problem of evil and the difficulty of prayer. Throughout, the poet seeks to celebrate the world of which he is made, find heaven in the ordinary and echo a little of its music.Trade Review'The Singing Bowl celebrates the recovering of what was never lost. Over and over, Malcom Guite invites us to rediscover what is most constant. These poems are a mantra, a chorus, a celebration and a lyrical reminder to pay attention to what is most important.' -- Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Book SynopsisHow can we have hope in a world that is dying? With a forensic eye, Howells takes us on a journey through ordinary human lives and the extraordinary natural world we are in danger of losing. The carder bee carries the story of a colony, a species, and, ultimately, the fate of all life on earth. The mermaid weaves an almost beautiful tale of a tragic miscarriage. The magpie writes yearning letters to her lost lover. The brilliant kingfisher flits through the mind of a woman with dementia. Through each exacting portrait, we begin to understand something special, a language of bees, and discover for ourselves how intimately we are all connected and what the natural world is trying to tell us.

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Book Synopsis Finally! The pain of parenting . . . in poetic form! Stark Raving Dad is an illustrated collection of poems (no claims of being Walt Whitman here) that humorously captures fatherly angst in comedic verse and pairs it with talented art from the author''s own kids.Let''s be honest: Most gifts for Dad usually end up being a golf club or a tie. But what about the Dad in desperate need of a laugh? Give him reassurance he''s not the only father trying to figure it all out.Over the years Sanderson Dean has turned all his fatherly angst into poetry, accompanied by crudely drawn images by his children. But before your eyes glaze over at the word poetry, you should know it''s more hapless than highbrow. From surviving road trips to being puked on, and from plunging clogged toilets to finding Craisins in the couch cushions, Sanderson covers many of the rarely talked about adventures that make the journey of parenthood so very exciting.

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Book SynopsisPoetic exploration of historical records of the Frog Lake Massacre (1885) links past to present.Trade Review"...Zits' book juxtaposes fragments of others' writing to invite readers to ponder the concept of reconstituting history when the low fog of racism attends cultural difference and shrouds events, when personal investments of witnesses to that history are so divergent, and when oral and written versions of events tell incommensurable stories." -- Susan Gingell

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Book SynopsisWhat is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?Nicky Beer’s latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books—and her personal one, too—in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious.Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini’s operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation—but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they’re right. “Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music.”Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: which image is the real one? This one—or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both—together, they might contribute to something like truth.Trade ReviewPraise for Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes“Beer populates the book’s pages with a cavalcade of pleasantly deceptive voices . . . But Beer’s playful embrace of such strange subject matter conceals darkly complicated speakers whose ultimate deceptions fool only themselves . . . Clever, kaleidoscopic, and powerfully profound.”—Booklist, Starred Review"From magic shows to drag shows, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes applies a queer sensibility to some of life's strange mysteries and pop-culture icons with simultaneous wackiness and intellect."—Shondaland“Electric . . . Readers are asked to look past first impressions in this imaginative and spirited collection.”—Publishers Weekly“A mix of delightful humor and deep, delicate sadness. Real Phonies is critical of the facades we choose to believe in, sure, but underneath it all is Beer’s genuine love of performance and the transformative, healing power of suspending disbelief in the right moments.”—Lavender Magazine"To read Nicky Beer's third collection, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, is to experience poetry as pageantry. In Beer's hands, the poetic form is a staging place for spectacle, replete with provocative imagery and a brash cast of characters . . . Her formal shape-shifting and penchant for performance make this a magnetic collection."—BookPage, Starred Review"The cheeky poem titles and subjects she chooses to inspect within clue you in to the fact that this is performance, with Beer controlling the show . . . Veering between full-on jokester, esoteric performance artist, and masterful dramatic actor delivering a gut-wrenching monologue, she lands somewhere in the middle, a generous magician who lets us see the mechanics of the tricks and of herself."—Southwest Contemporary“‘The sky is one long drink,’ Nicky Beer writes in this much-anticipated third collection, serving as a most welcome resource for people who seek imaginative illumination—and who could use a good old-fashioned chuckle. This book shimmers with Beer’s trademark wit and wildly inventive takes on pop culture, history, and humankind. Listen for the thump in these pages—this book has a bonafide heartbeat.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil“A brilliant, rollicking collection, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes illuminates the strange wonders and abiding mysteries that surround us. Beer is an exceptional writer, capable of mingling intellectual depth with humor and sharp poignancy. A wonderful book.”—Jasmin Darznik“‘Beauty should always taste a bit of its own blood / and blame in its teeth,’ Nicky Beer writes in her triumphant Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes. Here is a collection of poems so funny they’ll break your heart and make you glad for it. Take these lines that comprise ‘Sawing a Lady in Half’: ‘they want it to be true / and don’t want it to be true / that they want it to be true.’ Or take the witty wordplay on the Dark Knight's name in ‘Dear Bruce Wayne,’ in which Beer imparts this wisdom: ‘The bruise / wanes. Every woman / is Batman.’ Nicky Beer is the superhero we need, and these poems are the invisible jet she has sent to save us. Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is by turns lyrically burnished, subversively funny, and astonishingly beautiful. Beer says it best when she writes ‘what’s needed / now is a tongue with the chill of steel.’ Dear reader, look no further.”—James Allen Hall“Nicky Beer’s Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is a bonafide triumph––beginning with the table of contents. Just a few of her knockout titles: “Drag Day at Dollywood,” “Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs,” Dear Bruce Wayne,” “Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf.” Unless you’re a pig or a cow, how could you not read on? Beer’s intoxication with language combines with drop-dead wackiness and wisdom, and she uses fabrications to get at the truth: how disconnects connect us, how distortions, in concert, undo illusion. Via magicians, impersonators, forgers, plagiarists, liars, screen stars and two-bit actors, Beer delivers dark truths with humor and surprise. The poem “Elegy” begins: “I never liked the dead boy.” It’s a statement that feels less like confession than blunt instrument. Throughout the collection, the poems do a cannonball through the appropriate or expected into deeper waters. In “The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts,” Beer writes: “she believes death is God’s/apology for suffering.” And in “Drag Day at Dollywood,” she gives us a zany fun house of Dollys that morphs into a tender and sad eternity (or illusion thereof) in which: “Dolly, exhausted and sunburned, collapses/onto a bench, rests her head on Dolly’s breast,/who rests her head on Dolly’s breast, who rests/her head on Dolly’s breast on Dolly’s breast.” If that isn’t mother’s milk, what is?" —Andrea Cohen“Reading Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes felt like a dream. Each of Nicky Beer’s poems is blurred around the edges, swirling with hairspray, Marlene Dietrich, and magic tricks. The collection is funny yet emotional, blunt yet reverent, and illuminating. Each poem wraps readers in a soft blanket, but also fits them for a teased wig and sits them down in Dollywood. The story told is one of queerness, which is: a John Hughes movie, Batman, David Bowie, penicillin, and a stereoscope. Beer‘s work reads like a love letter, asking readers to embrace queerness in all its glam and tackiness.” —Nikita Imafidon, Raven Book Store Praise for The Octopus Game “I can’t help but ‘succumb to the enamored, oceanic maw’ of these poems. I love their horror and humility, their playfulness. Implicating me in the mysterious beauty of the universe, Beer connects the reader to the octopus, connects the octopus to the reader, and connects us all to her poems’ surprising subjects. Drawing insights from least predictable places, these poems are ‘a lesson in how ardor ignites not in unlikeness, but unlikelihood.’”— Camille Dungy “Clever and arresting . . . [Beer’s] energy for collecting trivia can equal the verve of her syntax: a group of eight danseurs photographed a century ago are a ‘pubescent octet in sepia wash, symmetrically poised / in borrowed frocks’; in the eponymous game, ‘[t]wo people sit side by side / And become each other’s arms.’ Beer’s insistence on using octopuses (and squid and cuttlefish) as metaphors does not keep her from exploring—and, at times, flaunting—marine zoology, such as when she writes, ‘[T]he thousands of real / octopus corpses washed / upon’ a Portuguese beach years ago. Nor does her attention to the links between human and nonhuman life, to the way that we are all just collections of cells, prevent her from delighting in old forms, especially sonnets and pantoums.”— Publishers Weekly“Beer takes the octopus as a central conceit in her second collection, which unfolds like a phantasmagoric bestiary. With the eye of a wild documentarian, Beer imagines fantastic names for the strange cephalopods (‘viral naiad,’ ‘charred nebula,’ and ‘sepia epicene’), and catalogs their otherworldly traits. . . . Beer links humans and invertebrates amid the unfathomable mass of twentieth-century data—the ‘maddening swarm of alien ciphers’—and reminds readers of a festering, dark desire: ‘We cannot bear to have our depths unmonstered.’”— Booklist Praise for The Diminishing House “A wonder of both human understanding and poetic craft.”— Pleiades “These are more than simply poems of intense intelligence and complexity; every line contains intricate movements, always progressing, redefining, and delighting in language and sound. . . . These are intricate contraptions, delicate and beautiful shapes.”— Hollins Critic “Written with education and enlightenment, The Diminishing House is a cherishable collection.”— Midwest Book ReviewTable of ContentsTable of Contents Drag Day at Dollywood Self-Portrait as Duckie Dale Cathy Dies Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf Etymology Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs Thorn Ostinato ⇎ Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944 Forged Medieval German Church Fresco with Clandestine Marlene Dietrich The Benevolent Sisterhood of Inconspicuous Fabricators The Magicians at Work Sawing a Lady in Half The Great Something The Plagiarist Notes on the Village of Liars Excerpts from The Updated Handbook to Mendacity ⇎ The Stereoscopic Man ⇎ Self-Portrait While Operating Heavy Machinery The Demolitionists Small Claims Courtship Exclusive Interview Marlene Dietrich Meets David Bowie, 1978 Marlene Dietrich Considers Penicillin, 1950 Mating Call of the Re-Creation Panda Scat Heart in Turmeric ⇎ Dear Bruce Wayne, Elegy Kindness/Kindling Juveniles Nessun Dorma The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts Because my grief was a tree Specimen #17 Revision Notes Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisGospel Drunk follows a speaker’s journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as “dragons in suits” collide with critiques of “the broken bicycle of recovery.” A child’s fingers interlace to form a gun during mass and Hulk attends an AA meeting. Boldly honest, Gospel Drunk is for all who seek humanity in a world where the personal and the political are equally complicated. He drops a match on his wound to set fire to his blood. At a certain temperature even the Devil cools. -from “Drowning Man Sonnets”Trade Review# 10 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, October 10, 2021Table of ContentsI 2 Disciple 3 Galileo 4 Trust 5 Helmets and Gloves 6 Social Development 7 Ode to the Hockey Bro 8 Churches, Trucks and Shallow Pools 10 Driving Through Kitsilano 11 Suburban Lament 12 Two Lips 13 Fall of the Empire 14 Meditation on Enclosed Space 16 This Might Be the Warmest Parking Lot in Canada 17 Another Seasonal Poem 19 We Are Bioluminescent 20 Passage II 22 Struggling Protagonist 23 Indelible 24 Sizing Up 25 The Light Salesmen 26 Prayer in the Age of Unreason 27 Mary Too 29 Sacrificial Sons 31 Eternal Optimist 33 Land in the Name of Taking 34 Suffering as Spectacle 35 Holes 36 Hard Rain 37 Sonnet in Defence of Lust 38 Nothing Written Is Sacred III 40 Gun Journal 47 Safety Rules 48 The Strongman 49 The Activist 50 Eyes of the Assailant 51 Good Men 52 Colonial Chokehold 53 Fallen 54 Superhero AA 55 Epistle of the Inebriate 56 Empty 57 Ode to Ruin 58 Drowning Man Sonnets 73 Notes 75 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisDeriving is a feminist exploration of the creation of life, of family, and of words themselves. Delisle asks: How does past infertility colour the experience of new motherhood? How do historical voices echo in the present? How does language impact our ways of being in the world? These poems embrace the rich material of mothering with unapologetic honesty, confronting the experiences that some would keep hidden. Fear, anger, envy mix with joy and ultimately hope, as Delisle considers the challenges of conceiving and raising children in both familial and global contexts. Deriving is a poignant, lyrical meditation on longing, place, and embodiment. I watched it freeze up, rafts of white snagging beneath the bridge, frazil ice, pans linked along the shoreline. Inside me my son was building white fat on bone. - from “North Saskatchewan”Trade Review# 8 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, May 9, 2021# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, May 23, 2021# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, July 25, 2021# 8 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, October 10, 2021# 5 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, December 5, 2021# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, December 12, 2021# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, January 2, 2022# 5 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, February 27, 2022Bestseller List Week Ending 2022-09-18 #9Table of ContentsCONTENTS xi Etymology 1 WATER IN A BLUE GLASS 2 Caribou 4 Seeds 6 The Way We Stand 7 Instinct 9 Reasons 10 February in Vancouver 11 Embryopathology Report 12 Gifts 18 Gravity 19 Know the Way 20 Vancouver 21 Anemochory 22 Highway 16, Near Blue River 24 To Violet 25 Spring 28 SHOEBOX PHOTOS 37 DRINK THE RIVER 38 Muskeg 39 It Never Rains 40 Two Prints 42 Ultrasound 44 Food 45 Rules 46 North Saskatchewan 47 Incongruous 48 Nurse 49 Falling Boundary 51 “THE PERFECTION OF WOMANHOOD” 52 Natural Childbirth 53 Son-of-a-Gun 54 Equivalent 55 Bikini 56 Concession / Stand 59 HOW THE RIVER CARVES OUR NAMES 60 Mother 67 One Little, Two Little, Three Little 68 Lioness 69 How Much I Want the Thing I Never Remember 70 Patience 71 September Snow 72 Go Green 73 Precarious 75 Notes 77 Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisMicheline Maylor’s The Bad Wife is an intimate, first-hand account of how to ruin a marriage. This is a story of divorce, love, and what should have been, told in a brave and unflinching voice. Pulling the reader into a startling web of sensuality, guilt, resentment, and pleasure, this collection asks: what if you set off a bomb in your own house? What if you lose love and destroy everything you ever knew? These poems have a disarming immediacy, full of surprising imagery, dark humour, and the bold thoughts of a vibrant and flawed protagonist. Balancing a need for wildness and the space to dwell, The Bad Wife explores the taut confines of those vivid, earthly pleasures that we all know and sometimes can’t escape. I forgot the oath: Do no harm. -from “Yesterday, I Went to the Market”Trade Review"These poems will wreck your home, wake you up with their noisy sex, devastate like a Wall Street banker on a Saturday night bender. These poems will sober you up in the morning with the strength of flowers, of prayer flags. These poems understand everything you’ve lived through. They show you where you live." -- Susan Musgrave, author of Origami Dove"Micheline Maylor is Canada’s Anne Sexton. To understand The Bad Wife, imagine Sexton on stage in 'cum-fuck-me-shoes,' perhaps chain-smoking, belting out Walt Whitman’s lost one-woman show about Helen of Troy. Linguistically inventive, surreal, playful, and ruthlessly honest, Maylor wades into the swamp of divorce, emerging with almost unbearable images of humiliation, devastation, joy, and praise. 'I’ve been,' she exclaims, 'a home wrecker, / witch, savior, mentor, mother. Let me tell you, I have been all / those things.' In these confessional poems, Maylor—without a whiff of virtue signaling—places her own psyche and body under the microscope, as great artists do." -- John Wall Barger, author of The Mean Game"By turns ornithological, scatological, geological, and meteorological imagery thread the poems together in a firsthand account of a midlife crisis, surreal and psychological, that fascinates with its psychic energy and playfulness." Gillian Harding-Russell, Arc Poetry, June 2023 [Full review at https://arcpoetry.ca/editorials/the-crows-salvage-and-redemption-micheline-maylors-the-bad-wife]Table of ContentsContents 1 How to Become a Bad Wife 2 Epithalamion: The Grand Canyon was a Long Way Down 3 The Mean Game 4 Yesterday, I went to the market 5 The Crow Takes the Body 6 Scrapbook 7 Your Motto 8 The Sleep 9 The Bad Wife’s Ankle 10 Two Men 11 How To Become A Bad Mother 12 (N)Ever Thought 13 How to Have Encounters with Foxes 14 The Danger of Georgian Guest Houses 15 The Bad Wife’s Clavicle 16 The Pine Siskin 17 And Let’s Not Forget Christina Lake 18 The Crow Gives a Body 19 The Bad Wife’s Vulva 20 Portrait of My Life as a Nurse Log 21 Guilt 22 Divorce Sudoku 23 So, Say I 24 The Moral Responsibility to be Intelligent 25 This is My 21st Wedding Anniversary 26 Don’t Feed the Animals 27 She tells me 28 There is No Word 29 Reasons for My Husband’s Inattentiveness 30 Styx and Stones 31 Vagabond 32 How to Be a Bad Ex-Wife 33 Double Fisting 34 Become 35 No Matter the Shape of Things, You are Much Missed 36 Inclement Weather 40 Omen: Calla Lilies 73 Notes 75 Acknowledgements 77 Prologue: On Our First/Last Toast 79 Epilogue

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Book SynopsisThis poignant debut by Gavin Bradley explores the emotional toll of different kinds of separation: from a partner, a previously held sense of self, or a home and the people left behind. The main narrative describes the deterioration of a long-term relationship, interweaving poems dealing with the loneliness of immigration and the anxiety of separation from Northern Ireland, the poet’s homeland. These personal poems enter their stories through a variety of characters and places, from dock builders to dogs, from shorelines to volcanoes, to “mouths soft and humming like beehives.” Other sections of the collection examine a post-Troubles’ experience in Northern Ireland (evoking the lived-experience of growing up with bombs and domineering Catholicism), tell grandfather stories, and show a lasting love for the people, the language, and the land. Separation Anxiety ultimately conveys a message of hope, reminding us that “we’ll be remembered for / ourselves, and not the spaces we / leave behind.”Trade Review“Gavin Bradley writes with great heart, vulnerability, and an engaging lilt and lyricism, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey historically, geographically, and emotionally.” Joanna Lilley, author of Endlings#3 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, April 3, 2022Separation Anxiety follows the deterioration of a long-term relationship, interweaving poems dealing with the loneliness of immigration and the anxiety of separation from home. The idea was to explore the emotional toll of different kinds of separation and loss, but to do so without losing a sense of hope that things can get better. I think it’s a book that a lot of people can relate to. Whether you’re part of an immigrant community or not, separation is something we all go through at different times in our lives. -- Gavin Bradley, The Quad, March 21, 2022Bradley deals with difficult emotions he’s revealing to a wider audience, a level of vulnerability and exposure that can be challenging. But it can also lead to something constructive, a release valve. -- Justin Bell, Edmonton Journal, March 24, 2022#7 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, April 10, 2022#2 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, June 5, 2022#1 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, June 12, 2022#8 on the Alberta Non-fiction Bestsellers list, June 12, 2022#9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, January 15, 2023#8 on the Alberta Non-fiction Bestsellers list, March 19, 2023#2 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, March 19, 2023#10 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, April 23, 2023#10 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, May 14, 2023#4 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, June 25, 2023Table of ContentsI 2 Hemingway’s Cosmonaut 3 September 4 Eating Our Words 5 Strange Kettle of Fish a haon 8 Although I Can See him Still 10 Laying the Docks 12 Brine 13 Out with the Tide II 16 False Spring 17 Persephone Starts to Wonder 18 Blood Warm 19 Chrysalis 20 Pockets 21 Why Couples Are Like Expressionists 22 Hidden Moons 23 Mead a dó 26 Sanctuary 27 Blue Plain Skies 28 Homebody Ghosts III 30 God Moves His Divan 32 Gossamer 34 What We Can Learn from Gutenberg and the Protestants 35 The Fox 36 Crossing the River with Hera a trí 38 It’ll Be Good for the Kids 39 Unburst Lights 40 The Blazer Brigade 42 The Liminal Sorts IV 44 Grand Canyon 45 Probably a Bit of Pathetic Fallacy 46 Easy Love 47 Gobi 48 Koi no yokan a ceathair 50 Dead Language 51 Birds of Paradise 52 Albatross 53 The Space between Breaths V 56 Panic Attack at a Stag Party in Whitefish, Montana 57 Challenge Your Self Talk 58 In with the Tide 60 Uncoupling 62 Scales 64 Epiphanies at the End of the World 65 Remainder a cúig 68 Going Home 69 Being an Albatross 70 Acknowledgements 72 Sometimes, a haiku:"

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Book SynopsisArborophobia, the latest collection by award-winning poet Nancy Holmes, is a poetic spiritual reckoning. Its elegies, litanies, and indictments concern wonder, guilt, and grief about the journey of human life and the state of the natural world. When a child attempts suicide and western North America burns and the creep of mortality closes in, is spiritual and emotional solace possible or even desirable? Answers abound in measured, texturally intimate, and often surprising ways. The title sequence, named for a word that means “hatred of trees,” sassily blurs the boundaries between human beings and Ponderosa pines, reminding us how fragile our conceptual frameworks really are. Another sequence responds to Julian of Norwich’s writing and call “to practise the art / of letting things happen.” Saints’ lives interlace with our quotidian experience, smudging connections between the spiritual and the earthly. Taking a hard look at what we have done to this beautiful planet and to those we love, Arborophobia is a companion for all who grapple with the problem of hope in times of crisis.Trade ReviewArborophobia, the latest collection by award-winning poet Nancy Holmes, is a poetic spiritual reckoning. Its elegies, litanies, and indictments concern wonder, guilt, and grief about the journey of human life and the state of the natural world. -- 49th Shelf, February 28, 2022#8 on the Calgary Herald Non-fiction bestsellers list, May 2, 2022"Arborophobia is made up of a series of narrative, meditative lyric on trees and dementia, loss and falling, mothers and motherhood, grief and erosion. Holmes writes of breakings, and of breaking apart, from climate to forests to the human ability to endure.... Through long, narrative stretches, she offers poems as companion pieces to climate anxiety, personal loss and the uncertainty of where we sit as a species, thanks in large part due to an array of choices both historic and ongoing." rob mclennan, April 27, 2022 [https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2022/04/nancy-holmes-arborophobia.html]"'The slow unzipping/ Of the body from time:/ I didn’t notice.' Nancy Holmes brings us beautifully observed instances of the natural world, a huge breadth of imagery, and documentation of an intense engagement with the living world. There is wit, and colour, swagger, and texture all played out along these lines, which move and live, brimming with invention." Jury comments, SCWES Book Awards for BC Authors"... Nancy Holmes’ brilliant newest collection, Arborophobia, ... [explores] in some deeply philosophical ways the relationship between the natural and spiritual selves and the manifold ways in which one may negotiate the complexities of living a life bound up in both." Neil Querengesser, Canadian Literature, September 1, 2023 [Full review at https://canlit.ca/article/poetry-for-our-time/]Table of ContentsI Orb 2 The Tribes of Grass 3 The Milk Chute, an Ode 6 Spring Shave 7 Lunolio 10 Anemone in Cyprus 12 Saint Lucy 13 Newborn II Arborophobia 16 Ponderosa Pine 16 I. Gotcha 24 II. Qualms III Stain 32 Early Spring Elegy 33 Mother Julian Imagines One Drop of Christ’s Blood As the Scale of a Herring 34 Being Upright 36 The Time Being 48 Saint Veronica 49 WTF—The Anthropocene? 50 The Animals in That Backyard 52 Before the Flood 54 Dementia, the Queen 56 Meat 57 Pitted 58 Saint Ursula IV Julian 60 A Cloth in the Wind, or Being with Julian of Norwich Contents V Path 76 Saint Cainnech 77 Ways and Means 78 How I Came Back to the Morning 80 The Way We Are Made Of 81 Paths Taken 85 Notes 87 Acknowledgements"

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Book SynopsisYou Might Be Sorry You Read This is a stunning debut, revealing how breaking silences and reconciling identity can refine anger into something both useful and beautiful. A poetic memoir that looks unflinchingly at childhood trauma (both incestuous rape and surviving exposure in extreme cold), it also tells the story of coming to terms with a hidden Indigenous identity when the poet discovered her Métis heritage at age 38. This collection is a journey of pain, belonging, hope, and resilience. The confessional poems are polished yet unpretentious, often edgy but humorous; they explore trauma yet prioritize the poet’s story. Honouring the complexities of Indigenous identity and the raw experiences of womanhood, mental illness, and queer selfhood, these narratives carry weight. They tell us “You need / only be the simple / expression of the divine / intent / that is your life.” There is a lifetime in these poems.Trade ReviewHonouring the complexities of Indigenous identity and the raw experiences of womanhood, mental illness, and queer selfhood, the poems in Michelle Poirier Brown’s You Might Be Sorry You Read This reveal how breaking silences and reconciling identity can refine anger into something both useful and beautiful. -- 49th Shelf, February 28, 2022#9 on Edmonton Bestsellers list, September 18, 2022"This is a book that refuses secrets, that seeks to transform dark and unsettling experiences by confronting them with clarity and fury." Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen, Winnipeg Free Press, July 23, 2022#10 on Edmonton Bestsellers list, June 5, 2023"An excellent job of carrying the reader along... [The author's voice] has an off-hand tone to it. It is practical, pragmatic, states its case. There is strength and indignance in it." Jury comments, SCWES Book Awards for BC AuthorsTable of Contents1 The Father I Had 3 God Was a Baby 4 A Child’s Book of Holy Services 6 Her Breath on My Face 8 Other Side of the Glass 10 Effect on Her Throat 11 The House on Strathnaver Avenue 15 Mothers Who Know 16 The Thing About Snow 22 Photograph 23 Under the Covers 25 The Girls I Grew Up With Are Everywhere 27 Short Change 28 After the Test 29 Walk on the Left-Hand Side 30 5:53 PM 32 A Perspective on Women 33 Collard Greens 34 Lasts 36 I’m Allowed to Have Whatever Kind of Father I Want 38 Intimacy 39 On the Porch 41 At Times, My Teeth Chatter about face 46 What It’s Like to Have My Face 47 Understanding My Face 52 Wake 54 A Fragile Defiance 55 Smoke 57 Winnipeg Trip 59 Commitment 61 Two Mornings, 2018 63 Boxed 64 Those I Call Friends 66 Duck Ugly 67 Beneficiaries of a Genocide 69 Slow 70 Sometimes You Learn Things Quite Late in the Game 72 Something Purple 75 what it is like to be this extreme and appear normal 78 The Other Grandmother 80 Self-Portrait of the Poet 83 addendum 87 poetic statement 90 acknowledgements"

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Book SynopsisSonja Ruth Greckol’s Monitoring Station enters a slipstream of space and planetary language, circling time, embodying loss and longing, generating and regenerating in a faltering climate. Orbiting through a mother’s death, a grandbaby’s birth, and a pandemic summer, these poems loop and fragment in expansive and empathetic ways. The title poem locates a settler voice revisiting Treaties 6 and 7 and the Métis lands of her Alberta childhood, while the overall collection is tethered to Toronto shadowed by northland prairie. Nimble, energetic, and challenging, the book engages a dense kind of poetic thinking about belonging and responsibility to people and place, within both recent history and far-flung cosmic realities. Falling squarely within a Canadian feminist experimental lyric trajectory, and grounded in bodily, personal, and political experience, Monitoring Station embodies the passage of a damaged world across generations.Trade Review"An illuminated simmer of sweetness from a poet who invents vessels for language to carry us over into presence, into the before and the after, holding us to the now. But oh, the exquisite workings of the mind over what matters, the inescapable dailyness of bloodlines, and geography, interdimensional and relational; a theory of everything." Lillian Allen, dub poet, reggae musician, writer, Juno winner“Sonja Greckol’s Monitoring Station is an enthralling exercise in intricating: the opposite, she explains, of extricating, thus ‘a verb meaning entangle or ensnare.’ What we find ourselves intricated with here—in propulsive, rippling, encircling syntax—is space and time, biological and cosmological origins, the pandemic and the human hash of colonialism and climate change. Under Greckol’s lyric microscope, ‘small things loom large’ and beauty is always a hair’s breadth from disaster. This is one of our very best poetic minds, humming along at the top of her form.” Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain"With the analytic mind of a statistician and the flow of a mystic, Sonja Greckol takes us into a chaotic, poetic fray as fraught near-pasts open out into possibilities. By tracing points, lines, and waves that situate a body (of a person, of a work) in all its specificities along with its imbricated activities that accumulate into (and rub against) structures, institutions, and systems, Greckol suggests ways towards futures in which social relations can be remade to accommodate more ethical interrelations among individuals and communities." Shannon Maguire, author of Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina and Fur(l) ParachuteTable of ContentsBecause of Ourselves Because of Ourselves Overhand Knots Our Oumuamua 2017 Nov 29 @ 8:30 a.m. One Year Now Monitoring Station Möbius

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Book SynopsisIn there’s more, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike takes on the rich concepts of home and belonging: home lost and regained, home created with others and with the land, home as “anywhere we find something to love.” Giving voice to the experiences of migrant and other marginalized citizens whose lives society tends to overlook, this collection challenges the oppressive systems that alienate us from one another and the land. Carefully built lyric meditations combine beauty and ugliness, engaging with violence, and displacement, while seeking to build kinship and celebrate imagination. Weaving domestic and international settings, salient observation and potent memory, Umezurike immerses the reader in rich, precise imagery and a community of voices, ideas, and recollections. there’s more navigates immigrant life with a multifaceted awareness of joy, melancholia, loss, and hope.Trade Review"In there's more, the reader is rhythmically lulled into coming face to face with the realities of a world that centers the voices of the global majority. Through the shapes and words that dance on the page, we become enchanted by an exquisite cadence that takes us into the psyches of the dehumanized and the disenfranchised." V Mason-John, author of I Am Still Your Negro“It is not only the soulful agonies of lost home, intimacy, people, and places, not only (to paraphrase the poet) the noiseless arrival of nostalgia that leaves a shroud behind, not only the angst of living in the exile of one’s own desires, in a place of one’s own escape from the ruins of home. It is not only the haunts of the memories of times past and present. The poems of there’s more touch even more on the very thing of human social life: the character of experience.” Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba, author of The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests for Meaningfulness"In these memory-infused poems, home vanishes and reappears with moving suddenness: "down the stairs/of clouds," in the expression on a beloved face, in parks, in songs, in the bones. This work sweeps our gazes across oceans, cultures, and years to explore how our shared human yearnings--for belonging, for connection--persist in the soul. With a full heart and keen inquiry, Umezurike finds tender language for the ineffable sting of departure, the ache of remembrance." Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia"Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike’s there’s more plumbs the grace of memory, the music of routes through stairs and scarves, silences and stares. Here language laces and weaves through the small pains which build, the quiet graces which relieve. Stories shift from the museum to the land to our eyes; each an aching momentary tender glimpse where, behind the words, there’s more." Derek Beaulieu, Banff Poet Laureate“Palpating the soundscapes of memory from his homeland, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike finds Nigeria returning in the wind against a window. The sense-suffused language becomes the homeland. Memories enter the rooms of his poetry in skillfully articulated images. Whether writing about the military dictatorship that existed in the 1990s or mourning the devastation of the Niger delta by drilling, the poet refuses silence. Uniquely, Umezurike’s dissent coexists with extraordinary tonal tenderness, as in ‘The Old Way,’ one of the best poems about nostalgia I have read. Rupture, heartbreak, hope, and efflorescence co-exist in Umezurike’s unguarded lyrics. His brilliance disarms the mind.” Alina Stefanescu, author of Dor and Ribald“Uchechukwu Umezurike in there’s more plumbs the depths of human emotions by creating poems that are touching, stunning, powerful, brilliant, tender, and heart-rending at the same time. In his hands, a poem which is often a small, discrete thing, becomes an entire universe of words—novels, songs, treatises, and quiet declarations of rage. The reading of each poem causes my breath to be stilled, and I sit in wonder, and let the beauty, luminescence, and subtle sadness from these words caress my heart. ‘Home is What the Tortoise Bears on Its Back,’ is an example of Uchechukwu’s mastery. In a few lines the author conjures up mythic tales from the time before time, middle passages, civil wars, migrations, gardens of Eden, love stories, exile, hard life, a kick-ass attitude, and a necessary resilience. In there’s more Uchechukwu reveals that he is a poet of first rank.” Afua Cooper, poet and author of Black Matters and The Halifax Explosion“’What is home if it’s a river,’ asks Uche Peter Umezurike, in his astonishing new collection, there’s more. The superb poems that inhabit these enchanted pages display the immigrant experience in a manner that is simultaneously vast and yet introspective, where ’a poem about home is the mother struggling with the shell on her back.’ This is a colourful, creative treatise on juxtaposition and place, where ’the parade of pines’ and ’the way snow climbs down the stairs of clouds’ mingle seamlessly ’sharp and sweet as cloves’ with ’the gnarled cotton tree where memories of old fathers water the roots.’ This is a world where udara trees, ravens, mangoes, bones, snow, and kola nuts find kinship with each other. Umezurike tantalizes with a skilled poet’s turn of phrase that is ’precise like a smack.’ I am thrilled for this alluring and magnificent poetry collection.” Michael Fraser, author of The Day-Breakers"Umezurike’s lyricism shines... These poems move between past and present and different cultures and worlds, capturing moments from childhood as well as current circumstances... Umezurike emphasizes that stories are a vital part of our present, rather than time capsules from the past." Manahil Bandukwala, Quill & Quire, April 3, 2023#10 on the Calgary Nonfiction Bestsellers list, May 18, 2023"I didn't mean to read Uche Umezurike's latest collection of poems, there's more, all in one sitting. But it is the kind of collection that leads you in with short lyrical works, slowly layering images, slowly working ideas until you unexpectedly find yourself immersed in a complex and brooding world.... "There's more," Umezurike promises with each turn of the page. Yes, there is." Bertrand Bickersteth, AlbertaViews Magazine, November 2023Table of ContentsI. 1. Home is what the tortoise bears on its back 2. The sea is the bridge 3. The sea grows its circle of stones 4. Wayfarer, you have seen again 5. The morning after the protest 6. On their evening walk through an alley 7. The woman hunches over her walker 8. The wind skulks at my window 9. Seagulls 10. The old way 11. Ahamefula 12. On slicing a mango one midday 13. Slush 14. Neighbours 15. Coyote down the valley 16. Tamarack Shade II. 17. The walk in May 18. Blooms in June 19. The park in July 20. Summer is gone III. 21. Bus stop 22. Origin 23. A word with an edge 24. Passerby (or, I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK!*) 25. Names IV. 26. The language of guns 27. Family story 28. The drawing 29. Postcard from a war-torn village 30. Photos on Twitter 31. there’s more 32. Body of bones 33. In my father’s shoes V. 34. Kinship 35. University Station 36. At the food court in Southgate 37. Nomads 38. Guitarist on the landing VI. 39. Humming Nina Simone on the train 40. Good love 41. Spilling 42. Compensation

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Book SynopsisEarly in the pandemic, medical personnel were our front lines. What was that like? Through stories, art, and poetry, Canadian health-care workers from across the country recount their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The contributors to The COVID Journals share the determination and fear they felt as they watched the crisis unfold, giving us an inside view of their lives at a time when care itself was redefined from moment to moment. Their narratives, at turns tender, angry, curious, and sometimes even joyful, highlight challenges and satisfactions that people will continue to explore and make sense of for years to come. Contributors: Ewan Affleck, Sarah-Taïssir Bencharif, Manisha Bharadia, Christopher Blake, Candace de Taeye, Arundhati Dhara, Paul Dhillon, Liam Durcan, Monika Dutt, Sarah Fraser, David Gratzer, Jillian Horton, Andrew Howe, Monica Kidd, Jaime Lenet, Pam Lenkov, Suzanne Lilker, Jennifer Moore, Shane Neilson, Kacper Niburski, Elizabeth Niedra, Margaret Nowaczyk, Tolu Oloruntoba, Rory O’Sullivan, Jordan Pelc, Nick Pimlott, Angela E. Simmonds, Tanas Sylliboy, Helen Tang, Bobby Taylor, Tharshika Thangarasa, Diana Toubassi, Shan Wang, Marisa Webster, Chadwick Williams, Dolly Williams, Jiameng Xu.Trade Review"The COVID Journals leaps off the page as a rich unmasking of those whom we too often herald as heroes but too rarely come to know, offering the reader an appreciation of the individuality, pain, love, humour, and creativity of Canadian health-care workers." Lawrence Hill, novelist and essayist“The COVID Journals brings readers into an encounter with the pandemic that is as exceptional as it is ordinary.” Emilia Nielsen, Associate Professor, York University“Just as stories have been central to our lives as human beings over millennia, they are also central to medicine. The narratives in The COVID Journals reframe health care as a human endeavor.” Pamela Brett-MacLean, Associate Professor, and Director, Arts & Humanities in Health & Medicine, University of Alberta"The COVID Journals is a poignant and insightful collection of stories, personal reflections, poems and artwork from the front­line of the COVID­19 pandemic in Canada. It offers an intimate glimpse into the struggles, triumphs, and unwavering dedication of those who bore the weight of ensuring the well-being of patients and communities. Each writer brings a unique perspective, but a common thread running through every story is that of vulnerability, of honesty, and of humanity. The anthology could be invaluable for those looking for resources that connect the humanities to the ‘sciences’ in health professions education. … This book, a must-­read, is a multifaceted, human-­centered perspective on the COVID­19 pandemic." Upreet Dhaliwal, Research and Humanities in Medical Education, October 23, 2023 [Full review at https://bit.ly/46JEC8o]Table of Contentsix Preface 1 Fight or Flight: The Ambivalent Health-Care Heroes of Pandemic Response, Canadian Edition | SHANE NEILSON 18 Uncertainty | PAUL DHILLON 22 The Sum of All Fears | TOLU OLORUNTOBA 26 A Journal of the Plague Year 2020 | NICK PIMLOTT 42 What I Will Not Doff | DIANA TOUBASSI 47 Workday | THARSHIKA THANGARASA 50 A Mask | MONICA KIDD 52 Facing the Unknown: Apprehensive, Overwhelmed, and Helpless | SHAN WANG 61 On Pandemic and Uselessness | JAIME LENET 67 Pandemic | JORDAN PELC 68 Prescription for Water | JIAMENG XU 70 Palliative Care | THARSHIKA THANGARASA 71 My So-Called COVID Life | JENNIFER MOORE 79 Pulling Strings | MONIKA DUTT 85 Disembodied” An Examination of the Examination in a Pandemic | LIAM DURCAN 93 Same But Different | DAVID GRATZER 97 I’m No Hero | SUZANNE LILKER 100 Sidelined | MENGXI (HELEN) TANG 101 Behind the Front Line: (Or, the COVID Experience That Never Was) | RORY O’SULLIVAN 108 Singularity | MENGXI (HELEN) TANG 109 With Beauty | KACPER NIBURSKI 114 Management Was Mad | SARAH FRASER 116 Preoccupations of a Public Health Resident | MARISA WEBSTER 119 Bongo Guy in Lockdown | CHRISTOPHER BLAKE 125 Mango Season | ARUNDHATI DHARA 132 Solidarity | MENGXI (HELEN) TANG 133 I Am Letting Myself Go (Or, Humans of Late COVID) | ELIZABETH NIEDRA 136 Life and Death in Denendeh | EWAN AFFLECK 144 Jipasi na’sɨk melkitai | TANAS SYLLIBOY 145 In the ER, Patients Need My Comfort But I Am Scared to Give It | SARAH-TAÏSSIR BENCHARIF 149 Vicissitude | PAM LENKOV 152 Connection | MENGXI (HELEN) TANG 153 What Was Missing | MARGARET NOWACZYK 162 A Family History in 2 Pandemics, 4 Infections, and 102 Years | JILLIAN HORTON 165 Endurance | MANISHA BHARADIA 167 Blowing Smoke in Your Ear | ANDREW HOWE, ANGELA SIMMONDS, BOBBY TAYLOR, and DOLLY WILLIAMS; facilitated by ARUNDHATI DHARA and CHADWICK WILLIAMS 185 It’s Hard Not to Slam a Fist on the Table When the Finish Line Keeps Lurching Further Ahead, or, Third Wave | CANDACE DE TAEYE 191 An Unconventional Conclusion | ARUNDHATI DHARA and SARAH FRASER 197 Acknowledgements 199 Contributors

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Book SynopsisFresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It’s a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities.Trade Review“In Northerny, Dawn Macdonald tempers a poetic soulfulness with a comic’s sense for absurdity and punch. These poems speak with smart humor and wit, linguistic delight, and honest observations spiked with confession, always with an ear, too, for what their poet can’t say. Macdonald’s take on born-and-raised life in the north avoids romantic quagmires with a well-cured settler colonial self-consciousness. Macdonald resists worn expectations in this fresh expansion of northern literature rich with voice, earned insight, and meaning.” Jeremy Pataky, author of Overwinter“Dawn Macdonald's poetry is alive with curiosity and truth. She speaks in conversation at times soft and at times bitter, creating images from a reality that can be obscure yet familiar. Macdonald's singular work reveals the unromantic beauty of a storied northern world full of lichen, kingfishers, and dog hair. Her poems open new paths in poetry from the high latitudes. This work is a bright addition to any library.” Ernestine Hayes, Alaska State Writer Laureate 2017-2018“Northerny echolocates around the rural, urban, and more-than-human worlds with unflinching curiousity. Macdonald’s poetry bewilders language, making it romp, flit, and twist. Her images are in turn luminous and jarring cut with knife-sharp wit, unafraid to trespass against our expectations.” Clea Roberts, author of AuguriesTable of Contents1. Roadside Wildflowers of the Northwest 11 Conversations 5 Ways of Shutting Up Littlest The 2nd Shortest Day The Failure of Winter’s Five-Year Plan Quickness Increase Aperture A Strange Request Changelings The Fungus Speaks 2. About the Author Fire Water Asbestos Mold Bird’s Ten Binaries (1) Binaries (2) The Kingfisher Walking the Long Loop ONLY GENIUS CAN SOLVE THIS PUZZLE Transcribed on Leaves and Thrown into the Wind A Boring Poem 3. Lately we’ve been talking Our 80s was Iron Maiden We are tasked to speak truth Please Leave On The Forts Gun Etiquette Charts Apologies to a Mouse Naturalist’s Notebook. Backyard, July In a Scrub Pine At Hidden Lakes The town filled up There’s a lot I can’t talk about 4. Look at how we didn’t know Occupational classification schema Every Yukoner owns the 1979 LongGone Outhouse Blues in 14 Lines The One Tree Wasp Summer This Isn’t the House Chit Chat There’s only two stories Acknowledgements"

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Book SynopsisThat Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Audibility is a primary theme of this collection—what can be heard, what is obstacled, and what remains unheard. Many of the poems included in the collection try to hold spaces open for the slipperiness of the heard and unheard and the not-yet heard and their associated problems: error, insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects such as fear and avoidance. “A Branch of Happen,” the opening section of award-winning poet Margaret Christakos’ collection, explores interior listening to both the self as sensation machine and the collaged external soundscape we both hear and fail to hear within the assailing violences and inequities of the news. A second suite, “Heart is a Guest Whippet Resting on a Firm Trunk,” is troubled by memories of deceased loved-ones amid the North Saskatchewan River valley and the many-layered history of amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). The fragmentary “Listening Line Notebook” multiplies the treatment of listening as a situated perceptual, sensory, and ethical process. A final long poem called “The Incubation” navigates ideas of being asleep and awake, altered and attuned, as well as spiritually dis/located in time and space. Poised within and beyond both established and emergent traditions of ecocriticism, contemporary feminisms, and experimental lyric, this intriguing and probing work of sound-illuminated poems welcomes readers into its overlapping worlds with grace.Trade Review"For maximum benefit, read That Audible Slippage out loud. It's a listening party: you will hear the whirr of birds, the click of Facebook posts, and a radical mind awake to its own listenings and jostlings within the rivers of the body and the body of the world. However you read this book, take it in, you will feel yourself hearing anew. Rest awhile in this consciousness." Ronna Bloom, poet"Within That Audible Slippage each measure of the text invites a deeper hearing in an entrancing dance of sounds vividly musical and politically astute. Twinned ironic anchors of popular culture and natural silence yield by turns whispers, yells, and experience." Sheila Murphy, author of Permission to RelaxTable of Contents[Draft] 1. A Branch of Happen Capacity Rise Unclutter Path Contest Enter People Collision Altercation Allegedly Branch Paper Crowns Feed The Birds Aluminum Machiavellian Allegations Hours Such Love Alert Chairs Bending at the Hips Upload Station Gloss 2. Heart is a Guest Whippet Resting on a Firm Trunk 3. Listening Line Notebook 4. The Incubation

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Book SynopsisDeviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace’s confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships. Later poems in the collection recall vivid moments of psychological trauma and stalking and explore the bias of the justice system toward gay men. Collecting memories, dreams, and fears about sexual identity, Deviant makes important contributions to queer coming-of-age and intimate partner violence narratives.Trade Review“Deviant deftly and with heartbreaking tenderness explores the beauty, yearning, grief, and boundless cycles of discovery involved in queer realization. With a narrative poise that invites the reader in as an intimate witness, Patrick Grace lays down a mosaic of moments that capture the wonders and cruelties of queer being, from heat-warped summer days to coiling truck exhaust and late urban nights. Grace’s poetry is a gift—at once confessional and intimate, yet allowing the queer reader to find themselves time and again within the verse. Deviant is an earnest testament to the way a life unfolds in the face of societal rigidities, told with a voice that carries a mesmerizing composure, yet which surges with the undercurrents of a fierce and luminous poetic grace.” Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin, author of Fire Cider Rain“Imagine a poem as a traffic light, blinking “stop, go, and wait.” In the hands of Patrick Grace, a phrasemaker of immense skill, these states are combined and recombined to form a highway to the living, breathing world. Deviant is the best kind of poetic debut—written to stand out, and in doing so subverting all expectation.” Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors“The glinting and sensually rich poems in Grace’s Deviant are in possession of such a harrowing nostalgia. Tread carefully, but tread nonetheless.” John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Junebat“In Deviant, Patrick Grace calls out from the charged and sometimes lonely terrain of queer male intimacy. In brilliant and emotionally devastating work, Grace reminds us how the hunger for connection and the desire for lasting redemption unites us in our longing. Deviant is a collection to savour, introducing a brave new voice in Canadian poetry.” Trevor Corkum, author of The World After Us“Deviant deftly embodies that complex space of queer selfhood and interaction and longing. What a journey, what a joy to move through its beautiful, bruising language, its resonance, and all the ways it makes hope and hurt alike sing.” Dominik Parisien, author of Side Effects May Include StrangersTable of ContentsI Why Not Dastardly Nick the Dick The First A Cone of Light Watergun Ravine Traffic Light Nightcallv II Layover Strawberry Island Arthur Teardown Student Debt Caterpillar The Dark Gap It’s Like That, Is It The Circuit III The Big Dark Someday You Will Ache You look older Afloat Touch Anywhere to Begin As If The Floor Was Water The Gaslighter As You Were switchrail IV A Violence Heatwave document Vermilion Therefore soft stalker The Tunnel Tilt The Mayfly Make Good V The Calling fullblown Fission Meanwhile"

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Book Synopsis"So what if I left language by the pier. Metaphor’s a raft," declares Andrew DuBois as he leads readers through a fractured past and present — from "slummy memories of streets" to a "a charnelhouse (?) of possible clowns" — defamiliarizing, critiquing, and satirizing a wide range of conversational forms in the style of Wallace Stevens and Michael Palmer. Yet, as "lives at time degenerate into victory competitions," and the poet alternates between searching for an escape from the mundane and accepting that "merely being there together is a dull catastrophe," we recognize that a formally wry, almost flippant, voice has become caught in language’s web. The surfaces of the poems begin to feel like thin ice, a brittle coating over which we skate for as long as it lasts. Danger lurks here: the poet must play the puppet, not the puppeteer and we must surrender, body and soul, into language as element.Trade Review“In this exciting debut, Andrew DuBois ignores the hand-wringing about irony in North American poetry, putting it to wild use as a resource for testing language’s capacities in the current of relentless play. The brilliant mind behind these flexible, world-bearing tableau-poems keeps seeking, equally unafraid of erudition and humor, on the trail of sound. When the dust settles, we are left with a living music.” -- Christian Campbell, author of Running the Dusk“Andrew DuBois’s writing is one magnificent twist of perception and language after another — strikingly clear, full of ideas, and open to all kinds of possibilities. These poems will move you like a raft from where you are all the way to the end-line of the sublime, a powerful and joyful reminder that the space between you and the sublime is alive.” -- Karina Vernon, editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology“What I marvel at most in the work of Andrew DuBois is how his poems can be at once so raw and so crafted, so challenging and yet so welcoming, immersed in the muck while taking miraculous flights. This is poetry’s answer to Schrödinger’s cat: the poem and its moment both flourishing and ruined, an urn both cracked and immaculate.” -- Daniel Scott Tysdal, author of Fauxccasional Poems“DuBois' writing is playful, witty, and deeply referential — a genuine joy to read.” -- Jake Morrow * The Puritan *

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Book SynopsisFinalist, Raymond Souster AwardIn this timely and powerful debut, Síle Englert explores what it is to feel othered in a world where everything is connected. Moving through time and memory — from childhood to motherhood, from historical figures and events to the precarious environment of the Anthropocene — Englert’s voice brims with grief while still holding space for whimsy.Juxtaposing unlikely metaphors and inchoate memories, these poems wander a timeline where Amelia Earhart’s bones call out from the past, an abandoned department store mannequin keeps an eye on the future, and spacecraft sing to each other through the dark: "we are only what we remember." Unearthing objects beautiful and bizarre, The Lost Time Accidents challenges the reader’s perceptions, finding empathy for the lost, the broken, and the overlooked.Trade Review“‘We drag the future through every hesitant hour, / scrabbling for safe places to grow fragile things.’ Englert is the loving curator of our peculiarities and vulnerabilities, giving a radically empathetic behind-the-scenes tour of the magpie museum of memory. Weaving a heady dark magic, like having your blood drawn by a gently mesmerizing vampire, The Lost Time Accidents bares the body’s interior beauty with reverence for its mysteries. These poems are bewitching post-apocalyptic love songs from the Island of Misfit Toys, a lost map to a secret garden, the fossilized remains of fabulous sea creatures, a crystalline curiosity cabinet of rare spun glass insects, the difference engine of alternate history and histology, an autopsy by gaslight of the heavy human heart. With painterly vision and precise language, Englert makes new the world, knowing that ‘To find what’s left of our names, / these rock bellies must be broken open.’” -- Roxanna Bennett, author of The Untranslatable I“Beautiful, haunting, psychological and vividly real all at once, Englert’s The Lost Time Accidents is definitely worth the read.” -- Zoë Lebrun * The Manitoban *“The Lost Time Accidents demonstrates an obvious mastery of language, imagery, and literary devices. Gorgeously executed and obviously queer, each poem in the collection is a triumph.” -- Rachel Friars * Lesbrary *

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Book SynopsisWinner, New Brunswick Book Award (Poetry)Finalist, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry AwardLeaving a drawer open in hereis like leaving your fly undone is like letting a scab hang off a healing wound.In Myself A Paperclip, Finlay sketches the internal self and the external whir of the psychiatric ward, laying bare its daily rhythms. Memories, musings, echoes, and meditations on stigma coalesce: quarters dispensed into a payphone to listen to the stunned silence of a partner; Splenda packets and rice pudding hoarded in dresser drawers; counting back from ten as electrodes connect with the temple.Deeply personal and reflective, Myself A Paperclip confronts abuse and experiences with debilitating mental illnesses, therapies, and hospitalizations, all shaped into the remarkable form of a serial long poem.Trade Review“‘Like a curious fawn,’ Triny Finlay writes in this stark, candid, and surprisingly funny collection about mental illness; ‘off a ledge backwards.’ Here is the self, undone and bent but unbreaking, the voice a lash and a roar, here are words well-wrought and wielded with such care. Myself A Paperclip is compelling in the earliest sense of the word, urging us irresistibly together. Would that we were all ‘so ready to be unfastened.’” -- Katia Grubisic, author of What if red ran out“Just as a paperclip is bent but holds every page together, its strength not sapped but tautened by the bending, Triny Finlay's fierce and gentle new poems join us to a struggle with the everyday, not just inside the psych ward but outside, baring its roots not only in care but in vulneration of bodies. Without flinching, Myself A Paperclip echoes Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as Finlay evokes an uncertain world, its components and banality, its Sanka and toast, a dwelling-place fraught and unfraught. Here is the litany of voices from which collectivity emerges and yet individuality is preserved.” -- Erín Moure, author of The Elements“In Myself A Paperclip, Triny Finlay renews the elemental possibilities of poetry — transformation, preservation, vision, and voice — in order to counter the stigmatization of mental illness, resist the idealization of treatment, and reveal the intense difficulties of recovery and survival. Myself A Paperclip is an essential, necessary read for its vital authenticity, courageous activism, and singular art.” -- Daniel Scott Tysdal, author of Fauxccasional Poems“Myself A Paperclip is more than just a book of poetry — it is a labour of love. Finlay has bravely brought conversations about mental health out of the shadows and put a face to them.” -- Quintina Northrup * The Brunswickan *“Myself a Paperclip oscillates between the thoughts and experiences of the speaker and the world of the psychiatric ward. ... The poems here are poignant, imaginative, and heart-wrenching. Her experiences, while harrowing at times, are also deeply familiar.” -- Rachel Friars * Lesbrary *

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Book SynopsisWinner, New Brunswick Book Award (Poetry) and Alcuin Society Book Design Awards Third Prize (Poetry) Shortlisted, Derek Walcott Prize for PoetrySue Sinclair has been praised for her "crisp, lyrical poems imbued with subtle, subtextual philosophic musings" (Globe and Mail). She has been described as a poet who "writes her way to a new understanding of the world and carries her readers with her" (Journal of Canadian Poetry). Sinclair’s debut collection, Secrets of Weather and Hope, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, while subsequent collections have earned a place on the Globe Top 100 list (Mortal Arguments), won the IPPY Poetry Award (The Drunken Lovely Bird), and the Pat Lowther Award (Heaven’s Thieves).This collection includes an introductory essay by editor and poet Ross Leckie, over one hundred selected poems from Sinclair’s twenty-year career, and new poems that consider the poet’s evolving relationships with the idea of beauty and with the more-than-human world in a time of manufactured upheaval. The new poems, many never-before published, exemplify Sinclair’s masterful powers of observation and her precise, arresting language.Trade Review“It is such a gift to have Sinclair's new and selected poems in one place, to see the remarkable evolution of her voice, and to see how singular her vision has been over time. Sinclair has pursued an artist's understanding of the sublime her entire writing life, and here is that pursuit in all its fearful beauty. Almost Beauty is like water. Essential. It’s that good.” -- Elizabeth Bachinksy, author of The Hottest Summer in Recorded History

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Book SynopsisFinalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry PrizeIn this powerful, intimate collection, a young woman travels between Paris and New York to pursue a career in modelling. Alternating between the world of fashion, where “it’s no longer enough / that the sample size fits,” and the eponymous Program, a place to “discover / what’s underneath,” Jones’s debut collection pulls the reader deep into the realms of psychiatric care and romantic relationships and probes a long tradition of female suffering.Taking inspiration from New York school poets such as Frank O’Hara, Jones employs an unadorned and at times funny narrative style that also calls to mind the work of Sheila Heti and Sally Rooney. Summoning images from the worlds of fashion, art, and therapy, and exploring the allure of pain and of suffering, The Program is a compelling debut about how we are seen, and how we see ourselves.Trade Review“I adore this book, its narrative, its voice, its struggle. Jones tells a familiar story of the body being used, with some complicity and ambition on the part of the body’s owner, but as the poems go on, the divide between the body and the voice grows. The craft and care of the poems returns to the thoughts now, and the thoughts then, even as it unspools its speaker’s glamorous and unglamorous travels. The Program attains a different beauty, more enduring than a photo shoot.” -- Ed Skoog, author of Travellers Leaving the City“The Program has a cutting, deceptively breezy sincerity, like the wind full of needles. With a crafted effortlessness, Jones pins down the grotesquely gendered experience of being seen and acted upon as a beautiful object in the world. These poems not only probe the meaning of being (or being used as) a model, but they also transform the noun into a verb — refashioning the narrative around sickness, pain, healing, and survival while letting girls keep their imperfect, messy humanity.” -- Domenica Martinello, author of All Day I Dream about Sirens

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