Modern and contemporary poetry

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 SynopsisIndie Rock candidly focuses on a queer poet/musician’s life in Newfoundland and his personal struggles with addiction, OCD, and trauma. This intelligent and punchy collection is steeped in musicality and the geographies and cadences of Newfoundland. With an astute attention to form, rhythm, and aesthetics, Joe Bishop tells an honest and contemporary coming-of-age story about an artist alienated from, but fascinated by, the world he inhabits. Readers dealing with grief and living through recovery will find solace in these poems, as will those conflicted by faith, curious about the rigid confines of masculinity, or yearning to hear a voice like theirs in verse. At its core, Indie Rock is about keeping records, an artist’s compulsion to make art, and the power of love and imagination to overcome death.Trade Review"Joe Bishop’s poetry comes with its own musical accompaniment. You feel his rich, rhythmic poems as much as you read them. All of life is there, manifested in a musicality of language that’s as bewitching as it is transcendent. I defy you to pick up this stunning collection and resist turning each page until you’ve read all the way through." Joanna Lilley, author of Endlings"Bishop's lyrics chronicle sexual exploration amidst Newfoundland music and folklore. Indie Rock has the volume jacked, and these poems pulsate and blister long after the show's over." Aidan Chafe, author of Gospel Drunk"Indie Rock is a significant contribution to the poetry of contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador—an edge-y book, one to place on your shelf alongside Joel Hynes and Megan Gail Coles. Moving between hard-driving staccato rhythms and more meditative cadences, these poems reflect the struggles and highs of a gay musician making his way in downtown St. John’s. In the process Bishop takes a good smack at many of the cultural stereotypes manifested in our writing and our music; many of the pieces have a bracingly sardonic tone. As well the book brings into itself the brutal energies of seascape and landscape. Here is a strong and highly distinctive debut." Mary Dalton, author of Red Ledger and MerrybegotTable of ContentsI Patrick Street on St. Paddy’s Day Live at The Battery Carpentry Devil-Ma-Click After a Three-Month Friendship After Our AA Meeting Quitting Conception Bay Woman Don’t Worry About Me, Mike II Parade Street Duo (April Fools) Time-Lapse (First Sleepover) Medley for My Banshee Barely Audible Lament Lowdown, Lowdown We Idled at the Ship Boxing Day (Cabin Fever) Ash Wednesday III Remembrance Day Canada Day Pyro Yankee Boys of Argentia Dance Song Farm Museum Fundraiser Heave-Up Song Dirty Newfoundlanders Evening on Livingstone Street Gary Laps at the University Pool Gooseberry Cove Jinker Root Cellar Blues Young Feller’s Tale Little Sea-Song IV Overture Saltbox Digger Arty Relative Enlightened Poets dissociative song Outsider Art Celluloid Tango Danny Boy I Believe He Would Believe Me Not Completely V Victoria Day in Heart’s Delight Touching Lines Father’s Day Inherited Thumbnail Nuclear Runoff Off Season Pitch Release Pinnacle Or scrupulous music East Coast Trail, Midnight Notes 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 SynopsisUsing the numerical structure of pi (3.1415), Mechanophilia is a collaborative epic poem by the American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne that follows the omniscient voluble conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet. Nao and Burgoyne, who have never met, began this project after discovering a mutual love of math and unending collaborations. This book, the first of four volumes presently completed, represents the first 1,000 digits of pi. Anachronistic in proportion, this work attempts to queer and rewrite myths in precise, restrictive numerical pi chronology, yet its verses remain free and ludic, time-travelling at will and often looping in present-day figures (Elon Musk, Lady Gaga, Cai Guo-Qiang, Phoebe Philo, Virgil Abloh, Donald Trump) and concerns. Feministic, irreverent, and supremely loquacious, Mechanophilia presents infinity as something reachable yet unrelated to linear time.

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Book SynopsisA “kunik” is a traditional Inuit greeting, often given to loved ones, in which a person places their nose on another’s cheek and breathes them in. Where the Sea Kuniks the Land extends that gesture of love to the Arctic landscape, in a suite of poems that celebrates the interconnectedness of people and place, past and present. The importance of land, culture, and identity play key roles in these poems, and the collection will move readers to think deeply about colonization, intergenerational trauma, and grief. This collection paints beautiful pictures of Arctic landscapes, love stories, and growth. It will take readers on a journey through the seasons, from fierce snowstorms to a warm field of Labrador tea flowers.Trade Review"Ashley Qilavaq-Savard is writing poetry that should be written, must be written"—The Fiddlhead "This collection widens the horizon and expands the world, transporting to places foreign, inhabiting its full complexity—to feel it deep within you, its joys, sorrows, and beauty. With a voice of sheer authenticity, the poet is clear-eyed sincere. She invites you to dance with her as the wind and snow dance in a blizzard, to feel the warm Arctic summer sun, to see her world through the eyes of her grandmother and great grandmother. The blue of her world, the sky and the ice and the sea will become yours."—The Eric Hoffer Award

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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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Book SynopsisShortlisted, Nelson Ball Prize Longlisted, Raymond Souster Award Long-Shortlisted, ReLit Award (Poetry)Daring in form and unflinching in its gaze, Daniel Scott Tysdal’s latest poetry collection examines madness as lived experience and artistic method. Taking inspiration from Al Jaffee’s illustrated fold-ins in MAD magazine, Tysdal explores living with mental illness through a new kind of poetry: the fold-in poem. In this innovative collection, each poem does not end at the bottom of the page; instead, the reader is invited to complete the poem by folding the page to reveal the final line. From the effects of being “smiled into an elephantine line” at Pearson International Airport to the rites of official memory and forgetting at a baseball game in the aftermath of tragedy, Tysdal probes both his own psyche and the myriad environments that work to enfold those who are deemed mad.Trade Review“Daniel Scott Tysdal has done what I would have thought impossible: he’s written beautiful, musical, language-y — maddeningly to die for — poems about a life haunted by constant thoughts of killing yourself. Far from being a downer, The End Is in the Middle is playful and exuberant, a testament to poetry and art pro viding sustenance when all else seems hopeless. In Tysdal’s hands, poetry is indispensably alive and in the middle of everything.” -- Sylvia Legris, author of Garden Physic“Like the finest origami, Daniel Scott Tysdal’s The End Is in the Middle crimps and pleats new worlds into life. Each piece invites us to climb mountains and ford valleys along the way, rewarding us with “the possible infinity of enclosures opening on their only impossible escape.” New textures and relations unfold between each crease, producing a work that is masterful, unruly, haptic, and gorgeous.” -- Adrian De Leon, author of barangay: an offshore poem“The End Is in the Middle does the serious, revolutionary, and indeed playful work of poetry. It uses the irreverent and legendary MAD magazine fold-in form to subvert the effects and residues of mental illness in deftly crafted and incisive poems. These unique poems function on multiple levels: puzzle, physical object, art, testimony, and, snake-folded upon themselves, a map to what else could be true. Their speaker searches insistently: How might we “gather while hunted?” Warring for peace, raging against oblivion, fighting for love? And what else is humanity, if not these?” -- Tolu Oloruntoba, author of Each One a Furnace“At the corner drugstore, each new issue of MAD would come out, the last page already folded numerous times by those who got there before me (buying the fresh unfolded copy). Daniel Scott Tysdal is that rarest of birds, he is nothing but heart. This rugged terrain could readily crush most, those who lack the gravitas, good meds, or a decent pair of sneaks. Only a playful lover, a jester, The Fool themself could wield such rococo tactical hullabaloo. In flares. I dare you not to fold every fucking page of this book. Go on. I dare you. I’m simply mad about the boy.” -- KIRBY, author of Poetry Is Queer“Tysdal creates and inhabits a space where Mad magazine and madness rub against one another, where his students and Eurydice, John Clare and B-movie monsters and filmmakers belong to the same web of connection and where poetry is survival.” -- Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen * Winnipeg Free Press *

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Book SynopsisThe “insistence” in this poetry is how the language calls out the adjacency to its own presence. Each careful syllable feels right next to what surrounds it. A drum hitting out its own “unbridled association.” — Fred Wah"This is where history began again/where some were told it insisted/itself into a lifelike violence.” Eclectic, darkly fascinating, and at times apocalyptic, Only Insistence is a protean book where lines and phrases echo back on each other, where images of the natural world are bookended by investigations that delve deep into memory. In this ethereal world, the poet interrogates his relationship with his father, realigns his idea of family after the birth of his son, and bears witness to the isolation, paranoia, and surrealism of the onset of the beginning of the pandemic. Here pandemic-era streets are “beaches in early April/Bright and bleached and barren” and a lake is “a rage of waves eroding rocks to a pebble beach,/each small stone confident in immanent restoration.” At times languid, at others cunningly sculpted into towering metaphors, Lindsay’s rich metaverse experiments illuminate a world that rewards close attention with infinite possibilities.Trade Review“Only Insistence reads as a dream might — each disclosure an unfolding, with its own tightly crimped folds waiting to stretch. James Lindsay develops a language of confessions that pour out beyond their boundaries, as ‘dashes of colour clustering’ through ‘slits of vision’ can knit what's behind a slatted fence. It is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope, where bodies are known by what crowd their edges, and coldness is known by how ‘piercing light prods the blue, [...] low and whispered,’ where many geographies of are explored compellingly, and softly as water tests a shoreline. I enjoy how Only Insistence is irreverent in its disdain for borders and discrete bodies, in the same way a dream urges us to revisit its many meanings, the ‘flurries it promises.’” -- Tyler Pennock, author of Blood

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Book SynopsisBright star, would I were stedfast as thou art — Breaking open John Keats’s “Last Sonnet,” Ali Blythe writes marginality into the canon, at once claiming, reviving, and un-fixing the Romantic vision. Taking place over one night, the poet in bed next to a sleeping lover, Blythe’s revelatory poems struggle with questions of illusion and reality, immersion and escapism, that which endures and that which is transient. Held taut in formal quivers of short lines, each poem is shot through with eros — to address, to dress and undress, the subject of the love poem and perhaps love itself. Trade Review“Stedfast is one of those books that reminds me why I love poetry. ‘Each new day is cut / from the key of the last;’ if the same is true of each new poem, here’s a set of gleaming keys cut from Keats’s sonnet. Where Keats’s bright star shines stedfastly, Blythe’s star offers an unsteady light. Instead of longing for constancy, the lyric ‘I’ of Stedfast loves and desires within the quivering here and now — and the poignancy of this love gives me all the feels.” -- Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty“Just like the two asterisks on a blank page, ‘two figures continue / their delicate revolutions,’ or an unsteady star, Stedfast is a slow burn that leaves a mark.” -- Joe Enns * British Columbia Review *

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Book SynopsisSophie grew up in Veslefjord, deep in the Norwegian North, where the ice stretches to the horizon and the long Arctic night is filled with stories about the animals of the sea, ice, and sky. Now the ice is melting and the animals are dying. Sophie's mother is also dead, leaving behind a daughter and a lover on the melting permafrost.An Orchid Astronomy is the story of Sophie, of her personal trauma and of climate catastrophe, told in striking experimental poetry. Crossing poetic styles and genres, words and sentences flow and break, twist into images, and cluster together like the Arctic stars. Coming together in a sustained narrative, these poems ask how we grapple with magnificent loss, searching for solutions in science, in mythology, in storytelling and ultimately, in our relived memories.Challenging, powerful, and beautiful, An Orchid Astronomy wrestles with the grief we feel for the loss of those we love and grief for the changing world. In the language of mass extinction and the unknowable sky, Tasnuva Hayden fearlessly explores the nuances of personal collapse, sublimated desire, unfulfilled longing, and the ways we must move forward in the face of the impossible in poetry that dazzles like the moon on a midwinter night.

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Book SynopsisRelic species extinct everywhere else on the planet thrive on a remote archipelago. Evolution requires isolation, and these islands offer the perfect environment for genetic variation to take place, fostering new and unique forms of flora and fauna. Evolutionary biologists Emily and Roland have come on an extended field expedition to this secluded world, eager to expose its unique biosphere.As they work to gather a large dataset of dead specimens for study and description, Emily and Roland experience growing shifts in their perception, in their bodies, and even in the flow of linear time. The environment they have come to quantify acts upon them, the species they collect observe and comment upon them, and the controlled lens of science cannot save them. Succumbing to the dynamic power of isolation, they find themselves irrevocably changed.A poetic novel told through field notes, letters, and scientific data, Refugia is a story of discovery and transformation that shows the hubris inherent in the idea that humans live both outside, and at the center of, the natural world. This is a book that reveals science in all its imperfect beauty, crossing the line between observer and observed, scientist and subject, between what is known and what is unknowable.

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Book SynopsisThe body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence.In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body. Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect. Bodies burble, rejoice, yearn, and suffer. Bodies grow old, they are injured, they hold strength and grow weak in unexpected ways.Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.

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Book SynopsisThe body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence.In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body. Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect. Bodies burble, rejoice, yearn, and suffer. Bodies grow old, they are injured, they hold strength and grow weak in unexpected ways.Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.

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Book SynopsisIn March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a “fancy academic” who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy’s trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.

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Book SynopsisIn March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a "fancy academic" who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy's trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Nelson Ball Prize, 2023Shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman AwardMinimalist poetry for maximalist times.Sheets: Typewriter Works extends the minimalist explorations of Cameron Anstee’s first collection, Book of Annotations. Prompted by receiving the Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter that belonged to poet William Hawkins after his death in 2016, the works in this book explore how small poems operate through the freedoms and constraints of the typewriter as both a decaying machine and a mode of composition. Through engagement with writers and artists like Jiri Valoch, Barbara Caruso, Leroy Gorman, Cia Rinne, William Hawkins, Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi, and Norman McLaren, Sheets: Typewriter Works re-embeds the minimalist poem in the typewritten page.Trade Review"Reading Sheets is a strange and wonderful experience. At times, composed fragments are isolated outbursts, constrained by the machine itself; on other occasions, inspiration flows freely over multiple pages. By its end, what begins as a whisper – ‘after years’ – crescendos over sixteen pages before closing on the cyclical refrain – ‘after years / years’. The cacophonous conclusion implies the continuation beyond this period of productivity and experimentation that the pamphlet captures, leaving the reader pondering the possibility of what is to come."—The Poetry Review"Sheets: Typewriter Works is at once an enigmatic gift and feat of curiosity. Anstee composes the 'eternal etcetera' in this collaboration between a poet and his late friend’s Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter. Sheets embodies a poet forwarding through language with love, carrying on through grief without backspace, tilting the page, pinning the voice. This collection is testament to how the language of love and grief can hold—and is itself—poetry."—Archibald Lampman Jury Citation"Master of the abundant small, Anstee makes space ring and strikes up the thingness of every word in this collection of the underinked, the overinked, the visual rhythm, the taptaptapestry, lovingly spooling back to past typers and out towards you."—Susan Holbrook, author of Ink Earl"Sheets: Typewriter Works furthers Anstee’s poetic explorations into and through the minimal, but through gestures that extend both the act and result of writing—both composition and erasure—into the deeply physical. The effect is striking and immediate... [...] There is a meditative kind of breathlessness to these understated gems, one that allows each poem to sit, not as a complete thought, but as individual gestures as both moments in space and as part of a lengthy, open-ended and even life-long sequence."—rob mclennan“I was intrigued by how the micro transcription of an event in time—like a fly landing on the page of a book—opens into reality at large.”—Aram Saroyan, author of Complete Minimal Poems

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Book SynopsisCarolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero’s church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand. By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forché to return home, asking her to ‘talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us. Convince them to stop the military aid.' A week later he was assassinated (and is only now being made a saint). Back in the US, Forché gave readings and talks about US-backed oppression in Central America, but found publishers and critics uncomfortable with the startlingly different poems of her second collection, poems relating to torture, murder, injustice and trauma. When the book appeared in 1981, at a time when the conflict in El Salvador had finally forced its way into public awareness, it won her immediate recognition. Briefly available in Britain from Jonathan Cape in the 1980s, it was reissued by Bloodaxe to coincide with the publication by Penguin of Carolyn Forché’s long awaited memoir of those times, What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance (Penguin, 2018) followed by a new collection from Bloodaxe, In the Lateness of the World (2020). The Country Between Us has sold tens of thousands of copies on the US, where it has never been out of print. It won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets.Trade ReviewHer collection of poems The Country Between Us (1981) has been reissued to accompany the memoir. It was a bestseller at a time when many Americans were increasingly aware and ashamed of US-sponsored brutality in its “backyard”. It’s fascinating to see how the two works qualify and complement each other across the intervening decades. -- Lorna Scott Fox * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsIN SALVADOR, 1978-80 11 San Onofre, California 12 The Island 15 The Memory of Elena 17 The Visitor 18 The Colonel 19 Return 23 Message 25 Because One Is Always Forgotten REUNION 29 Endurance 31 Expatriate 33 Letter from Prague, 1968–78 35 Departure 36 Photograph of My Room 39 On Returning to Detroit 41 As Children Together 44 Joseph 47 Selective Service 48 For the Stranger 50 Reunion 52 City Walk-up, Winter 1969 54 Poem for Maya OURSELVES OR NOTHING 52 Ourselves or Nothing

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Book SynopsisStaying Human is the sequel to the Staying Alive trilogy of anthologies which have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. This fourth Bloodaxe world poetry anthology offers poetry lovers an even broader, international selection of 500 more ‘real poems for unreal times’, with a strong focus on 21st-century poems addressing current issues. The range of poetry here complements that of the first three anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about what makes us human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder; talismanic poems which have become personal survival testaments for many. There’s a strong focus on the human side of living in the 21st century in poems from the past two decades relating to migration, oppression, alienation and the individual’s struggle to hold on, stay connected and find meaning in an increasingly polarised world. Staying Human also draws on poems suggested by readers because they’ve been so important in their own lives, as well as many poems which have gone viral after being shared on social media because they speak to our times with such great immediacy. And there are poems from around the world written just recently in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.Trade ReviewThese poems distil the human heart as nothing else… Staying Alive celebrates the point of poetry. It’s invigorating and makes me proud of being human. -- Jane CampionStaying Alive is a book which leaves those who have read or heard a poem from it feeling less alone and more alive. -- John BergerI love Staying Alive and keep going back to it. Being Alive is just as vivid, strongly present and equally beautifully organised. But this new book feels even more alive – I think it has a heartbeat, or maybe that’s my own thrum humming along with the music of these poets. Sitting alone in a room with these poems is to be assured that you are not alone, you are not crazy (or if you are, you’re not the only one who thinks this way!) I run home to this book to argue with it, find solace in it, to locate myself in the world again. -- Meryl StreepTable of ContentsNeil Astley 17 Introduction 1 Staying human Tom Leonard 22 Being a Human Being Patrizia Cavalli 22 ‘Here I am, I do my bit…’ Göran Sonnevi 23 ‘Whose life? you asked’ Fernando Pessoa 24 They Spoke to Me of People, and of Humanity John Barr 24 Bonsai Master Audre Lorde 25 A Litany for Survival Robert Pinsky 26 Samurai Song Zeina Hashem Beck 27 You Fixed It Janet Fisher 28 Life and Other Terms Vincenza Holland 29 Excuse Me U.A. Fanthorpe 30 A Minor Role Pippa Little 31 Against Hate Tatamkhulu Afrika 32 The Woman at the Till Ellery Akers 33 The Word That Is a Prayer Danusha Laméris 34 Insha’Allah David Friedland 35 Blind man Danusha Laméris 35 Small Kindnesses Mimi Khalvati 36 Smiles Mimi Khalvati 37 The Brag Nikola Madzirov 37 When Someone Goes Away Everything That’s Been Done Comes Back Ellen Bass 38 Gate C22 Naomi Shihab Nye 39 Gate A-4 Fred D’Aguiar 41 Excise Thomas Kinsella 42 Mirror in February Charles Simic 42 Mirrors at 4 a.m. Zhang Zao 43 Mirror Rachael Boast 44 Desperate Meetings of Hermaphrodites Werner Aspenström 44 You and I and the World Kaveh Akbar 45 What Use Is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around Tim Liardet 46 Self-Portrait with Aquarium Octopus Flashing a Mirror M. Vasalis 47 The IJsselmeer Dam Stewart Conn 47 Conundrum Valerio Magrelli 48 Vanishing Point Richard Siken 49 Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede Marjorie Lotfi Gill 50 Gift Patrizia Cavalli 51 ‘I’m pretty clear, I’m dying…’ Lawrence Sail 51 Recognition Tracy K. Smith 52 Nanluoxiang Alley Dzifa Benson 52 Self Portrait as a Creature of Numbers Wisława Szymborska 53 A Contribution to Statistics Gennady Aygi 55 People Linda Anderson 56 Sanctuary Judith Herzberg 56 The Way Anna Swir 57 The Same Inside Martín Espada 58 Rednecks Natalie Diaz 59 The Beauty of a Busted Fruit Suji Kwock Kim 59 Monologue for an Onion Nadine Aisha Jassat 60 The Years Nadine Aisha Jassat 61 Let Me Tell You Jessica Traynor 62 In Praise of Fixer Women Marie Howe 63 Magdalene Afterwards Marie Howe 65 One Day Tishani Doshi 65 Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods 2 Ten Zillion Things Mark Strand 68 Lines for Winter Linda Pastan 68 Imaginary Conversation Jack Gilbert 69 Failing and Flying Gillian Clarke 70 Snow Vladmír Holan 71 Snow W.N. Herbert 71 Breakfrost Derek Mahon 72 Rising Late Michelle O’Sullivan 74 What Was Mistook Michelle O’Sullivan 74 Lines John F. Deane 75 The Red Gate Alison Brackenbury 75 So Ellen Bass 76 Any Common Desolation Lisel Mueller 77 In Passing Leanne O’Sullivan 77 A Healing Hanny Michaelis 78 ‘It’s terrible…’ John F. Deane 78 The World is Charged David Butler 79 And Then The Sun Broke Through William Stafford 80 You Reading This, Be Ready Hanny Michaelis 80 ‘Over the years…’ Deryn Rees-Jones 81 Meteor Tuvia Ruebner 81 Wonder Blake Morrison 82 Happiness Jack Underwood 82 Happiness Ruth Stone 83 Wanting Mikiro Sasaki 84 Sentiments David Ferry 84 Lake Water Randall Jarrell 86 Well Water Seamus Heaney 87 A Drink of Water Lani O’Hanlon 87 Going to the Well Denise Levertov 88 The Fountain G.F. Dutton 89 The Miraculous Issue George Szirtes 90 Water Moya Cannon 91 Introductions A.E. Stallings 91 Olives Jan Wagner 92 quince jelly Louis de Paor 93 Marmalade Sarah Lindsay 95 If God Made Jam Craig Arnold 95 Meditation on a Grapefruit Aleš Šteger 96 Chocolate Aleš Šteger 97 Egg Thomas Lux 98 Refrigerator, 1957 Connie Bensley 99 Cookery Mary Ruefle 100 Timberland Matthew Dickman 101 The World is Too Huge to Grasp Linda Gregg 102 Let Birds Imtiaz Dharker 103 Carving Alice Oswald 104 A Short History of Falling Aracelis Girmay 105 Ars Poetica Ruth Sharman 105 Fragments Carlos Drummond de Andrade 106 The House of Lost Time Vera Pavlova 107 ‘If there is something to desire…’ Luis Muñoz 107 Leave Poetry Boris A. Novak 108 Decisions: 11 Carlos Drummond de Andrade 109 Absence Mairéad Byrne 109 Facing the Music Ruth Sharman 110 Hilltop Dennis O’Driscoll 110 Nocturne 3 Innocence and experience Malika Booker 112 Cement Malika Booker 113 Erasure Tracey Herd 114 Happy Birthday Sinéad Morrissey 115 Fairground Music Sharon Olds 116 To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now Dorothea Lasky 117 The Miscarriage Fiona Benson 118 Sheep Derry O’Sullivan 119 Stillborn 1943: Calling Limbo Deirdre Brennan 120 Born Dead Noelle Lynskey 121 Still Born Sandeep Parmar 122 An uncommon language Aoife Lyall 124 Sounds of that day Aoife Lyall 125 Ubi Sunt Catriona Clutterbuck 126 Her Body Rebecca Goss 126 The Lights Ciara MacLaverty 127 ‘That’s Quite a Trick If You Can Pull It Off’ Fiona Benson 128 Prayer Hannah Sullivan 128 from The Sandpit after Rain Mona Arshi 129 Delivery Room Doireann Ní Ghríofa 130 Inventory: Recovery Room Justyna Bargielska 130 Different rose Zoë Brigley 131 Star / Sun / Snow Doireann Ní Ghríofa 133 Jigsaw Puzzle Jack Underwood 133 William Rebecca Goss 134 Last Poem Fiona Benson 135 Hide and Seek Ellen Cranich 136 Blasket Sound Niall Campbell 137 Night Watch Niall Campbell 138 February Morning Liz Berry 138 The Republic of Motherhood Rebecca Goss 140 My Animal Fiona Benson 140 Ruins Moya Cannon 141 Milk Esther Morgan 142 Latch Ailbhe Darcy 142 After my son was born Hollie McNish 143 Embarrassed Stephanie Norgate 146 Miracle Lauris Edmond 147 Late song Peter Sansom 148 Mini Van Sharon Olds 148 I Cannot Say I Did Not Katharine Towers 149 Childhood Lucille Clifton 150 daughters Jane Clarke 150 The trouble Brenda Shaughnessy 151 I Wish I Had More Sisters Ann Gray 153 I wish I had more mothers Gretchen Marquette 154 Want Tess Gallagher 155 With Stars Tess Gallagher 156 I Stop Writing the Poem Jane Clarke 156 Hers Naomi Shihab Nye 157 Shoulders Olivia McCannon 158 New Road Leanne O’Sullivan 159 My Father Asks Why Leanne O’Sullivan 160 The Cord Naomi Shihab Nye 161 Supple Cord Gwendolyn Brooks 162 a song in the front yard Tracy K. Smith 162 The World Is Your Beautiful Younger Sister Penelope Shuttle 163 Outgrown Carol Ann Duffy 164 Empty Nest Anna Enquist 165 All at Once Inua Ellams 165 Swallow Twice Jacob Sam-La Rose 166 Never Jacob Sam-La Rose 166 The Other End of the Line Jericho Brown 168 Prayer of the Backhanded Jericho Brown 169 As a Human Being Doireann Ní Ghríofa 170 Tooth Anne Michaels 172 from Correspondences: a poem Abigail Parry 176 The Quilt Safiya Sinclair 177 Family Portrait Pascale Petit 178 My Mother’s Love Pascale Petit 179 Her Harpy Eagle Claws Pascale Petit 180 My Wolverine Jacqueline Bishop 181 Snakes Selima Hill 182 from Grunter Selima Hill 185 from Sunday Afternoons at the Gravel-pits Shivanee Ramlochan 188 from The Red Thread Cycle Zoë Brigley 190 The Eye in the Wall Nicki Heinen 191 Solent Ward, Royal Free Hospital, 2008 Aria Aber 192 Asylum Sasha Dugdale 194 Asylum Sasha Dugdale 195 ‘Perhaps Akhmatova was right’ Xidu Heshang 196 Fictionalising Her Tony Hoagland 197 Personal 4 After Frank O’Hara Frank O’Hara 200 The Day Lady Died Rita Dove 201 Canary John Burnside 201 The Day Etta Died Clare Pollard 202 The Day Amy Died Nick Flynn 203 The Day Lou Reed Died Ian McMillan 205 The Evening of the Day Pavarotti Died Anjum Hasan 205 The Day No One Died Frank O’Hara 206 Autobiographia Literaria Safiya Sinclair 207 Autobiography Geoff Hattersley 208 Frank O’Hara Five, Geoffrey Chaucer Nil Simon Armitage 208 Poem Martina Evans 209 I Want to Be like Frank O’Hara Phoebe Stuckes 210 Kiss me quick Frank O’Hara 211 Katy Roger Reeves 211 Someday I’ll Love Roger Reeves Ocean Vuong 212 Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong Frank O’Hara 213 Why I Am Not a Painter Maria Barnas 214 Why I Am Not a Painter Matthew Sweeney 215 My Life as a Painter Adam Zagajewski 216 Describing Paintings 5 Harmony and discord John Hegley 218 A Declaration of Need Robert Wrigley 218 A Lock of Her Hair Jackie Kay 219 High Land Marie Howe 220 Low Tide, Late August Katharine Kilalea 220 You were a bird Sarah Lindsay 221 The Arms of a Marvelous Squid Warsan Shire 222 for women who are difficult to love Jericho Brown 223 Colosseum Jericho Brown 224 Of My Fury Caroline Bird 225 Marriage of Equals Joan Larkin 226 Want Chen Chen 227 Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls Mary Jean Chan 229 // Jane Clarke 230 Vows Miriam Nash 231 Love Song for a Keeper Seamus Heaney 232 Scaffolding Valerio Magrelli 232 The Embrace Vidyan Ravinthiran 233 Aubade Leanne O’Sullivan 233 Leaving Early Leanne O’Sullivan 234 Note Alex Dimitrov 235 Some New Thing Eavan Boland 236 Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary Hester Knibbe 236 Yes Dick Davis 237 Uxor Vivamus… Dick Davis 238 Making a Meal of It Wendy Cope 239 To My Husband Wendy Cope 239 One Day Anne Haverty 240 Objecting to Everything Elaine Feinstein 242 A Visit Tara Bergin 242 Wedding Cake Decorations Ranjit Hoskoté 242 Couple Rebecca Perry 243 Windows Joan Margarit 244 Love is a place John Challis 244 The Love Fleur Adcock 245 Happy Ending Kei Miller 246 Epilogue Conor O’Callaghan 246 Kingdom Come Vona Groarke 247 Ghost Poem Phoebe Stuckes 248 Gold Hoop Earrings Phoebe Stuckes 249 Attempt Cynthia Huntington 250 For Love Bobby Parker 251 Working Class Voodoo Melissa Lee-Houghton 252 Love-Smitten Heart Louis Jenkins 255 Fish Out of Water Sarah Holland-Batt 255 No End to Images Patrizia Cavalli 256 ‘Very simple love that believes in words…’ Natalie Shaw 257 Like when we went to the cinema that time Darío Jaramillo 258 from Impossible Loves Darío Jaramillo 258 Mozart on the Motorway Michael Longley 259 Ceilidh Derek Mahon 260 Aran Paddy Bushe 261 The Rolling Wave Seamus Heaney 262 The Given Note Gerard Fanning 262 That Note Seamus Heaney 263 Song Adam Zagajewski 264 Music Heard with You Elizabeth Burns 265 Listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass in the Kitchen Lars Gustafsson 266 The silence of the world before Bach Adam Zagajewski 266 Chaconne Jane Hirshfield 267 Even the Vanishing Housed Tomas Tranströmer 268 Schubertiana Tomas Tranströmer 270 Allegro Gregory Orr 270 To Be Alive 6 Mortal hurt Tomas Tranströmer 272 The Half-Finished Heaven Jan Erik Vold 272 The Fact That No Birds Sing Galway Kinnell 274 Wait Louise Glück 275 from Averno Caroline Bird 276 The End of the Bed Caroline Bird 277 A Surreal Joke Ken Babstock 278 As Marginalia in John Clare’s The Rural Muse Lieke Marsman 279 The Following Scan Will Last Less Than a Minute Lieke Marsman 279 The Following Scan Will Last One Minute Lieke Marsman 280 The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes Jo Shapcott 281 Of Mutability Ilyse Kusnetz 282 Harbinger Julie O’Callaghan 283 No Can Do Wayne Holloway-Smith 284 ‘the posh mums are boxing in the square…’ Anna Swir 285 My Body Effervesces Robert Hass 286 A Story About the Body Max Ritvo 286 Poem to My Litter Max Ritvo 288 Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together Max Ritvo 289 Cachexia Mark Doty 290 Michael’s Dream Ana Ristović 291 The Body Elaine Feinstein 292 Long Life Ruth Stone 293 The Excuse Finuala Dowling 294 At eighty-five, my mother’s mind Finuala Dowling 295 Widowhood in the dementia ward Finuala Dowling 295 Birthday in the dementia ward Judith Herzberg 296 Old Age Roger McGough 296 The Wrong Beds Geraldine Mitchell 297 Sneak Geraldine Mitchell 297 How the Body Remembers Elise Partridge 298 from The Book of Steve Menno Wigman 298 Everyone Is Beautiful Today Michael Longley 299 Age Thomas Lynch 300 Refusing at Fifty-two to Write Sonnets Dermot Healy 300 As You Get Older Mary O’Malley 301 A Lift James Fenton 302 For Andrew Wood Vijay Seshadri 303 Bright Copper Kettles Anne Stevenson 304 Anaesthesia Elise Partridge 305 Last Days Michael O’Loughlin 306 In This Life Zaffar Kunial 308 Prayer Adil Jussawalla 308 Mother’s Ninety-fourth Birthday Menno Wigman 309 Body, my body Janet Ayachi 309 Spooning Stars Matthew Sweeney 310 The Tube Kerry Hardie 311 Ship of Death Sara Berkeley Tolchin 312 Burrow Beach Helen Dunmore 313 My life’s stem was cut Helen Dunmore 314 Hold out your arms Lorna Goodison 316 My Mother’s Sea Chanty Vicki Feaver 316 You Are Not Sharon Olds 318 In the Temple Basement Emily Berry 319 The photo that is most troubling is the one I don’t want to show you Annemarie Austin 320 from Country Annemarie Austin 320 What My Double Will Steven Matthews 321 Last Christmas Cracker Kerry Hardie 322 After My Father Died Valérie Rouzeau 322 from Vrouz Bernard O’Donoghue 323 Ter Conatus Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 324 The Morandi Bridge Jay Whittaker 325 The call Jay Whittaker 325 Bed fellow Ruth Fainlight 326 Oxygen Mask Ruth Fainlight 327 Somewhere Else Entirely Elaine Feinstein 328 Beds Imtiaz Dharker 328 Screen-saver Imtiaz Dharker 329 Passport photo Imtiaz Dharker 330 Say his name Gillian Clarke 330 Honesty Katie Donovan 331 Off Duty Eunice de Souza 331 Advice to Women Ron Koertge 332 Lily Wisława Szymborska 332 Cat in an Empty Apartment Theresa Lola 333 Tailoring Grief Wisława Szymborska 334 The Day After – Without Us Billy Collins 335 Helium Mary Ruefle 336 Trust Me Lucie Brock-Boido 337 Soul Keeping Company Dean Young 338 Street of Sailmakers Denise Riley 339 Listening for Lost People Dennis O’Driscoll 340 Then Julie O’Callaghan 341 Beyond Julie O’Callaghan 341 Cyber You Alison Brackenbury 342 All 7 Interesting times Selina Nwulu 344 We have everything we need Derek Mahon 345 Insomnia Colette Bryce 346 Helicopters Jennifer L. Knox 347 Drones Colette Bryce 348 Belfast Waking, 6 a.m. Doireann Ní Ghríofa 349 On Patrick Street Imtiaz Dharker 350 Flight Radar Jean Sprackland 351 CCTV Jasmine Ann Cooray 352 Call Centre Blues John Cooper Clarke 352 Bed Blocker Blues David Constantine 354 Pity Jacob Saenz 355 Sweeping the States Jane Commane 356 Midlands kids Sarah Howe 357 On a line by Xu Lizhi Jeong Ho-seung 358 Death of a Cellphone Sabeer Haka 358 Politics Sabeer Haka 359 Mulberries Paul Farley 359 Hole in the Wall Zohar Atkins 360 Song of Myself (Apocryphal) Tim Turnbull 361 Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn Caitlín Nic Íomhair 363 Praise the Young Jessica Mookherjee 363 Ursa Minor Theresa Muñoz 364 Be the first to like this A.E. Stallings 365 Like, the Sestina 8 Roots and routes Deryn Rees-Jones 368 Home Nina Bogin 368 Initiation, II Maura Dooley 369 Dancing at Oakmead Road Eavan Boland 370 Nocturne Tom French 371 The Last Light Peter Sirr 371 from The Rooms Jane Clarke 374 Who owns the field? Kirun Kapur 374 Anthem David Dabydeen 375 Catching Crabs Aleš Debeljak 376 A Letter Home Stanisław Barańczak 377 If China Arundhathi Subramaniam 378 Home Moniza Alvi 378 And if Vidyan Ravinthiran 379 Ceylon Vidyan Ravinthiran 380 My Sri Lankan Family Daljit Nagra 380 Our Town with the Whole of India Roger Robinson 382 To His Homeland Elisabeth Sennitt Clough 382 Potato Season Mir Mahfuz Ali 383 My Son Waits by the Door Alberto Ríos 384 We Are of a Tribe Vahni Capildeo 385 Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere Imtiaz Dharker 386 Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch André Naffis-Sahely 387 Vanishing Act André Naffis-Sahely 387 An Island of Strangers Adam Zagajewski 388 The Three Kings John Agard 389 Checking Out Me History Sujata Bhatt 391 A Different History Karin Karakaşlı 392 History-Geography Amir Darwish 393 Where I come from Imtiaz Dharker 394 Minority Luis Muñoz 395 The Foreigner Hama Tuma 396 Just a Nobody Amarjit Chandan 396 In This Country Keki Daruwalla 397 Migrations Beata Duncan 399 The Notebook Mina Gorji 400 Exit Adam Zagajewski 401 Refugees Wisława Szymborska 402 Some People Bejan Matur 403 Night Spent in the Temple of a Patient God Bejan Matur 404 The Moon Sucks up Our Grief Ribka Sibhatu 406 In Lampedusa Musa Okwonga 408 Hundreds of cockroaches drowned today Azita Ghahreman 408 The Boat That Brought Me Carolyn Forché 409 The Boatman Linda Gregerson 410 from Sleeping Bear Naomi Shihab Nye 411 Mediterranean Blue Kimiko Hahn 411 After being asked if I write ‘the occasional poem’ Reza Mohammadi 412 Illegal Immigrant Moniza Alvi 413 Flight Fadwa Soulieman 414 For Lana Sadiq Audre Lorde 415 Diaspora Philip Gross 416 The Displaced Persons Camp Teresa Samuel Ibrahim 416 Longing Teresa Samuel Ibrahim 417 The last train across Ariat Bridge Warsan Shire 418 Conversations about home Sabeer Haka 420 Home Gabeba Baderoon 420 I Cannot Myself 9 Empathy and conflict Kwame Dawes 422 Land Ho Edward Baugh 422 A Nineteenth-century Portrait Kevin Young 423 Reward Martín Espada 425 How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way Gwendolyn Brooks 426 We Real Cool Terrance Hayes 427 The Golden Shovel Wanda Coleman 429 American Sonnet: 94 Terrance Hayes 429 American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin Terrance Hayes 430 American Sonnet for the New Year Patricia Smith 431 That Chile Emmett in the Casket James Berry 432 Travelling As We Are James Berry 433 In-a Brixtan Markit Elizabeth Alexander 434 Smile Patricia Smith 435 10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine Jericho Brown 436 Bullet Points Danez Smith 437 the bullet was a girl Evie Shockley 438 supply and demand Dean Bowen 439 mi skin Kayo Chingonyi 440 The N Word Natasha Trethewey 441 Flounder Natasha Trethewey 442 Help, 1968 Hannah Lowe 443 Dance Class Hannah Lowe 443 Sausages Rita Dove 444 After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed Raymond Antrobus 445 Jamaican British Anthony Anaxagorou 446 Cause Anthony Anaxagorou 447 Departure Lounge Twenty Seventeen Claudia Rankine 449 from Citizen Claudia Rankine 450 from August 4, 2011 / In Memory of Mark Duggan Roy McFarlane 453 from …they killed them Danez Smith 454 dinosaurs in the hood Thomas McCarthy 456 Slow Food Imtiaz Dharker 456 A Century Later Remco Campert 457 Poetry Leanne O’Sullivan 458 Safe House Ilya Kaminsky 459 We Lived Happily during the War Ilya Kaminsky 460 In a Time of Peace Luis Muñoz 461 Breathing Fatimah Asghar 461 If They Come for Us Solmaz Sharif 463 Look Lorraine Mariner 465 Thursday Chrissy Williams 466 The Burning of the Houses Ishion Hutchinson 466 The Garden Major Jackson 468 Selling Out Jay Bernard 470 Clearing Jay Bernard 471 + Jay Bernard 471 – Roger Robinson 472 Doppelgänger Roger Robinson 473 The Portrait Museum Roger Robinson 474 The Father Valerio Magrelli 474 The Boundary André Mangeot 475 Bellwether Deborah Moffatt 475 Eating Thistles Choman Hardi 476 Dispute Over a Mass Grave Choman Hardi 477 A Day for Love Seamus Heaney 478 Chorus from The Cure at Troy 10 The future? Nick Drake 480 Stranger Thing Sarah Westcott 481 The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Maura Dooley 481 Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide Polly Atkin 482 Colony Collapse Disorder Frank Báez 483 Exodus Mikeas Sánchez 484 What Is It Worth? David Constantine 484 Dominion Dom Bury 485 The Body’s New Weather Patrick Deeley 486 Two Hundred Million Animals Patrick Deeley 487 The End of the World Jack Underwood 487 Alpha Step Chase Twichell 488 Birdsong Chase Twichell 489 Herds of Humans David Tait 490 By Degrees David Tait 490 The Virus at My Window Imtiaz Dharker 491 Cranes Lean In Peter Sirr 492 Ode Gerda Stevenson 493 Hands Amit Majmudar 494 An American Nurse Foresees Her Death Imtiaz Dharker 494 Seen from a Drone, Delhi Imtiaz Dharker 496 Seen from a Drone, Mumbai Ruth Padel 497 Still life with a map of the world outside the window Joshua Bennett 498 Dad Poem Nick Drake 499 The Future 501 Acknowledgements 510 Index of writers 517 Index of titles and first lines

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Book SynopsisJohn Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In The Coming of the Little Green Man, his eighth Bloodaxe collection, we enter a world of play and parable – in which the little green man stands for all pesky outsiders – in provocative poems charged with contemporary resonance. Which box should the little green man tick on the question of identity? Will the little green man survive as a minority of one in a multiracial London? What if the little green man volunteers to give blood to 21st-century humankind? Winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, he brings to bear his trademark trickster wit that bridges the metaphysical and the political, the comic and the poignant, the oral and the literary. His Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (2009) was followed by Travel Light Travel Dark (2013) and Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (2016).Trade ReviewIf Agard had not already been forged in the roller-coaster aftermath of empire, there would be an urgent need for society to invent someone like him.’ – William Wallis, Financial Times

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Book SynopsisKen Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, his work and example inspiring a whole generation of younger British poets. His politically edgy, cuttingly colloquial, muscular poetry poetry shifted territory with time, from rural Yorkshire, America and London to the war-ravaged Balkans and Eastern Europe (before and after Communism). His early books span a transition from a preoccupation with land and myth to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection. The pivotal work marking this shift was his long poem Fox Running (1980), brought to recent attention when an archive recording of him reading it was broadcast by BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please in 2016. His Collected Poems brings together poetry from four decades, including all the work from two earlier retrospectives, The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (1982) and Shed: Poems 1980-2001 (2002), together with the posthumously published You Again: last poems & other words (2004). The book is introduced with essays by Roger Garfitt and Jon Glover. Publication coincides with his 80th birthday and with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Bloodaxe’s first title, Ken Smith’s Tristan Crazy (1978).Trade ReviewKen Smith brought an original and memorable voice to poetry in Britain. He spent his writing life not so much swimming against the tide as ignoring the stream’s existence… He was one of those by whom the language lives.’ – Sean O’Brien, Independent

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Book SynopsisSpiritlands invites you into a territory that is at once individual and plural. On the one hand, this is poetry about a personal geography, an eclectic landscape, space in which to be oneself and welcome who one chooses to express hospitality towards; on the other, these are poems all about hope, life and nature, about belonging to the whole world and asserting one’s right to a place and voice in it. The drive of this collection is spirit in the sense of the courage it takes to true to one’s instincts. There is a timelessness to the poems in this book and a sense of what endures. Here is oneness with existence, an appreciation of the universe, a happiness that springs from standing on the globe and the feeling of being a living, breathing soul in it.Trade ReviewSarah Wardle writes with great humanity and makes A Knowable World of the indignity, frustrations and fear of acute episodes of mental illness. That’s how she manages to get her readers to empathise with all those in the community, both in and out of hospital, who live with the stigma of madness’ – Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger.Table of Contents9 Song for World 10 The Golden Bough 11 Votive 12 Spiritlands 15 Amina’s Truth 16 Night Nurses 17 First-hand Evidence 18 In the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 19 The Spirit to Solve 20 Human Spirit 22 Pamphleteering 23 At Dove Cottage 24 Schoolgirl to Teacher 25 Mr Wales 26 Careless Whisper 27 Art Therapy 28 On Empty Street 29 City Rain 30 Mill-hands Conversing, 1919 31 Still Life 32 Umbrella 33 US 34 Modern Classics 35 Artistic Preference 36 Letter to the Third Millennium 37 At Home with the Celts 38 Cassie At Six 39 Topspin Theory 40 Lotus 41 Dreamtime 42 Abigail’s Wedding 43 Amanda 44 Blue Rosette 45 Out on the Hustings, 1974 46 Oxfords of the Mind 47 Autumn Effect at Argenteuil 48 Spirit Horse 49 Midlander 52 On Connecting 53 Howling Wolf 54 Soraya and the Spider 57 May Morning 58 May Sunday 59 Reminiscence at the Community Centre 60 Making 61 Kissing in English 62 After Astrup 63 On Woodland

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Book SynopsisNegative of a Group Photograph brings together three decades of poems by the leading Iranian poet Azita Ghahreman. Born in Mashhad in 1962 and based in Sweden since 2006, Ghahreman is the author of five highly acclaimed collections. Her poems are lyrical and intimate, addressing themes of loss, exile and female desire, as well as the changing face of her country. Negative of a Group Photograph runs the gamut of Ghahreman’s experience: from her childhood in the Khorasan region of south-eastern Iran to her exile to Sweden, from Iran's book-burning years and the war in Iraq to her unexpected encounters with love. The poems in this illuminating collection are brought to life in English by the poet Maura Dooley, working in collaboration with Elhum Shakerifar. Farsi-English dual language edition co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.Trade ReviewThese poems are a wonderful mixture of the bodily, the earthy and the transcendent, the metaphysical; they have lyricism and a sense of elegy and a wonderful sense of defiance. -- Boyd Tonkin * Judge, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation *

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Book SynopsisSpiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence – from the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China – lie at the heart of this new collection by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton. Herod’s Dispensations shows his work now reaching beyond middle age, to revisit – in meditations on death and migration – the territories of the Far East from his early years, in the light of a new nomadic age. Harry Clifton has published nine other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and Portobello Sonnets (2017).Trade Review'There is so much history in Harry Clifton's poems, so much geography, landscape, cityscape, repeopled precincts of the imagination, so much human drama and comedy; so many people, mythic, unlikely and hauntingly real. And all of it is limned with a masterful formal dexterity and an apparently limitless cultural curiosity' – C.K. Williams.; 'The poems begin with something seen, remembered, or suddenly known, or a melancholy feeling about time passing, or complex emotions about love, and then they take a longer view, or hold their breath while a new tone, filled with sonorous risk and odd wisdom slowly seeps into an end-line of a stanza or a new section of a poem… There are moments when you hold your breath… and you sit up in pure delight… there are a number of poems in this book that will be read as long as any poems are read anywhere… The last poem, "Oweniny, Upper Reaches", filled with soft, haunting cadences and strange, ambiguous musings on solitude, memory and the meaning of things, is a masterpiece. It displays Clifton’s reticence and technical skill against the need to let the poem soar into a truth that emerges from the gap between the words, and then it allows the words themselves to glide up and out in all their hushed and controlled beauty' - Colm Tóibín, Irish Times on The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.; `His dazzlingly accomplished book is arguably the first great work of Irish poetic post-modernism… His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God…dreams of becoming flesh again… an Irish voice that is utterly contemporary in its restless movement through time and space’ – Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times on Secular Eden.Table of Contents9 To the Next Generation 10 Redesdale Estate, 1956 12 Endgame 14 The Accursed Questions 15 After Mao 16 Across the River 17 Ruins 19 Daytime Sleeper 21 The Egg-wife 22 Therese and the Jug 24 Before Christ 25 A Flight into Egypt 26 Pity and Terror 28 Art, Children and Death 29 Disfavour 31 The Stage-door 32 The Achill Years 34 Horace 35 The Bible as Literature 37 At Racquets 38 The Pit 40 Wreckfish 42 The Dry-souled Man 44 Trance 46 Auden in Shanghai 47 Anabasis 49 from Red Earth Sequence 54 Zhoukoudian 56 Come and See Us Sometime 57 To the Philippians 58 Toronto Suite 59 Ballinafull, 3 July 2014 60 Death’s Door 61 Goodbye to China

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Book SynopsisTess Gallagher’s new poems are suspended between contradiction and beauty. Is, Is Not upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and journeys toward discovering the full capacity of language. Gallagher’s poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop and hover daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Guided by humour, grace, and a deep inquiry into the natural world, every poem nudges us toward moments of awe. How else except by delight and velocity would we discover the miracle within the ordinary? Gallagher claims many Wests – the Northwest of America, the north-west of Ireland, and a West even further to the edge, beyond the physical. These landscapes are charged with invisible energies and inhabited by the people, living and dead, who shape Gallagher’s poems and life. Restorative in every sense, Is, Is Not is the kind of book that takes a lifetime to write – a book of the spirit made manifest by the poet’s unrelenting gaze and her intimate engagement with the mysteries that keep us reaching.Trade Review'The book itself is dedicated to two great loves (the American writer Raymond Carver, and the Irish painter and storyteller, Josie Gray) and its narratives echo through time... Beneath all the places, stories and loves, this poet finds that deep resonance of common essence. There is beauty and grief and humour here; there is a gentle wisdom; there is a quiet, incremental insight that sings us awake. I treasure these poems.' - Jane MeadTable of ContentsRecognition 1 i In the Company of Flowers 5 Almost Lost Moment 6 Ambition 7 Your Dog Playing with a Coyote 9 Ability to Hold Territory 10 Blind Dog/Seeing Girl 12 Doe Browsing Salal Berries 14 ii Little Inside Out Dream, 17 Dream Cancel 19 Stolen Dress 21 Glass Impresses 23 Hummingbird-Mind 25 One Deer at Dusk 26 iii Correction 31 Sully 33 Retroactive Father 36 Earth 38 The Seemingly Domesticated 39 Reaching 41 Right-Minded Person 44 In the Too-Bright Café 45 iv Let’s Store These Hours 51 Season of Burnt-Out Candelabras 53 The Branches of the Maple 56 Yet to Be Born Weather 57 I Want to Be Loved Like Somebody’s Beloved Dog in America 59 While I Was Away 63 v Without 67 Deer Path Enigma 69 The Favorite Cup 70 What Does It Say 71 vi Bus to Belfast 75 Is, Is Not 76 As the Diamond 78 During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading 81 Curfew 83 Eddie’s Steps 84 Four-Footed 86 The Gold Dust of the Linden Trees 88 Blue Eyelid Lifting 91 vii Button, Button 95 Breath 99 To an Irishman Painting in the Rain 100 Encounter 102 Planet Greece 103 Cloud-Path 105 viii Oliver 109 A “Sit” with Eileen 112 Remembering Each Other While Together 115 Opening 117 Word of Mouth 118 Daylong Visitor Caress 123 March Moon Three Stars 125 Afterword: Writing from the Edge: A Poet of Two Northwests 127 Notes 135 Acknowledgments 139

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Book SynopsisIreland. Night. A grotto to the Virgin Mary illuminates a deserted road. Overhead, the soundless roar of the Milky Way’s glittering traffic reminds us of a past that runs parallel to our own uncertain times. Olives ripen in a Portuguese valley. The sound of gunfire approaches a Paris café. Irish women revolutionaries march towards their future. Tigers prowl through County Leitrim's rural townlands, whose old names emerge like neon signposts from the dark: Red Marsh, Small Watery Place, Round Hill of the Boys. Róisín Kelly’s Mercy is an attempt to reconcile her Catholic background with her pagan heritage, transcending the limits of a world in which everything is connected. Both intimate and political, this powerful debut collection combines a passionate exploration of self with an awestruck confrontation of wilderness. Róisín Kelly was born in west Belfast, raised in Leitrim, and now lives in Cork. Her pamphlet Rapture (Southword, 2016) was described by Leanne O’Sullivan as ‘fierce and mysterious, beautiful and compelling’.Trade ReviewRóisín Kelly hauls the mythological up into the contemporary world in this fiercely tender collection. Love and loss are laid bare again and again under constellations new and old, in skies above Greece, Portugal, America, France, and Ireland. Kelly’s intelligence and wisdom ignite each of these poems, whether funeral pyre or beacon in the dark light. Mercy burns with ruthless beauty. -- Zsuzsi Gartner * author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives *What is striking about Kelly’s writing is that she intentionally situates herself within Ireland’s literary tradition, frequently drawing on Yeatsian images like the rose. She is unswerving, however, in her desire to draw romance and realism together, and Kelly revives the symbols of old so that they might be re-spoken in a brazen, drunken voice… Kelly’s poetry is at once tender and savage, steeped in tradition yet brave in expression — she takes readers where they don’t want to go, a feat that most writers attempt, but few achieve. -- James O’Sullivan * Los Angeles Review of Books *Unafraid of sentiment, these twenty poems meditate on lost love, longing, and the tendency of intimacy to arrive as an utter surprise, and dissolve just as swiftly. -- Grace Wilentz * Poetry Ireland Review (on Rapture) *This brief collection shows remarkable emotional range. Kelly leaves the reader afloat on a tide of colour.’ -- Alison Brackenbury * PN Review (on Rapture) *Table of Contents9 Mercy 10 Leave 11 Mars in Retrograde 12 Tom Barry 13 Chameleon 15 Penelope 16 Domínio Vale do Mondego 18 Guarda 20 A Massage Room in West Cork 21 Rapture 22 In America 23 Mary Anne MacLeod 25 Mar-a-Lago 27 La Chalupa 28 At a Photography Exhibition in New York Public Library 29 Rose 30 Glenveagh 31 Storm Warnings 32 Paris, 13 November 2015 34 Tropical Ravine House in Belfast Botanic Gardens 35 Eden 37 The Cave of Melassini 39 Ithaca 41 Oranges 43 Easter 44 Miracle at Standing Rock 46 The Unicorn Children 47 Tigers in Leitrim 48 Poem for a Friend’s Unborn Baby 50 Northern Lights 51 Cosmic Latte 52 irish coffee 53 Mercury in Retrograde 54 Ophelia 56 Amongst Women 59 Wedding Below the Perseid Meteor Shower 60 Tuam 62 Granuaile 64 Notes

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Book SynopsisPia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, and her work has been translated into many languages. She received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for Queen’s Gate, which was published in David McDuff’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow are the first two collections in Pia Tafdrup’s new series of books focussing on the human senses. While taste and smell dominate, the poems are equally about the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives – the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one’s own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations. Pia Tafdrup’s previous series of themed collections was The Salamander Quartet (2002–2012). Written over ten years, its first two parts were The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses, translated by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems. This was followed in 2015 by Salamander Sun and other poems, McDuff’s translation of The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun, the third and fourth parts of the quartet.Table of ContentsTHE TASTE OF STEEL I No return 15 Stages on life’s way 16 In eternal pursuit 17 Unposted letter 19 Winter blood 20 Not even in museums is there peace II Meditation 23 Stopping at the sight of swans 24 Plenty of time 25 Taste 27 Undercurrent 28 Loneliness III Off track 30 Earring 31 After frost-white shell of cold 32 Japanese cherries 33 Night country 34 Metal 36 Bodies without root nets 37 Down IV Crossroads 40 Power cut 42 Pont Neuf 44 Daily choice 45 The pets and their people 46 Time and space V War 49 The darkness machine 50 Razed city 51 The journalist’s question 52 The spring’s grave 53 A before and an after 54 View from space VI Waiting 57 Chink 58 A squirrel bids welcome 59 Despair drinks fire 60 Life with pigeons 62 Frog VII Loss 65 The anonymous part of the churchyard 66 Each in our own flame 67 Porous border 70 A display case filled with night 72 On the other side 73 Greeting from the deceased 74 Snow flowers 76 Residue 78 Threshold VIII Words 80 Crime scene 81 Mother tongue 82 Word and soul 83 Searchlight 84 Johan Borgen – a ritual 86 Poets IX Paradox 89 Harvest 90 Separation 91 The taste buds wake up 92 We are born again 93 Animal smell of light 94 Killer whales 96 Early morning THE SMELL OF SNOW I Breathe in, breathe out 101 Spirit 102 Prana 103 Fresh snow 105 Under cirrus clouds 107 Your fragrance wakes me 109 Freezing fog 110 Lovesick bird II Antitheses 112 Noses, a comparative study 114 Seduced by Gregory Pincus 115 Not a gift 116 Tags in the night 118 Cleaning poisons 120 Them or us 121 Digital odours III Meditation 125 Spring inhalation 126 Exchange of smells 127 Danish cat meets Australian stone 128 Smell of tomatoes 129 Smell-trace of a morning 131 Camellia japonica 132 Benchmarks from a long day IV Bloodstreams 137 Wrong number 138 Under the asphalt the Milky Way 139 Garlic 140 Nose to the ground 141 The cream from China V The five seasons. A catalogue of smells 145 Spring 147 Summer 149 Autumn 151 Winter 153 The fifth season VI Flashes of thought 157 Caught in the act 158 Smell blind 159 The meaning of meaninglessness 160 After showers of bullets in paradise 162 Words without smell VII Vanishing 164 The smell can be parted from the body 165 Reflection on snow and ice 167 Intense lethargy 168 Glenmorangie Highland Single Malt 169 The end of icebergs VIII Inner world, outer world 172 The smell greets me 173 Memory bank for smells 174 Insect wing 175 Nausea – a flashback 177 Stink 179 Flower shop 180 The primordial brain IX One breath makes the difference 182 Attack in Copenhagen 183 Welcome, people live here 184 I want to be a tree 185 Twelve breaths 186 The smell of books 188 There has been prismatic rain 189 The stream of smells from below 191 Notes

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Book SynopsisThe two searching sequences that bookend this collection are not so much elegies as unfinished conversations with friends no longer living – friendships lost or neglected, with their closeness and distances sensitively mapped. This is Philip Gross’s writing at its most hospitable, lit up by a sense of personal address, both tactful and deeply engaged. The sea that is always in sight, between us and beyond us, is more than a metaphor. It is another conversation – with the real sea of this planet, used and abused and in need of our care. Between the Islands is Philip Gross’s 26th book of poetry, and his 11th from Bloodaxe.Trade ReviewAt the heart of all of Gross's collections has been his deep enquiry into and fascination with the nature of embodiment and existence – what water is and does in The Water Table, the role of language, and speech especially, in identity and the self in Deep Field and Later. Now in Love Songs of Carbon Gross tests and feels his amazed way through the mysteries of the multiple manifestations of love and ageing... Such exactitude of feeling and image is typical of all Gross's work, and no less inventively in this new collection. Characteristic too is his focused, sustained approach across the whole book: Love Songs of Carbon asks to be read as a song-book, to use the terms of its presentation, curated for the reader to turn and return to. From poem to poem, pace and metrics quicken and still and quicken again as the book progresses. -- John Burnside & Jane Draycott * PBS Bulletin *Table of Contents11 Edge States 14 Erasures 15 Nocturne with a View of the Pier 23 The Age of Electricity 24 Touched 25 A Wave… 28 Shag, Rampant 30 Himself 32 Firepower 34 Pyroglyphs 37 Three Fevers and a Fret 40 Equator 41 Southern Cross 43 The House of Innumerable Things 45 Canberra Rising 48 The Day of the Things 50 The Floes 51 Restoration 54 Bay Laurel 56 A Kind of Rapture 57 Sea Koan 59 How He Lay 60 Flugelhorn on a Pembrokeshire Beach 62 Dear Barber 63 Of the Silence at the Heart of Pyrotechnics 64 Between the Islands 79 Towards a Line from Guillevic

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Book SynopsisJane Hirshfield’s urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives’ dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees. The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to sustain one another and the earth’s continuance. Finally, it is the human spirit and the language of poetry – loyal instruments of recognition, humility and praise – that triumph in this stunned, stunning accounting, set forth by a master poet whose voice is tonic and essential, whose breadth of inclusion and fierce awareness rivet attention. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield’s structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.Trade ReviewA profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings… It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield…In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness. -- Czeslaw Milosz * Prze Kroj (Poland) *From the opening poem, “Let Them Not Say", to the closing, “My Debt”, the masterful ninth book [Ledger] from Hirshfield is an account of how “We did not-enough” to save the world. Most poems are no longer than a page, though some are considerably shorter (“My Silence” is only a title). They are set against a page and a half of prose in the middle of the book about “Capital” which, for the writer, is language “as slippery as any other kind of wealth”. Through this juxtaposition, Hirshfield urges a reckoning of human influence on – and interference with – the planet. In “As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us", she begins: “As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting” and ends, underscoring humanity’s obliviousness: “We scrape from the world its... wonder.../ Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.” Hirshfield suggests that people are unable, or unwilling, to comprehend their role in their own destruction: “If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief.” Hirshfield’s world is one filled with beauty, from the “generosity” of grass to humanity’s connection to the muskrat. This is both a paean and a heartbreaking plea. * Publishers Weekly *Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human. * The Scotsman *Her poetry is a rich and assured gift… an extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstraction…The poems’ realised ambition is wisdom. -- Alison Brackenbury * Agenda *Table of Contents11 Let Them Not Say * 15 The Bowl 16 I wanted to be surprised. 18 Vest 20 An Archaeology 21 Fecit 22 Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes 23 As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us 24 Description 25 Ants’ Nest 26 A Bucket Forgets Its Water 27 Questionnaire 29 You Go to Sleep in One Room and Wake in Another 30 Chance darkened me. 31 Some Questions 33 Today, Another Universe 34 The Orphan Beauty of Fold Not Made Blindfold * 37 Now a Darkness Is Coming 38 Words 39 Homs 40 She Breathes in the Scent 41 A Folding Screen 42 Practice 43 Cataclysm 44 Paint 45 Heels 46 Cold, Clear 47 Capital: An Assay 49 Falcon 50 Spell to Be Said Against Hatred * 53 Advice to Myself 54 Notebook 55 In Ulvik 56 O Snail 57 Branch 58 Without Night-shoes 59 The Bird Net 60 Corals, Coho, Coelenterates 61 To My Fifties 62 Brocade 63 Interruption: An Assay 65 My Doubt 67 My Contentment 68 My Hunger 69 My Longing 70 My Dignity 72 My Glasses 73 My Wonder 74 My Silence * 77 A Ream of Paper 78 Lure 79 A Moment Knows Itself Penultimate 81 Bluefish 82 Almond, Rabbit 83 The Paw-paw 84 Musa Paradisiaca 85 It Was as if a Ladder 87 Like Others 88 Husband 89 Wild Turkeys 90 Nine Pebbles 90 Without blinking 90 Like that other-hand music 90 Retrospective 91 Library book with many precisely turned-down corners 91 Now even more 91 Haiku: monadnock 92 A strategy 92 Sixth extinction 92 Obstacle 93 They Have Decided 94 Things Seem Strong 95 Dog Tag 96 Biophilia * 99 Amor Fati 100 Snow 101 Kitchen 102 Harness 103 Rust Flakes on Wind 104 Pelt 105 Wood. Salt. Tin. 106 I Said * 109 Ledger 110 In a Former Coal Mine in Silesia 111 Engraving: World-tree with an Empty Beehive on One Branch 112 (No Wind, No Rain) 113 On the Fifth Day 115 Page 117 My Confession 118 Ghazal for the End of Time 119 Mountainal 120 My Debt 125 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisSeán Ó Ríordáin (1916-77) was the most important and most influential Irish-language poet of modern times. He revitalised poetry in Irish, combining the world of Irish literature with that of modern English and European literature, thus adding to the Irish tradition from the other side. His poems ‘seek to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human existence and the place of the individual in a universe without meaning’ (Gearóid Denvir). Many of Ó Ríordáin’s poems came out of his struggle with the isolation, guilt and loneliness of life in mid-century Catholic Ireland experienced in Cork, the native locale also of the poet Greg Delanty, translator of Apathy Is Out. Ó Ríordáin’s poems have been translated by many poets, but until now no single writer has translated the majority of the poems. This collection gives a much more unified sense of Ó Ríordáin’s work, catching the poetry’s verve, playfulness and range and also ‘the music you still hear in Munster,/even in places where it has gone under’. It includes the dark, sorrowful poems Ó Ríordáin has usually represented with in anthologies but also poems of exuberance and celebration, notably ‘Tulyar’, one of the funniest satirical critiques of the Irish Church’s attitude to sex which matches any similar attack by Patrick Kavanagh or Austin Clarke. Seán Ó Ríordáin renewed poetry in Irish by writing out of the modernist sense of alienation, fragmentation and identity, but he also saw beyond Modernism’s confines to the connective matrix of our world.Table of ContentsClár | Contents 9 Preface 11 Introduction (2005-2017) an Eireaball Spideoige (1952) | from A Robin’s Tail Apologia 20 | 21 Apologia An Dall sa Studio 22 | 23 The Blindman in the Studio An Leigheas 24 | 25 The Cure An Cheist 26 | 27 The Question A Sheanfhilí, Múinídh dom Glao 28 | 29 Old Poets, Teach Me your Call Bacaigh 30 | 31 Beggar An Peaca 32 | 33 The Sin An Doircheacht 34 | 35 Darkness An Stoirm 36 | 37 The Storm Sos 38 | 39 Rest Cláirseach Shean na nGnáthrud 40 | 41 The Old Harp of Ordinary Things Do Dhomhnall Ó Corcora 42 | 43 To Daniel Corkery Adhlacadh mo Mháthar 46 | 47 My Mother’s Burial Na Fathaigh 50 | 51 The Giants Cúl an Tí 54 | 54 Behind the House Malairt 56 | 57 The Swop Cnoc Mellerí 58 | 59 Mount Melleray An Bás 64 | 65 Death Ceol 66 | 67 Music Oileán agus Oileán Eile 68 | 69 An Island and Another Island Saoirse 78 | 79 Freedom Siollabadh 84 | 85 Syllabling an Brosna (1964) | from Kindling A Ghaeilge im Pheannsa 88 | 89 O Irish in My Pen Rian na gCos 90 | 91 Footprints Claustrophobia 94 | 95 Claustrophobia An Feairín 96 | 97 The Maneen Seachtáin 98 | 99 A Week Reo 100 | 101 Cold Snap Na Leamhain 102 | 103 The Moths In Absentia 104 | 105 In Absentia An Moladh 108 | 109 The Praise A Theanga Seo Leath-Liom 110 | 111 O Language Half Mine Fiabhras 112 | 113 Fever Tost 114 | 115 Silence Tulyar 116 | 117 Tulyar An Lacha 118 | 119 The Duck Colm 120 | 121 Colm An Gealt 122 | 123 The Mad Woman Bagairt na Marbh 124 | 125 Dread of the Dead An Dá Ghuth 126 | 127 The Two Voices Soiléireacht 128 | 129 Clarity Catchollú 130 | 131 Catology Duine 132 | 133 People File Arís 134 | 135 Return again an Línte Liombó (1971) | from Limbo Lines Línte Liombó 138 | 139 Limbo Lines Súile Donna 140 | 141 Brown Eyes Ceol Ceantair 142 | 143 Local Music Cloch Scáil 144 | 145 Quartz Stone Aistriú 146 | 147 Transformation Tar Éis Dom É Chur go Tigh na nGadhar 148 | 149 After Sending Him to the Doghouse Solas 150 | 151 Light Bás Beo 152 | 153 Live Death Obair 154 | 155 Work Ní Ceadmhach Neamhshuim 156 | 157 Apathy Is Out Dom Chairde 158 | 159 To My Friends Mise 160 | 161 Me from Tar Éis mo Bháis (1978) | from After My Death Clónna Uber Alles 164 | 165 Forms, Above All Údar 166 | 167 Author Barra Na hAille, Dún Chaoin, Lúnasa 1970 168 | 169 Clifftop, Dunquin, August 1970 Gaoth Liom Leat 170 | 171 A Dithering Wind 175 Note on the translator

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Book SynopsisDiana Anphimiadi is one of the most widely revered Georgian poets of her generation. Her award-winning work reflects an exceptionally curious mind and glides between classical allusions and surreal imagery. She revivifies ancient myths and tests the reality of our senses against the limits of sense. Boldly inventive, prayers appear alongside recipes, dance lessons next to definitions. Her playful, witty lyricism offers a glimpse of the eternal in the everyday. The poems in this selection have been collaboratively translated into English by the award-winning British poet Jean Sprackland and leading Georgian translator Natalia Bukia-Peters. A chapbook selection of their translations of Anphimiadi's work, Beginning to Speak, was published in 2018 and praised by Adham Smart in Modern Poetry in Translation for capturing the 'electricity of Anphimiadi’s language' which 'crackles from one poem to the next in Bukia-Peters and Sprackland’s fine translation'. Georgian-English dual language edition. Co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.Table of ContentsIntroduction Sleeping Beauty Poet in the Shower Prayer Before Bathing Iphigenia Helen of Troy Eurydice Persephone Medusa Cassiopeia (Three Back to Front Songs) Dance Lessons (3/4 Time) Studies Lesson Silent Writing Pompeii Soul Autism: Beginning to Speak Mute Braille Because Prayer Before Taking Nourishment Retrospective Why I No Longer Write Poems Winter Loss Dogs Bond Gardening for Beginners The Snake in the Yard Centaur etc Lost Upside-Down Immune Deficiency The Trajectory of the Short-Sighted Surrogate The Choice Tears in the Glass Evening Children The Forest Near the Window Exchange of Prisoners Entertainment Orchestra Reaping Song July Fair Copy Endangered The Second Coming About the Authors

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Book SynopsisTua Forsström is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland’s most celebrated contemporary poet. Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. I walked on into the forest is her twelfth book of poetry, her first since One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (2012/2015), the collection which followed her celebrated trilogy, I studied once at a wonderful faculty (2003), published in English translation by Bloodaxe in 2006. In some sense a continuation of the previous collection, her new book focuses more acutely on the themes of death and grief, and in particular the devastating loss of her beloved granddaughter. It shows her poetry’s tone of inner discourse shifting imperceptibly towards a new and harsh gravity. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented on her work as a whole, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.Trade ReviewForsström has Finland-Swedish modernism in her bloodstream but has kept a coolly timeless tone in her poetry. Her style can with some reason be called classical… What we read slowly reveals its true poetic face – the face of the lament, the elegy… It’s most beautifully and bravely done. -- Magnus Ringgren * Aftonbladet, Sweden *Tua Forsström writes poetry that comes stealing up on you. There is something curious about her poems, a way of adhering to the world that is hard to put one’s finger on. -- Hadle Oftedal Andersen * Klassekampen, Norway *I don’t know what I am going to need on the day that I have to face major loss, but I’m already writing a reminder to myself to go to the bookshelf then and pick out all of Tua Forsström's books. -- Anna-Lina Brunell * Hufvudstadsbladet, Finland *Table of ContentsI II III IV V

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