Poetry / Poems

Book SynopsisOh my goodness. Did you ever get to thinking that "down on your luck" isn't just an expression? And that what we need here is a bigger statement? Something that adequately describes the scope of the situation? Like when your ex-wife spends all of her time angrier than a five-dollar pistol at everything on the planet, but mostly at you (well, really only at you, and she brings back your record collection, but she sets fire to it on your porch and the flames spread to your house and that just proves what you've said all along: that she is crazier than a box of frogs. Or when your ninety-year-old stick of a father uses his gnarled up knuckly fingers to apply "the nut twister" on you every chance that he gets. And you haven't been with a woman for a very long time and about the only chance you will ever have of getting laid again is to crawl up a chicken's ass and wait. This shit is dire. Well, what I mean is that "down on your luck" doesn't quite cut it when bad luck has become a way of life. You just have to remember: You can have everything you want in this life. Provided all you want is a stained mattress and a hangover. Skin House is a story about two guys who end up in the same bar they started out in. Maybe they're slightly better off than they were at the start. Or maybe not. One has a girlfriend though. They both have a little extra cash, enough to order nachos whenever they want to without going through their pockets first. They're not dead, and that's something right there. And they're not arrested, which is the quite surprising part.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. The acclaimed author of the memoir, In the Slender Margin, turns her focus back to poetry in this amazing and condensed work of prose poetry. The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor's hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists. PRAISE FOR EVE JOSEPH'S PREVIOUS WORK: "To Joseph, it makes as much sense for the dead to appear as spirits glowing in midair as for them to be inert and terminated." (The New York Times) "Poet and essayist Joseph (The Startled Heart) serves up luminous, poetic prose in this thoughtful look at dying, grief, burial, and how animals react to loss, among many related topics." (The Publishers Weekly) "In the Slender Margin is intended as an exploration rather than a balm or solace, though it will no doubt be those things for some people. Its resonance comes, rather, from its intelligent open-endedness, its unflinching, simultaneous embrace of death's reality and persistent mystery." (Globe and Mail) "I was haunted by the gentling towards innerness and by the way the poem slowly opens up to the world at large. White Camellias' is a geography of the moment before the moment passes." (Barry Dempster) "The Startled Heart is a memorable collection that tugs on death's sleeve, sometimes with the innocence of a child, sometimes with the ache of the unforgiving." (Georgia Straight)

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Book SynopsisRaymond Souster Award nominee. Finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima. This long-poem memoir tracks the author's experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself. Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, Trauma Head disturbs and disorders language and syntax to reconcile appearance with experience. Advance Praise for Trauma Head: "Elee Kraljii Gardiner's Trauma Head is a quicksilvered mirror-a startling and exquisite sequence of poems. The unspeakable' reflected is intensely fierce and sublimely sensual. Difficult, devastating, and meticulously crafted, this work is a rewarding chronicle of persistence through the trauma of recovery and return. Speech and soma are disrupted, shattered, unsheathed and reshaped-and they shimmer with Kraljii Gardiner's luminous strength and control." - Sandra Ridley, author of Silvija (2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist)

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Book SynopsisIn her uncompromising follow-up to 2012's Sympathy Loophole, Jaime Forsythe offers a breathless cascade of evocative somethings: mysterious sounds, faint rumblings, biographies real and imagined, tabloid rumours, nagging memories, an animal stirring, a baby waking, a storm threatening, an escape hatch beckoning, and an inexplicable machine coughing into motion somewhere in the distance. The poems in I Heard Something comprise a surreal menagerie - at times funny, chilling, and tender - of what it is to be a human at this very minute. Forsythe writes startling poems for the startled. Cup a hand around your ear as you read these poems - it'll enhance the experience.

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Book SynopsisSpanning more than 25 years, I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You gathers work from three distinct eras of Jay Millar's development as a poet: the wonder years of the 1990s culled from a variety of self-published micropress publications, most of which are hiding in special collections; poems from his trade books issued between 2000 and 2015; and, new poems that have emerged during his present condition as one of Canada's most progressive co-publishers. The broad view that this collection offers enables an appreciation of Millar's work as both an idiosyncratic, herkyjerk chronicle of small press culture and a multifaceted mode of questioning how we judge sensations, failures, affections, and relationships. However irreverent he may seem, Jay Millar possesses a disarmingly honest, inventive sensibility closely attuned to the everyday, the overlooked, the transient. Be careful where on your bookshelf of Canadian poetry you place this volume: it might very well set others askew.

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Book SynopsisOn the Count of None is the first full-length poetry collection by Kingston poet Allison Chisholm. The surprising poems in this audacious debut explore the relationship between the serious and the absurd, the formal and the illogical, whimsy and threat, and meaning and tone. Chisholms poems, whose content is often inspired by guidebooks, podcasts, birth notices, and other unlikely sources, are pretty sneaky: they seem to always be trying to get away with something. Sometimes they try to get away with sneaking in invented words and idioms and facts. These are poems whose language looks both ways before licking the envelope.

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Book SynopsisIn Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, Stuart Ross continues to ignore trends in Canadian poetry, and further follow the journey he began over four decades ago with his discoveries of the works of Stephen Crane, E. E. Cummings, Nelson Ball, Ron Padgett, Victor Coleman, Tom Clark, Nicanor Parra, Joe Rosenblatt, and David McFadden. Over the years, his influences have snowballed: Lisa Jarnot, Alice Burdick, Richard Huttel, Opal Louis Nations, Joanne Kyger, Bill Knott, Max Jacob, Larry Fagin, Heather Christle, Charles North, Emily Petit, Paul Guest, James Tate, Valéry Larbaud, Joe Brainard, Matthew Zapruder, Harryette Mullen, Dara Wier, Dag T. Straumsvåg, Mark Strand, Wislawa Szymborska, Mary Ruefle, John Ashbery, Sommer Browning, Jim Smith, Benjamin Peret, Renee Gladman, and more. In this eclectic, pleasurable gathering of poems and sequences, Mr. Ross unapologetically leaps from howls of grief and despair to zany incursions into surrealism and the absurd. He embraces this panoply of approaches to respond to our cantankerous existential dilemma. All that, and it's structured after Bela Bartók's String Quartet No. 4! Get a room and enjoy.

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Book SynopsisBounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper's fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing. Measured and meticulously weighted, these poems are playful and poignant as they navigate the strange terrain around losing a loved one: how the past and present blur together, the dead simultaneously here and missing, and how joy moves inevitably forward, as if on wheels.

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Book SynopsisHoward White says, "Some poets try to capture rare butterflies in their writing. The things I go after are more like houseflies." The comparison does him no favours but it is true inasmuch as his writing is notably unpretentious and concerned with common and everyday realities. That is, if your everyday realities include such things as sinking docks, driving bulldozers, arguing about sand, baseball, pouring without a funnel, dancing in the street, thought guns, coition, brainfarts, not sending sympathy cards, not shooting your father, and sea otters. In this book he also writes quite a bit about writing, not so much the kind of personal writing he does in this book so much as that he has done as an "accidental chronicler" for "a galaxy of voices" he acted as a "conduit" for in his work as a memoirist and publisher.

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Book SynopsisMark Laba's second full-length poetry collection - and his first in seventeen years - recreates the structure of the old variety shows he watched on TV as a child. Much of the imagery plays across the broad spectrum of these popular cultural tropes, albeit many lost or forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. In The Inflatable Life, the reader will find a little singing, a little dancing, a little drama, a little comedy, a little experimentation, all rooted in a veritable grab-bag of far-ranging influences. Laba draws on everything from gritty pulp fiction to Borscht Belt humour, from dime-store ventriloquism to twelve-cent comic books (the long poem "Tolstoy's Leech Farm" is riddled with Laba's own comic drawings). He hurls these surprising and sometimes shocking vaudeville narratives from the peak of the Jewish Alps, and even his most extreme language experiments entertain. Some may call these surreal poems literary atrocities while others hail them as lyricism for an impossible century, but if Mark Laba didn't write these poems, no one else would.

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Book Synopsis2020 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD SHORTLIST In acclaimed short-fiction writer Heather Birrell's rollicking debut full-length poetry collection, Mr. T, Joni Mitchell, Fidel Castro, and the poet's mother (among others) barge in to distract and derail the poet's dreams. The poems in this book are playful, hallucinatory, and often funny. They explore the far-fetchedness and perseverance of love between friends and family members, the importance of libraries and locked mental health wards, and ways to live with meaning in the face of a looming apocalypse. Birrell's poetry lines-weaving through an acrobatic breadth of forms and tones-are both precise and plainspoken, and showcase an odd, intuitive logic, embracing the surrealism of this world we're stuck in.

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Book SynopsisPineapple Express is Evelyn Lau's eighth collection of poetry.&nbspThe collection is rooted in the mind and its disorders.&nbspDepression, anxiety, and obsessive thinking have been explored widely in fiction and non-fiction, much less so in poetry. "Pineapple Express" explores moods, medications and side effects, capturing the flatness of depression while making the language sing. It also explores the notion of mid-life, in all its manifestations: physical changes, psychological upheaval, the notion of becoming "invisible," and mortality.

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Book SynopsisIn language that twists together hobo slang and flights of troubadourish diction, Hearts Amok scrutinizes the history of the love sonnet in Surrey, England and simultaneously celebrates the tickings and tollings of one love-struck heart in Surrey, British Columbia. In the words of Chelene Knight: "Kevin Spenst's Hearts Amok will shake you to your core. Everyday questions of love are earned, won, lost and then ultimately answered through the whirlwind of constantly spinning verse." Examining the underpinnings of love, this book journeys from the Middle Ages to the present where Spenst dates his way through Vancouver to finally find the love of his life.

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Book SynopsisThere is something of the elemental in Outlasting the Weather, Patrick Friesen's Selected and New poems 1994-2020. Over time, the elements shape new worlds. Wind carves a stone bowl, the earth receives our dead. The poems are archaeological digs through layers of a life lived without the certainty of belief. Covering twenty-six years and selected from eight previous volumes, the poems in this collection reject wisdom; rather, they are infused with the kind of knowledge that comes from having weathered many seasons yet still remaining open to wonder. Perhaps, writes Friesen of his late father, you are in that grave where we laid you but I am child enough to think the sky. And for a moment we all look up, transported, filled with the endless possibilities offered by a poet for whom poetry is a way of thinking. The volume wraps up with, "New Work," twenty-seven new poems that display the poet's vast and prodigious talents.

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Book SynopsisLow Centre of Gravity finds Michael Dennis in familiar territory. You'll laugh. You'll cry. Dennis' poems continue to be the narratives of movies you'd like to someday see. These poems ask the questions you'd really like answered, sauntering into the room and staking claim. The story-telling continues, the good, the bad and the sadly tragic. With Low Centre of Gravity Dennis remains "direct, curious, pissed off and honest".

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Book SynopsisThe book-length prose poem The Headless Man takes up Georges Bataille's subversive image of the acéphale and turns him into an outsider "everyman" to explore the paradoxes of identity, the body, and desire. This oddly fractured tale centres the monster, both human and inhuman, recognizable yet strange, in a labyrinth of experience. The Headless Man awakens in a place that, although based on our own world, is unfamiliar to him. Moving through this strange landscape, he must make sense of it through his actions, striving to determine whether there is a place for him in a world not made in his image, or whether he must imagine something different in order to be. Having no head, he cannot speak, see, or hear in the usual ways, so he must learn to do these things using other parts of his body-which leads him to a fuller sense of himself. In this gothic, picaresque narrative, laced with horror and humour, Montreal surrealist Peter Dubé addresses his concern with queer challenges to identity and sexual boundaries, exploring questions about insider and outsider, what constitutes the "normal," and what is relegated to the realm of the "monstrous."

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Book Synopsis"A town is a tin of children in an ocean," writes Anna van Valkenburg in her debut poetry collection, Queen and Carcass, a rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the multiple contradictions we each embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths, especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable, using Bertolt Brecht's maxim "Do not fear death so much as an inadequate life" as a touchstone. At once ecstatic, meditative, and grotesque, the poems in Queen and Carcass confront some of the most fundamental existential questions.

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Book SynopsisScofflaw is a long poem, a playful exploration of Indigenous-Settler relations amid globalized pressures. For the most part, the poem is a lyrical dialectic flowing between a shadowy figure known as Scofflaw and an enigmatic "we." The content ranges from the effect of pesticides on Manitoba butterflies to the reworking of a John Newlove poem on Indigenous peoples to Native remains beneath the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The text culminates in a "lexicon standoff," where Scofflaw uses metaphysical means to avoid a character assassination, battling against the culling of words from the language.

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Book Synopsisil virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto. These responses to daily news and eclectic media posts encompass dogs (lots of them), Zambonis, jazz and blues, Jackie Gleason, mathematics, thermodynamics, and geography (real and imagined). These miniatures are Lillian Necakov's most spare poems, but each is jam-packed with explosives: anger, grief, love, need, and a foraging for ink.

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Book SynopsisGeoff Inverarity writes poems for people who don't like poetry (and those who do). In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents, hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself. But it's not all shattered dreams and sad-luck stories here, there is hope and optimism too - in the future, in the Now, and in the heat and power of the coming generations. And there are poems of memory, poems for grandfathers and aging aunts, children and lost loves. Inverarity also probes the the multitude of possibilities "in this fallen world of compromises," gently reminding us that "we're stockpiling for the short term / the long term we don't know. / No matter how much you prepare / there's always something new looming / like the Unexploded Grief Bomb." It is a world where we struggle to give back the past, to finally get to the point "where the past does not exist" and "where all history is now." The penultimate entry is "Mars Variations," a wonderfully extended suite of complementary poems, a time-traveling fractal narrative: a sci-fi horror movie for the ears, referencing works as disparate as Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Wordsworth's "Prelude," and horror films like Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man along with nods towards the various iterations of Godzilla; and of course the classic 1962 "Mars Attacks" Topp's Bubble Gum cards - which form a framing device. The sequence explores the relationship between time, fiction, and facts; between public history and private experience. The book concludes with a short Epilogue, assuring us that "one day, all the broken things will be mended."

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Book SynopsisInfused with the spirit of Charles Bukowski, these down to earth poems by Downtown Eastside warrior poet, Henry Doyle, take readers on a hard-scrabble journey, starting from Doyle's early years as a runaway from foster homes, an incarcerated youth, a boxer, and a homeless wage-earner living in shelters and on the streets of Ottawa and Toronto, to his eventual arrival in Vancouver to work in the construction labour pools before landing work as a custodian and maintenance man. Doyle's potent combination of gritty realism, weary wisdom and wry humour make No Shelter an unforgettable collection.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Mouthfuls of Space offer a dissociative journey through the life of a once homeless recovering drug addict and victim of childhood sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. Tom Prime's debut solo collection was written under the haze of antipsychotics later discovered to have caused many of his symptoms. His hypnotic, surreal voice reveals his transition from the street into the low-paying menial labour of factory work. There is beauty here too, and deeply dark comedy: a sprite-like being imagines his hallucinations as a deeper reality, where indescribable creatures coexist with "hyenas dressed as real estate agents" and those who march in "the skeleton parade." Mouthfuls of Space explores trauma and the dehumanizing enterprise of factory work with sensitivity but also desperation. The voice in these poems struggles to breathe but finds a certain comfort in "the mother-shadow of trees, the old light of vibrating stars."

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Book SynopsisThis Here Paradise begins with an epigraph from the work of Welsh poet, Menna Elfyn: "your language a hymn/ lost in the multitude,/ requiem for a world/ that's forgetting how to be". As if in response to this "forgetting," Wharton's poems move from the personal to cross a panorama of hopeful attentiveness. Clear images combine with a distinctive sense of rhythm and music to shape a collection both straight-ahead readable and carefully thoughtful, serious and playful. There is a recognition that paradise includes both highs and lows. The presumptive duality of these two conditions suggests a tension that resolves through the book's five sections, as Wharton opens a suitcase of birds and watches them soar over a landscape alive with radiant, open waters.

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Book SynopsisAnnette Lapointe''s poetry collection SWIM: INTO THE NORTH''S BLUE EYE explores the gothic anxieties and bodily discomforts of constant travel. Some of its journeys are global, but many are more regionally oriented: from one prairie city to another, between small towns, from city to cottage country, from prairie to coast.The collection also follows Lapointe''s family migrations around western Canada, particularly into fly-in communities of northern Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 70s. Those settlements, which make every trip monumental, provide a frame for years of restlessness and desire, and for meditations on the still world and its swarming occupants.Poetry.

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Book SynopsisReckoning is one long poem in search of itself, its own meaning. A synecdoche of verse, segments calling and responding to each other, like jazz musicians riffing back and forth in a late-night smokey speakeasy. Snippets of conversation make it through the air, across the space that seems vast even in its closeness. We are big, we are small, there is eternity in a birdcall. This is end times, yet beginnings surround us. They are there in memory, in grief, in happiness and in song. Here is a master poet taking stock in later years. Adrift and grounded, lost in memories that are alive in the present and also lost to history, the artist's mind cannot help but speculate and wonder about the navigation of it all. How does one chart the course? How did one chart the course? And what was discovered along the way? Joy, awe, grief, loss, wonder . . . "disappearing into the mind of the dream, / that opening," and now all rolled into one ball of what, wisdom? "what was my early life, banging away at that padlocked gate? . . . is this where the return begins? starting over in old age, body falling apart according to plan, and no blossoming wisdom, kneeling on the muddy riverbank, thirsty once again for mind, . . . and when the brain falters the stories skew once more into something unfamiliar, something from long before you, and those pieces won't be put together again, not ever, will they?" What connects us with the past?&nbspMemory and story.&nbspEach fragment a part of the whole. Without it we exist in isolation.&nbspFriesen's deep and careful observations make Reckoning both intensely personal and universal.

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Book SynopsisLonglisted, Raymond Souster AwardAn on-the-scene report of a childhood abroad. A child's vision of real-world events made real (and unreal) by the presence of his father.Memories of snow falling on Quebec City's copper roofs; scientists tracking the location of a sinking submarine near the Russian Coast. Children flipping bright kopeks at a dancing bear outside a flea market; a translator awaking from a suicide bombing with ears ringing, surrounded by destruction. A young boy watching his father report the news on TV as hostages hold wet handkerchiefs to their mouths, trying not to breathe too much.Across the street, a red sun sets the windows of the Hotel Ukraina on fire. The tallest of Stalin's seven sisters. We huddle on the couch in our pyjamas. My mother holding a remote in her lap. Static sky, bad reception. The TV clearing its throat. My father's body, cut in half, moving up and down the screen.This remarkably confident debut collection offers three long prose poems, each divided into 19 sections, fusing images of bucolic coastal summers, a father fixed by a television broadcast, and the colours of a Moscow winter with vividly depicted scenes of gunfire, media scrums, and live reporting. In this unusual hybrid of the personal and the historical, Dominque Bernier-Cormier tenders alternating perspectives on what is said, what is seen, and where the silence begins.Trade Review"A correspondent not only tells of stories happening far away — distant in time, space, and experience — but also pursues their own experiences in the larger weave of history. In Correspondent, Bernier-Cormier seeks to answer a vital and impossible question: what can the individual do when crushed by the immense forces of war and violence? He answers by crossing borders and entering his own new language of poetry in this love letter from a son to his father." -- Kazim Ali"How impossible languages are, how they fail to deliver on the promise of connection. Yet, through the deft weaving of multiple voices, the assembling and dismantling of rhythm and pattern, Bernier-Cormier finds a loophole. The poems in Correspondent come together to form a rare reportage, where the as-yet-unspoken becomes audible and signals transmit via other means: dream, song, prayer." -- Sheryda Warrener

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Book SynopsisLonglisted, Gerald Lampert Memorial AwardOn "A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould":"The poem sits up at its greasy-spoon counter and recounts its tale, a kind of cryptic plain-speech, an inverted code, all the more puzzling for what it plainly says: 'Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved,’ as Robert Frost said." — Jeffery DonaldsonAbsorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure. Ritual Lights takes the reader on a journey through an underworld that is both familiar and uncanny, a space between death and life where one nourishes the other. Shadowed by the aftermath of sexual assault, Joelle Barron places candles in the darkest alcoves, illuminates mysteries, and rises again to an abundant Earth where the darkness is transformed into rich loam.These poems follow the speaker through grieving and loss, heartbreak, repression, and discovery, seeking, never finding an answer, but finding meaning in the work of continuing. A meditation on trauma and identity, deeply vulnerable and reserved, funny and full of rage, Ritual Lights explores the sometimes messy and ugly, but always necessary, nature of survival.Trade Review"Contemporary, stunning and deeply personal." -- Étienne Lajoie * Maisonneuve *

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Book SynopsisShortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry PrizeStanding in the granite of his own voice.Remembering your gathering body.Hello, My Forever Ago, don't worry,you won't be reading this much longer.You will have already returnedin a snowcloud, which is suggestively,fashionably, only ever one second old.Yes, Darling, it's me, it saysas proof that in spacethough there are many silences,fleeting isn't the oppositeof infinite, but its perfect match.Four years ago, Ali Blythe arrived with Twoism, a remarkable debut collection, every line shimmering with life and shivering with erotically charged glimpses of completeness. Now in Hymnswitch, Blythe takes up the themes of identity and the body once again, this time casting an eye backwards and forwards, visiting places of recovery and wrestling with the transition into one's own skin. Readers will find themselves holding their breath at the risk and beauty and difficulty of the balance Blythe strikes in the midst of ineffable complexity.Combining a stark, tensile precision with musicality that lulls and surprises, Blythe, a surreal engineer of language, has once again created an unusually memorable collection. Imbued with emotional awareness, these stunning poems will imprint readers with startling images and silences as potent as words.Trade Review"Ali Blythe's Hymnswitch wears the good, solid boots of language to trek through the unsendable here of daily decision. Here the little bent nails of punctuation assemble to testify to the bruised thumbs and split silence of hammerblows and timbercrack. The hands of the clock, like those little nails, tick past in a recitation of clarity." -- Derek Beaulieu

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Book SynopsisShortlisted, Trillium Book Award for Poetry and Gerald Lampert Memorial AwardIn this confessional debut collection, Matthew Walsh meanders through their childhood in rural Nova Scotia, later roaming across the prairies and through the railway cafés of Alberta to the love letters and graffiti of Vancouver. In this nomadic journey, Walsh explores queer identity set against an ever-changing landscape of what we want, and who we are, were, and came to be.Walsh is a storyteller in verse, his poems laced with catholic "sensibilities" and punctuated with Maritime vernacular. In These are not the potatoes of my youth, Walsh illuminates the complex choreography of family, the anxiety of individuality, and the ambiguous histories of stories erased, forgotten, or suppressed. Readers will find moments of humour, surprise, and a queer realization that all is not what it seems.Trade Review"It seems improbable that a book of poetry can consistently surprise, but such is the case with These are not the potatoes of my youth. These vital, necessary poems place an invigorating pressure on normative assumptions and perceptions about love, family, friendship, and the world. This is a book that will delight and move readers." -- Rhea Tregebov"Matthew Walsh dares readers to enter an urban world in which queer rurality is important, creative, poetic, and crucially disruptive to the norms of urban queer life. If the ‘here’ of this book isn’t yours, then get ready. If it is, then wait no longer for a book that captures the impossible queerness of the Maritimes and its effect on more arrogant locales." -- Lucas Crawford

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Book SynopsisFinalist, A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and Raymond Souster AwardIn tarot, the Fool represents continual beginnings, not being able to see or think past the excitement and potential of a new start. The Fool is also associated with zero — a literal loop.Like Anne Carson writing poetry in the style of the poet alchemist Arthur Rimbaud, Jessie Jones renders her reflections with acerbic brilliance. In her debut collection, she examines the sensual, cruel, pleasing, and depraved state of being human in the twenty-first century. All pro, she’s ready to stage a coup d’état.Reflective with a kind of circular logic edging toward a darker surrealism, these poems are at times comically satirical, but always grounded in fresh ethos. A pleasure of language and circumstance, where passengers on a boat peer through "a thick, absorbent mist" and the poet moves "through/the city like a bundle of kindling./ All day I wait for a bit of friction/ to transform me," The Fool sets its sights on a world riddled with panaceas designed to course-correct our lives.Trade Review"The Fool is electric proof that the fear of not becoming is the only useful fear. The speaker of these poems introduces us to unforgettable places where 'sound has the skin of an apricot' where 'the half-life of [...] ardour is a thousand inner deaths.' In The Fool, to be human is to be ever-emerging. The speaker here makes resolutions only to find each piece of herself is Hydra, is Medusa's hair, a tentacular force propelling her in a million possible directions. With Jones, we learn that arrival is not the conclusion of desire but an extension of it. I'll go under any spell she casts." -- Sarah Burgoyne, author of Saint Twin"Like watching a hitherto unknown surrealist film through shivering Venetian blinds, to read The Fool is to be invited to consider the unfixed apertures and shapes of images and words. The botanical, kaleidoscopic language of this stunning and strange debut drew me into its depths, where I found a continuous refusal of the female body, mind, and psyche to be sayable or knowable, i.e. 'kept.'" -- Emily Skillings, author of Fort Not

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Book SynopsisHow is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in.Each line a strip of skin torn from me.In A thin fire runs through me, Kim Trainor interrogates what it means to exist, to navigate the quotidian amidst the constant drip-feed of political and ecological disasters. Written over an intense nine-month period in 2016 and 2017 amidst the stresses of heartbreak, depression, and the progression of a new love, Trainor’s exquisite sequence of short poems offers meditations on different hexagrams in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Incorporating fragments from reportage on current events, Jewish liturgy, and lyric poetics, she latches her readers to the present while acknowledging the inescapable presence of the past. A thin fire runs through me grapples with Trainor’s own personal circumstance while contemporaneously documenting the tenor of our times, suggesting that “We peer into other lives; we absorb words, headlines, violent events. We see and we don’t see. These scraps are unintegrated, unintegratable, yet we carry them.”Trade Review“With a fierce and deft yearning, Kim Trainor’s exquisite work returns with the evocative incantation that is A thin fire runs through me. These poems sensuously entwine human connection with grief, amid hopeful, verdant longing. Reading this propulsive book is to feel anointed, a guest of honor in an orphic space, with Trainor as your visionary guide in a complex and gorgeous terrain.” -- Jennifer Lovegrove, author of Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes“Everything happens at once in Kim Trainor’s A thin fire runs through me — the headline and the garden, the I Ching and the Song of Songs, stripping away and piling on, worry and grief and desire. With the steadiness of a daily spiritual practice, the short sections gather and explore, and what accrues is a powerful, transformative sensitivity that both haunts and inspires.” -- Adam Sol, author of Broken Dawn Blessings“Scattered lament stalled in depression, seared anew with love’s joy, Trainor contends with the fierceness of constant change. Now the I Ching says of A thin fire runs through me: 49. Ko/ Revolution (Molting) becoming 58. Tui/The Joyous, Lake.” -- Jane Munro, author of False Creek

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Book Synopsis“I used to think this was a book about a disguise,but now I know that it’s a book about translation.”According to Cormier family lore, Pierrot Cormier escaped a British prison the night before the Acadian Deportation by disguising himself in a dress. In the invigorating, transliterative Entre Rive and Shore, Dominique Bernier-Cormier uses his ancestor’s escape to ponder what it means to live between two languages. Writing in a blend of English and French that evokes Chiac, “a living thing, growing gills, a voice from the future, prophetic and clear,” Bernier-Cormier probes the mutability of language and of translation. A heady mix of English renderings of a single French poem, a Franco-fusion mélange of reflections on Acadian history and identity, and meditations on the evolution of language and the rapper Young Thug, Entre Rive and Shore exhibits “an eloquence we aren’t attuned to.” The result is protean, an exhilarating collection that reassesses what it means to live between two identities, two worlds, two languages. Trade Review“From poetry to essay to diary entry, and with lucidity and frankness, Bernier-Cormier addresses the ever-delicate issues of language and history that are so crucial to Acadian identity. Blending legend with family history and a series of fantasist self-portraits, Entre Rive and Shore offers a mooring point between two cultures and two realities. Brilliant in its form and content, Entre Rive and Shore offers a refreshing and innovative view on our future as Acadians.” -- Herménégilde Chiasson, author of To Live and Die in Scoudouc“With turns of language both striking and gentle, Entre Rive and Shore invites us into the tender and haunted space between English and French. Translation ‘weaves itself into a dress of wind’ as we are swept up in its violence and distorted offerings of home. Bernier-Cormier’s use of metaphor and imagery is ‘bone-bright’ and will fill you with awe.” -- Selina Boan, author of Undoing Hours“The poems and texts of Entre Rive and Shore unravel family memory and history to create a book of the future, inhabiting the fissure between languages that in fact joins and nourishes them. Bernier-Cormier opens a world of possibilities to us, where poetry’s act of thinking crosses linguistic borders to give us a newly liveable world.” -- Erín Moure, author of The Elements“Throughout this recueil of reflections, Dominique Bernier-Cormier redefines and brings a certain justice to the internal bilingual battles that torment Acadians and Cajuns alike. Bernier-Cormier’s stunning mix of history, outer space, and pop culture is seductive. His words are refreshing, vivid, and sometimes surreal — making it difficult to put Entre Rive and Shore down before finishing it in its entirety.” -- Vivianne Roy, Les Hay Babies

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Book SynopsisRaw, confessional, and often messy, Terrarium continues Matthew Walsh's exploration of Queer identity and desire against the lonely highs and lows of depression and addiction. In this new collection, Walsh begins where their debut collection, These are not the potatoes of my youth, left off. Writing in their trademark conversational style, Walsh wanders from Toronto parkettes with remnants of magnolia leaves to California, a long/black cocktail dress the night lights/amethyst and citrine against the arm/muscle of the sea, their voice intimate and exposed, a whisper between friends or lovers. And then, when they ruminate on influences and themes as diverse as the poetry of Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn MacEwen, the vagaries of Instagram, and the reimagination of Miss Havisham in a Toronto bathhouse, they offer readers the opportunity to think deeply or laugh loudly, reaching out to close the gap between us.

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Book SynopsisEscaping from the evils of the modern world into the vivid colours of a bird's plumage, Michael Trussler's 10:10 plunges into the mystery and horror of living at the beginning of the Anthropocene. How can there be both terrible violence and extraordinary beauty in the world? How can birdwatching coexist with genocide? How can nature be loved and destroyed all at once? Trussler's poetic voice is delightfully fluid: moments and images from movies, aesthetic theory, and animal life collide in each poem, sometimes in a single line. From lyrics to prose, high art to emails, Trussler sifts through the shards of society to seek refuge in the beauty and strangeness of words, the beguiling richness of images, the intensity of the natural world.

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Book SynopsisThrough poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat. Inspired by Pablo Nerudas Elemental Odes, this wide-ranging and diverse collection plays with the yin and yang of everyday existence, employing lyricism, narrative, humour and an occasional dash of irreverence and fun through visual play with text and typography.

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Book SynopsisAfter moving to Vancouvers West End in 2014, The Human is drawn to a small body of water called Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Daytime visits, with a surprising array of wildlife, are quietly revelatory; but so is suddenly waking in the night when owl hoots, or geese startle in alarm at otter on the prowl. The Human savours this up-close relationship between wildlife and fast-paced urban living, questioning the interface between the urban and natural world. Upon learning the lagoon was named by nineteenth century Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson, of Mohawk and English origin, Johnson then becomes a presence in the narrative. Pauline Johnson wrote evocatively about it: Among the wild rice in the still lagoon/In monotone the lizard shrills his tune. During five years of intimate counterpoint between urban living and wildlife, The Humans notions are challenged and altered. Questions of how significant the specificity of place is to story, how our relationship to nature is altered by urban living, and how we might return to the natural world. Reminiscent of Henry Thoreaus Walden Pond, perceptions about nurturing, fear, inventiveness, delight, death, protection, humour, even tenderness change as the lagoon has exposed what being human in the twenty-first century actually means.

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Book SynopsisDevolution is Kim Goldbergs eighth book and her personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. Using absurdism, surrealism and satire, Goldberg offers up businessmen who loft away as crows, a town that reshapes itself each night, a journey through caves so narrow we must become centipedes to pass. Goldbergs canvas holds both the personal and the political at once, offering rich layers of meaning, but with a playfulness reminiscent of Calvino or Borges. Each imaginative narrative will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down.

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Book SynopsisIn this haunting and disarming debut, McConnell recalls a dark time in BCs history to give poetic voice to the many forgotten residents of the infamous Woodlands School. In her debut poetry collection, Shannon McConnell explores the fraught history of New Westminsters Woodlands School, a former lunatic asylum opened in 1878 which later became a custodial training school for children with disabilities before its closure in 1996. Partially set in the 1960s and 70s, The Burden of Gravity uses personas to imagine residents lives, giving voice to those who were unable to speak for themselves, to shift focus from the institutional authority to the experience of residents. As poetry of witness, the collection uses a grounding tone to excavate the individual experiences through traditional narrative, ekphrastic and experimental erasure forms that elicit an array of emotions, from heartbreak to anger. Drawn from archival research, The Burden of Gravity, challenges readers to consider how we, in the aftermath of deinstitutionalization, choose to remember institutions like Woodlands School.

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Book SynopsisBlending lore and magic with contemporary questions around belief and beauty, power and fear, this stunning new poetry collection from Kelly Rose Pflug-Back is a grimoire for our times. Spanning centuries, The Hammer of Witches reaches from present-day urban dystopias and the unlikely enchantments that they harbour, to medieval Norway, where the first Christian king waged war on the countrys gender-nonconforming wizards. Macabre imagery, speculative themes, and everyday mysticism blur the distinction between the real and the unreal, challenging modern concepts of beauty, power, and fear. In her first full-length collection, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back weaves together the magical and the monstrous, the sacred and the profane, to make sense of a world where primeval forests are clear-cut to build parking lots, and where it often seems that the gods have all gone to live behind the veil.

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Book SynopsisTaking the name of a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary shaking, Essential Tremor undertakes an exploration of the body that holds disruption at its heart. The captivating and timely poems in Essential Tremor attend to many bodiesthe body of the world, changing, unreachable, at times momentarily illumined; the human body, loved, ill, mourning, passing or passed from this world; and the divine body, questioned, encountered and not, sought by people from the margins in the body of a biblical palimpsest. In her third collection, award-winning poet Barbara Nickel blends sonnets in sequences and scattered stand-alones with more formal innovations and extensionserasures of the notes accompanying da Vincis anatomical drawings, lines found from Beethovens autopsy, and the musings of poet isolating in the midst of a twenty-first-century pandemic. Nickel asks her readers to consider the many facets of the body, how it finds the words, lines and poems that together form an essential life, a gift among our deepest wounds and terrors.

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Book SynopsisMany of the poems in this book come out of me determination to write about the imperiled Pacific Ocean during my tenure as the City of Victorias Poet Laureate. During that time, I was also raising my special needs son and my mom and father-in-law both died. The writing expanded to other creatures on the planet, and the harm we are doing to them, through a collaboration with Robert Batemans paintings and through work with the Royal BC Museum and their National Geographic Photography display. The poem I wrote in response to Robert Batemans Circus Train, Night Hawks contains within it the metaphor of the train as an extinct creature moving along the prairie and I began to feel the train and the idea of circus caries the metaphorical context of what this book, and the poems in it, explore. That is, endangered animals, lost moments, and events as in circuses themselves, unusual or neurodiverse people who are circus performers, all contained within this endangered beast, the train, or the earth. I watched The Greatest Show on Earth as a child and feel The Last Show on Earth and apt title for a book exploring death, disability and the imperiled world.

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Book SynopsisIn his debut full-length collection, former City of New Westminster Poet Laureate Alan Hill delivers a deeply revealing and heartfelt depiction of a lifetime of mental illness -- both his own and that of his brother. IN THE BLOOD traces the brothers'' relationship from childhood to adulthood, and examines how his brother''s diagnosis became inextricably intertwined with Hills own mental health struggles. As his brother spends much of his life in and out of institutions, Hill grapples with his own guilt, shame, and loss. Moving from the past to the present and back again, In the Blood looks for meaning and comfort in the confusion of childhood and the untethered searching of adulthood. With stark vulnerability, Hill reveals the intricate and often hidden bonds that are both broken and created by mental illness and pushes toward a form of relief, release and recovery.

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Book SynopsisIf books come from books, as David W. McFadden has claimed, then TIME OUT OF TIME is a clear example, arising, very deliberately as it does, out of Etel Adnans astonishing collection entitled Time. The poems in TIME OUT OF TIME are in love with the poems in Adnans Time and, it seems, Paré has fallen in love with Times author, Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned poet and painteror perhaps it is that she has merely fallen in love with Adnans words. Parés poems mirror the form, the rhythm, the shape, the short, brief lines in her own spare missives that are the poems in Time. This mirroring increases the intensity of TIME OUT OF TIME, creating a rare intimacy in Parés collection. Parés work pays homage to Adnans work. Both collections pay homage to the world of the lesbian in the twenty-first century and to the world of the small poem. Using clear, crisp, well-defined language in visibly defined geometries, in stanza after sweet-smelling stanza, Paré attempts to examine the trials of this new century, the hush around the word lesbian, the hush of the worlds general collapse.

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