Poetry Books

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 SynopsisKevin Spenst''s much-anticipated debut collection of poetry opens as a coming-of-age narrative of lower-middle class life in Vancouver''s suburb of Surrey, embroidered within a myriad of pop-culture and post-Mennonite. Jabbering with Bing Bong interrogates memory and makes its way into the urban energies of Vancouver. Language is at play with sit-com sonnets and soundscapes of noise; videogame goombas and an Old-Testament God; teenage longing within the power chords of heavy metal andthe complicated loss of a father to schizophrenia. Jabbering with Bing Bong, chronicles the heartbreaking and slapstick pursuit of truth in the realms of religion, mental health, and poetic form itself. The poems in Jabbering with Bing Bong are formally inventive, emotionally charged, and teeming with ideas. Belief and disbelief rub up against each other in this startling and flawless debut collection by Kevin Spenst. Jabbering with Bing Bong''s urban and suburban-scapes vibrate with a controlled hysteria; a music at turns ebullient, ribald, somber. These important poems do not redeem so much as allow the possibility of redemption: Sometimes words/mean nothing and everything. Open your mouth and see.'' (Jen Currin) In Jabbering with Bing Bong, Kevin Spenst playfully-and masterfully-confronts the preacher of the urban pastoral. For us, he gives a deserved and surreal middle finger to the comic absurdity of the evangelist. Infused with 80s pop culture, folklore, psychology, and thetransient mythos of the changing ''nonesuch'' of place and people, Spenst''s poems platform a don''t-mess-with-me feistiness and versatility. Fearless, attentively probing, and sonically sharp, he is a rare counter-theosophist rhapsodist. His poems reveal the labour of an unyielding, gentle soul. Indeed, Spenst''s Jabbering... is the work of a remarkable shepherd. (Sandra Ridley) Inside a twisted TV-to-organism takeover, Kevin Spenst provides further proof that the best writing these days is in the practice of poetry. Hang on tight as you are winged deftly through the human strains...curiosity, sexuality, death, religion and striving, it''s all here. ''Best of all you can jump towards the heavens on the trampoline in bouncing rain.'' Something for everyone: a story of Surrey as a history of traffic; family life of the scruffily psychotic; the phrenology of things that go David Lynch in the draft beer night; and gibberish too! (Dennis E. Bolen, author of Black Liquor, Anticipated Results)Charged with energy and delivered with confidence, Jabbering with Bing Bong is a compelling read. Kevin Spenst''s muscular vocabulary, vigorous pace and nimble references to cultural details enliven his exploration of topics ranging from adolescence to God to Fenris wolf. Skepticism is offset with humour and compassion, and holding it all together is grief for a dead father whose troubled life still haunts the son and informs his writing. (Sarah Klassen)

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Book SynopsisFurther Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is a continuation of the columns and essays that comprised Stuart''s 2005 release, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer. Again, equal parts literary memoir, reckless tirade, and unsolicited advice for the aspiring writer, Further Confessions is drawn largely from Stuart Ross''s notorious Hunkamooga column, his blog entries, essays for subTerrain magazine and other online venues. We bring them together here in their collected brilliance: alternately snarky, sincere, touching, honest, and always opinionated, Stuart''s confessions are essential reading for any literary confessional. This volume offers its readers a roller-coaster journey into the mind of one of Canada''s most committed small press activists. Praise for Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, vol. 1: Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is a wonderful book-funny, outrageous, and acute. I''ll even say it''s the best short-essay collection about the writing life I''ve read in ages. (Lynne Van Luven, Malahat Review) For a quick and dirty breath of fresh air, it''s difficult to beat renegade urban poet Stuart Ross''s latest effort, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer ... No reformed baby boomer or slumming trust-funder, Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn''t about flowers and meadows, it''s about blood and guts. (Stephen Knight, Quill & Quire) The book is a must for anyone working as a poet in Canada, with standout pieces on the politics ofwriting for free, open mic readings, poetic bitterness, chapbook and zine publishing, and the requisite but never-funnier grouch advice to young poets, salubriously titled Stop Bugging Me Already!'' (Prairie Fire) ...no pulled punches here ... this is writing that works because, as with all good confessions, it''s from the heart but comes by way of the brain. (Vancouver Review)

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Book SynopsisAssdeep in Wonder is a collection of new poems that explore the idea of identity in a myriad of contexts: personal, sexual, cultural, national, literary, and poetic. The poems are raw and immediate, exploring themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures. Selected Praise: "Gudgeon's first poetry collection is a quirky valentine to irreverent readers, full of stark and pretty imagery, wry quips, and glorious bursts of vulgarity. ..." (Foreword Reviews)

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Book SynopsisA finalist for the&nbspAlfred G. Bailey Prize,&nbspIgnite&nbspis a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. Born into a strict Mennonite family, Abe Spenst's mental illness spanned three decades in and out of mental institutions where he underwent electric shock treatment and coma-induced insulin therapy. Merging memory and medical records, Kevin Spenst recreates his father's life through a cuckoo's nest of styles that both stand as witness and waltz to the interplay between memory, emotion and all our forms of becoming. Praise for Ignite: "... with a fearless layering of voice,&nbspIgnite&nbspis upfront and unswerving. A novel-esque torrent tracing a troubling history of illness, part confrontation and part chronicle, this collection is daring with its dark narrative. Here is a willingness for, and enviable strength in, extending poetic range.&nbspIgnite&nbspheals and ascends. There are books that need to be written and this is one of them. This is a collection which gives more and more with every read." (Sandra Ridley, judge, Alfred G. Bailey prize) "An outstanding follow-up to Spenst's excellent first collection. (Winnipeg Free Press)" A selection of poems from Ignite won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry.

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Book Synopsis"Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion.&nbspMost of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response.&nbspThe blade melts ice via friction and pressure. I drifted away from skating but the language is imprinted in me, too, a tracing, a line extending beyond the margins." (from Serpentine Loop) These are engaging and poignant poems about life on and off the ice.

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Book SynopsisSelected and with an Introduction by Stuart Ross Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn't exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest. Bad Engine brings together mostly revised versions of about one hundred poems selected from Dennis's published work, along with several dozen new poems. This volume, introduced and edited by Dennis's long-time friend, the poet and editor Stuart Ross, marks a milestone in the career of a homegrown, no-bullshit, tells-it-likes-he-sees-it populist bard. Here the reader will find a rollicking tale of drinking with racists, poignant prayers for quiet nights with lovers, raw narratives of childhood abuse, defiant anthems of a body broken by sports injuries, a mindful meditation about a stoned dragonfly, and the not-quite resigned laughter of a man smashing away at a keyboard for four decades and becoming neither rich nor famous. Bad Engine is Michael Dennis being human.

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Book Synopsisda Vinci Eye Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards. Escape from Wreck City is a debut collection of poetry from Calgary author John Creary. There are poems about nature, poems about love and relationships, poems about living in the city, and poems about traveling the world. And all at once they capture the thrill of being fully engaged with the world, keenly observing each moment and event that constitutes being human. Whether it's following the "wounded insomniac" through the "desert lushness of sage and creosote" or hot lovers who "flicker bare back beneath the full moon, panting" or drifting, moribund couples on empty streets moving like "dead meat or heavy traffic" under leaves of an "electric yellow" Creary's language is potent, lush, playful and witty, demanding of attention. Sharp with insights that cut, lancet-like, to the core of the matter, the poems in Escape from Wreck City like the people who inhabit them are ecstatically alive. Advance Praise for Escape from Wreck City: "John Creary's poems growl, roar, whisper, chortle, purr and shout. He's a writer stoned on words, constantly surprised by what they can and can't do. Language's energy-clean, dirty, pulsing, spiking, minimalist-vibrates through Escape from Wreck City." - Tom Wayman, author of The Order in Which We Do Things

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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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 SynopsisWinner, E.J. Pratt Poetry AwardShortlisted, NL Reads, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and Raymond Souster AwardLonglisted, First Nation Communities READ AwardFrom the author: I cannot let the story of Crow Gulch — the story of my family and, subsequently, my own story — go untold. This book is my attempt to resurrect dialogue and story, to honour who and where I come from, to remind Corner Brook of the glaring omission in its social history.In his debut poetry collection, Douglas Walbourne-Gough reflects on the legacy of a community that sat on the shore of the Bay of Islands, less than two kilometres west of downtown Corner Brook.Crow Gulch began as a temporary shack town to house migrant workers in the 1920s during the construction of the pulp and paper mill. After the mill was complete, some of the residents, many of Indigenous ancestry, settled there permanently — including the poet's great-grandmother Amelia Campbell and her daughter, Ella — and those the locals called the "jackytars," a derogatory epithet used to describe someone of mixed French and Mi'kmaq descent. Many remained there until the late 1970s, when the settlement was forcibly abandoned and largely forgotten.Walbourne-Gough lyrically sifts through archival memory and family accounts, resurrecting story and conversation, to patch together a history of a people and place. Here he finds his own identity within the legacy of Crow Gulch and reminds those who have forgotten of a glaring omission in history.Trade Review“Crow Gulch announces an important poet. The differences Douglas Walbourne-Gough explores between class and ethnicities are as hard as Newfoundland’s rock, as shifting as the foundations of a forcibly resettled Crow Gulch. This book is a conversation between a rude landscape, the displaced or dispossessed, and a narrator searching for belonging.” -- Stephanie McKenzie, author of Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology“One of the most captivating elements of Douglas Walbourne-Gough’s Crow Gulch is the powerful humanism running through the collection.” -- James M. Fisher * Miramichi Reader *“A small stone, warm to the touch, mostly smooth but with just enough rough, satisfying edges to run your thumb along. That is the texture of Douglas Walbourne-Gough’s debut poetry book, Crow Gulch. It is a book of ‘hard beauty.’ . . . It is a stone worth keeping and returning to.” -- Emily Skov-Nielsen * The Fiddlehead *“Walbourne-Gough is so aware of and precise with words. . . . He disinters the houses, neighbours, and family from their scrapped, shunted-aside history, while reimaging and releasing his own past. Crow Gulch is superb.” -- Joan Sullivan * The Telegram *“Engaging, tender, and astute. . . . Crow Gulch shows us a poet with a distinct style and pioint of view.” -- Annick MacAskill * Atlantic Books Today *

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Book SynopsisWatch out for those who have, seek, and hold onto power.So drinkAs the fanged stoat from the rabbit's napeAs though from a flagon of river waterShaken with ancestral ashAs if it isn't knowledge you seekBut some osmotic soul-foodTo be filled up with blursThat might later resolve themselvesInto memoriesTo return to where you really liveWith changes in your bloodLyrical yet shot through with experimental and political veins, the poems in Soft Power are engaged with both the here-and-now of a world on the brink and the hope of something better, a planet where "generations hence / Inactivists will bathe under a sun made safe / By the collapse of oil-can economics."Traversing badlands, sandhills, prairies, suburbia, Miami, London, Dublin, Paris, and beyond, Cole's voice revels in questions of travel while resonating with the unheimlich "Canadalienation" of his expatriate existence. Whether bog surfing, gallery hopping, bug hunting, or meditating on the "strange genre" of national anthems, the poems in Cole's long-awaited follow-up collection to his critically acclaimed Questions in Bed exist in a searching exchange with the world, both entering and being entered by it.Trade Review"The voice in Stewart Cole's Soft Power is like an animal turning circles in high grass, prepping the ground prior to bedding down. Agitated, aware, and nowhere at home, these poems know why they're adrift, uprooted, abandoned to a transcient language of visitor, caretaker, scribe, and witness." -- Ken Babstock, author of On Malice"Soft Power is an ars inveniendi, an 'undirected love' for the world that refuses the falsifying aspirational ubiquity of late capitalism in favour of a mutual mediation between subject and object. With a critical eye growing weary of 'needing to be useful' and sensing 'what is is more than what's here,' this restless, wry rumination has no expectations, leaving readers to wonder if they're alive in the same negatively capable way. Stewart Cole's poetry is a kind of doubt, still in search for what might humanize us in a barbaric age." -- Nyla Matuk, author of Stranger"Soft Power accomplishes what I thought was no longer possible. It is political without being prescriptive; it is clear without being simplistic, it is sure of itself without being sure of its conclusions." -- Richard Kelly Kemick * The Fiddlehead *

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Book SynopsisOn CBC Books' list of 29 works of Canadian poetry to watch for in spring 2020In Tanja Bartel’s riveting poetry debut, the bucolic Vancouver suburbs clash with the interpersonal. The reader dips into the lives of individuals whose day-to-day is anything but peaceful, altered by luck and choice, fear and failure. In poems that light upon themes such as regret, guilt, and human empathy, Bartel highlights the arbitrary nature of life and the demons that persist within.Unsentimental and blunt, but ultimately forgiving, Everyone at This Party scans the suburbs and tries to make sense of our private selves.Trade Review"The long party of modernity is almost over, the food and drink all but done. Yet still revelers rage into the night light-headed, quixotic, and heedless. Everyone at This Party is alive to the strange and provocative peculiarities of this moment. These are surreal and revelatory poems in which 'the predictability of eulogies offers zero comfort' while a 'neighbour removes the earth’s crust with a pressure washer.'" -- Adam Dickinson, author of Anatomic"Everyone at This Party delves into a person’s relationship to their environment, their peers, and themselves in a seemingly cynical and yet humorous, honest, and lighthearted way." -- Emma Rhodes * Miramichi Reader *

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Book SynopsisThe richness of memory is a curse and a gift.Twisting and turning against the soul-sicknesses of late-capitalism, Chris Hutchinson's new collection of poems scrolls through myriad moods and aesthetic guises, by turns hallucinatory, despondent, and serene. Authenticity and artifice collide and collude. Political and personal boundaries blur as do the categorical divisions between content and form. Imagine an architecture of breezeways, a freeway of exit ramps, a literature of repurposed literary conventions, the past "re-presented" in endless waves of arrival.Here we find a nostalgia for modernist disjuncture, there a yearning for symbolist depth, and everywhere a fondness for surfaces which, ironically, coax the reader to peel back the stylish veneer.Haunted by a weird range of historical personages, while travelling from Houston to the moon and several places in between, the lyric "I" bears witness to its own endless destruction and reconstitution.At once escapist and socially engaged, Hutchinson's poems enact the ephemeral and fluid nature of our linguistic experiences, tracing those ecstatically tortuous processes by which we might sometimes find, even in the midst of loss, the value of our lives beyond the spheres of war, toxic rhetoric, and neo-liberal commerce.

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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 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 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 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 SynopsisConceived as an archive of wisdom written by a disabled man for his children, You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations gives voice to the experience of living in an ableist society: "Why does it hurt when emotion spills out of a body? How does emotion spell ‘body’? What does it mean to be good? Why is the surplus of beauty everywhere? What is the password?" Weaving together reflections on fatherhood, Walt Whitman’s place in American history, art, and the lingering effects of past trauma, these ringing and raw poems theorize on the concept of shame, its intended purpose, and its effects for and on disabled body-minds.Trade Review“Striking not just because of the relentless questioning, but because those questions are always pressing at the core of what it means to be here together. The clarity comes in realizing how few answers we actually have.” -- Jordan Abel“Like an AI algorithm gone haywire, Shane Neilson's work, with its beautifully bewildering rush of questions, breaks open the half-truths, the denials and evasions that we draw on when giving an account of ourselves to ourselves. It's a vision of consciousness as crossexamination, and a perfect expression of our polarizing era.” -- Carmine Starnino

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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 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 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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