Susan Telfer's intense poems in Ghost Town are possessed of a wild brilliance all their own. There is a raw, unruly, exhumed energy coming to the surface of these poems, which is the source of their power. This book's themes are identity, a struggle for self, invention and re-invention, against the undertow of family dysfunction, of ancestral influences, of grief and loss. They are rooted in the West Coast, explicitly located on the fault line as well as in dreams. Sometimes poetic forms offer t …

Waiting for the Albatross is Sandy Shreve's fifth collection of poetry. It features found poems composed using fragments from a diary her father, Jack Shreve, wrote in 1936 when, at age 21, he embarked overseas as a deck hand on a freighter. The five-month trip took him from Halifax, through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia; then back again, docking at Montreal. Shreve's poems are illustrated with photos from the journey, taking the reader into the life of a y …

Miranda Pearson's exquisite poems in The Fire Extinguisher reveal the individual psyche in a way that is both painstakingly beautiful and generous. No detail is too small to find a place in her constantly shifting vision of how we live in the contemporary world. Conscious of how vulnerable she is in this detached gypsy life many of us are forced to live, she longs for something more stable, more permanent. To find an answer, she travels the globe and asks the question, how do we cope with the un …

Lyric poems that are open to readers; Strong imagery; Poems that describe the need to build "bridges" between people; Interesting accounts of a single woman in Italy; The difficulties involved in learning to age gracefully; The act of writing as a means of living with courage in crossing the narrow bridge of life. COMPARATIVE TITLES: The Road in Is Not the Same Road Out by Karen Solie (Anansi, 2015); The Wrong Cat by Lorna Crozier (McClelland & Stewart, 2015); The Waking Comes Late by Steven Hei …

This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re- …

An early member of the avant-garde TISH group, which turned Canadian poetry for the first time to a focus on language, Marlatt’s career has spanned five decades and a range of formal styles and concerns. Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems offers Marlatt’s perceptual and Vancouver-centric work of the 1970s, her feminist writing of the 1980s, and her later collaborative work. Intertidal collects a broad selection of this poet’s groundbreaking work, including poetry from sixteen publish …

In 1776, at the age of sixty-four, an embittered Jean-Jacques Rousseau took to rambling. Feeling rejected, neglected, and condemned, he turned his back on the society in which he had never managed to feel at ease, and found peace in wandering the fields outside Paris, noting interesting flora and fauna, and ruminating on his life and career. Rousseau jotted down his musings on playing cards he carried in his pocket; these notes would form the basis for his last book, Les rêveries du promeneur s …

Combining text from government questionnaires and reports, lyric poetry, and photography, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes examines the possibility of a privatized prison system in Canada leading up to then Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative government passing the Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51. This legislation criminalizes Indigenous peoples’ attempts to protect their traditional and unceded territories from ecological destruction by classifying their actions as acts of te …