Poetry in Transit 2017
Created by ABPBC on October 3, 2017
Collecting Silence
The poems in Collecting Silence arc through youth, love and loss, to maturation, aging, peace. Wide travels throughout Asia, Europe and North America bring Narwani face to face with the oppressions of poverty, caste and religion, as well as the seductions of magical new beauty. The poems take the reader down the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, to Chopin’s garden; a village of untouchables in India, to remnants of the Berlin Wall; from the Pietà and the Mona Lisa to Magritte’s The False Mirror …
Foreign Park
Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes), 2016
Foreign Park situates itself in an epoch where prior assurances of the natural world's solidity begin to slip. Poisons enter the Fraser River Basin. An oil slick approaches by night engulfing a fishing vessel, leaving its captain in open waters. Page after page, Foreign Park makes strange with its inhabitants. As it unfolds, it plots itself along the Fraser River overlaying myth and historicity with present day. These calm poems detail …
If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You
If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You is a collection that travels through both time and place, liminally occupying the chasm between Canadiana and Americana mythologies. These poems dwell in surreal pockets of the everyday warped landscapes of modern cities and flood into the murky basin of the intimate.
Amidst the comings and goings, there's a sincere desire to connect to others, an essential need to reach out, to redraft the narratives that make kinship radical and near. These poems are l …
Acquired Community
Jane Byers' Acquired Community is both a collection of narrative poems about seminal moments in North American lesbian and gay history, mostly post-World War II, and a series of first person poems that act as a touchstone to compare the narrator's coming out experience within the larger context of the gay liberation movement.
The "parade" poems such as "Celebration Was a Side Effect, 1992" explores the important role parades have played in the queer movement and how they have transformed from act …
Once in Blockadia
In this collection of long and serial poems, Stephen Collis returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes—and stands in the path of pipelines, where on Burnaby Mountain in 2014 he was sued for $5.6 million dollars by energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers glossed Collis’s writing in court …
What the Soul Doesn't Want
In her newest collection, Lorna Crozier describes the passage of time in the way that only she can. Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm.
Thin Air of the Knowable
Shortlisted 2017 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award * Longlisted 2017 Raymond Souster Award
An elegiac and incisive debut that blends poems of social justice with poems of ordinary life.
In her first collection, Thin Air of the Knowable, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa's life — West Coast, Caribbean, prairies — ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations. A road-trip poem moves from prairie winter, "an icy scatter of gravel / the moving centre of thi …
Frequent, small loads of laundry
In her debut collection, poet Rhonda Ganz, brazenly mixes darks with lights and dares to peg out the quirky and bizarre, both real and imagined, with all seams showing. From spontaneous combustion to suicide, from pterodactyls to pumpkin pie, Ganz is obsessed with the way people behave in moments of intimacy and domesticity. With her sharp wit and painterly abstractions, she pairs the banal with the absurd to expose the flaws of love –the frayed edges of belief and despair. Strung up, these po …
