Head Full of Sun celebrates poetry and language's rich spiritual heritage by weaving together the biblical and the personal. Carla Funk uses biblical forms and stories to explore the human condition and give blood and bone to the spiritual. These poems lament, question and sing praise as they wrestle with the divine.

In the main component of this co …

City of Vancouver's Poet Laureate for 2009-2011

In 1999 Brad Cran exploded onto the Canadian literary scene with the release of Hammer & Tongs, a milestone anthology of the country's newest generation of poets. It became the bestselling book in the history of the Vancouver International Writers Festival and was followed by a cross-Canada tour with s …

In April, 2000, when the celebrated Canadian poet Al Purdy died, Alberta writer Tim Bowling decided that the best way to pay homage to Purdy would be to devote an entire book to the many fine poets still living and writing in Canada. Where the Words Come From is a comprehensive collection of eighteen interviews, in each of which a younger, less wid …

With its juxtaposition of Canadian prairie with the downs of southern England, with its movement between reality and dream, night and day, Norm Sacuta's brilliant debut poetry collection, Garments of the Known, uses both traditional verse forms and linguistic fracture to create a most passionate landscape.

That landscape is always half one world, ha …

With Blue Himalayan Poppies, Jay Ruzesky collects his best poetry of the past seven years. Acclaimed as one of Canada's most interesting and innovative contemporary poets for his first two books, Am I Glad to See You (Thistledown, 1992) and the highly praised and influential Painting the Yellow House Blue (Anansi, 1994), Ruzesky has produced his be …

Billie Livingston's poems drive straight for the sharp edges--from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives and friends grappling with the torturing frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death.

These jagged re …

In his fourth collection of poetry, Tim Bowling continues his exploration of loss, heartache, joy and wonder. Employing a supple lyricism that is at turns tender and fierce, he draws on his experiences as a father and son, on his memories of childhood, and on his journeys into landscape as ways to explore the deep mysteries at the heart of consciou …

Sharp, accessible and witty, Slant offers a fresh exploration of issues of race, sexuality, and life in the global village. The collection alternates between three main themes of childhood and family in the Chinese diaspora; gay sexuality, community and rites-of-passage; and voyages literal and metaphorical. Slant asks "how do we belong?" and answe …

In As Though The Gods Love Us, Goh brings a lifetime of love, despair and passion to his work with the skill of a master craftsman. Amidst some of the world's most exotic locales, he uses graceful and lyrical language to understand his world and to bring us closer to ourselves and each other. From Vancouver neighbourhoods to the tropical darkness o …

Written mainly during the poet's travels through India, Basmati Brown represents a spiritual and social journey through Punjabi cultural roots while retaining a clear connection to a home in British Columbia. Phinder Dulai's poems have the ability to seduce with liquid words, caressing the reader with Punjabi rhythm and speech pattern in harmony wi …

Rasa theory, part of Indian genre theory and Sanskritic poetics, describes an elaborate typology of nine essences or emotions, ranging from adbhuta (wonder) to raudra (fury) to karuna (sorrow) to santa (serentity). This first collection of poetry by Kuldip Gill is rich with these emotions.

Gill, a Sikh woman who immigrated to Canada in 1939, creates …

"Many of Stewart's poems honour the ordinary and domestic; others get dressed up and strut their stuff. The female body and mind, from adolescence to maturity, bask in their glory, seducing the reader from cover to cover."
--Lorna Crozier

In this first poetry collection, Shannon Stewart spans a century of female experience, from an 1890s Victorian h …

This collection by the award-winning writer Goh Poh Seng is the first volume of his poetry published in North America. It spans more than thirty-five years of his work and traverses cultures as well as continents.

Goh's settings range from the wharfs at Singapore's harbour to a backwater bar in Papeete, Tahiti, from a park in Halifax to the streets …

In a letter to his brothers in 1818, John Keats remarked on a curious expression in vogue among his friends: "they call drinking deep dying scarlet." The poems in this collection, inspired by Keats' misspelling of "dyeing," explore the ways in which we drink deep from life, searching for beauty and passion despite a melancholy awareness of our own …

Diane Tucker writes from experience and "the sustaining power of memory" in this first collection of poems. She writes of falling in love with the wrong person: "For you I ride without a seat belt, willing to be thrown clear at first impact"; her daughter at four months, whose fingertips "are globes of amber salmon roe/ cool smooth/ and salty"; and …

In the title poem of this extraordinary first book, Sally Ito remembers her childhood in Alberta, when she set frogs in the rain barrel and watched them swim like stars in a "pool of still and nether depths/ whose mirrored surface was all."

Those imagined depths become a powerful metaphor in these poems, which reflect Ito's experiences as a young Ja …

In the language of the Fraser River fishermen, "low water slack" is that particular tide when everything slows down: the wind, the river, even the human heartbeat. It is a time to reflect, to count the stars in Orion's belt, to listen for the slow creak of the heron's wings. During low water slack, the challenges of life on the river give way to so …

Poems by Order of Canada inductee and founder of Grain magazine Ken Mitchell.

The two prose pieces that constitute The Black Debt deploy rhythms, cadences and repeated motifs to create an overall structure that is pre-eminently musical. This is a Large Print edition.

A/Z Does It is a collection of conceptual wordplays and concrete puns, by an innovative writer who literally draws the line between impractical fictions and improbable art.