2008 Winner of the Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry

The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder is an unusual collection of poems that combines craft, innovation, humour and down-to-earth insight in a focused and riveting read that will charm poetry buffs of every stripe.

The poems in The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder subversively and imaginativ …

Shortlisted for the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Atlantic Poetry Prize

George Murray proves once again he is one of his generation's most accomplished poets with The Rush to Here. Diverging from the excess and declamation of his highly praised previous collection, The Hunter, Murray breaks new poetic ground in poems that are dangerous, sharp a …

Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for the 21st Annual Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English
Finalist for an Ottawa Book Award

Part history, part invention, Muybridge's Horse is a sensual biographical long poem that follows the career of Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth-century British-born photographer whos …

The Cold Panes of Surfaces is the moving second collection of poems from award-winning author Chris Banks.

Rooted in the pastoral tradition of Wordsworth, Frost and Wallace Stevens, The Cold Panes of Surfaces describes the Southern Ontario landscape of trains, lakes, moose and pine with unflinchingly sharp image and metaphor. In so doing, he brings …

"Recommended... 3 stars out of 4."
-Stephanie Yamniuk, CM Magazine.

Since its publication in 1993, thousands of children have enjoyed the whimsical text and illustrations of The Ferryboat Ride and its companion volume, The Ferryboat Ride Colouring Book. These bestselling titles have garnered praise from teachers, parents and young people, with more …

Drawing on Canadian geography, culture, history, politics and even national pastimes like hockey, Kathleen Hamilton creates puzzles that celebrate Canadian identity. With their recognizable folkart covers and uniquely Canadian content, Hamilton's O Canada Crosswords books have garnered a devoted fan base of crossword aficionados from coast to coast …

"Matthew Holmes brings us to the end of his rope with a nuanced precision... we are not tethered by what he hitches us to, for as he writes, generously, 'the premise of tying' is, yes and ever, 'to untie.'"
-- Er�n Moure

"A solid debut distinguished by Holmes' far-ranging versatility."
-- Steven Heighton

Hitch is the first collection from New Br …

Shortlisted for the 2007 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award

"Satisfying and resonant... John Degen has written a very fine book—rarely is an uninvited guest so enjoyable."
— Steven Galloway, The Globe and Mail

"The Uninvited Guest offers a fictional and philosophical lens on a wide range of subjects from the lives of professional hockey …

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2006 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD

"Elizabeth Bachinsky is one of those rare poets capable of negotiating poetic forms with rigour and testing their limits, while never losing sight of the strange, dark music of what it means to be human. We should expect great things from her." --The Globe and Mail

Home of Sudden Service is a sad and …

a blewointment book

"bill bissett is my astral twin."
--Margaret Atwood

Many of Canada's most renowned poets salute a national treasure in this poetic tribute to bill bissett. bissett has been a landmark on the Canadian literary scene since the 1960s, renowned as much for his fascinating life as for his poetics. He is best known for his anti-conventi …

Amanda Lamarche's debut collection of poetry is a work of imaginative grace and power.

These poems topple the normal hierarchy of everyday concerns, promoting fears unlikely in the "normal" state of being--the fear of buttons, of dying to the wrong song, of houses built on corners--to the same stage and emotional impact as the more common (perhaps …

Stole This from a Hockey Card is a thinking-fan's hockey book that strikes just the right note for those disillusioned by today's NHL.

Chris Robinson pushes the bounds of both hockey writing and creative non-fiction in this hard-boiled contemplation of where hockey fits into a man's life--whether he be a casual beer-league player who first embraced …

"Sure to score big with soccer fans, especially girls who play the sport themselves."
- Julie Chychota, CM Magazine

Soccer is the most popular sport for more than 350,000 Canadian girls, and their heroines and role models are the talented players profiled in Goals and Dreams: A Celebration of Canadian Women's Soccer.

Goals and Dreams is a detailed, …

NOMINATED FOR THE 2006 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

Matt Rader's debut collection is the fierce and tender retelling of our first "miraculous hours"--those early significant-and-strange interactions with the ones we love and the world we live in. From a world where wild dogs slide like ghosts into homes, water towers are "giant blue bullets unexplo …

"[U]ndeniably fruitious and wild."
- Kemeny Babineau, The Danforth Review

False Maps for Other Creatures expands the taxonomy of insects, mushrooms and trees to inventive meditations on life and language. A fascinating and multi-layered journey across the geography of the imagination, False Maps for Other Creatures is the perfect book for those of u …

Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's new selection of Canada's finest young poets.

Nine years ago the first volume of Breathing Fire was published to rave reviews, introducing 31 of Canada's finest new poets to a wide and appreciative audience of readers. The anthology has since gone into several printings and become a basic text in …

The poems in Anthropy fuse the scope of classical traditions to the disturbing agility of the moderns. Hsu artfully presents the fierce rigour of the philosophical mind engaged with the survival of histories.

Anthropy, Ray Hsu's first book-length collection, is a work of extraordinary range and precision. Excavating sites of human cruelty and endura …

In this book, 19 of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers contribute the narrative pieces that together compose a humorously accurate national reflection. Each author was commissioned by the Ottawa International Writers Festival to write a chapter, set in their local community, in a serial story moving across the country from East to West. Started b …

Teethmarks offers a cutting examination of contemporary society, from the personal to the global. The "fuzzy" simplicity of childhood at the book's outset is deftly shadowed by details of cigarette butts in the girl's room, the scent of burning leaves and teeth marks on Barbie dolls (From the dog, Terry assures her, when he was a puppy.) From there …

In his debut poetry collection, A.J. Levin presents a world in which the past overlays our modern existence, where classical allusions and philosophical observation are married to slapstick humour and carnival: Plato is a blues singer, Tantalus is a prospector in BC, and Descartes wanders around a Montreal amusement park. Monks' Fruit is above all …

Notes on Leaving is a debut poetry collection that is every bit as captivating, emotive and razor-sharp as Laisha Rosnau's bestselling first novel The Sudden Weight of Snow. Rosnau's poignant poems address life in a startlingly direct and honest voice, employing a robust combination of jaw-dropping forthrightness and delicately crafted verse.

The la …

Triny Finlay's debut collection of poetry is a meditation on the self's negotiation with the material world. Finlay pushes poetic form and language, creating images of love and loss that are at once playful and profoundly disturbing. The poems in this collection are rife with metaphorical leaps and unexpected associations: the troubled self as conj …

The Words Wanting Out is the first selection from one of Canada's most respected poets. In 1982 Barry Dempster landed on the short list for the Governor General's Award for Poetry for his very first book, and has since published seven more collections to high praise.

Over this time, Dempster has chosen to keep a relatively low profile, relocating fr …

Bringing Canadian poetry back to the achingly honest tradition of John Newlove and Bronwen Wallace, Chris Banks eschews linguistic showmanship, sketching in deft strokes the foreignness of things familiar.

Framed within the rural landscape of southwestern Ontario and Al Purdy's "country north of Belleville," Banks turns his pen to modern life and th …

Flux is everything a significant debut should be--the arrival of a fresh, confident voice with an extraordinary range of form, direction and style.

From a sequence that captures the art and vocabulary of commercial fishing with careful precision, Denham bursts into a free-flowing and varied narrative based on the angst-ridden and picaresque life of …

Philip Kevin Paul is a rare young poet with the voice of an elder. A WSÁ,NEC Indian from BC's Saanich Peninsula, Paul's oral tradition and life perspective are as old as the hills themselves, but their addition to Canadian poetry is long-awaited and increasingly vital.

Philip Kevin Paul's poems rise from the belly of awareness. With the movement of …

The Witness Ghost is Tim Bowling's most unified collection of poems since his widely praised debut, Low Water Slack (Nightwood, 1995). Here, in an extended sequence of powerful elegies, he traces his feelings of loss, bewilderment and anger at the death of his father, a man who spent his working life as a salmon fisherman on British Columbia's maje …

Pouring Small Fire is a debut poetry collection that intricately regenerates a full life experience spanning from the baseball diamonds, pond-mist and summer grass of Upstate New York to hot and sour soup and middle-aged love on Toronto's Spadina Street. Understandably, throughout this journey much is tragically and regretfully left behind, but Man …

In poems that are both world-weary yet suffused with a moral force, Adam Getty gives us the perspective of the common man, but gives it in an uncommon voice -- a voice of quiet, contemplative directness tinged with the fierce integrity of one who has lived the experience.

Reconciliation, Adam Getty's first book-length collection of poems, is a work …

This well-illustrated book has lay-flat binding for easy use and includes drills, exercises and games for different age groups and skill levels. Topics include footwork, ball handling, mental preparation and coaches' tips. Also included are game action photos, as well as quotes and anecdotes by youth and professional goalies and coaches, including …

Author Kathleen Hamilton combines world references with clues reflecting a distinct Canadian cultural identity. Spellings are Canadian too, and the words are derived from our history, geography and pop culture. Books 2 through 5 have giant weekend-size puzzles for even more crossword fun.

A stunning first book from one of the Chinese-Canadian community's most insightful and grippingly honest young voices, Intimate Distances is a deep exploration of the vicissitudes of interpersonal connection and family relationships. Lam writes poignantly and vividly about her background: her father's early death during her childhood, the end of ma …

Cruise Control knows no borders, hurtling down BC's Coquihalla Highway, sightseeing in Regina, tearing through Windsor, "plunging beneath the Earth" in Chicago, visiting some eccentric characters in Germany and even exploring the "non-presence (i.e. lostness)" of Atlantis.

Ken Howe's reckless intellect and insatiable curiosity for everything -- Cana …

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 …

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 …

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 …

In Salmon Boy: A Legend of the Sechelt People, a young boy is captured by a Chum salmon and brought to the country of the salmon people-a dry land beneath water where "the salmon people walked about the same as people do above the sea." The boy lived with them for one year, and his captivity becomes a source of learning that will ensure the surviva …

Author Kathleen Hamilton combines world references with clues reflecting a distinct Canadian cultural identity. Spellings are Canadian too, and the words are derived from our history, geography and pop culture. Books 2 through 5 have giant weekend-size puzzles for even more crossword fun.

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 …

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 …

The books are filled with lively illustrations by Anne DeGrace, as well as facts and quirky trivia about Canadian actors and athletes, history, geography, books and authors, music, movies, animals and place names. Ages 8 and up.

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 …

Author Kathleen Hamilton combines world references with clues reflecting a distinct Canadian cultural identity. Spellings are Canadian too, and the words are derived from our history, geography and pop culture. Books 2 through 5 have giant weekend-size puzzles for even more crossword fun.

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 …

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 …

"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 …