The title of Carleton Wilson's debut poetry book, The Material Sublime, contains an apparent contradiction that is central to the collection's aim--to investigate how the intangible, spiritual sphere of existence is connected with the material world of nature and human society. With finely honed, immaculate craftsmanship and an extraordinary abilit …

Few figures in Canadian history have attained such an iconic status as Louis Riel. Celebrated Metis poet Gregory Scofield takes a fresh look at Riel in his new collection, Louis: The Heretic Poems, challenging traditional conceptions of Riel as simply a folk hero and martyr. By juxtaposing historical events and quotes with the poetic narrative, Sco …

In Kerosene, her debut book of poetry, Jamella Hagen weaves individual memories into a narrative that charts the process of orientation and growing maturity within shifting geographical locations.

Patterned on the author's own experience, the collection follows the story of a young woman's life, encompassing the beauty and harshness of a childhood s …

"I grew up in a blue-collar town ten minutes down the road from a white-collar town. And I've spent most of my life uncomfortable in both places."

With these opening words, accomplished poet Tim Bowling outlines the central tension that acts as a vital force in his newest book, Tenderman—the dichotomy between the sensitive poetic observer and the …

Kevin McNeilly's debut poetry collection, Embouchure, compiles the intertwined lineages of trumpet players who came to prominence in the States during the "pre-bop" era, loosely defined as the period between 1890 and 1939. This series of vignettes betrays a broad and detailed knowledge of the players' lives and work, yet reads like a collection of …

Sex, booze, war and wordplay collide loquaciously in Err, the latest collection from innovative and accomplished poet Shane Rhodes. Equally amusing and stunning with his joyful manipulation of language and his stark portrayals of disease and oppression, Rhodes tackles everything from AIDS to martinis with style, wit and clarity.

The book is divided …

Earworm, the second book from acclaimed poet Nick Thran, expertly combines wicked cleverness, adept craftsmanship and a uniquely insightful perspective in an entertaining yet substantial tour de force. Building on the success of his debut, Thran has enhanced his compelling pop culture rhythms and distinctive voice with bolder formal experimentation …

In this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning, critically lauded debut, Rob Winger's sophomore collection, The Chimney Stone, bends the contemporary lyric into startling new shapes. Concentrating on a splendid mess of headlines, wars, politics, relationships and artistic influences, Winger's ghazals ask us how to negotiate the complex …

In Triny Finlay's second collection of poetry, she asks what it means to let in the ghosts of the past. Will memories loosen the frame of a life? Will subtle fears take over? Finlay plumbs the depths of family life as she negotiates the territories of ancestry, love, and new motherhood: a great-grandmother who went to bed for seventeen years; a lov …

Patternicity contains a suite of poems that won a 2008 CBC Literary Award and follows the author's debut book of poems, The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008). As a physiologist currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, Johnstone's work is informed by a scientific approach, his own corporeal environment and an explorati …

"I have to wonder why poets are always expected to write exactly what they wrote the last time they wrote a poem. So I wrote the poems a little differently this time. That's okay too."
- MillAr, interview published in The Danforth Review

Jay MillAr's poetry resists classification. This book, being a collection of Other Poems, is an assemblage of see …

Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, the follow-up to Ray Hsu's award-winning first collection, Anthropy, is the second book in a prospective trilogy that explores the "grammar of personhood."

Whereas Anthropy approached the human condition through the prism of first-, second- and third-person perspectives, Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon uses the grammat …

How do we reconcile story with fact? What must one lose for the other to exist? In this debut collection, Rowe explores the nature of mythology and how it morphs in time to retain cultural and personal significance. Folk tales, supernatural creatures, family histories and personal elegies come together to expose the cohabitation of the dead and the …

Windstorm is a passport to the place where chaos and form meet; Denham's timeless ethereal gaze is rooted in the mastery of poetic forms such as the sonnet and Dante's terza rima. These quiet, forceful poems explore heaven, earth and sea with arresting images, ideas and words. Like the wind, Denham's poetry has the power to move.

in the windsong. T …

"Red Nest is a deeply political book without the cant. This first book argues passionately for the interconnectedness of all our everyday actions with the larger, political and cosmic forces shaping the destiny of our species. It's got the scope of Whitman, the sensuality of Keats, the ferocity of Kathy Acker and Sylvia Plath."
—Suzanne Buffam

Ent …

Written in the near absence of creative works by Ukrainian Canadians of her generation, God of Missed Connections is a breakthrough collection by one of Canada's leading young poets. This book is profound, devastating, and draws on Ukraine's brave and bloody history as a means to explore the author's place in the contemporary world.

"This book expl …

The first anthology of urban Aboriginal songs by Gregory Scofield is a retrospective of the award-winning poet's pivotal work to date. The word kipocihkan is Cree slang for someone who is mute or unable to speak, and charted in this book is Scofield's journey out of that silence to become one of the most powerful voices of our time.

"I make offerin …

In this collection, husbands and wives stumble into each other at the end of days, children find the wild edges of suburbs, new mothers try to navigate through a map-less terrain, and a relentless epidemic of bugs eats away at the forest. The collection explores new territory, both physically and emotionally--relocation, the north, new marriage and …

From the salmon fishing grounds to the Special Collections library, from the vanishing rural world of pheasant hunting and canning along the banks of the Fraser River to the deck of the Titanic and the famous book collector's tragic fate, Tim Bowling's startling and powerful eighth collection of poems moves seamlessly between the riches of nature a …

Shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry

Shortlisted for the Relit Award for Poetry

Philip Kevin Paul's first book, Taking the Names Down from the Hill won the 2004 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry. In Little Hunger, his second book for the WSÁ,NEC (Saanich) Nation of Vancouver Island, Paul continues to draw upon the ric …

Letters I Didn't Write is a contemplative collection of poems imbued with a sense of longing for opportunities lost and lives unfulfilled. Acclaimed poet John Mackenzie explores a sweeping range of subjects, from the tragedies of war to the musings of a discouraged physics major to the violent end of Spanish poet Federico Garc�a Lorca. At the …

Repose, the striking new work by award-winning poet Adam Getty, is technically flawless, philosophically refreshing and naturally phrased.

Repose is an exploration of the definition of cultural freedom; it is a pointed look at an obsession with production, and a comparison of the natural and urban environments that shape our lives. Getty argues that …

"Living Things thrives." –George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald

Written in the year after the birth of Matt Rader's first daughter, Living Things honestly introduces the contradictions of the modern world: "how what we see in daylight is less than whole / and also more so." Using words in lieu of sonar, these poems bounce off the ecology …

Winner of the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Finalist for the 2008 Asian American Literary Award

Rita Wong's new collection of poems explores how ecological crises relate to the injustices of our international political landscape. Querying the relations between writing and other forms of action, Wong seeks a shift in consciousness through poems t …

Winner of the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize

In her debut collection of poems, Birch Split Bark, Diane Guichon uses a quintessentially Canadian image -- a birch bark canoe -- to speak of those private waters that make us universally human. By writing in the first person of a father, a mother, a son and a daughter, she bridges age to gender …

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 …

"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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

"[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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …