Digsite draws on Nicholson's experience working in the Alberta oil sands and arboreal forest, taking an archaeological lens to its subject, and in this way, reimagines tens of thousands of years of human existence. These poems grow from a schism between the current place of living and the ones in which we are pulled back to, in particular, the plac …

Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada's most recognized poets. The first part of the book, "Dangerous Sound," contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. "Muskrat Woman," the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that c …

The Duende of Tetherball fearlessly ransacks the scrutinizing role of the past on the present; the interactions and accountabilities of ourselves and other species; the challenges and pleasures of getting older and forever striving to balance our most cherished and often incomprehensible relationships both with the world and each other.

Bowling st …

With humour and humanity, Surviving City Hall reveals the workings of the municipal world based on author Donna Macdonald's nineteen years as a city councillor. Wrestling with ground squirrels, dealing with dogs and grappling with the Three Bears of Governance, Macdonald offers an insider's view into how things work at city hall in a call to citize …

This debut poetry collection from Lisa Bird-Wilson reflects on the legacy of the residential school system: the fragmentation of families and histories, with blows that resonate through the generations.

Inspired by family and archival sources, Bird-Wilson assembles scraps of a history torn apart by colonial violence. The collection takes its name f …

From the monk who sets himself on fire in a crowded intersection of Saigon ("the familiar corded tendons of his hands, become / a bracken of ashes, a carbon twine of burnt"), to the salmon run in British Columbia ("The salmon word / for home is glacierdust and once-tall trees unlimbed, / a taste, no matter where, they know"), Johnson writes of topi …

"a great writer" -Daniel Lanois

"one of the finest songwriters on the planet... his lyrics [are] every bit as powerful as the best Dylan, Cohen and Lennon combined." -Ron Sexsmith

"a national treasure" -Michael Barclay, Exclaim

"he's a stone genius" -CBC

"Kyp Harness scrapes at the backdrop of reality to reveal the tired, the broken, the lost and d …

In this debut poetry collection by award-winning author Kim Fu, incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence illuminate small scenes of domestic life and the banal tragedies of modern love and modern death.

A sharp edge of humour slices through Fu's poetry, drawing attention to the distance between contemporary existence and the basic fact …

The power of water is the power of blood, flood and drought. Water keeps it real, keeps us real. Forgetting this, we turn the earth into a toxic dump. Remembering this, we unfurl the future as perpetual possibility.

Water is also the strength of subtlety, quietly making its way through your body. perpetual is both a gift and a warning from water. T …

Raw and honest, Bearskin Diary gives voice to a generation of First Nations women who have always been silenced, at a time when movements like Idle No More call for a national inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Carol Daniels adds an important perspective to the Canadian literary landscape.

Taken from the arms of her mother as s …

Twenty years ago Nevin Sample walked into a small bank in Deep Cove, robbed a teller at gunpoint and fled into the forest of Cates Park. After a lengthy pursuit, he hid behind a stump at the edge of a small clearing. The police called to him. He raised the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Nevin had a magnetism, an understated complexity: the …

This latest instalment of the bestselling O Canada Crosswords series serves up an appetizing palate of Canadiana, pop culture and whimsical wordplay. Canadian themes touch on hockey, music, industry and places, and author Gwen Sjogren brings to the table several of her trademark pun puzzles like Money Changes Everything and Fit for a Witch. Seven g …

"Thran's poems offer a meditation on the creativity involved in viewing, engaging with its productivity as well as its superfluity, spilling past the edges of what is represented to reflect the ways through which viewers come to imaginatively inhabit what is seen."
--Michael Borkent, The Journal of Canadian Poetry

Mayor Snow is about both the abdica …

Sheryda Warrener's second poetry collection touches on the illusion of remaining grounded and a sense of belonging. A retired cosmonaut returns from a record-breaking 438 days in space and attempts to re-immerse himself in the world. One speaker considers reinvention from the top floor of the World's Tallest building; another, our complicated futur …

The water belongs to itself. undercurrent reflects on the power and sacredness of water—largely underappreciated by too many—whether it be in the form of ocean currents, the headwaters of the Fraser River or fluids in the womb. Exploring a variety of poetic forms, anecdote, allusion and visual elements, this collection reminds humanity that we …

In her lyrical memoir The Death of Small Creatures, Trisha Cull lays bare her struggles with bulimia, bipolar disorder and substance abuse. Interspersing snatches of conversations, letters, blog entries and clinical notes with intimate poetic narrative, Cull evokes an accessible experience of mental illness.

In The Death of Small Creatures, Cull str …

Hastings-Sunrise is a love letter to a fleeting place and time. Bren Simmers's second collection captures her old East Vancouver neighbourhood in the midst of upheaval. As it is colonized by tides of matching plaid and diners serving pulled-pork pancakes, condo developments replace the small businesses and cheap rentals that once gave the area its …

Debut talent Raoul Fernandes's first offering is Transmitter and Receiver, a masterful and carefully depicted exploration of one's relationships with oneself, friends, memories, strangers and technology.

The three parts of this collection are variations building on a theme--at times lonely, sometimes adoring, but always honest. Wider areas of contem …

What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story, "All This Was a Long Time Ago," is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for fiction from The Malahat Review, and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, …

With eighty-five all new crosswords, Gwen Sjogren's O Canada Crosswords Book 15 features plenty of puns and challenging wordplay for Canadian solvers from coast to coast. The specifically Canadian-themed crosswords cover writers, landmarks, music and cities, and include puzzles called Shining in Sochi, Leading Canadian Men, National Parks and Playi …

Cycling with the Dragon is a personal investigation of family,love, culture, self, and the helpless feeling of "smallness." Elaine Woo's poems take the form of the words that they speak: she forms an "o" for the buoy that is a child's safety-raft (found in the solitude of a notebook and Harriet the Spy), and weaves a poem about fearing snakes and d …

For Your Safety Please Hold On is a truly remarkable first poetry collection from debut talent Kayla Czaga. Her poems are already making waves--several from this collection have received award attention, including: The Fiddlehead's 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Malahat Review's 2012 Far Horizon's Award for Poetry and an Editor's Cho …

Shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch award for innovative poetry, The things I heard about you is an exploration of precision and the unspoken, executing a process whereby vignettes and scenes break apart into fragments, rumours or suggestions of the original story. When stories decompose or self-destruct, the results vary, producing an effect …

The candid, direct poems of Canoodlers interrogate sexuality, friendship, family, language, and social, cultural and political phenomena. Straddling genders, sexualities and social positions, the collection hilariously but harrowingly follows the growth and class leaps of a "townie tomboy."

From family relations ("Dearly beloved, Don Cherry has bett …

Pluck is a series of poems taking on issues of sexuality, female vulnerability and parenthood with delicacy and intent. In turn, Rosnau employs words that give way to feelings of both solid surety and waning doubts. From the harsh realities of sexual assault to the routine heaviness of child-rearing, Pluck's sharp portrayals evoke how "beyond the s …

Old Hat is the third book of poetry and first collection of occasional poems by the author of the 2007 Globe 100 book, Muybridge's Horse: Governor General and Trillium Awards nominee, Rob Winger. Driven by an attempt to understand how to reorder common experience, the book's transitional sections - "Set," "Re/Set," and "Lect" - all intertwine and o …

There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Anymore explores the manipulative pull of self-mythology and how it informs the telling of story--whether by a fan worshipping her idol, or an old vaudevillian star reminiscing about a glamorous past. Intimate glances into the lives of the famous bring back points of reflection on their relation to the everyday. Poem …

Building on the success of the Journey Prize-shortlisted title story, the stories of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? present an updated and whimsical new take on what it means to be Canadian. Lau alludes to the personal and political histories of a number of young Asian Canadian characters to explain their unique perspectives of the …

John Rottam is on a journey back in time and place. Fleeing a private stripping engagement turned violent, he reflects on a time in his life when he was burdened with a broken heart, self-doubt and a floundering dance career. A few clumsy steps in the corps de ballet of a prestigious Canadian ballet company sends John fleeing to join a psychotic an …

Cube Squared is the much anticipated follow-up novel from Christian McPherson, picking up where his darkly comic debut, The Cube People, left off. Returning to the seemingly mundane reality of government cubicle culture, McPherson finds more humour in the misadventures of a struggling computer programmer/wannabe writer.

Colin MacDonald, a happily ma …

children of air india is a series of elegiac sequences exploring the nature of individual loss, situated within public trauma. The work is animated by a proposition: that violence, both personal and collective, produces continuing sonar, an echolocation that finds us, even when we choose to be unaware or indifferent.

This collection breaks new grou …

Book 14 is packed with all the trivia, puns and fun that solvers love (and sometimes love to hate!). Thirty-four Canadian-themed crosswords key on well-known places, people and events, with titles including The Wonder of Canada, When Brian's Eyes Are Smiling, Exposed and Fields of Dreams. Thirty-two universal crosswords offer even more Canadian con …

The poems in Songs that Remind Us of Factories explore how we
remain connected: to the world outside, to our ideas of home, to
each other, and to ourselves. In their searching, these magpie poems
strike a balance between wound language and quiet meditation,
the arched-brow wisecrack and the emotionally frank gesture. The
result is an honest and pl …

One of the first lines of X, Shane Rhodes' sixth book of poetry, is a warning: "this book of verse demands more of verse, this book demands perversity." He goes on to write:

“This book is about where I live, a place still settling, still making the land—law by law, arrest by arrest, jail by jail—its own snow blown”

Heed this warning. In X, …

With Selected Poems, Tim Bowling has gathered together his finest poems over a twenty-year period, a selection including work from his widely celebrated debut collection, Low Water Slack, in 1995, to his tenth collection, Tenderman, in 2011. Always a poet of intense emotion and surprising metaphor whose lyric-narrative voice ranges in tone from rom …

In Blaise Moritz's second collection, Zeppelin, we are passengers in the long-range ghost ship that is our new millennial culture. The time before technology recedes in our wake—the past an amazing clutter, if only as deep as early modern things—and looking forward, our impressions phase constantly. We travel far, seeing much that is strange, b …

Timely Irreverence is a collection of occasional poems that are sewn together through the inescapable intrusion of poetry itself. With circles of logic that provoke thoughtfulness, the paths of these poems are alluringly complex, and they engage through amusing points of casual living, visceral moments when poetry is permitted to intrude upon the e …

With her signature eye for irony and sensuality, Elizabeth Bachinsky's latest book of poetry, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, balances a youthful playfulness with observational maturity. Bachinsky strings together seemingly non-sequitur images, capturing in these poems the commonality of raw intimacy, dark humour and a sense of immediacy. H …

Brad Cran's highly anticipated second book of poetry, Ink on Paper, is a compelling collection of political poems that seek to elucidate our relationships with our surroundings as well as those who surround us. Cran, former Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver, masterfully constructs images held in contradictory tension, as in his civic poem, "T …

Catch Canucks fever and celebrate over 40 years of Vancouver Canucks hockey! This must-have collection—jam-packed with 80 pages of puzzles, crosswords, games, trivia, facts and fun for towel-waving fans of all ages—will have you Luu-ing and riding your stick like Tiger Williams in no time. From Harold and the Steamer to Gino and the Russian Roc …

Drawn from nine collections published over thirty years, the thirty-eight poems in this retrospective reveal the poetic accomplishments of John Barton. In this collection, which is introduced by R.M Vaughan, Barton explores the role of love in contemporary society, the complexity of gay experience, the persistence of homophobia, the reinvention of …

"Later we will laugh; shake moonlight
off our clothes like ash.

For now we stare at the clock. The
day wears, tired as mechanism."
--from Undark

Undark: An Oratorio is the highly anticipated second collection from Sandy Pool, whose debut book of poetry Exploding into Night (Guernica, 2009) was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for poetry i …

In this unsettling collection, Vancouver singer/songwriter Rodney DeCroo delivers raw footage of a childhood marred by violence, sudden uprootings, and abuse. Allegheny, BC is a candid, gritty tour through DeCroo's troubled past in a small coal town outside of Pittsburgh, PA, the bush of northern BC, and his young adult years in Vancouver. Scenes o …

Richard Trench finds himself with no arms and no legs, reduced to a torso in the trunk of a car. There is a reason. It all makes sense. The point is there somewhere . . .

Imperfections elucidates the private lives of supermodels and circus freaks, sheiks and designer dominatrixes and the metamorphosis of the body chic. These are lives where the impo …

It's lucky 13 for the latest instalment of the bestselling O Canada Crosswords series. This volume features 100 puzzles for solvers from coast to coast, including 67 with full-on national content. Solvers can take a trip to the nation's capital with Destination: Ottawa. Savour true Canadian flavour with For the Foodies and Eponymous Edibles. Test y …

The poems in Chris Jennings's long-awaited debut poetry collection are linked at their core by a preoccupation with the ways objects or moments become charged with meaning. Narrative occupies the territory of memory, making the most ordinary things--a classified ad, the odds and ends of an estate auction, graffiti, an antique lancet, a vegetable st …

Dirt of Ages is the highly anticipated second book of poetry by Gillian Wigmore, whose debut collection soft geography (2007) captured the ReLit Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize.

In Dirt of Ages, everything meets in "the perfect v" of the valley: where rivers meet in an "exchange between sky and water," whe …

In his third poetry collection, A Brief History of the Short-Lived, Chris Hutchinson brings the full force of his linguistic dexterity to bear on the elusive subject of literature itself.

With his restless intellectual curiosity tempered by a dash of witty self-deprecation, Hutchinson deftly manoeuvres through hallowed halls of academia with humour …

An otherworldly uncanniness haunts the margins of Darren Bifford's debut collection, Wedding in Fire Country. Bifford is exceptionally adept at capturing the beauty of the mundane, and his poetry offers an insightful meditation on the meaning of the individual journey within larger political and geographical spheres. However, these familiar scenes …