Bounce House
Bounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper's fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing. Measured and meticulously weighted, these poems are playful and poignant as they navigate the stra …
A Mysterious Humming Noise
Howard White says, "Some poets try to capture rare butterflies in their writing. The things I go after are more like houseflies." The comparison does him no favours but it is true inasmuch as his writing is notably unpretentious and concerned with common and everyday realities. That is, if your everyday realities include such things as sinking dock …
I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You
Spanning more than 25 years, I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You gathers work from three distinct eras of Jay Millar's development as a poet: the wonder years of the 1990s culled from a variety of self-published micropress publications, most of which are hiding in special collections; poems from his trade books issued between 2000 and 2015 …
The Inflatable Life
Mark Laba's second full-length poetry collection - and his first in seventeen years - recreates the structure of the old variety shows he watched on TV as a child. Much of the imagery plays across the broad spectrum of these popular cultural tropes, albeit many lost or forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. In The Inflatable Life, the reader …
Motel of the Opposable Thumbs
In Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, Stuart Ross continues to ignore trends in Canadian poetry, and further follow the journey he began over four decades ago with his discoveries of the works of Stephen Crane, E. E. Cummings, Nelson Ball, Ron Padgett, Victor Coleman, Tom Clark, Nicanor Parra, Joe Rosenblatt, and David McFadden. Over the years, his inf …
Trauma Head
Raymond Souster Award nominee. Finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima. This long-poem memoir tracks the author's experiences …
On the Count of None
On the Count of None is the first full-length poetry collection by Kingston poet Allison Chisholm. The surprising poems in this audacious debut explore the relationship between the serious and the absurd, the formal and the illogical, whimsy and threat, and meaning and tone. Chisholms poems, whose content is often inspired by guidebooks, podcasts …
Slinky Naive
In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways. Her phrases, her metaphors and similes, slam up against each other like strangers on the street. Apologies, changes in direction, barometric pressure, objects ping and ricochet, but some residual thing clings after the …
Bolt
BOLT, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over both familiar and unexplored landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from 20 years as a welder with the Boilermakers' Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, B …
I Heard Something
In her uncompromising follow-up to 2012's Sympathy Loophole, Jaime Forsythe offers a breathless cascade of evocative somethings: mysterious sounds, faint rumblings, biographies real and imagined, tabloid rumours, nagging memories, an animal stirring, a baby waking, a storm threatening, an escape hatch beckoning, and an inexplicable machine coughing …
Quarrels
Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. The acclaimed author of the memoir, In the Slender Margin, turns her focus back to poetry in this amazing and condensed work of prose poetry.
The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty co …
The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent
For over thirty years, Steve Venright has devoted himself to the liberation of the imagination, documenting hallucinatory trips through Southwestern Ontario's deliriomantic landscapes with his signature puns, portmanteaus, and spoonerisms. The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings is a generous gathering of Venright's most end …
A Temporary Stranger
A Temporary Stranger is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. At the centre of A Temporary Stranger are …
Escape from Wreck City
da Vinci Eye Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards. Escape from Wreck City is a debut collection of poetry from Calgary author John Creary.
There are poems about nature, poems about love and relationships, poems about living in the city, and poems about traveling the world. And all at once they capture the thrill of being fully engaged with the world, keenl …
Bad Engine
Selected and with an Introduction by Stuart Ross
Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn't exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and Am …
Leaving Mile End
Leaving Mile End is Jon Paul Fiorentino's seventh collection of poetry and tenth book-a collection of poems that documents the daily din and clatter of cafés, galleries, and dive bars that make up Mile End in Montreal, perhaps the most artistically vibrant neighbourhood in the world. But this is no ordinary tour-we take a sharp turn and go online …
Assdeep In Wonder
Assdeep in Wonder is a collection of new poems that explore the idea of identity in a myriad of contexts: personal, sexual, cultural, national, literary, and poetic. The poems are raw and immediate, exploring themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures.
Selected Praise: "Gudgeon's first poetry collection is a quirky vale …
Serpentine Loop
"Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, …
Ignite
A finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, Ignite is a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. Born into a strict Mennonite family, Abe Spenst's mental illness spanned three decades in and out of mental institutions where he underwent electric shock …
Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer
Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer takes up where Stuart Ross’s Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer left off in 2005. Memoir, tirade, unsolicited advice — this new volume is drawn largely from Stuart’s notorious “Hunkamooga” column that ran in subTerrain, but also includes pieces from his blog as well as previously unpublis …
Foreign Park
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 t …
Rue
In her compelling debut poetry collection, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award, Melissa Bull explores the familial, romantic, and sexual ties that bind lives to cities. Rue takes us through its alleys, parks, and kitchens with a robust lyricism and language that is at once inventive and plainspoken, compassionate and frank.
In English, to rue …
Jabbering with Bing Bong
Kevin Spenst's much-anticipated debut collection of poetry opens as a coming-of-age narrative of lower-middle class life in Vancouver's suburb of Surrey, embroidered within a myriad of pop-culture and "post-Mennonite." Jabbering with Bing Bong interrogates memory and makes its way into the urban energies of Vancouver.
Language is at play with sit-co …
Some Birds Walk For the Hell of It
Some Birds Walk for the Hell of It is the third volume of poetry from musician and spoken word artist, C.R. Avery. In his take-no-prisoners style of verse and performance, Avery celebrates the virtues of the bohemian lifestyle, late-nite denizens of inconvenient madness, the dissolute and the temporary, lawless black leather pioneers of rap, and ev …
Wood
Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes)
Wood is a pop-culture meditation on parenthood and all its complexities and complications. In her third collection, Harper deftly inhabits the lives of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers - the real, the mythical, the dreamed-up, and the surrogate. Pinocchio tries to make his father proud i …
Unus Mundus
Author Statement: Five years ago I began working on a collection of poems titled Unus Mundus, derived from Marie Louise Von Frantzs description of human union with the one cosmos. In her book, Creation Myths, she writes: This unus mundus is not the cosmos as it exists now, but an idea in Gods psyche. When I began this manuscript, I was …
Glossolalia
Glossolalia is an unflinching exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, and sexuality as told in a series of poetic monologues spoken by the thirty-four polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Marita Dachsels second full-length collection, the self-avowed agnostic feminist uses mid-nineteenth …
Trobairitz
Twenty-first century metalheads; twelfth century troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz- what could they possibly have in common? The creation of an often misunderstood and at times reviled genre for one; for another, a kin preoccupation with the questioning of structures set up by class, gender, and religion.
"Describing metal fa …
The Song Collides
'The Song Collides' takes the reader on a highly personal and internal metaphysical investigation into the state of the natural world-and then back again via more lyrical and local enquiries that speak to each and every one of us. Life is an exchange: each of us takes in the world and then expresses it for ourselves and for others. This is a simult …
Galaxy
'Galaxy' is about a wounded family, a prairie place, love that is queer and conventional, longing and loss, and a light shone into dark corners. ' Galaxy' is "emotional biography", as Margaret Laurence called it, where the facts are fabricated, but the feelings are authentic.
"A truly wonderful collection of poems. Wonderful and clear imagery as wel …
Vs.
'Vs.' is a collection of poems chronicling the author's foray into the world of amateur boxing. A shy, bookish woman you'd never expect could hit someone in the face, Ryan was soon hooked on the physical and mental challenge of the sport, as well as the camaraderie of the club's members and volunteers. When the club announced an upcoming white coll …
Making Waves
Distinguished in part by its attention to language of place, natural science, local flora and fauna, land and seascapes, and receptivity to aboriginal forebears, much of the literature from British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest region of the US is increasingly informed by cross-border and multicultural perspectives. Within the context of the r …
Frenzy
In Greek mythology the muses preside over the arts and inspire writers and artists to produce works of genius. In 'Frenzy', Catherine Owen pays homage to the muses in a six-part compilation of muse-quests, some the author's, some those of others. In "Flood-Ghazals," she takes the leaping form of the Persian ghazal and makes it fluid, out of entirel …
Inventory
'Inventory' is a collection of 58 object poems. Taking as a starting point the reciprocal relation between subjects and objects, the book explores the unique way that objects appear in an individual consciousness. Each object in this inventory exists on its own and also reflects the author's experience, from the mundane stapler and tea bag, to the …
Tortoise Boy
Four disparate people confront each other--their memory and their responsibility--at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode.
Tortoise Boy is a “chamber play,” four monologues, or mon-dialogues, if you will. Through these four voices, four instruments--a quartet--these ch …
What It Feels Like For a Girl
What It Feels Like for a Girl is a series of poems following the intense friendship between two teenagers as they explore pop icons, pornography, and the big, strange world of sex. They soon learn just how complicated sexuality is--and how confusing desire can be.
What It Feels Like for a Girl is about many things: the friendships girls have at the …
Suicide Psalms
'Suicide Psalms' is both hymn and visceral scream-of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off of the ledge. Even though the media has recognized suicide as an epidemic, it is sti …
What It Feels Like for a Girl
What It Feels Like for a Girl is a book-length series of poems that tell the story of two teenage girls as they delve into the big, strange world of sex.
What It Feels Like for a Girl is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its “lessons” for the young woman who has never experien …
Imagining British Columbia
The twenty contemporary writers featured in this anthology have one thing in common: a connection to British Columbia, to a specific time, landscape, or community in BC. Their essays and memoirs have been inspired by, or are in some way affected by, the particular "sense of place" that sets that left-hand corner of the country apart from other prov …
The Stone Face
The year is 1964 and first-time film director Alan Schneider is about to embark on a project combining the talents of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. When Alan visits the home of Keaton to discuss the project, titled simply Film, he discovers the former star engaged in an imaginary card game with the long-deceased Irving G. Thalberg.
It doesn’t …
Rental Van
Burnham's poetry works at the edges of meaning, propriety, and the commodification of language. Combining elements of found text-the overheard, the over-read-he recasts his findings in various combinations that are unique to their presentation on the page. The essentials of language, how people use it-and how it uses them-is Burnham's main concern. …
I Cut My Finger
'I Cut My Finger' is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed 'Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected' (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide …
Cusp/detritus
Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother. 'Cusp''s central sequence, however, concerns the tragic l …
Signs of the Times
'Signs of the Times' reunites the poetry of Bud Osborn and the woodprints of Vancouver printmaker and painter Richard Tetrault. As with their first collaboration, 'Oppenheimer Park', 'Signs of the Times' is both an unflinching look at Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and a beautiful object in its own right.
"The linocut and woodcut prints that constitu …
Bizarre Winery Tragedy
'Bizarre Winery Tragedy' is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism. These poems continue Neff's quest to explore the modern-day juxtaposition of urban and rural landscapes, and the lines of power between the countryside and the metropolis-firewood, dams and the WiFi-enabled grid. Deeper insights emerge in this, th …
Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer
Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress
Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough)
Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he …