Since his first book, The Mood Embosser, was published in 2001, Louis Cabri has established himself as a one of the most distinctive, and entertaining, poets in Canada. Steeped in the transformative poetics of the post-New American Poetry world of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Cabri has followed that impulse into a fresh terrain that is simultaneously familiar …

In the course of a writing life that has spanned more than five decades and encompasses almost eighty books of fiction, poetry, history, and criticism he's written and another thirty that he's played an editorial role in, George Bowering has learned a thing or two about the craft.

Writing and Reading features thirty recent essays, ranging from a sin …

"Hailed by the Call as I stepped across
Venables at Clark following a transverse line
like all the other commodities circulating aimlessly
I drifted along corrugated steel walls
sun burning every body every building every form
cash exploding from crowns of distant towers
occupied by the rentiers in this haemopolis of
arteries and conduits branchi …

‘A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.’

How you view 21st century life depends largely on the view from your place, which depends on where you can afford to live. In this suite of texts and poems written over twent …

Drawn from 22 books of poetry published by David Bromige in his lifetime, if wants to be the same as is chronicles the career of one of contemporary poetry's most distinctive writers. Born in London, England, in 1933, raised in Canada, and a resident for most of his adult life of California, David Bromige is just as difficult to pin down in terms o …

A masterpiece of late style and friendship, this volume combines back to back two powerful new works by old masters, George Bowering and George Stanley.

Stanley's West Broadway is a long poem, composed over the past decade, following on Stanley's other long city poems, "San Francisco's Gone," "Terrace Landscapes," and Vancouver: A Poem. Like those …

The Receiver is Sharon Thesen's thirteenth book, and the first from the three-time Governor-General's Award finalist since Oyama Pink Shale, six years ago.

More formally various than Thesen's recent books, The Receiver includes the short lyrics documenting the poet's witnessing that readers of her work will recognize, as well as various kinds of fou …

A new child, a new house, a new neighbourhood: rob mclennan takes the measure of his environment in A perimeter, a collection of shorter and longer pieces from 2010 to 2014. The birth of a child, and the moves that follow in its wake, brings about a defamiliarization of the world, and the poems in A perimeter reflect this newly enhanced awareness. …

The 160 pages of Clean Sails were wrested from dozens of typewriters, some of them hand-modified, through countless thousands of hours of typing over the past half-decade, and informed by Gustave Morin's quarter-century of investigation into the (im)possibilities of concrete poetry. Mr. Morin insists Clean Sails is a volume of poetry; others call i …

The World, I Guess is a substantial book, six sections that demonstrate a command of a broad poetic range, a catholic range of interests, and echoes of a lifetime of reading and learning from Pound, Williams, Stanley, and others. The centrepiece is "The Flood," a long, complex, discursive poem whose subject is poesis and whose interest is in the wo …

"If the loitersacke be gone springing into a taverne, I'll fetch him reeling out." "Loitersack" is 17th century slang for a lay-abed, a lazybones. In his new book, Loitersack, Donato Mancini (You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence, Bookthug, 2012) extends his inquiry of Canadian poetry and poetics in the form of a book that contains poe …

Posh Lust is about poetry that is everywhere findable, provided the bits of "everywhere" are words and provided this life is lettered. People study poetry and some read it. Poetry is a pinnacle art — as in "a small ornamental turret" — even when it's a drunk imaginary communist, or just a drunk imaginary. Kitsch makes the serious art of poetry …

California St. is one of the major thoroughfares in downtown San Francisco, the city where George Stanley was born in 1934, and left at age 37 to move to Vancouver. Associated with the "San Francisco Renaissance" in poetry, moving in circles that included Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, Stanley had won a reputation as an exciting young …

Rua Da Felicidade is an actual place, a "Street of Happiness" in colonial Macau, where from the 1920s to the 1950s it was said that every desire could be fulfilled — for a price. It is a book written against the appropriative gesture, against the grain of what we too often believe we can possess for a price. Instead, the book turns on the seams o …

"Hammertown" is Georges Perec's invention, an imaginary fishing port on Vancouver Island that Peter Culley recognized as the Oulipo writer's vision of what Nanaimo might be like. In Parkway, Culley continues his project of describing Perec's Hammertown from the inside. Deeply musical and infused by Culley's love of rhythm, Parkway is an acute and s …

"Don't gaze into the abyss," George Stanley states in his new book. "Gaze out." And this is what the reader receives from Stanley's eighth book, After Desire: the observations of a poet, and a consciousness, as they arrive together at old age. Not what the poet is thinking — although we get to watch him thinking too — but what he sees and notic …

NDN word warrior Marie Annharte Baker's fourth book of poems, Indigena Awry, is her largest and wildest yet. It collects a decade's worth of verse — fifty-nine poems. Set noticeably in Winnipeg and Vancouver, but in many other places on either side of the Medicine Line as well, the poems are a laser-eyed meander through contested streets filled w …

Words, Words, Words is a wide-ranging collection of literary essays that astonish the reader with their candor, insight, and generosity. Many of them reveal the absurdity that so often underlies our most passionate thoughts, our most cherished moments, even our most disturbing fears and recognitions. They echo everywhere with a kind of cosmic laugh …

Roger Farr's IKMQ consists of sixty-four brief passages — stories, descriptions, instructions, scenarios, formulae — each involving the characters represented by the letters I, K, M and Q. Various clues, suggested by the rules of grammar and syntax, hint at connections and continuities, and at narrative peaking out from behind the screen of act …

Franzlations takes the parables and aphorisms of Kafka as a starting point, and steps a few places to the left in order to reinvent them. Sometimes this means walking off a cliff and into the empty air. (Don't look down!) Sometimes this means keeping the cage and replacing the bird. For of course, Kafka's writing is a rich source of ideas, play, st …

Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's collection of poems about food, trade and life under late-late-night-snack capitalism. Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture, and the politics of language, Mancini organises his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors of con …

Every Day in the Morning (slow) is a work that looks and reads like no other. Sam, a composer, reflects on his floundering career, life with his lover, and tensions with his father. Some thoughts, like facial hair and breakfast, are mundane; others, like love, money and war, are often overwhelming. At turns laughable and vain, at others, tender and …

Divided into two parts, Robin Blaser consists of two essays by people who knew Blaser intimately, as a life-long friend, a mentor, and intellectual influence. In part one, award-winning author Stan Persky offers a cohesive guide to reading Robin Blaser's poetry and the ways in which Blaser's work was "an attempted rescue or defense of poetry". In p …

In the Millennium is a thirteen-part sequence written over the last ten years that measures a wide range of the poet's experience. The writing emerges in response to human processes, conditions and places: love, sex, death, the insecurities and pressures of the inner and outer world, and the politics of person and place that act as prompts for what …

The world's largest manufacturer of the two-stroke engine may seem like an unusual jumping-off point for poetry. But Peter Culley's second book about his hometown Nanaimo stems from his realization that there is not an hour of his waking existence when he cannot somewhere hear a leaf blower, a lawn mower or another piece of Briggs & Stratton-powere …

The Lions bare of snow, crowded express buses, a giant red turning letter W. Vancouver: A Poem is George Stanley's vision of the city where he lives, though he does not call it his own. Vancouver, the city, becomes Stanley's palimpsest: an overwritten manuscript on which the words of others are still faintly visible. Here the Food Floor's canned ex …

First there was Backup to Babylon. Now comes Subway Under Byzantium, the second in Maxine Gadd's double act of works about the Gulf Islands and the Downtown Eastside: twin axes of the fall. Covering the period from 1986 to 1993, Gadd's writing in this volume is by turns intensely personal, slyly funny, and socially incisive. Her poetry draws on the …

Fascinated by the ligature — a joining of two letters in a single word — Donato Mancini chose, logically, to conjure one up in the title of his second book of concrete poetry, Æthel. "Although," as Mancini remarks parenthetically, "it might be the name of the crabby old blue-rinse who calls the police if you cross her lawn." Æthel, the book, …

Backup to Babylon collects three shorter works by Maxine Gadd, a writer who has based her life and her work in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside for more than two decades. The first section, "Greenstone," follows an arc between rural life, shaped by idealism, and the city. Feminism, activism, and utopianism are among Gadd's concerns. "Backup to Babylon …

Welcome to BC's frontier days, when loggers and laundresses penned poetry, and entertainment consisted of reciting verse 'round the fire. The Old Red Shirt is a rollicking collection of old-fashioned pioneer poetry. Selected by longtime amateur BC historian, Yvonne Klan, the poems address the social issues of the day, teach moral lessons, and refle …

With Hammertown, Peter Culley establishes himself as a stylistic virtuoso utilizing a startlingly broad range of reference to result in a body of work at once intimate and prophetic. It is above all a portrait of a town. Caught by a passing reference in George Perec's Life: A User's Manual to a "village on Vancouver Island," Culley began to re-imag …

Exercises in Lip Pointing is a new collection of poems by respected First Nations writer, Annharte. She uses oral sounds and written signs to probe and prod the reader, to ask the right questions, to lay bare the contradictions and delights in the serendipities of her experience. She makes us laugh, cry, and learn.

"One of Canada's best poets ... Robertson's language is sparkling and sharp, and builds momentum through its rhythmic motion motion to produce a dense and difficult, but enjoyable and readable book ... The Weather rewrites the pastoral with confidence and cunning."
— Prairie Fire
"Hip, cerebral, streamlined, and dense, The Weather is about many …

First issued by Tsunami Editions in 1993, XEclogue is an exploration of the pleasures of the pastoral poetry from a late-twentieth-century feminist perspective. Robertson, the Governor General's Award finalist, plays in a neo-classical landscape with equal doses of iconoclasm and erudition. This new and revised edition is sure to win new devotees f …

Lisa Robertson has applied her rhetorical skills to the epic, and what emerges is a spectacular, subversive vision of the world through female eyes. This is an act of sheer writerly bravado, taking and tweaking the form, enlarging the world between the covers of a book. The language is lush, the concept superactivated, growing over the page at an a …