The Whole Singing Ocean
Part long poem, part investigation, this true story begins with a whale encounter and then dives into the affair of the École en bateau, a French countercultural school aboard a boat. The École was based on the ideals of ’68, but also twisted ideas about child psychology, Foucault’s philosophy and an abolition of the separation between adults …
The East Side of It All
The East Side of It All, written from the perspective of a drug user and single-room occupant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, explores the ongoing process of healing through reconnection with family, the natural world and traditional Indigenous (Kwantlen) storytelling. Dandurand’s voice is lyrical yet intimate, obscured yet sitting with you a …
Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation
Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation explores the experience and greater social implications of mental illness, specifically OCD and Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder. It asks the questions: How does anxiety inform both how we act and how we interpret those actions afterwards? How does the fear of retribution from one’s own mind lead t …
Pluviophile
Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. Its poems continually revitalize form, imagery and sonancy to reconsider the ways we value language, beauty and body. The collection houses sonnets and other shorter poems between larger, more meditative runes. One of these longer poe …
Body Count
In this vital début, Kyla Jamieson sifts through the raw material of her life before and after a disabling concussion in search of new understandings of self and worth. Energized by the tensions between embodiment and dissociation, Body Count flickers between Vancouver and New York, passing through dreamscapes and pain states. Both earnest and irr …
Renaissance Normcore
Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tra …
Belated Bris of the Brainsick
Belated Bris of the Brainsick traces 1) a belated and in some ways violent revelation about one’s ancestry and one’s past, 2) a resultant mental breakdown and 3) the pursuit of a new life with someone else who lives with mental illness. These events and the styles in which they are told are inflected by queer, transgender and disabled perspecti …
Un-Canadian
Un-Canadian: Islamophobia in the True North is a provocative warning to Canadians that the values they cherish are being eroded through a pattern of political, legal and social prejudice directed towards Muslims in Canada since September 11, 2001. Featuring never-before-published interviews with key politicians and journalists, influential Muslim l …
Outside, America
Outside, America criss-crosses the Canadian–American border to understand dilemmas that occur across a variety of scales, from global spheres to the most intimate domestic spaces. Sarah de Leeuw digs through grief, loss, aging, technological frustration, environmental degradation, nationalism and confusion to grasp the state of the world. These p …
Fresh Pack of Smokes
“This night in Oppenheimer Park Dan asked me to shit-kick this chick in the face as she owed money and I said no because I didn’t know who she was and I wasn’t about to play with fire so he sat on the bench then stood up and did a flying kick twice to her chin and she convulsed and passed out he said he didn’t want to spill blood because s …
Near Miss
Near Miss considers the relationship between close calls and the tenuous conditions of contemporary life. From actual cataclysms such as meteor collisions and volcanic eruptions to everyday failures and accidents, these inventive poems collide with the perpetual unease created by life’s unpredictability while contemplating mortality, fragility, g …
What the Poets Are Doing
In 2002, Nightwood published Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation, a successful first-of-its-kind collection of interviews with literary luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Avison, Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier and P.K. Page, conducted by “the younger generation” of poets of the day. Sixteen years late …
What Your Hands Have Done
What Your Hands Have Done looks at how life spent in a close-knit fishing family in rural Prince Edward Island marks a person. The book is rooted in PEI but moves from there to Toronto where the malaise of life proves to be unbound to the sameness of small-town days spent hauling gear on the Atlantic or toiling in rust-red potato fields.
Bailey exam …
Bec and Call
Rife with colloquialisms, irony and a healthy dose of sass, the poems collected in Bec and Call refuse to be silent or subtle; instead they delve into the explicit, the audacious, the boldly personal. Bec and Call subverts the notion of female sexuality as male appeasement, the French wordplay in the title using the meaning of “bec”—a kiss, m …
Little Wild
Little Wild explores the performance of masculinity in contemporary Canada, with a focus on how toxic masculinity relates to mental health, aggression, substance abuse and crises of identity. Through the reimagining of family histories and personal experiences, the poems in this collection exact a representation of a young man in conflict with outd …
After the Hatching Oven
After the Hatching Oven explores chickens: their evolution as a domesticated species; their place in history, pop culture and industrial agriculture; their exploitation and their liberation. Alexander takes us deep into the world of this common species, examining every conceivable angle: chicken politics, antics, pretenses and pleasures. These poem …
Our Familiar Hunger
Our Familiar Hunger is a book about the strength, will, struggle and fortitude of generations of women and how those relationships and knowledges interact, inform, transform and burden. These poems are memories of reclaimed history and attempts at starting over in a new place. They are the fractured reality of trickle-down inheritance, studies of t …
Cruise Missile Liberals
WARNING: Cruise Missile Liberals contains few proper poems. That is, poems with proper manners, proper etiquette, or proper service to our national narratives. Poems that reassure the powerful.Poems that lie inert—with the smell of the museums. Poems that are, in a word, nice.
Instead, Spencer Gordon's debut smoulders with explosive contradicti …
Landfall
In Landfall, Governor General's Award-nominated poet Joe Denham revisits the plaguing environmental issues in the poetic journey he began ten years ago with his second collection, Windstorm. Writing in long elegy form, using a voice harnessed by concern, pathos, anger and empathy, Denham's fourth collection is the result of age, time and love, draw …
The Panic Room
Preoccupied with the complexities of identity and selfhood, memory, embodiment, loss, and family, Rebecca Păpucaru carefully examines details that make up one’s lived experience.
“Lobster Dinner” describes a happy childhood memory of eating an entire lobster with an admiring father as her audience. “Take It or Leave It” is the casual and …
Next Door to the Butcher Shop
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Rodney DeCroo's second poetry collection, Next Door to the Butcher Shop, explores the permeability of memory and uncovers heart-wrenching beauty from shadowy grit.
How quickly age
descends on us. Our memories are maps
to places that don't exist. I was an emperor
on a green lawn wearing a white sheet
and a paper crown. Th …
Bad Ideas
Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the li …
then/again
Michelle Elrick's then/again is a poetic account of finding home, and the meanings and moments that the concept of home can come to embody. The collection tracks the poet through a landscape of intimate places--an ancestral home in Scotland, a mother's birthplace in Salzburg, a childhood home on the West Coast--as well as the memory-warped terrain …
Digsite
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
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 …
If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You
If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You is a collection that travels through both time and place, liminally occupying the chasm between Canadiana and Americana mythologies. These poems dwell in surreal pockets of the everyday warped landscapes of modern cities and flood into the murky basin of the intimate.
Amidst the comings and goings, there's …
The Duende of Tetherball
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 …
Regeneration Machine
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 …
Floating is Everything
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 …
Mayor Snow
"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 …
Cycling with the Dragon
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 …
The things I heard about you
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 …
Canoodlers
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 …
Old Hat
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 …
Pluck
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 …
There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Anymore
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 …
children of air india
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 …
Songs That Remind Us of Factories
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 …
X
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, …
Selected Poems
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 …
Zeppelin
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 …
The Hottest Summer in Recorded History
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 …
Timely Irreverence
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 …
Ink on Paper
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 …
Undark
"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 …
For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin
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 …
Dirt of Ages
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 …
Wedding in Fire Country
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 …
A Brief History of the Short-Lived
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 …
Occupations
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 …