Books for review
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MAUNDER
by
93 pages
June 2017
Maundering is both a physical and verbal process. One can walk in a maundering, aimless fashion and one can verbosely maunder on. Claire Kelly’s debut collection, Maunder, contains poems about the physical act of walking as well as the mental act, what is seen and what is reflected on. These poems allow the reader to amble across the page, stepping from image to image, place to place, striding, pivoting in different, unexpected directions.
SEARCH BOX BED
by
70 pages
June 2017
There is no history of poetry without love poetry, and there is no history of media without pornography. Darryl Whetter turns his attention from evolution in the natural world to the co-evolution of love, sex and media. Urging readers to “fill the tiny / unmade bed of the search box,” these alluring poems build on radically changing communication technologies to explore a new sexuality that does (and does not) dare to tweet its name. Here, finally, is the language of digital love.
DEAD WHITE MEN
by
125 pages
May 2017
Juxtaposing the seemingly benign names of Europeans that permeate our geographies with the details of their so-called discoveries and conquests, Dead White Men turns ideas of exploration, discovery, finding and keeping back upon themselves. Engaging with exploration and scientific texts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries – texts wrapped up in the history and ongoing present of colonization – this collection builds a fascinating poetry of memory out of histories that are largely forgotten
FEEL HAPPIER IN NINE SECONDS
by
75 pages
May 2017
This collection is a universe where minimalism and maximalism work in harmony. Ethics, economics, glamour and alternative physics are just a few of the vehicles Besner uses in her jaundiced pursuit of knowledge and joy. At the collection’s core is a series of brilliantly illuminated poems patterned on a scientific study of synaesthesia and Fisher Price refrigerator magnets. Besner’s courageous comparisons and musicality provide the critical happiness we all need.
THIN AIR OF THE KNOWABLE
by
109 pages
May 2017
In her first collection, Thin Air of the Knowable, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa’s life—West Coast, Caribbean, prairies—ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations. A road-trip poem moves from prairie winter, “an icy scatter of gravel / the moving centre of this unpeopled world,” past a cattle liner on its way to the slaughter house, but it also passes beneath the sky’s “blazing scroll of light,” and magpies “flashing black and teal in the sun.” Landscape also functions metaphorically to suggest how historical settings play out in the exigencies of individual lives.
Other preoccupations include poems that reflect on poesis itself—the strange poem-making compulsion to capture that which is largely inexpressible (hence “the thin air of the knowable”), and the role of dreams, memory, and intuition in shaping a poem’s knowledge.
OTHER HOUSES
by
56 pages
May 2017
In Other Houses, Kate Cayley’s second collection of poetry, objects are alive with the presence of the people who have handled them. Myths and legends are interwoven with daily life. Visionaries, mystics, charlatans, artists, and the dead speak to us like chatty neighbours. An imaginary library catalogues missing people. Reading becomes a way of remembering the dead. Home is an elsewhere we are “called to,” a mystery that impels children to wander off, and adults to grow in unexpected directions.
Cayley couples a rich, meaty lyricism with the intimacy of direct address, creating a poetry that is at once embodied and spectral. She directs us to wonder, “Did light and dark have a taste and texture, like food?” At the same time, her command of voice and narrative is masterful—each of these poems unfolds with the sweep and precision of a compressed novel.
DUST BLOWN SIDE OF THE JOURNEY
by
126 pages
May 2017
At times apocalyptic and other times passionate and intimate, the poems in Eleonore Schönmaier’s Dust Blown Side of the Journey show the beauty of the lived and natural world in both wilderness and urban settings.
A woman hides her love letters in beehives, a cherry tree in full blossom is transported horizontally on a bike, and three crows tap their beaks on a metal door. A grandmother gestures how birds once flew in blue skies, public smiles are outlawed, and a shot-down jet lands in a field of wildflowers. Men from warm countries wear big coats and are falsely suspected of hiding bombs, an Indigenous man is forced by police into the trunk of a car, and a stork lands in prison under charges of espionage. In Canada, the northern village of Paradise is under evacuation orders, and in Europe Desmond Tutu steps down from a podium into a crowd of photographers. Over a Belgian lunch Frederic Rzewski talks about his piano concerto A Dog’s Life, and a Dutch dinner is shared with a young refugee boy who laughs joyously.
Reflecting a childhood in the northern Canadian boreal forest, combined with an adult life lived without borders, Eleonore Schönmaier’s vivid and sensual language invites the reader to fully join in and enjoy the journey.
NEXT DOOR TO THE BUTCHER SHOP
by
79 pages
May 2017
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. DeCroo unsentimentally recounts moments suffused with grief, longing and loss, and offers a refreshingly unfiltered view of one's self. In a deft combination of lyrical and visceral imagery, Next Door to the Butcher Shop offers a rare, sharp, first-hand perspective of life around the edges, with dark comedy dispersed throughout.
WHAT THE SOUL DOESN’T WANT
by
59 pages
May 2017
In her newest collection, Lorna Crozier describes the passage of time in the way that only she can. Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who — not unhappily — finds that cockroaches are drawn to her.
“God draws a life. And then begins to rub it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws a world in What the Soul Doesn’t Want, and then beckons us in. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.
RAG COSMOLOGY
by
95 pages
May 2017
The ecological is personal; the personal is ecological. Rag Cosmology is a pulsating meditation on this most intimate relationship. These poems inject pleasure deep into the tissues of our language and state, countering fatalist narratives with the intimacy of entanglement and engagement.
TO LOVE THE COMING END
by
99 pages
May 2017
In To Love the Coming End, a disillusioned author obsessed with natural disasters and ‘the curse of 11’ reflects on their own personal earthquake: the loss of a loved one. A lyric travelogue that moves between Singapore, Canada, and Japan, this debut from Leanne Dunic captures what it’s like to be united while simultaneously separated from the global experience of trauma, history, and loss that colour our everyday lives.
CHARM
by
96 pages
May 2017
A charm can protect, inflict or influence.
Charm, the second collection by poet Christine McNair, considers the craftwork of conception from a variety of viewpoints—from pregnancy and motherhood, to how an orchid is pollinated, to overcoming abusive relationships, to the manual artistry of carving a violin bow or marbling endpapers.
Through these works, McNair’s poetic line evolves as if moving in a spellbound kaleidoscope, etched with omens, fairytales, intimacy’s stickiness, and the mothering body.
BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN WITH PET FOXES
by
83 pages
May 2017
Beautiful Children With Pet Foxes by Giller Prize-longlisted author Jennifer LoveGrove bears witness to moments of extreme crisis that will take you on an odyssey through a terrain of startling dreamscapes. These are poems haunted by the ghosts of alienation, trauma, delusion, and fear that the past decade has instilled in us. Here you will encounter a whole host of personas, both tame and wild—from humans, to foxes, moose, deer and crows, slugs, fish, beetles, mosquitos, earthworms, and more—who give voice to the things we can’t express in our daily lives.
SPACE BETWEEN HER LIPS: THE POETRY OF MARGARET CHRISTAKOS
by
66 pages
May 2017
Space Between Her Lips presents the first selected works of one of Canada's most important poets of the last few decades. Margaret Christakos writes vibrant, exciting, and intellectually challenging poetry. She plays language games that bring a probing and disturbing humour to serious themes that range from childhood and children to women in contemporary techno-capitalist society to feminist literary theory, and so much more.
Gregory Betts’ introduction to the collection highlights her formal diversity and her unique combination of feminist and avant-garde affinities. He connects the geographies of her life — including Northern Ontario where she was raised, downtown Toronto where she studied with cutting-edge authors and artists like bpNichol and Michael Snow, and Montreal where she integrated with the country’s leading feminist authors and thinkers — with her polyphonic experimentation. While traversing the problem of bifurcated identities, Christakos is funny at a deeply semiotic level, wickedly wry, exposing something about the way we think by examining the way we speak of it.
In her afterword, Christakos maps out a philosophy of writing that highlights her self-consciousness of the foibles of language but also deep concern for the themes she writes about, including her career-length exploration of self-discovery, hetero-, queer and bi-sexual sexualities, motherhood, self-care, and linguistic alienation. Indeed, Margaret Christakos is a whole-body poet, writing with the materiality of language about the movement of interior thought to embodied experience in the world.
REAL IS THE WORD THEY USE TO CONTAIN US
by
109 pages
May 2017
As the sickly boy dreams in bed, the shadows beneath his parlor curtain are stirring, taking shapes inexpressible even in a child's dreams. "Real keeps us silent," argues the taxidermied rabbit to the young air-rifle that shot it dead. "Real keeps us still. You must never ask anyone if they are Real." For exactly as long as history, a secret peace has bound the human and inanimate worlds. But the stories of the other world are pushing into our own, and that peace will be tested tonight... In this collection of twenty-six poems and the unbelievably weird happenings that link them, Noah Wareness steals electricity from nihilistic horror fiction and shaggy late-night cartoons to create a landscape of profound loss, vertigo and wonder.
#INDIANLOVEPOEMS
by
100 pages
May 2017
Covering Indigenous adventures from Wahpole Island to Northern Saskatchewan to the West Coast, #IndianLovePoems is a poetry collection that humourously delves into the truths of love and lust within Indigenous communities. The poetic speaker, a First Nations Donna Giovanni, relates stories of her search for The One, or even better, that One-Night-Stand, in heated lines that fearlessly shed light on the intimacy and honesty that may arise even from the most fleeting encounter, leading to reflection on the complexities of sex, race, culture, and intention within relationships. From discovering your own John Smith to sharing sushi in bed, #IndianLovePoems will bring a smile to your lips as you are reminded of your own stories about that special someone.
WHISTLE STOPS: A LOCOMOTIVE SERIAL POEM
by
83 pages
May 2017
Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem occurs over a series of train rides between Toronto and London, Ontario. Each segment of the poem, marked by a time stamp and train number, occupies one train ride. Jack Spicer's concept of serial poetry combines with Charles Olson's "projective verse" in a dynamic that resembles the momentum of a train as it carries the poet speaker towards and away from her love interest. Whistle Stops is also informed by Philip Larkin's "The Whitsun Weddings", Thomas Hardy's "On the Departure Platform", and Allen Ginsberg's Iron Horse, works in which these male poets incorporated the train as a phallus image into the railway poem tradition. Even so, Izsak responds to critiques of the poetic movements she clearly reveres with unbridled (and surreal) female sexuality. In "Nov. 12th to London 16:36", she writes, "Oh train / it is strange for your shape / that I / am inside you". In Whistle Stops, sex—like rail travel and serial poetry—hurtles forward in non-narrative fashion, as a rhythmic train of thought offset by purely poetic spasms. Whistle Stops is not a reaction against the railway tradition or the Olsonian tradition, but an unapologetically female addition to a movement that is and should be still in motion.
CITYSCAPES IN MATING SEASON
by
109 pages
May 2017
Cityscapes in Mating Season combines a lyric sensibility with a distrust of any such singular vision, a loneliness coupled with desire to feel into the thrumming ground of a place, and a willingness to register beauty even at its most apocalyptic. By turns playful, sensual, and unsettling, the poems in this collection are always tightly crafted, attuned to language's possibilities as well as its limitations, its pitch and roll. From protest-filled Montreal to Vancouver's property disputes, the works in Cityscapes reach out to the textures of urban space, but also interrogate the human industrial facets of supposed wilderness—graffitied ruins in the Irish countryside and baited crab traps along B.C.'s Gulf Islands.
Preindustrial techniques of looking—the picturesque aesthetic, landscape tourism—meet iron fire escapes and Alberta's clamorous construction boom, in poems that reject an easy pastoralism or nostalgia to reveal the politics of ownership and the power of dynamics of gender and space. Street grids give way to arterial passageways where blood flows and nerve endings fire through bodies that are fearful, mysterious, or libidinous. These are poems of varied anatomies, where death and desire take unexpected directions, and share the same air.
MIDWAY RADICALS & ARCHI-POEMS
by
105 pages
May 2017
Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems is a provocative foray into experimental poetry. Exploring fertile gaps and overlaps between the architecture of poetry and poetry of architecture, this work of serious play is sparked by a double inquiry. Shaped by rules—found, broken or bent along the way to archi-poetry—many of the poems are also transformative responses, remediating off-cuts and jump-cuts, radically renovating exemplary sources (archai): Homer and Aristotle; Berrigan, Hejinian and Silliman; Bök, Bowering, Olson and Creeley; Musil, Barthes and Lefebvre; Shklovsky, Ruskin and Poe. Harmonizing with and against this global carnival of “midway radical” wisdom, the layered voice of the poems does not belong to a single poet, genre or discipline, but resonates in the polylogue of an open chorus.
IF THERE WERE ROADS
by
122 pages
May 2017
Guided by the geography of land and mind, the familiar and the unknown converge in If There Were Roads by Joanna Lilley. Pulled like the tide between the sea and the shore, If There Were Roads drives toward new vistas while reflecting on what has been lost in the process of moving forward. Lilley's poems explore the paths we take from here to there when there are no roads to guide us.
ALL THE NAMES BETWEEN
by
101 pages
May 2017
All the Names Between is Julia McCarthy’s third collection. Grounded in the experience of presence in which the external and internal meet, a crossroads of consciousness where “a language without a name / remembers us” and the poem is a votive act, All the Names Between reflects the shadow-light of being, of what is and what isn’t, of the seen and the unseen, the forgotten and the remembered; here “every elegy has an ode at its centre / every ode has an elegy around its edges.”
SEASONS IN AN UNKOWN KEY
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78 pages
May 2017
In her latest collection of poems, Karen Mulhallen takes us on a physical journey through the course of a year and on a spiritual journey through many lives. The beauty of birds, the amour fou of the inconstant lover, the rapture of the past in the history of Toronto Islands and of the city of Pompeii. This is a poet at the height of her art, crafting language and rhythm, to mirror the ebb and flow of the scene. A compelling and devastating group of poems.
PROSOPAGNOSIA
by
112 pages
May 2017
Riffing on the neurological condition “prosopagnosia” (face blindness), the difficulty recognizing familiar faces, Ron Charach’s new collection of poems explores our struggle to recognize ourselves in others, and to remain recognizable to them across the boundaries of gender, race and religion, health and illness, love and indifference, celebrity and fandom, youth and advancing age.
CLOSER TO WHERE WE BEGAN
by
96 pages
May 2017
Lisa Richter’s Closer to Where We Began is a diverse collection of poetry that follows the speaker on a path of self-discovery. The collection navigates the tension between memory and imagination, between the personal and the political, and the primacy of sensual, sensory, lived experience. These dream-like poems not only concern themselves with the speaker, but with urban and natural environments, friends, family, and lovers, past and present. The poet explores overlapping/intersecting identities that shape and inform us, celebrating the importance of telling our stories as a means of bringing us closer to our authentic selves.
SIREN
by
75 pages
April 2017
Siren, Kateri Lanthier’s astonishing second book, calls us to attention. In her search for what she calls “compelling melancholy,” Lanthier’s new poems not only draw on the ghazal's history as love poetry but remind readers of the dangerous and alluring quality of the ancient form itself. The siren was a lethal yet seductive figure, and that sense of power—and as well as her fast-taking bemusement at her own reputation—is present in lines that marry unnerving dream logic to emotional fearlessness. Siren is an uncompromising achievement: an original style at once mysterious, witty and musical that refines and clarifies the world in consistently surprising ways." Call it playing with fire. Call it connect-the-dots lightning."
HERMETIC DIVAGATIONS
by
na pages
April 2017
In spare erudite verse, Toronto poet Michael Boughn refuses to let memories vanish. Inspired by Hermetic Definitions by H.D., Boughn’s recollections of loss, love, and location are playful, gripping, and inconclusive. At the heart of this latest work by the author of the Governor General Award nominated Cosmogrophia: A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro Epic (2010) is an investigation into a world of secrets; how they are made, kept, and exposed. On display are the keen observations of a truth seeker contemplating love’s mysterious evidence. This is a work to be reveled and unravel slowly in the mind and heart.
HUMAN MISUNDERSTANDING
by
78 pages
April 2017
Human Misunderstanding is the latest work by award-winning poet Kathy Mac. The first of the book’s three long poems compares a fictional child soldier (a hero) with a real child soldier (a victim). The second juxtaposes eighteenth century philosophy with one person’s search for another in downtown Halifax. The final poem explores two court cases in which an immigrant faces deportation, and torture, if found guilty of assault in a Canadian court.
THE BOOK OF SENSATIONS
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120 pages
March 2017
The Book of Sensations by Sheri-D Wilson embodies an intricate ecosystem of language and feeling. These poems reach their roots down into the depths of what it means to be—to connect to one another, and to connect to the earth. With fine-tuned vocabulary, far-reaching observation, and the dream-vision of the surrealist eye, Sheri-D delves into the personal and the universal, the everyday and the mythical. This book is full of poignant sensations and astonishing realizations. This is a book of life and experience. Put it in your pocket and immerse yourself in a world of sensations.
THROWING THE DIAMOND HITCH
by
105 pages
March 2017
In 1951 two intrepid women, Phyllis and her best friend, Anne, set off on a journey from Victoria, British Columbia, to Red Deer, Alberta, and back again. Travelling first by 1927 MG Roadster to Alberta, and then on horseback on the way home, the journey took months and would test the women’s wits and resourcefulness at every turn. Phyl and Anne documented their adventures and the stories of the people they met along the way in a journal, which was passed down to author Emily Ursuliak, Phyl’s granddaughter. Throwing the Diamond Hitch—an inventive, poetic retelling of the Phyl and Anne’s journey—crackles like the starter of an old roadster, and kicks like a stubborn pack pony. Ursuliak employs a variety of poetic styles and approaches to capture the personality of the two women and the motley of characters they encountered on their trip. Ride along with Phyl and Anne, and discover how to throw the elusive diamond hitch.
A PLACE CALLED NO HOMELAND
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83 pages
March 2017
This extraordinary poetry collection is a vivid, beautifully wrought journey to the place where forgotten ancestors live and monstrous women roam―and where the distinctions between body, land, and language are lost. In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Kai Cheng Thom draws equally from memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. In the world of a place called No Homeland, the bodies of the marginalized―queer and transgender communities, survivors of abuse and assault, and children of diaspora―are celebrated, survival songs are sung, and the ancestors offer you forgiveness for not remembering their names.
Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk poetry, Kai Cheng Thom's debut collection is evocative and unforgettable.
STRAY
by
59 pages
March 2017
Allison LaSorda's Stray shows the formation of a considerable poetic talent. These poems are sun-bleached, at once gritty, raw, and playful. LaSorda can conjure childhood memories of beaches and ice cream, ponder the elemental force of the ocean, and plumb the depth of loss in a coal mine disaster. Bringing to mind the poetry of Robert Hass and Louise Glück, LaSorda presents the messiness of daily life with emotional honesty and humour.
Stray examines intimacy, memory, and decay, often betraying existential bewilderment. Deft word play and musical sense underscore the absurdity these poems explore, while surprising rhymes and unexpected images resound in deeply personal narratives. In this dazzling debut, LaSorda both disarms her readers and breathes fresh life into Canadian poetry.
OTOLITH
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87 pages
March 2017
Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader's attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of British Columbia's coastal rainforest, these poems are full of life and decay; they carry the odours of salmon rivers and forests of fir; salal growing in the fog-bound mountain slopes.
This astonishing debut, at once spare and lush, displays an exquisite lyricism built on musical lines and mature restraint. Nilsen turns over each idea carefully, letting nothing escape her attention and saying no more than must be said. Combining a scientist's precision and a poet's sensitivity, Otolith examines the ache of nostalgia in the relentless passage of time.
THE RULES OF THE KINGDOM
by
120 pages
March 2017
To seek belonging, to strain against the familiar - these are the polarities many of us live between, feeling the pull of each desire. Offering a particular history, an intimate vantage point from within the various kingdoms we inhabit, Julie Paul’s The Rules of the Kingdom is an exploration of this struggle on a personal level and a universal one.
Broken into five sections, the book examines the human struggle to find meaning, comfort, and a sense of home. In “Settlers’ Descendant Reclaims the Past,” the poems consider rural life, both the specific and the collective, including a village’s destruction by fire. In “Weight of the Word” the focus turns to family of origin, religion, and rites of passage. Poems take a familial tack again in “Cleavage,” wherein Paul dives into the waters of motherhood, and they drift into further intimacy in “The World’s Smallest Republic,” a series of poems about sex, love, and marriage. Finally, the poems in the fifth section, “Next Time the World Will Burn,” explore our place in the twenty-first century and offer some idiosyncratic suggestions on how to live.
At turns humorous, playful, contemplative, and coy, the poems in The Rules of the Kingdom question the vagaries of faith and family but ultimately celebrate life and love.
SAME DIFF
by
141 pages
March 2017
Same Diff by Donato Mancini meets at the intersection of contemporary poetry, art, and current politics. Influenced by documentary cinema such as the films of Frederic Wiseman, Dada poets, montage techniques, and a range of modern poets, Same Diff explores the way social and economic histories become imprinted within language itself.
The political and poetic melancholy of our moment is revealed in a long poem on climate change, particularly the disappearance of snow, while the real-life effects of fiscal austerity and poverty are voiced in fragments conveying social neuroses that stem from amplified, unfair competition for basic necessities.
Each poem introduces a dominant motif that develops through repetition and incremental variations, sourcing language from newspapers, online sources, and overheard conversations to create an emotive effect, as felt in music.
LITTLE WILDHEART
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70 pages
March 2017
By turns quirky, startling, earthy, and hope-filled, Micheline Maylor’s poems slip effortlessly through topics ranging from what we give up as we age to regrets for love that has passed, the interplay between the animal world and human thought, and the myths we append to ourselves and others. An expansive, conversational voice underscores the poet’s technical mastery as her subjects turn from love to hope to fearlessness. Maylor asks readers to perceive how we inhabit our selves, how words construct us. Little Wildheart is rich with challenge and surprise.
LEAVING MILE END
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66 pages
March 2017
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 as Fiorentino mines the peculiar linguistic resources of a new world of doxxing, swatting, snarking, trolling, catfishing, and shaming. While addressing the disconnect between the way we treat each other online and the way we treat each other IRL, Leaving Mile End provides a new framework for understanding what it means to be home in 2017.
ALL OF US, RETICENT, HERE, TOGETHER
by
87 pages
December 2016
Families guard the unsaid. Neighbours listen over the fence and whisper. Technobabble, journalese, and the relentless sloganeering of politics strip-mine our last great cultural resource: words. Amid the detritus of that site, Stephen Brockwell’s All of Us Reticent, Here, Together stakes out a reclamation zone, prospecting for an authentic voice in a world of shocking scarcity, nauseating abundance, and ubiquitous twittering.
HYAENA SEASON
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115 pages
December 2016
The poems of Hyaena Season examine, with narrative and lyric intensity, the intimacies of a wide range of human experience from the killing grounds of Rwanda and DR Congo, to more familiar Canadian settings. But no matter the topics - whether memories of parents, children, lovers or the even more challenging stories of physical and emotional conflict at home or away, the focus is intensely personal as the poems grapple with the tensions between the darker undercurrents and tender epiphanies that make up human experience.
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[OR]
by
127 pages
November 2016
[OR] might be a book of steganography. Or not. The tension of appearance inheres in it, and ciphertexts seem to abound. As the poems take up their concealing/revealing, coded/decoded, intelligence/counter-intelligence themes, borders and borderlands appear, are crossed, or are closed. Many of the borderlands turn out to be their own interiors – “secret” workings of the codes ghosting through them. Are they abject castoffs, lost possibilities, proscribed mutations, or future events?
BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS
by
Signal Editions pages
November 2016
Taking its inspiration from Melville’s famous line “If man will strike, strike through the mask!”, Based on Actual Events punches through the surface of visible things, grabbing wild at the drifting actual. Calling himself a “a realist in fabulist clothing,” Robert Moore gives us a book-length sequence of sleek, fiercely comic, colloquial poems whose aphoristic storytelling is pegged to a nostalgia for sublimity. His project is to find new frames of reference for our estrangement from the world. With each burst of invention and stylistic high-spiritedness (“So we reverse engineered the awesome and all we got / was this lousy poesy”), Based on Actual Events adds up to be Moore’s best book yet.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S LAST PICTURE
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378 pages
November 2016
Sean Howard has written twenty poems inspired by photographs he discovered in a tattered copy of Collier's Photographic History of the European War (1916), although 'inspired' is hardly an adequate word for it. For Howard, each photograph introduces a cascade of associations and ideas about history and memory, about the events and implications of the First World War, and about our ongoing relationship with global conflict.
ON NOT LOSING MY FATHER’S ASHES IN THE FLOOD
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83 pages
November 2016
In his final years, Richard Harrison’s father suffered from a form of dementia, but he died without ever forgetting the poems he had memorized as a student and had taught to Richard as a child. In 2013, the poet feared his father’s ashes had been lost in the flood water that ravaged Alberta – a crisis that would become the inciting event and central theme of this collection. Combining elements of memoir, elegy, lyrical essay and personal correspondence with appreciations of literary works ranging from haiku to comic books, Richard Harrison has written a book of great intellectual depth that is as generous as it is enchanting.
ةيلمع Operación Opération Operation 行 动 Oперация
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178 pages
November 2016
From poet-provocateur Moez Surani comes ةيلمع Operación Opération Operation 行 动 Oперация—a book-length poetic inventory of contemporary rhetoric of violence and aggression, as depicted through the evolution of the language used to name the many military operations conducted by UN Member Nations since the organization’s inception in 1945.
With ةيلمع Operación Opération Operation 行动 Oперация, Surani draws from two poetic traditions—conceptual poetry, with its appropriation and filtration of language and its methodological focus on establishing rigorous constraints from which poems develop and emerge; and inventory poems that aggregate small parts into larger, inferred meanings. In so doing, he achieves two important aims: On the one hand, he shows that no word is free from connoting violence—where “tulip” and “grasshopper” are equal to “killer” and “bone breaker,” no word is inherently innocent, beautiful, or good. On the other hand, he provokes people to consider whether their personal values match the values of the military operations that are conducted by their countries, often in the name of protecting and/or representing those same citizens.
By pulling military language away from euphemism—effectively, making it account for its doublespeaking ways— ةيلمع Operación Opération Operation 行动 Oперация documents the chasm that exists between these two sets of values, and gives voice to the many lives lost in conflicts around the world, in a volume that will speak equally to lovers of contemporary poetry, language, and linguistics, as to readers interested in politics, international relations, and public discourse.
LOST ORIGINALS
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112 pages
November 2016
Translation is the extrovert, metaphor the introvert. Without translation, there is no communication. Without metaphor, there is no art.
Starting from the notion that every act of speaking is a translation between worlds, writer, scholar, and critic David B. Goldstein’s Lost Originals comprises a collection of elegies for a series of “lost originals”—objects, images, and experiences whose ghostly traces can only be evoked through language.
The book’s encounters with a menagerie of items—from porcelain figurines, maps, and soundscapes, to computer-generated email spam, and journalism about sharks—yield a myriad of voices, giving metaphorical speech to the unspeaking or unspoken, and at the same time, uncovering a surprising beauty in language normally viewed as impenetrable or utilitarian.
For lovers of allusive and layered poetics, Flarfist experimentation, and language that communes with art, and for those interested in how we encounter objects and how they encounter us.
STOMATA
by
107 pages
November 2016
Stomata, Genevieve Lehr’s second collection, asks that language shoulder loss, that it reach out centrifugally, at full metaphorical stretch, calling upon all its narrative and lyric resources to be adequate to human tragedy. These losses include immediate deaths, Alzheimer’s, abuse, cancer, and—in a remarkable poem—residential schools, and they activate a potent spirituality that calls on a full range of imagistic resources.
As a grief book, Stomata is remarkable for its energy and range. While it honours and remembers the lost, it is always charged with a sense of a mystic power deriving from them. “In a conversation between Homer and Hermes, loss was found to be a gift,” writes Lehr. The result is the poetic experience of a vitalistic universe in which “Metamorphosis is everywhere”: a grief-enhanced rather than a grief-stricken vision. In Lehr’s poems, one keeps being struck by a simultaneity of mundane and cosmic, as can be see in the first lines of her opening long poem: “In the latter half of the third quarter of the waning moon / I sit at the table drinking tea.”
This is a book that is constantly provocative, alive with spirit and a restless energy in the face of disaster.
LEAVE - TAKING
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78 pages
October 2016
Leave-Taking moves through stages of grief—the reckoning, the remembering, the rituals—after the sudden death of a spouse. The poems trace reflections on a long marriage, and what it is like to be left behind. The poems travel from Haida Gwaii on the west coast of Canada, across the mountains and into the prairie city of Winnipeg, to the beaches of Cape Cod; however, they stop often to rest in the quiet spaces found inside Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto. Through these interspersed cemetery poems and epitaphs—mini-stories in stone—grief unfolds from many perspectives: praise and lament, love and disenchantment, hope and pain, faith and doubt. Above all, Leave-Taking is a tender love elegy; one that connects with anyone who has experienced deep loss.
DUST OR FIRE
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105 pages
October 2016
Is this life a route or a destination?
Alyda Faber's assured début examines the ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth we inhabit, and asks the question, What is left of us when we are gone?
In the quiet and unsettling poems of Dust or Fire, Faber speaks from the grief following death to explore the meaning of love and family. She is not afraid of gaps and ellipses, finding music in the silences. Her unflinching gaze explores the imperfections of our fleeting existence, our ambitions and relationships, our flawed humanity. Documenting the search for home, the longing to belong, to love and be loved, she turns to the ways love can curve toward pain, how we carelessly hurt one another, but also how we find the grace to forgive and carry on. Dust or Fire is a moving collection, at once grounding and uplifting.
ONCE IN BLOCKADIA
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135 pages
October 2016
In this collection of long and serial poems, Stephen Collis returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene Era. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes – and stands in the path of pipelines, where on Burnaby Mountain in 2014 he was sued for $5.6 million by energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers glossed Collis’s writing in court by noting that “underneath the poetry is a description of how the barricade was constructed.” Called by Eden Robinson “the most dangerous poet in Canada,” in Once in Blockadia Collis is in search of how we can continue to resist – as we only begin to understand the extent of our complicity and the depths of the predicament we are in.
THE LAST WHITE HOUSE AT THE END OF A ROW OF WHITE HOUSES
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69 pages
October 2016
The poems in The Last White House at the End of the Row of White Houses teem with delightful and confusing life, from workhorses and dinosaurs to wolves and kings. Alternately spare and lush, surreal and precise, these poems work their way under the skin to sing gorgeous songs to the heart.
SLICK RECKONING
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86 pages
October 2016
In these thoughtful, yet playful poems, Belford builds a poetry experience the curious reader can open anywhere, read, and read on. Although the phrasing of his lines is unusual, Ken Belford’s poetry is not easily forgotten. It’s not necessary to begin at the beginning or to read to the end to get a good sense of what this poet is about. Read a little, or read a lot; he’s worth it.
Ken Belford is a timber framer. He has managed a northern wood lot, from which he has milled his own lumber, carrying out most of the timbers for his buildings on his back. These thoughtful, yet playful poems, like his structures, tell of powerful connections artfully made, of an earned sense of how things work, and an intimate awareness of the cycle of all things.
FRIENDLY + FIRE
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119 pages
October 2016
Comprising experimental poetry and prose, Friendly + Fire interrogates the male subjective experience of war and the gendered implications of camaraderie or “brotherhood” while aligning the seriousness of a war target with the frivolities of gossip: “MILITARY LINGO SUBLIMATES SMACK TALK FROM HERE ON IN.”
Friendly + Fire employs a character named H.S. (also to be read as “his”) as a filter for engaging with and through real-life stories of friendly fire. In the first section, the Tarnak Farm Incident (where four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by American Air Force pilot Harry Schmidt) is used as source material, intersecting with questions about receiving a “pink slip” from one’s employer and the mental and physical conditions endured by fighter pilots (suppressed appetite, prescribed sedatives and amphetamines to regulate sleep, and stress tolerance). Reductionist language is used to describe friendship in the 21st century (forced affect in the workplace and Facebook friends).
Act I of LaFrance’s first book, Species Branding, ends with the line: “crippled on my last leg. where are our friends?” It is a question that has carried forward into Friendly + Fire, acting as the connective tissue between these two texts.
DIGSITE
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103 pages
October 2016
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 places we no longer occupy. Nicholson’s language draws on his archaeological and fieldwork background as he burrows and grinds the places we have lost, consistently underpinned by the grief that must accompany such a fervent exploration. In these discoveries, Nicholson presents us with the material remains of our own abandonment, of loss and acceptance, and ultimately leaves us with more questions than when we began.
SELAH
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58 pages
September 2016
Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk — to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould’s second poetry collection, is a sequence of fragments written in dialogue with all of these meanings. Stitched together, these fragments form a poem that runs from the ranch land of Alberta into the heart of a shared house and a shared life. Selah is about living with a husband recently diagnosed with dementia; it’s about the looking back and the imagining forward, about saying what cannot be said — the wayfaring bush and its shadow. It’s about finding a way through all this: “The palette darker than I’d planned,” yes, but also shot through with humour and care, crafted with both frankness and decorum.
NIGHT & OX
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83 pages
September 2016
Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative.
KIDS IN TRIAGE
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66 pages
August 2016
From the winner of the 2010 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award comes a remarkable debut poetry collection. In a media-saturated culture that fetishizes fear and outrage, how can we talk about emergencies, both public and private, in a way that cuts through surface truths? Kilby Smith-McGregor confronts this question with a dizzying range of voices animated by desire, humour, pleasure and grief. Richly nuanced, this is poetry that strikes a balance between baroque elegance and haunting understatement. Moving from visions of spontaneous human combustion to troubling childhood swimming lessons, the double life of a brilliant code breaker to the helplessness of a bedside vigil, we witness complex violence and ordinary hope. Effortlessly combining the languages of myth, medicine and metaphysics, Kids in Triage sounds a vital siren call.
CLEARING
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87 pages
August 2016
A Clearing is a meditation of the everyday—both the joys and the losses observed in the natural world as they so closely mirror day-to-day human experience. There is a mystical edge to these poems that opens to deeper understanding of simple desire juxtaposed with the hard realities of homelessness, failed relationships, and loss in childbirth. A Clearing, Carson’s first full collection of poetry, alternates between tender, poignant portraits and a sharper, darker voice evoked by difficult life experiences. Seasons are metaphors for loss and hunger, leading readers to larger revelations about aging, violence and global conflict. These poems are short, gritty and provocative, asking the reader to look harder at their own lives and the world around them. With the poems in A Clearing, Carson explores how having the courage to let go of the things that bog us down can lead to a place where sun shines through the shadows.
NINETEEN FIFTY-SEVEN
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128 pages
August 2016
Nineteen Fifty-Seven is much more than a look at Prairie life after World War II - with sections on Women, Family, Memories, Work, Writing and Music - these poems are an exploration on what makes life worth living. In plain language, McLean weaves fascinating, sentimental images of Moose Jaw and the Prairie landscape, as well as stories of workers and the railroads. At the same time, McLean creates a separate persona to move in an out of darker poems on death, suicide, alcoholism and voyeurism. Through poems such as "my brother, who I looked out for when we were kids", "After" and "about MacKay", McLean delves into the heart of humanity: what keeps us alive, and what shapes our past, present, and future
NOT EVEN LAUGHTER
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86 pages
August 2016
A clearance bin of corner-cut records, remaindered paperbacks, and cannisters of faded film, Phillip Crymble’s first full-length collection strives to rescue, celebrate, and preserve the works and sensibilities of those whose ideas and visions have been long overlooked by posterity. Crymble’s technical acumen, ear for music, and emotional sincerity are the adhesive agents that bring together the vernacular ethnographies, high-brow ekphrastics, tender elegies, forlorn love lyrics, and acutely observed accounts of plain and seemingly unremarkable domestic experience in this formidable debut.
SMALL FIRES
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113 pages
July 2016
Tracing a series of journeys, real and imagined, Kelly Norah Drukker's Small Fires opens with a section of poems set on Inis Mor, a remote, Irish-speaking island off the west coast of County Galway, where the poet-as-speaker discovers the ways in which remnants of the island's early Christian monastic culture brush up against island life in the twenty-first century.
Also present is a series of poems set in the Midi-Pyrenees and the countryside around Lyon. Linked to the shorter poems in the collection by landscape, theme, and tone is a set of longer narrative poems that give voice to imagined speakers who are, each in a different way, living on the margins. The collection concludes with a long poem written as a response to American writer Paul Monette's autobiographical work Borrowed Time : An AIDS Memoir.
In detailed and musical language, the poems in Small Fires highlight aspects of landscape and culture in regions that are haunted by marginal and silenced histories.
SLOW STATES OF COLLAPSE
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101 pages
July 2016
Slow States of Collapse explores the cultivation of resilience in a world that is at once menacing and full of wonder and grace. It's a book built around day-to-day conflicts—poems about love, family, grief, power, and longing that navigate the fault lines of popular culture and traditional poetry to assert that we are all history makers.
CONJUGATION
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99 pages
June 2016
As much care was taken with the writing of this collection as the shaping of the poems themselves. Replete with images of the natural world and in some cases, the mechanisms that transform it—horses, leaping fish, trees, canals, and locks—Conjugation signals a return to the nature/nurture elements that have wound their way through his earlier collections, but also a versed ode to the discouragement that many Canadians have felt about the progression of their country and government over the past number of years.
MY DINOSAUR
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157 pages
June 2016
My Dinosaur , Turcot's elegy to his father, holds poems both tensed and open, minimalist and talkative, serious and droll, alternating the father's words with the fictions and assemblies of the son. My Dinosaur is a praise and listening, the end and start of an era, and a tribute to all our Dads.
POEMS BY GERARD LEGRO
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117 pages
June 2016
In the spring and summer of 1949, Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro—two teenage pranksters with the right mix of bad attitude and artistic ingenuity—composed, circulated, and performed a collection of poems on the campus of Black Mountain College, the experimental school just outside Asheville, North Carolina. The resulting work, Poems by Gerard Legro, edited with annotations by Alessandro Porco, presents an enlightening exploration of a side of the Black Mountain College canon that is rarely seen. It is a critique of the obscurity of modernist poetry from two disaffected teens desperate to fight back against aesthetic and moral codes of maturity, propriety, and sophistication in post-war America. Poems by Gerard Legro is heterodox poetry from one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic heteronyms.
A BEDROOM OF SEARCHLIGHTS
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71 pages
June 2016
The poems in this collection explore the life of the poet's mother who divorced in 1939, at a time when a woman divorcing was still frowned upon by society. This collection draws a picture of the artist and single mother who struggled with poverty, war, and the realities of daily life, yet still found beauty and comfort in her garden, and her art.
HARD WORK CHEERING UP SAD MACHINES
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99 pages
June 2016
Jason Heroux's fourth collection of poems finds him in the laboratory. Working in free verse, more formal structures, and the prose poem, Heroux's image-rich lines explore loss, death, angst—but with wit, an empathetic gentleness, and magic. And Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines culminates with several long poems and serial poems that take his work further than ever before. Read this book and you will never look at the ordinary—a cobweb, a cricket, a parking lot—in the same way again.
BOOK OF SHORT SENTENCES
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124 pages
June 2016
In her ground-breaking fourth collection, Alice Burdick's playful and challenging—and often surreal—poems are deeply imbued with the landscape of Nova Scotia's south shore, as well as her own inner landscape, and the landscape of family. Her poems explore, too, the human vessel in which we carry pain, memory, joy, and existential bewilderment. Book of Short Sentences expands the rich palette of this highly praised poet's work.
SHINER
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105 pages
June 2016
Shiner is Eva H.D.'s powerful successor to her critically acclaimed debut, Rotten Perfect Mouth, and includes the Montreal International Poetry Prize-winning "38 Michigans." This is lyrical poetry that is as beautiful as it is angry, bracing in the sharpness of its observations. Whether noting the emotional effects of the financial crisis, the long tail of grief, or the unfolding panorama of a cross-Canada road trip, Eva H.D. measures the world around her in vivid, rambunctious, and musical excursions that ricochet with images and ideas—a surprise at every turn.
BARKING AND BITING The Poetry of Sina Queyras
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66 pages
June 2016
Sina Queyras is at the forefront of contemporary discussions of genre, gender, and poetry criticism. Her blog-turned-literary-magazine, Lemon Hound, published up-and-coming writers as well as work by established literary figures. Now, for the first time, representative work from Sina Queyras's poetic oeuvre is presented in a single volume.
HOW TO BE EATEN BY A LION
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80 pages
June 2016
Lyrical and rich with visceral imagery, Michael Johnson's debut How to be Eaten by a Lion lingers, exploring the world with an eye for detail and an ear for music.
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 topics varied and eclectic, unified by a focus on moments both declining and revenant.
HEAVEN’S THIEVES
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85 pages
May 2016
Heaven's Thieves is a collection engaged with the big questions—What are bodies for? What does it mean to be alive? What is beauty and why does it have such power over us? What is the point of art?—and the urgent ones—how to live in a shattered ecology, what to do about grief, illness, betrayal. Sinclair turns her attention to these questions with fearless curiosity, economy, and an originality born of her willingness to pursue her own line of inquiry to its limit.
PLAYERS
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95 pages
May 2016
John Nyman's Players is staged in an urban dreamscape, fusing popular culture with narratives about hand-to-hand combat, how to hustle, and high art. Taking lyrical cues from hip-hop, Nyman's poetry bends genre expectations, unravelling with a flow that's both unique and engaging.
WEATHERVANE
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80 pages
May 2016
A book of poems that's as unpredictable as the seasons that guide it, Weathervane is part eco-tourism, part domestic nocturne, and part tempest. In a shifting world, Mark Sampson resounds like a modern Zeus, advising his readers to "wear galoshes, / even if it doesn't rain." Weathervane is an intensely personal, alchemical debut from an accomplished new voice.
OFF-LEASH
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80 pages
May 2016
Everyone has a dog story, from the salesman at Home Depot to the passenger on a plane who confesses about the scar on his face. The poems in Mahoney's third collection explore the concepts of identity and ownership through rich linguistic textures and voices. From a boy's fascination with Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred to uniquely imagined Biblical dogs, Off-Leash delves into the anguish of dogs loved and lost, and the joy of homecoming.
UNDER THE STONE
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147 pages
May 2016
From birth, the child was locked away in a miniscule cell at #804 of level 5969 of the Edifice. Around him...only concrete, without a view of the outside world. And two people: the tyrannical father, slowly killing himself; and the mother, fearing eviction. Unmoving in his roost, the child's life is eventually disrupted by a transformation that reveals an unexpected horizon.
POEMW
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87 pages
May 2016
SIGHTLINES
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151 pages
May 2016
This collection is truly global in scope and universal in perspective. From a bog near Ottawa to the lagoons of Venice, from a chamber concert in an Ontario barn to a blind beggar in Mexico, from the infinities of interstellar space to the birth of a grandson—Henry Beissel celebrates the world in all its richness, mysteries and ecstasies, without ever flinching from its contradictions and torments, and offers exciting sightlines on the human condition.
ARGUMENTS FOR LAWN CHAIRS
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67 pages
May 2016
The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs take multiple positions. The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs don't trust your grandmother's cooking. They have visited Pangea, they have visited Toronto and Montreal, the B.C. Gulf Islands, Tiberias, the tailing ponds near Sudbury, and they are still not satisfied, are still unconvinced, still need more proof. They are suckers for dovetailed boxes, winter fire pits, houses that sit not quite true, a rent garbage bag spilling its guts on Queen Street. The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs have some choice words for Orpheus, for Eurydice, for Beowulf, for Dumbledore and Hermione. The poems in
are devoid of hope, but are joyful nonetheless. 
NAVY BLUE
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61 pages
May 2016
Broken hymns. Desperate prayers. Tales of first heroes. Stories of the street. The poems in Navy Blue walk the middle ground between sorrow and salvation, tackling themes of devotion, regret, innocence lost and mortality through an array of dark landscapes and narratives of the dispossessed. Written in sharp and urgent language with undercurrents of raw emotion, this book marks the arrival of a brave and original new voice in Canadian poetry.
SONGS OF EXILE
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133 pages
May 2016
The poems in Songs of Exile are not simply about geographical or political exile. They reveal a metaphorical exile from the poet's lost self, the one she left behind in Iran, her place of origin, the one she has struggled to preserve all her life. They reveal concern about the Middle East and the negative associations with Iran; preoccupation with the possibility of reconciliation between the three Abrahamic religions; worries about family back home; and broodings on newly found friends and lovers. In these poems, the political is the personal.
SHAPING A WORLD ALREADY MADE
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226 pages
May 2016
Rudy Wiebe once claimed that poetry cannot encompass the epic nature of the Canadian western landscape: "A poem, a lyric," he argued, "will not do." Geographer Carl Tracie begs to differ. In Shaping a World Already Made, Tracie not only illustrates how the poets of the prairies have captured this expansive landscape, he also shows how their poetry expands and enriches our understanding of it. Examining the exchange between poet and landscape, Shaping a World Already Made— the first book on this topic—offers an intimate reflection of prairie poetry by a scientist forever touched by the land. Science, Tracie shows us, has much to learn from art.
POUND @ GUANTANAMO
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85 pages
May 2016
Appropriating language from YouTube comments and neighbourhood signage, Clint Burnham swerves through the neoliberal and the hyperlocal, gathering fragments and contexts. In Pound @ Guantanamo he draws an analogy between Ezra Pound, imprisoned in Pisa after World War II, and the inhabitants of the military prisons at Guantanamo Bay, asking us to trek through a non-place both actual and virtual, where poetry is written under the conditions of wartime.
HUMAN TISSUE
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145 pages
May 2016
In Human Tissue: a Primer for Not Knowing, Weyman Chan unravels the otherness of incongruous personal experience, forging paths with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, Alan Turing, and Donna Haraway. In his palimpsest of personal and borrowed language, Chan addresses our human condition as it is: mediated by technology, laden with fragmented history, and shot through with love.
Human Tissue asks us to dwell within uncertainty as a way of being in the world, and to acknowledge the brimming relations among each other as we come to discover ourselves.
TIGHT WIRE
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75 pages
May 2016
In this skillful collection, images of the circus are central. The theme of these poems are balance: both literal, with ten antique carnival prose poems becoming the spine of the collection, as well as symbolic, with prose poems about women's stories/voices—balancing their growing/shrinking bodies and their ordinary/extraordinary lives. Funambulism—the art of walking the tight wire, writes courage into focus.
CEREMONY OF TOUCHING
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100 pages
May 2016
In language that is both meticulous and sensuous, Ceremony of Touching asks the reader to bear witness to the often fragile connections that bind our relationships.
In this collection of poems, Karen Shklanka illuminates her own experiences with unerring focus and a vocabulary that is lean and relentlessly honest.
She is fearless in using her life as a lover, a dancer, a traveler, a physician and a poet as a prism to refract the light of emotion so that we can see our own lives more clearly.
SERPENTINE LOOP
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103 pages
May 2016
Writers, like skaters, test edges. Although Elee Kraljii Gardiner drifted away from skating as an adult, the language of the ice delineates her poetry debut, serpentine loop . These poems take as their starting points a figure from skating, the serpentine loop, and push off into other shapes and places. While some poems enact principles from the rink—of symmetry, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, others circle ideas of femininity, control, and language as pattern. And some leave the rink for winter lakes and rivers, where every figure contains the risk or memory of falling through ice.
WHERE WE LIVE
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104 pages
May 2016
Where We Live explores how specific places and their features (street scenes, classrooms, furniture, creatures both real and mythical) become part of our identities, and illustrate how we carry them around and how we are shaped by their outlines even as we, in turn, transform them. This reciprocity extends to the adoption of other voices in the translated poems that are a vital part of each section, and to the active participation of the reader invited by the collection's flexible use of poetic form. John Reibetanz's approach comes from a conviction that the most compelling and significant features of human identity are not primarily found in solitude but rather evolve through our conversations with otherness.
THE UNLIT PATH BEHIND THE HOUSE
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100 pages
May 2016
Sensuous, atmospheric, and spare, The Unlit Path Behind the House collects poems that seek light in difficult places. In lines filled with intense music, Margo Wheaton listens for the lyricism inside the day's blessings and catastrophes.
Wheaton's poems sing at the intersections where public and private worlds collide: the steady cadence of a boy carrying an unconscious girl in his arms, the afternoon journey of a woman taking books to prisoners, the rhythmic breathing of a homeless man asleep in a parking lot. In these works, fireflies pulse in the dark, lovers clasp and unclasp, and street signs sing like Blake's angels. Deeply informed by the natural world, Wheaton's writing is marked by great meditative depth; while passionately engaged, these poems evoke a field of mystery and stillness.
RED WITH LIVING
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90 pages
May 2016
In this compelling collection of poems and art, the colour of living is red with excitement, pain, sunsets, blood, and tropical flowers. Along the way, the poet paints herself into the works of Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and Maude Lewis. Diane Driedger confronts the body in two different contexts: through her participation in the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival and through her experience of undergoing breast cancer treatment and of being chronically ill. This is poetry that celebrates the body in all its varied forms.
THE LARGENESS OF RESCUE
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66 pages
May 2016
The big theme—perhaps the only theme—is the narrative that unfolds between the bookends of our birth and death. Each of us is born into a time and place—our present—and must answer the questions only we can answer ourselves: Who are we? What will we do? What choices will we make? The Largeness of Rescue helps us travel along our own storyline by doing what the best art does so well: engages us with ourselves and with our world, and encourages us to slow down and consider our very humanness.
LAND OF THE SKY
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97 pages
May 2016
Inspired by the Rocky Mountains, "Land of the Sky," the last poem in this collection, is a means of using detail from various distances to reflect on the socio-political and the human that is all around us. At the essence of all the poems in this collection: to explore the land through the distance of the sky and understand that which seems so grounded as the sky as full of metaphor and near-unfathomable reflexes of histories. This collection is also a continuation of one of the projects of Salimah Valiani's previous poetry collection, Letter Out: Letter In , defining and redefining love as an alternative to solidarity, with the added twist of drawing alternatives to diversity and democracy from the multiplicity of nature.
DISTURBING THE BUDDHA
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82 pages
April 2016
Disturbing the Budha , Barry Dempster's fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness, and simple lack of luck—the "three-leaf clovers" so much more plentiful than four. Dempster's wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to life's ongoing intensities, indignities, and disruptions. In these poems, a forty-year-old man dons a pink plastic crown on his niece's order; a solitary man watches a Nicole Kidman rom-com with his cat; an aging Aphrodite, more mortal than god, suffers hot flashes. Like the mystic poets he addresses in the book's final section, Dempster respects the unknown as he comes to terms with the ups and downs of the all-to-human condition.
APRES SATIE — FOR TWO AND FOUR HANDS
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118 pages
April 2016
A man who might be Erik Satie floats, a la Magritte, above Paris rooftops, thinking of a newly extinct species of songbirds, "contemplating grief in the absence of song." By turns tender, playful, and fierce, the poems in Dean Steadman's second collection, Apres Satie — For Two and Four Hands, use surreal imagery, recurring characters, and cyclical themes to evoke the at once fresh and repetitive nature of much of Satie's music, as well as the artistic and intellectual temperament of Paris during Satie's most creative years.
TO GREET YOURSELF ARRIVING
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125 pages
April 2016
To Greet Yourself Arriving pays tribute to inspirational and illustrious figures throughout black history. A wide range of individuals including activists, artists, and athletes are showcased in Michael Fraser's poetic portraits. In his foreword to this collection, Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke writes, "Fraser gives us characters who, even if tortured by their experiences of "race" and/or racism, win through to a stardom that edges into heroism..."
TOMORROW’S BRIGHT WHITE LIGHT
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54 pages
April 2016
Acclaimed poet Jan Conn's latest book,Tomorrow's Bright White Light, offers poems as phenomenological guides to an approximation of a future "truth." The collection includes poems about odd, secretive childhood events and poems that visit the badlands of adolescence from both male and female viewpoints. Some poems deal with the struggles of contemporary life in its many guises, while others derive from Conn's time in Latin America. Obvious or not, all of the poems in this stunning collection are linked, creating a personal mosaic of the poet's many lives and experiences.
