First collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb * * A Dream in the Eye** presents colour reproductions of the paintings and photocollages of renowned poet Phyllis Webb. A Governor General's Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Webb was a major Canadian cultural…

First collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb * * A Dream in the Eye** presents colour reproductions of the paintings and photocollages of renowned poet Phyllis Webb. A Governor General's Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Webb was a major Canadian cultural…

In this debut poetry collection, Samantha Nock redefines where and what “home” is. A Family of Dreamers delves into the complexities of growing up in rural northeast British Columbia and the love and grief that blooms there. In this debut collection, Samantha Nock weaves together threads of fat liberation, desirability…

These brief but concentrated pieces of literary work seem at first simple in their approach and straightforward in their intent: designed to be read easily and then to be carried away in our memories. As if they were ours. But when one person writes “this is what happened, this is…

The constraint-based poems in this debut collection are written in the future-perfect tense, used as a way of bending time and playing with non-linearity. They challenge the “self” imagined as a unified monolith by pulling language apart, dissecting idioms and speech, then reassembling it in new and unconventional ways, using…

A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe through its dissolution of the categories of “man-made” and “natural.” How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous…

A kaleidoscopic net woven of words A Net of Momentary Sapphire offers three closely related poetic sequences, random rearrangements of a poignant but obsessively recurrent source text – streams of consciousness in which no stable self can be elucidated. A broken long poem, this singular net is an interrogation of…

Jack Spicer, the barroom soothsayer of the “Berkeley Renaissance,” forged a new kind of poetry with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser in the decade 1945–1955, grounded in their “queer genealogy” of Arthur Rimbaud, Federico García Lorca and other gay writers. Beginning his famous serial poem, After Lorca, in 1956, Spicer…

All Is Flesh collects in one volume Hugh Hazelton’s English translations of Yannick Renaud’s brilliant first two books of poems, Taxidermy and The Disappearance of Ideas, first published by Éditions Les Herbes rouges in Montreal.Taxidermy is a discourse on time consisting of prose poems stretched to the very limits of…

A follow-up collection from the author of the astonishing long poem eat salt | gaze at the ocean (Talonbooks, 2020), Allostatic Load chronicles the lived experiences of a Black woman in a tumultuous year marked by global racial tensions. Interweaving personal narratives with collective struggles, the poems delve into themes…

Adeena Karasick’s startling and arresting work constantly de-contextualizes and re-contextualizes language: its signs, signifiers, images, ideograms, pictograms, lexicography and syntax. In doing so, it leads us into the subliminal, where it foregrounds memories, associations, archetypes, metaphors and other elements of the subconscious usually well and deeply suppressed in the communications…

This collection of 37 essays by Canada’s Confederation Poets is the first in a series of volumes intended to collect all the significant essays on poetic theory written in English by Canadian poets from the late nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first. These essays follow a long…

An Honest Woman by Jónína Kirton confronts us with beauty and ugliness in the wholesome riot that is sex, love, and marriage. From the perspective of a mixed-race woman, Kirton engages with Simone de Beauvoir and Donald Trump to unravel the norms of femininity and sexuality that continue to adhere…

Another Order gathers the dynamic and previously inaccessible works of Judith Copithorne, the boundary-pushing writer, artist, community worker, and outspoken feminist who has been a key figure in Vancouver’s literary scene since the 1960s. Including poetry, fiction, visual art, comics, and life writing, Another Order captures Copithorne’s “embodied approach to…

Asian Skies is the final book of Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he has previously left behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book, Limbo Road, only to find himself in the terra incognita of the new world of the second, Dominican Moon.Now guideless, Norris…

Even though we spend a third of our lives asleep, the behaviour remains largely a mystery. Sandra Huber’s first book, Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep, assumes that any attempt to solve this mystery requires new modes of experimentation. What happens when the line of a Berger’s wave (an…

Loved and admired by readers for the grace of her language and the humanity of her vision, Sharon Thesen is one of Canada’s finest and most respected poets. Thesen’s poems express the pleasure and magic of a language fully transformed into visions of grace.

More than 30 years in the making, Frank Davey’s careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence his youthful imagination assembled growing up in and immediately after World War II is a work of astonishment.This is no lyrical work of sentimental nostalgia, no attempt to return to a romanticized “simpler past,”…

For thousands of years, formal compositional rules of rhyme, metre and rhetorical devices have shaped the language of poetry, creating “meaning” through the interplay between these culturally determined aesthetic prerequisites imposed on its syntax, and the “other” intelligence of the poet pushing against these constraints. Bardy Google reinvents these formal…

Comprised of two lines of poetic text flowing along a 114-foot-long map of the Columbia River, this powerful image-poem by acclaimed poets Fred Wah and Rita Wong presents language yearning to understand the consequences of our hydroelectric manipulation of one of North America’s largest river systems. beholden: a poem as…

Blonds on Bikes is George Bowering’s first book of poetry since Urban Snow was published by Talonbooks in 1992. Characteristic of Bowering’s other work, this book is largely made up of sequences. The longest one, the title poem, is a composition of daily riffs during an autumn in Denmark and…

In this her first book of “prosaics,” Renee Rodin discovers a home in the wilderness surrounding her. Pieced together from childhood memories of Montreal, dreams of her mother’s towering absence, long distance calls with her father, street politics and the joy of children, Bread and Salt, what you bring for…

With the publication of this present edition, Talonbooks is pleased to make available to the reader the first complete version of Fred Wah’s Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh, the seventh book of poetry from one of the most important poets in North America today.

breth presents both new and selected poems from legendary Canadian sound, visual, and performance poet bill bissett. bissett’s innovations have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and have stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. This new collection, bissett writes,“shows sew manee threds thru poetree n…

The terminal illness and death of the author’s father and a recent trip to Egypt led Lola Lemire Tostevin to explore what she perceives to be the essential relation between language and death. In the hieroglyphs and carvings of ancient Egyptian temples she experienced how the bleakness of death and…

Chambersonic imagines the book as an acoustic chamber, its pages populated with an ensemble of players who breathe together, enacting translations between instruments and materials. The space comes alive with rehearsals, scores, and a reverberation of adjoining environments – aural, social, physical, visual, political. A conductor fades in and out…

The multifaceted pun in the title of Mark Cochrane’s latest book of poems (a room is a stanza, is a space, is an enclosure; in which a change, a transaction, a metamorphosis takes place) is a barbed hook of seduction for the reader in love with the body of language.…

A moving new collection from award-winning poet, novelist, critic, and creative-writing instructor Margaret Christakos, charger considers the plugged-in self fuelled by the technologies that deliver us to each other. A deeply humane poetic cycle in twelve sections, charger grapples with the complicated currents that course between private and social, between…

Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces – concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms – that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection.The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is…

Drawing on more than two thousand years of ancient Chinese tradition that present diverse philosophical modes of being, whether it be the spiritual teachings of Kong Zi or Lao Tzu, the military dicta of Sun Tzu or the complex sensibilities expressed by poets such as Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, Li Bai, Du…

Written over the span of a decade and a half, Coast Mountain Foot keens its ear to the energies that connect cities, refracting the gesture of George Bowering’s 1968 classic Rocky Mountain Foot. Occasioned by fitzpatrick’s own move from Calgary to Vancouver in 2011, the book writes through the messy…

Conversations with the Kagawong River poses questions about language, the boundaries of authorship and readership, and the possibility of collaboration with the more-than-human. A site-specific engagement with a local ecosystem, it makes visible the colonial, environmental, and social processes that construct an ecosystem and (settler) relationships to it.The author spent…

cop city swagger takes an etymological and theoretical dive into the words “safety” and “care,” questioning whose “safety” matters in the City of Vancouver. Spanning from 2019, near the beginning of the pandemic and the corresponding rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the city, to 2023, the centennial year of…

Taking as her guide the structure of the contemporary pop psychology how-to book, with its neatly numbered and ordered rules regarding how to change and improve our lives, and also flirting with a concept found in serial poems such as Jack Spicer’s “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy,” Dina Del Bucchia fashions incredibly…

Catriona Strang expertly “fabricates her own reality” in poems that explore the female condition and respond to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In a powerful and rare display of poetic ingenuity, Strang situates classical themes of existentialism, memory, time, and the role of women in two clarifying contexts:…

What earthly use is the love of ornament? Slowing down to look closely at an inherited shawl made by hand, the title poem in Rahat Kurd’s Cosmophilia traces an object of luxury to the traditionally male art of Kashmiri shawl embroidery. The poet works with images from Kashmir, her maternal…

Cultural Mischief is a collection of prose poems on the hyperbolic absurdities of multiculturalism in action. Whether digging up the midden under Greg Curnoe’s house, revisiting Hiroshima, attending a dog breeder’s show or retelling the history of Quebec from the point of view of its founding nations, the Mohawks and…

To the street that is a village, Daniel Zomparelli conveys a liveliness and wit that rhetorically towel-flicks its way from the sardonic bathhouse banter of ancient Rome to the cinematic musical machismo of the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, with each poem “translating” another chapter in his documentary of…

If language is an index of belonging, then Decompositions is the writing of an exile, a tribe of one.For much of his life, Ken Belford has lived in the north, in the pristine region of the headwaters of the Nass River. His careful (de)compositions disclose the land as a complex…

A debut poetry collection that grows from the impulse to explore home in the suburb – in the intersections, overlaps, and gaps between urban and rural. These are walking poems and driving poems. In growing suburbs across the country, there is a push to urbanize, to rethink this sprawling space;…

With breathtaking virtuosity, Garry Thomas Morse sets out to recover the appropriated, stolen and scattered world of his ancestral people from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, retracing Captain Vancouver’s original sailing route. These poems draw upon both written history and oral tradition to reflect all of the respective…

Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, Dominican Moon is the second book in Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he leaves behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book in this series, Limbo Road, and finds himself in the “terra incognita” of the Caribbean Sea.On his own…

Down Time proposes a social self that is able to recognize the ironies and restrictions we live in without returning to a garrison mentality.

In this quick-witted collection of poems, Nikki Reimer mines the language of new media – hashtags, YouTube comments, Twitter updates – to defamiliarize the very substance of modern life: the Ingram CoreSource of media-enforced ideals that barrage our newsfeeds, daily commutes to #work, and (mostly online) excursions to the (Apple)…

The Japanese steamship Komagata Maru set sail for Canada with 376 Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu migrants travelling from Punjab, India. They were refused entry at Vancouver, even though all passengers were British subjects. The Komagata Maru sat moored in Vancouver’s harbour for two months while courts decided the passengers’ right…

Lifted from an ancient Chinese astronomical text, the title Dream Pool Essays hints at Gil McElroy’s interest in cosmology: always a construct made visible between the elements of chaos.These poems constitute an active multiple streaming of sources usually considered quite disparate: the physical sciences, particularly astronomy, theoretical cosmology, and quantum…

Edward Byrne’s Duets consists of interpretative translations of sonnets by Louise Labé, who lived and wrote in sixteenth-century Lyon, and those by thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti.In the case of Labé, the twenty-four sonnets – twenty-three in French, one in Italian – constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the duration of an…

A long poem that blends and bends the lyric, procedural poetry, the travelogue and extended forms, Dwell lives in, or dwells on, the interaction of a restless subjectivity with the seemingly transparent, yet identifiable, social codes that encase us.

Adeena Karasick’s fourth book of poetry achieves an astonishing layered complexity and maturity. Dyssemia Sleaze is at one and the same time Karasick’s most political and most personal book to date. Its performance is that of an inter-folded language, woven (shuffled) back and forth between the perpetual absence of intimations…

A lyrical collection focussing on a specific street and on a particular tree growing there, Earle Street, by Governor General’s Award winner Arleen Paré, takes the concept of street and urban living, the houses on the street, the neighbours, the boulevard trees and wildlife, and the street’s history as a…

eat salt | gaze at the ocean explores the themes of Black sovereignty, Haitian sovereignty, and Black lives, using the Haitian (original) zombie as a metaphor for the condition and treatment of Black bodies. Interspersed with information about zombies, Haiti, and policies is the author’s personal narrative of growing up…

Poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei’s Eight Track is a transliterary exploration of traces. Sound recordings, surveillance cameras, desert geoglyphs, drone operators, refugee interviews, animal imprints, and audio signals manifest moments of inspired wonder, systems of power, slippages, debris. In “the great era of seeing” when the boundary between tracking…

Fifty is the book Ken Norris began writing when he was 47 and stopped writing on the day he turned 50. It is both a counting and an accounting. He writes of love found and love lost, of children growing and parents dying, of political injustice, of the slow crawl…

This third volume in McFadden’s Terrafina Trilogywhich began with Gypsy Guitar and There’ll be Anotheris shaped by a wealth of poetic forms.

In Floating Up to Zero, Ken Norris introduces us to a traveller from an antique land,” though in this case that traveller’s story is not Shelley’s meditation on the vanity of ancient kings, but rather the poet’s ­meditation on the here and now, on the present moment, precariously balanced between…

Flying Red Horse is a book of poetry, with a lyric essay, about fatherhood and masculinity, and the conditions of whiteness that pressure those terms for contemporary relevance and meaning. It looks at the precarity of relationships between people and place in diverse geographic and racial contexts; it addresses the…

Anahita Jamali Rad’s debut book of poetry juxtaposes Marxist economics with pop culture lyrics, from FKA Twigs to Sonic Youth, tangling the "You & I" of relationships and social identification. She asks: How is it possible to communicate when the "I" speaks from the margins? Who is the "I" when…

Starting with lyric statement as a point of interrogation, Fortified Castles asks what might cause retreat into the comforting walls of the self. Moving from a tickertape tableau of economic and environmental crisis to the difficulty of finding one another in the streets, these poems locate the Western subject between…

In fractal economies, derek beaulieu pushes the limits of poetry and poetics by grinding language through the mill of photocopiers, found material, collage, printmaking, frottage and Letraset—creating a new language for the genre. These “fractal economies,” or series of increasingly complex replications of forms through the repeated application of a…

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 led to Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks 2016), where LaFrance takes aim at friendship as such. The Tarnak Farm Incident, where four Canadian soldiers in…

BC Book Prize, Poetry: Cecily Nicholson, From the Poplars (Winner)In the North Arm of British Columbia’s Fraser River lies an uninhabited island. Guarded by water from the city of New Westminster’s bustling industrial and shipping district, Poplar Island is lush and unspoken, but storied. It is the traditional territory of…

This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to…

This first book-length study of Bowering explores the relationship between his work and the arts.

Why is it so difficult to stay present in the moment? Murakami's poems, written in response to her open call on the Internet, search airport departures and arrivals for a handhold on the fleeting present. Working within and wriggling out of the constraint of 14 lines, the poems explore how…

The eponymous first part of mclennan’s new book consists of fifty “gifts” each centred around words, phrases, or “glyphs” of language that initiate and replicate their own fractal transformations: some remain simply found fragments about which other words and phrases unfold, some lose themselves into pieces that we forget were…

Composed in three sections, Glengarry is a return in writing to the landscape of rob mclennan’s youth and a headlong rush into the fractures, slippages and buried surfaces of what the text leaves undisclosed to him.In “glengarry: open field (a postscripted journal)” the poet discovers that “the earth remembers every…

If, as Robert Creeley said, “form is never more than an extension of content,” what happens when we lose form? Does content retreat into its ruins, its absences? Can we never go home because it retreats from us as relentlessly and unfathomably as our future? Is the imagination of “our”…

Colin Browne’s exciting new work Ground Water received a glowing review in The Georgia Straight (June 6-13, 2002 issue). In all map making, one begins with the representation of ‘ground’ and ‘water,’ and what grows or is constructed on these representations is rendered by a series of conventional symbols-the ‘elements…

David McFadden has set for himself, in this sequence of one hundred poems, a task both breathtaking in its scope and stunning in its accomplishment. By echoing with his gypsy guitar the troubadour tradition of the Languedoc, the great sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the redefinitions of beauty and…

For the past four decades, world-renowned Haida artist Clarence Mills (Ḵ’aak’insk’us) has been creating artwork in the cultural tradition and style of his people, including a totem displayed at Expo 86 in Vancouver. He made history as the first Haida artist whose work was shown at the Louvre, and is…

Astonishingly beautiful entrances into the personae of lost companions who reappear, animated by a voice in love with the music of their speaking.

Set mainly in the rural, HARROWINGS connects with Black intellectual and art history in relation to agriculture. The poems include pulses of memoir from the poet's childhood growing up on a farm, as well as from more recent pandemic experiences volunteering for a local agricultural enterprise led by people who…

For rob mclennan, poetry is a way of seeing, and what is seen in harvest: a book of signifiers is always a landscape as it inhabits the poet and his various personae. In the absence of capital letters, with only minimalist punctuation, and with a denial of the possessive case,…

With Here, award-winning poet Colin Browne offers a book of luminous encounters, contradictions, collisions, and meditations on art, nature, justice, historical memory, and territorial occupation. Browne’s texts mine the harrowing destinies and densities of place – in this case, of the North American Northwest Coast. The work’s seven movements are…

Since 1975, Ken Norris has produced some of Canada’s most intriguing poetry. Whether detailing the amorous lives of produce (Vegetables), documenting travels to the South Seas (The Better Part of Heaven and Islands), engaging contentious social and political issues (In the Spirit of the Times and In the House of…

Weyman Chan’s fifth collection takes poetry to the laboratory, splicing a layered, tactile network that is Human Tissue.Short lyric poems navigate personal experience and memory, then weave into serial poems such as “Parables for Frankenstein,” diving into the material conditions of hybridity to construct the symbiotic self of a prototype…

Written in his unique phonetic language, bill bissett’s second novel-poem, hungree throat, recounts the relationship of two men – one bold and unafraid, the other burdened by terrible memories and unable to trust. We witness ten years of a shared life marked by hunger “4 breething being singing eeting digesting…

The idea for this book, says Weyman Chan, is simple—approach the world as metaphor, and it will come to you. Subtitled “notes to myself,” Hypoderm is a manifesto of observations, intimations and recognitions of mortality that get under the poet’s skin—that remind the reader that poetry is documentation and speculation,…

Guided by Arthur Rimbaud’s mottos “Change ton vie,” and “Je est un autre,” Jamie Reid began publishing poetry in TISH magazine at barely 20 years old, in 1961. This selection draws from those brilliantly impressionist early poems, through his contemporary writing expressive of an urban particularity within a sophisticated global…

Impeccable Regret travels terrain demonstrating that, as a result of the so-called postmodern impulses driving poetic discourse, culture has replaced nature as humanity’s defining context; that, within the paradigm of the twenty-worst century, the recollection of natural environments seems anachronistic or oxymoronic. The poems in this collection respond to the…

In her first idiom-shattering book of poetry, Wanda John-Kehewin endeavours to “speak her truth,” combining elements of First Nations oral tradition with a style of dramatic narrative that originates from the earliest traditions of cultural storytelling and also keeps pace with the rhythmical undulations of Canadian poets such as James…

For over 40 years Warren Tallman, reader, critic, mentor, friend, confidant, host and impresario to writers all across North America has remained “in the midst” of the poetic discourse that time and again restores the body of his great goddess, Mother Tongue. He has been almost single handedly responsible for…

Award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s third collection, Injun, is a long poem about racism and the representation of indigenous peoples. Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 – the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America – Injun then…

Taking its title from a phrase in a pop-up ad, Inspecting Nostalgia is R. Kolewe’s second collection of poetry that brings together found text and fragments of various writers’ work with scraps from his own journals. Kolewe’s concerns with “nostalgia,” derived from the Greek “nostos” (return) and “algos” (pain), forge…

Moving with nomadic grace across the terrain of his previous book, Decompositions, the poetic language of Ken Belford in Internodes shares similar roots, traversing decades at the speed of a search query – pressing onward through Hazelton, the Bulkley Valley, and the unroaded headwaters of the Nass River in the…

An early member of the avant-garde TISH group, which turned Canadian poetry for the first time to a focus on language, Marlatt’s career has spanned five decades and a range of formal styles and concerns. Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems offers Marlatt’s perceptual and Vancouver-centric work of the 1970s, her…

An early member of the avant-garde TISH group, which turned Canadian poetry for the first time to a focus on language, Marlatt’s career has spanned five decades and a range of formal styles and concerns. Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems offers Marlatt’s perceptual and Vancouver-centric work of the 1970s, her…

Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of the poem’s ability for “suddenness” to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening—writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events,…

A pioneer of sound, visual, and performance poetry, bill bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently since the 1960s worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry. bissett’s latest collection since…

So many things seem like a BIG DEAL: buying clothes, food trends for healthfulness and coolness, what’s trending online, your personal problems, what someone else has said, the political landscape, an Instagram post, avocado toast. This list could go on and on. What’s a big deal to someone might be…

At once raw and skillful, painful and funny, personal and pervasive, the poems in Jump Scare dig deep into mental health, neurodivergence, grief, dreams, monstrosity, sexuality, pop culture, queer consumer culture, and the commodification of identity. Jump Scare tackles isolation and loss head-on and thinks hard and with wry humour…

In JUST LIKE I LIKE IT, Danielle LaFrance combines poetry and autotheory as a means of targeting ideological infatuation, spilling into an obsession with ideological abolishment. JUST LIKE I LIKE IT searches for ways to kill and abolish "it," seeking means to get it done right, even when attempted slowly…

It is extraordinary that one can take the measure of how radically cultural sensibilities can change throughout a century by a careful reading of only two texts—in this case Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, written in the midst of the First World War, and George Bowering’s brilliant response to Rilke’s…

In the Standard Model of Big Bang Cosmology, about 300,000 years after its birth the temperature of the universe had dropped to the point where the first simple elements were formed, matter became cool enough for light to at last move freely, and the universe itself became transparent to radiation.…

lettuce lettuce please go bad is an incantation and a plea for transformation. Using the idea of compost as composition – since the organic process of recycling leaves, words, or food scraps into valuable fertilizer enriches both soil and human life – the book draws on divination systems, herbal healing…

Just as for Dante, for whom the image of the beloved gave entrance to a complete imagination of the world, an “imago mundi,” the betrayal of a beloved can also shatter the poet’s vision, no matter how elaborately conceived. Such a betrayal can turn the world upside down, where what…

Poems that tell stories on many different levels: through sound, visual images, political insights, non-narrative fusion and linguistic music.accepting th radiant dances uv being4 kleerances uv ko dependenseez n helpth selvs being plural storeez soundvizual politikul non narrativ fuseynlinguisteek mewsik letting go uv thrashyunalizasyuns irrashyunalizaysyunsblaming games they made me putting…

An incendiary new novel based on the myth of Medusa from noted author Martine DesjardinsShe’s been called Medusa for so long that she’s forgotten her real name. She walks with her head down, her face hidden behind her hair to spare others the sight of her Deformities – eyes so…

Mercedes Eng’s first book is a risky and profoundly unsettling work of “auto-cartography,” documenting the struggles and politics of everyday life in Vancouver, foregrounding the literal and figurative violence behind the euphemism “missing women,” resistance to the Olympic-Industrial Complex, and other legacies of colonialism that continue to haunt the fragile…

Life-long poem project from the Governor General's Award–winning former parliamentary poet laureate.

In December 2005, stalled on a novel he was writing, George Bowering thought he needed a challenge. By the end of the year he had made a New Year’s resolution: write a poem a day for the 365 days of 2006. While working on Crows in the Wind, in January,…

My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan is a darkly humorous book about grief and isolation. Cutting yet tender, sorrowful yet angry, these poems touch on death and loss, architecture, alcohol, horse statues, and catalogues of life.

The follow up to Eng's BC Book Prize-winning Prison Industrial Complex Explodes.

th text below is an abbreeveatid transliterasyun uv bill bissetts own descripsyun uv his latest book.“narrativ enigma / rumours uv hurricane is about the fragility and incompletion of all narratives, really. Stories, of course, can be condensed and are more portable, more understandable, and in so doing lose much of…

News & Smoke includes selections from all six of Thesen’s previous books (of which only Aurora remains in print); unpublished poems from the fifteen year period of the late 70s to the mid 90s; as well as some work previously published only in magazines. All of the work is imbued…

When Zero, the hero of our story, stumbles upon a mysterious manuscript, they’re thrown into a journey across centuries, continents, and concepts. They travel throughout the Muslim world, from Sumeria to India to Baghdad. They learn about Europe as other and outside. They’re guided by the cryptic mirror the manuscript…

No Town Called We writes through the death of elders, social panic, and the climate crisis via the lens of the multiply disabled, female-coded body approaching midlife. Punching through the veils of complacency and greed that shape the cultures of the petrostate, these poems are meditations on an emergency, dispatches…

Weyman Chan’s second poetry collection elaborates his singular and solitary work on the renaissance of the contemporary lyric form. Unmistakably present in these poems are the sensibilities of Li Po, wherein the powers of nature illuminating a meticulously built landscape articulate a poignant, harmonious but fleeting epiphany; Keats’ vision of…

The 19th-century German mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann’s ideas had a profound effect on the development of modern theoretical physics and provided the concepts and methods used later in Einstein’s relativity theory and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” Riemann is popularly known for his challenge of Euclidean geometry’s axiomatic (“given” or “natural”)…

A pioneer of sound, visual and performance poetry—eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things (“proper” nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word…

Celebrated since the 1960s for pushing linguistic boundaries, bill bissett describes this book as “a novel with connekting pomes n essays.” This interweaving of fact and fiction creates a narrative that is redolent with surprise and discovery. Its three-part “fictional” story offers a new and engaging understanding of the human…

Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book.Composed almost entirely of quatrains (each page being comprised of four four-line stanzas) and written while travelling through North…

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. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes—and stands in the…

ORACULE occurs at the intersection of poetry and theatre. Its characters inhabit a classical and cosmological world where psychic phenomena constantly threaten to impinge upon the arc of combat occurring between the women trapped within. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, the writings of Plato, the films of…

The poems in this collection examine how our experience of movement through space is what lends time its dimensionality, from childhood memories of the Cold War to the Julian calendar, making manifest the arc of a complete year-long cycle of both “sacred” and “ordinary” time, returning to our ongoing attempts…

Death, desire, and divination are the threads running through Jónína Kirton’s debut collection of poems and lyric prose. Delicate and dark, the pieces are like whispers in the night – a haunted, quiet telling of truths the mind has locked away but the body remembers. Loosely autobiographical, these are the…

Mohawk spoken-word artist Janet Marie Rogers’s newest collection pulses with the rhythms of the drum and the beat of the heart. Poems drawing on the language of the earth and inflected with the outspoken vocality of activism address the crises of modern “land wars”—environmental destruction, territorial disputes, and resource depletion.

When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s…

When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s…

"Part treatise on phenomenology, part theatrical score on ontology, part billet-doux to poetry itself” (Divya Victor), PEЯFACT is a three-part series of poems interrogating the nature of experience, language, trauma, and identity.

bissett’s latest book marks some significant boundaries, draws some sharp, clear lines for this veteran of the evolving phonetic alphabet, and of sound, concrete and performance poetry. While the work remains overwhelmingly playful, subtly layered, and full of the astonishment and sheer delight at seeing and hearing things one has…

This book of prose poems strips down the codes and conventions that make up our society’s “popular narratives.” A revealing and witty, exploded view of our culture.

“Prairie poetry,” as it came to be known in the 20th century, has found no more eloquent and accomplished a practitioner than Robert Kroetsch. Yet the North American prairie his work has made so recognizably visible in all of its characteristic particularities is changing profoundly in the 21st century. This…

Throughout these poems is a meeting of obscene or politically charged material, as well as commentary on language usage under extreme circumstances of duress such as the Arab Spring. This is poetry written under conditions of wartime. The title implies an analogy between Ezra Pound, imprisoned at Pisa after World…

In this contrapuntal follow-up to Governor General’s Award finalist Discovery Passages, Garry Thomas Morse traces multiple lines of his mixed ancestry. These include the nomadic “pre-historical” movements of Wakashan speakers who were later to form various West Coast First Nations; the schismatic mindset of Jedidiah Morse, the “father of American…

Combining text from government questionnaires and reports, lyric poetry, and photography, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes examines the possibility of a privatized prison system in Canada leading up to then Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative government passing the Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51. This legislation criminalizes Indigenous peoples’ attempts to…

Reading Sveva is award-winning author Daphne Marlatt’s response to the life and paintings of Sveva Caetani, an Italian émigré who grew up in Vernon, B.C.Daughter of an Italian prince, leftist, and scholar of Islam, Sveva grew up with the multilingual and highly cultured European traditions of her parents who moved…

Sachiko Murakami approaches the urban centre through its inhabitants' greatest passion: real estate. Rebuild engraves itself on the absence of Vancouver's centre, with its cranes, excavation sites, and bulldozed public spaces. Its poems crumble as the page turns, words flaking from the line like rain-damaged stucco off a leaky condominium,…

The collected longer poems of brilliant Canadian poet Sharon ThesenRefabulations collects and reanimates the longer and serial poems from Sharon Thesen’s œuvre, from her first book in 1980 to today. It is a record of a life in language, created by a dexterous and renegade poet whose mind is ever…

In 1776, at the age of sixty-four, an embittered Jean-Jacques Rousseau took to rambling. Feeling rejected, neglected, and condemned, he turned his back on the society in which he had never managed to feel at ease, and found peace in wandering the fields outside Paris, noting interesting flora and fauna,…

At precisely the cultural moment you were hoping for, a dream team of smart, sexy, brunette, West Coast poets of Italian descent has passionately co-authored an intelligent collection of poetry that both celebrates and capsizes the romantic comedy.From the origin of the genre (It Happened One Night) to its contemporary…

In this companion to Governor General’s Award finalists Discovery Passages and Prairie Harbour, Garry Thomas Morse resumes his expansionist mapping of lyrical consciousness onto geographical concerns, acknowledging the unsettled edges of an imaginary territory. In Safety Sand, the reader is invited to step through a multilayered literary filter of uncanny…

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…

scars on th seehors is bill bissett’s latest report from and to the image nation, in which his metric performs a kind of absence of narrative intent that lets everyone and everything speak for itself:eye dont have 2 invent th world ium / alredee in itThere is much evidence of…

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped…

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped…

This volume includes work selected from each of Phyllis Webb’s books of poetry published prior to 1982, including: Trio, Even Your Right Eye, The Sea Is Also a Garden, Naked Poems, Selected Poems 1954-1965, Wilson’s Bowl, Sunday Water, Thirteen Anti Ghazals and Talking.

This volume represents the most definitive and comprehensive selection of bissett’s writing from the 1960s and 1970s, in voices “erotik, politikul, humorous, lyrikul, sound-vizual, narrative, meditative, konkreet, collage, nd song-chants.”

This volume includes work selected from six of Frank Davey’s books of poetry—Weeds, Four Myths for Sam Perry, Griffon, Arcana, King of Swords and The Clallam—as well as the manuscript edition of his War Poems.

This volume includes work beginning with bpNichol’s visual poetry (progressing from the use of individual letters, to words, to distinct shapes on the page), moving through his sound poetry (in its written form) for one voice only, to poems which combine visual and traditional lyric qualities (leading to an excerpt…

This volume includes work from each of Daphne Marlatt’s earlier books of poetry: Frames of a Story, leaf leaf/s, Rings, Vancouver Poems, Steveston and Our Lives; from the forthcoming What Matters; the prose work Zócalo; magazine selections from Imago and The Capilano Review and unpublished work.

Seven Sacred Truths presents a powerful exploration of an Indigenous woman’s healing journey. Seeing the world through “brown” eyes, poet Wanda John-Kehewin makes new meaning of the past, present, and future through a consideration of Love, Wisdom, Truth, Honesty, Respect, Humility, and Courage. By sharing her views on these Seven…

Noh-influenced libretto by renowned Canadian poet Daphne MarlattThe Noh-influenced libretto of Shadow Catch recounts the dreams – or are they dreams? – of the Runaway, a teenage boy who ends up one night in Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Here four troubled spirits from the park’s past appear to…

Working for decades in English and French in poetry, novels, and translations that investigate the relationship between language and female subjectivity, Lola Lemire Tostevin has hewn her own unique and intensely aesthetic path across the national literary landscape, earning her the reputation as one of Canada’s leading feminist writers.Tostevin’s latest…

In these thoughtful, yet playful poems, Belford builds a poetry experience for 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. His poetry collections, like this one, his slick reckoning, are experiences the curious reader…

Slow Scrape brilliantly enacts a poetics of relation and action to counter the settler colonial violences of erasure, extraction, and dispossession. Drawing on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts, the book cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowing. In…

In a time of floods, fires, plagues, and famines, nothing could be more pertinent than the work of Maya/Irish writer and artist annie ross. Some People Fall in the Lodge and Eat Berries All Winter, her follow-up to Pots and Other Living Beings,gives voice to the pain of living “where…

COVID meditations from literary phenom Otoniya J. Okot BitekRife with the paradoxical forces of boredom and intensity, the early days of COVID-19 passed under an inescapable pall. The poems of Song & Dread seek quietude, order, refuge, and space within that shroud. They remind us of community, connectedness, and what…

Widely noted for the popularity of his dynamic performances, Michael McClure has been celebrated since his first poetry event. At twenty-two years old, in San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery, McClure, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg gave their first poetry reading—Ginsberg read “Howl” that night. McClure’s writing followed his deepening environmental…

A brilliant collection weaving history, personal experience, and Indigenous resilienceSpells, Wishes, and the Talking Dead: ᒪᒪᐦᑖᐃᐧᓯᐃᐧᐣ ᐸᑯᓭᔨᒧᐤ ᓂᑭᐦᒋ ᐋᓂᐢᑯᑖᐹᐣ mamahtâwisiwin, pakosêyimow, nikihci-âniskotâpân is a wonder. With inspiring defiance, John-Kehewin plays with form, space, and language, demonstrating which magics cannot be suppressed. Here is an unflinching look at colonialism’s sickening trail:…

Standing in a River of Time merges poetry and lyrical memoir on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on a Métis family. Kirton does not shy away from hard realities, meeting them head on, but always treating them with respect and the love stemming from a lifetime of…

still is a book of poems about alienated interiority, a self-withdrawn, hidden presence: affective and extractive capitalism, surveillance and commodification of behaviour, non-participation, withdrawn complicity, paralysis in time of crisis, what non-doing does.

sublingual is perhaps the most highly structured yet of bissett’s “textual visions.” Its first seven poems construct a Genesis, beginning with a poem of birth—our pre- or sub-lingual first breath, a phenomenological gesture of recognition, of both being and belonging, in and of the world. Following this short creation story,…

Taking Measures collects the major serial poems of Canada’s inaugural Poet Laureate, George Bowering, including work from each of the last six decades. Here is Bowering at his experimental and irreverent best.

Taking Measures collects the major serial poems of Canada’s inaugural Poet Laureate, George Bowering, including work from each of the last six decades. Here is Bowering at his experimental and irreverent best.

New poems from Canada’s shaman of sound and performance poetry, bill bissett.bissett’s innovations in sound poetry, have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun n sumtimes…

What is logic? Isn’t it a sickness we create? Useful for certain things, but not paramount in helping us be & share & change. Angels are rising in spirit places, helping us through & set against a back-drop of deaths, tortures, imprisonments, AIDS, big religious right-wing power control grabs, unroyal…

the berry takes the shape of the bloom originated as a gesture towards optimism after loss and pain, difficulty and fear. It began as a linear narrative, offering a window into one trans person’s life after they felt contented and secure. But in the end these poems, which capture particular…

Before moving to Prince George in 1969, Barry McKinnon was writing single narrative poems that, in terms of form, began to seem outworn and inadequate in his new environment. The emotional range of the lyric had become too personal and limiting. Starting with a poem based on a discarded fragment…

Artie Gold wrote. And although he published only eight books, they were just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Artie was always writing on his manual Underwood, on the back of cigarette packs, on napkins, on the wall, on postcards to himself and to the rest of the…

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosed—taken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalism’s “primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call “privatization”—but it spilt…

Combining visuals and text, this collection of poems travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities; social relationships; literature, cinema, and art; as well as dreams, as it moves between the page and the exhibition. The Eyelash and the Monochrome asks: what happens when material becomes thought and…

Nancy Shaw was an award-winning poet, scholar, and critic who was formative in shifting the ground of Canadian literature and poetics. She was co-director of the influential Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) and Writing magazine, was an artist-in-residence at the Western Front in the 1980s, and served as a chair…

Colin Browne’s new collection, The Hatch, extends his formal engagement with the margins of the new documentary. Myth, history, and the present are contemporaneous in these poems; nothing is ever one thing, and nothing is itself for very long. Figuratively speaking each poem is caught in mid-air, as if delivered…

The House That Hijack Built explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of “logical” or normative semantic patterns. If “to hijack” is “to steal in transit,” this text focuses on how language, with its idioms and ideologies, is appropriated—hijacked and transported—to unknown destinations in…

These poems were written in the political and emotional wake of the “Missing Women” of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Although women had been going missing from the neighbourhood since the late 1970s, police efforts were not coordinated into a full-scale investigation until the issue was given widespread public visibility by Lori…

Written in the midst of wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends award-winning poet Stephen Collis’s investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering. The fulcrum of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, The Middle hikes the shifting treelines of our…

The long poem, nowadays, is the talk of various discourses with each other: “A poem is a small painting, a long poem is a mural.”The second edition of The New Long Poem Anthology is an irreplaceable roadmap of a vital and powerful poetic form, a record of the most seductive…

George Ryga Award for Social Award: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Finalist)BC Book Prize, Poetry: Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Winner)The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a…

Poetry begins when the properties of things — and the correspondences among them — reveal themselves through language. Language is the veil that can pierce itself. The poems in The Properties record encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They’re alert…

The ambition that inspired rapper and MC Baba Brinkman to transpose his performance piece “The Rap Canterbury Tales” to the printed page was his desire to resurrect Chaucer’s brilliant stories from their vellum mausoleum into visible and audible contemporary forms that would once again delight and edify both live listening…

The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh covers the range of love, loss and learning that have made rob mclennan one of the most exciting young poets in Canada. The language of the poems, though thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth…

Everything Colin Browne has made up or invented in The Shovel seems written in prose; everything in it he has “unearthed”—from research, the stories of others and source texts—appears as poetry. In this extraordinary book, he has inverted the way we have been defining and privileging forms of language in…

The Singer’s Broken Throat is a collection of poems that trace a path through both physical and emotional landscapes; each step of the narrative way is marked by an event of the heart; each image is a map of person and place. Des Walsh’s fourth book of poetry echoes his…

Based on the experience of city life, The Vestiges moves across the uneven geography of the present, linking historical moments when quarters of cities were squatted, when social change boiled and the future was up for grabs. In the context of our precarious present, the poem “The Vestiges,” around which…

From one of Canada’s most influential poets, poems written in response to the discovery of letters by her father. These poems explore a sense of place and home on Canada’s West Coast now on the brink of global climate change. “There Then” permeates any “Here Now” of immigrant consciousness and highlights the impermanent quality of “home.”

There’ll Be Another delivers on the promise of the title: It is actually three books of poems in one, each offering the reader the unique new opening of an entirely different language.The first, Heavy-Hearted in Havana, is made up of a series of poems written during McFadden’s sojourn in Cuba…

This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic-saturated world we are enmeshed in. Composed in the style of Facebook updates and extended tweets, each section infuses itself with continuously shifting tones, styles, and commentary which in turn are provocative, emotive, and deeply satiric. Mashing up lexicons…

Daphne Marlatt’s latest book of poems is a memory book—an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from her first writing of what was to become the opening section, “A Lost Book,” to later, most recent sequences.These are love poems in the sense that in the meeting of our minds…

“To get at turn away.” In Thrum, her second collection of poetry, Natalie Simpson reveals how making sense is not always the same as making meaning. Her supple and agile poems seduce the weary reader away from representation and toward sound, texture, and absence. Here, a sentence is no longer…

The quest in this latest fusion of song, sound, performance and visual poetry from bill bissett is for a human condition outside the perpetual terror of the twenty-first century—a terror based in an irrational fear that the loss of our ideologies, our homemade gods and bombs will leave us impoverished…

bill bissett, who recently celebrated his seventieth birthday, remains even in his “biblical years” Canada’s most exciting, innovative pioneer in the field of the written, spoken, performed, illustrated and sculpted word. No one over the past half century comes close to what bissett has accomplished in pushing the boundaries of…

In To the Barricades we move back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. At once elegy (poems dedicated “to” past revolutionary figures and scenes) and a call…

The poems in Tracery enact a lyric condensation. Many of them were written in transit: on the bus, on a bicycle, on foot, in the endless to and fro of work life. Their lyric brevity allowed composition directly in the brain, or quick jottings in a pocket notebook, primarily governed…

Transnational Muscle Cars provides a withering critique of how it is that consumption, buying (into) something, buying anything, has become the prime mover in a transient global urbanism that now defines our everyday lives.Written over the past ten years in a quartet of cities—Calgary, Toronto, New York and Vienna—Transnational Muscle…

How might poetic practices undermine racist ideologies and colonialism, engendering ecological attentiveness, and anomalous and compassionate communities? Christine Stewart’s Treaty 6 Deixis takes up these timely and pressing questions as it investigates what it means to be a non-Indigenous inhabitant of Canada’s Treaty 6 territory, “in this city, on this…

In a world where the corporate iron fist clad in the velvet glove of the state has appropriated all that is authentic and authoritative in language, there seems little left for us to say to each other. Yet against the determination of borders, capital, criminalization and violence, stigmatized bodies also…

This book is about cities and trees, about deeper social justice, about working less and living more, about decolonizing temporalities, about mutual aid, about human and more-than-human labour, and about futurity. It’s about trying to live through the last ugly decade. And it’s kind of angry-funny too.

Vital bilingual poetry by Innu Elder Joséphine BaconUiesh / Somewhere consists of short poems that speak directly to the reader, without artifice or pretension. They arise from Joséphine Bacon’s experience as an Innu woman, whose life has taken her from the nomadic ways of her Ancestors in the northern wilderness…

The poems in Un interrogate the subjectivity of a western revolutionary socialist’s early-twenty-first-century masculinity against a backdrop of revolutionary legacies of moderate gains and terrible defeats. Thematically, the poems draw from the U.S. War on Terror and the disappearances of people extrajudicially apprehended from the Middle East and North Africa…

This is the second edition of award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s second collection of poetry, Un/inhabited, which maps the terrain of the public domain to create a layered investigation of the interconnections between language and land.Abel constructed the book’s source text by compiling ninety-one complete western novels found on Project…

Unfuckable Lardass reverts the patriarchy’s gaze. It began as an attempt to refract and undercut an outrageous insult allegedly lobbed at German Chancellor Angela Merkel – an egregious demonstration of the framing of women in reductive and sexualized terms ignoring their existence as subjects of their own complex histories. As…

George Bowering has always maintained many of his poems are germinated in secret ways—secrets he has, until now, assiduously kept to himself. In suddenly giving most of those secrets away, Vermeer’s Light, much of it written while Bowering was “in office” as Canada’s first poet laureate, constitutes an extraordinary gesture…

Wayside Sang concerns entwined migrations of Black-other diaspora coming to terms with fossil-fuel psyches in times of trauma and movement. This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath Great Lake rivers between nation…

In Wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. She navigates place and placelessness while observing other migrant workers toiling outdoors despite the hazardous conditions. In photographs and…

what’s left, a book in six related sections, presents us with cues and clues to the poet’s compositional strategies. The first section, “hazelnut,” measures time as the unfolding life of space. It alludes to mclennan’s long-term genealogy project, in which he discovers traces of the Sumerian flood, Etruscans, Icelanders, and…

Witness Back at Me is personal dissection that draws on the author’s childhood episodes of disembodiment, when, through the death of his mother from cancer at age two, he lost his ability to speak for nearly two years, which is also the time when he was placed in a foster home at a dairy farm outside Calgary, from age two to four. During this tim

You’re Gonna Love This tracks the narrator’s entwined relationships with her spouse, her television, and herself. Displaying Del Bucchia’s trademark nuanced media literacy, this distinctly working-class long poem unravels how media culture’s around-the-clock presence impacts our connection to the world. Recapping episodes in her experience of caregiving, she also addresses…

[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…