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.

Within the contours of TENDER lie field notes from a life lived across multiple affinities, kinships, and desires. Equally visual and textual, TENDER is a beautifully complex collection spanning thirty years of curious inquiry into our shared human–animal condition. Laiwan traverses diverse terrains – the body, land, language – which are rooted in her courageous and uncompromising history of activism and in experiences of building community across and beyond difference. TENDER offers a radical and decolonizing cleansing of all that oppresses and alienates.

In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun n sumtimes joy byond binaree constraints if evreething goez what is aneething accepting nihilism lettr texting as an approach 2 heeling sorrow denial.”

Canada’s most linguistically innovative poet takes on the “linear binary traps” of conventional logic, history and politics.

bissett has remained on a permanent world tour for over thirty years, writing this book while on a European reading circuit that included performances in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Dublin, Paris, Mainz, Trier and Berlin.

the berry takes the shape of the bloom originated as a gesture towards optimism after loss, 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 moments…

The Centre: Poems 1970–2000 begins with a long poem sequence that initiates McKinnon’s engagement of and life in the north with new and unavoidably present recognitions. The “centre” in this sequence of ten long poems thus shifts from a nostalgic, idealized and elegiac rural singularity to a new relentless multiplicity of the urban, where the centre constantly threatens not to hold. The “centre” in these books becomes a multiplicity of urban attentions reproducing itself as an articulate awareness of a fractured and fragmented self in a wasteland where beauty appears only through glimpses of externalized objects of desire.

Collected works of Artie Gold, who appeared like a supernova within the constellation of Montreal Anglophone poets in the 1960s.

In The Commons we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, pick wild fruit with Henry David Thoreau, and comb the Lake District with a host of authors of Romantic guides and tours, undermining William Wordsworth’s proprietary claim to the region. Somewhere along the way Robert Frost’s wall falls down, the Zapatistas make their appearance, and Gerrard Winstanley reclaims the
earth as a “Common Treasury.”

The Empress Has No Closure contains, as a centre-piece, the “Alefbet Transfers,” a meditative, spacial explication of the 22 figures of the Hebrew alphabet.

Tiziana La Melia’s writing moves between the page, the screen, and the exhibition. Her work engages with thinking through material and image hesitation, nonhuman forms of materiality, violent sentimentality, excessive desire, naiveté, narrative construction, the body and memory.

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 the1980s, and served as a chair of…

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…

Explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of normative semantic patterns. Includes a homolinguistic “trans’elation” of the Sefer Yetzirah.

Murakami’s first book of poetry, written in the political and emotional wake of Vancouver’s “Missing Women,” this project investigates the troubled relationship between a marginalized neighbourhood’s “invisible” populations and the city that surrounds them.

While many of the poems in The Monument Cycles speak to Vancouver as a whole, several focus specifically on the city’s Downtown Eastside (“the poorest postal code in Canada”); they explore the poet’s experiences working in this community and write toward possibility, remembrance, and the nature of truth and storytelling.

Bowering and Greg Curnoe became friends when their art was in its youth, and for 26 years they grew up parallel, inside each other’s work.

Features the work of Blaser, Bowering, Derksen, Dudek, Hartog, Kiyooka, Kroetsch, Marlatt, McKay, Nichol, Ondaatje, Robertson, Stanley, Wah and others.

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…

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 are a record of encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They’re alert to correspondences, attentive to the lines of force to which the poet’s family quietly assented in the contested place that is the Northwest Coast of North America.

Hip-hop artist Brinkman resurrects Chaucer’s brilliant stories into visible and audible contemporary forms.

Thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, mclennan’s language casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth and depth of reading which inform this
work.

In this extraordinary book, Colin Browne inverts the traditional ways we define and privilege forms of the English language; self-expression becomes prosaic, the recording of history poetic.

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 extensive film and theatre work: the voices here are always dramatic and present, not passive and absent, even when the poems are elegiac in form and substance, even when their subject is historic. These poems disclose the fragility and wonderment of relationships, as well as remind us that we are all alive to each other inextricable from our frames in both time and space.

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…

These poems are written from a sense of place and home on Canada’s West Coast now on the brink of another catastrophe, global climate change, so that throughout the book, “There Then” permeates any “Here Now” of immigrant consciousness and highlights the impermanent quality of “home.”

C.S. Morrissey’s brilliant translations bring a modern, lyrical sensibility to Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod’s two great poems that paved the way for subsequent achievements in Greek philosophy. Theogony tells of the first generations of the gods and recollects how Zeus established his cosmic reign of justice. Works and…

Three books in one: Heavy-Hearted in Havana, Sex with a Sixteen Year Old and Anonymity Suite Part II.

This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic saturated world in which we’re enmeshed. Composed in the style of Facebook updates or extended Tweets, and mashing-up lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Whitman, financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Derrida, and Flickr streams, This Poem is a self-reflexive romp through shards and fragments of post-consumerist culture.

This Tremor Love Is is a memory book—an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from Marlatt’s first writing of what was to become the opening section, A Lost Book, to its latest, most recent sequences.

“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 21st century.

time is reelee abt how evreething is fleeting n how we deel with that n how deeplee we undrstand that awareness  th jewels shine as our undrstandings  th layrs n openings  apertures n iris lens in  or not n how manee narrativs reveel our paradoxikul n continualee shifting minds … a storee is what time is it … 4 ourselvs  n our specees    n how timeless th breth uv th galaxee  n oftn ourselvs  tho agen fleeting  lyrik  song chant  philosophikal  theologikul  prsonal  propheseez vizual  n tanguld tangos … with th invisibul dansrs … n th 4tune tellrs shuffuling theyr decks  how we yern 4  n letting go uv our games finding love  n th chancs 4 savin th environment n our selvs [bill bissett]

To the Barricades continues Collis’s “life” poem, “The Barricades Project,” which also includes Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008). Both the anti-archive of the revolutionary record and the dream of a once and future “commons” upon which all can equally dwell continue to shape these poems where words are hurried bricks thrown up as “barricades” in language.

The poems in Tracery enact a lyric condensation. Often written in transit: on the bus, on a bicycle, on foot, in the endless to and fro of work life – they are primarily governed by the music of reason: “the ear’s judgement” (Joachim du Bellay), the “natural music” of poetry…

Written over the last ten years in a quartet of cities: Calgary, Toronto, New York and Vienna, Transnational Muscle Cars is the second book in Jeff Derksen’s trilogy addressing place, culture and capital, and draws on a wide array of North American post-war poetics—the declarative aspects of New American Poetry, the pop cultural details of the New York School, the reflexive politics of the Language Poets, the personal politics of the Kootenay School of Writing—and on contemporary cultural and political theory, critical geography, urban theory, and architectural concepts.

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…

Triage attempts an ordered, critical response to the manufactured crises that perpetuate our public and private disentitlements.