news | Friday March 21, 2025

Today Is World Poetry Day!

March 21 is World Poetry Day! Talonbooks has had the pleasure of working with tremendous poetic talent since its inception as Talon, a high school literary journal in 1963. To celebrate World Poetry Day this year, we’ve put together a reading list of collections from our backlist that are well worth a read, a re-read, and a shout out.

1. hypoderm: notes to myself by Weyman Chan

Weyman Chan’s 2010 poetry collection hypoderm: notes to myself 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, not a sentimental fabrication of the rapture (rupture) of our “end times.” hypoderm was shortlisted for the 2010 W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize. Pick up your copy here.

2. page as bone – ink as blood by Jónína Kirton

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 weavings of a wagon-goddess who ventures into the double-world existence as a mixed-race woman. In her struggle for footing in this in-between space, she moves from the disco days of trance dance to contemplations in her dream kitchen as a mother and wife. Order your copy here.

3. breth /th treez uv lunaria by bill bissett

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. breth includes more than a hundred illustrations and visual poems, many of them appearing in print for the first time. Get your copy here.

4. PERFACT by Nicole Raziya Fong

PERFACT is a series in three parts, beginning with an interrogation into the structure of experience, language, and identity. The title poem, “PERFACT,” is an approach to materiality and consciousness in which each intersect, partaking in a coded interchange. This interchange precedes the stage play, 物の哀れ (“mono-no-aware,” an untranslatable Japanese term which might be expressed as an empathy or awareness of things), a “dark night of the soul” whose dramatic interchange leads a feminine “I” inwards and back again, countering the coherence of singular identity with the threat of sublimation. This mystical junction makes way for “MINE,” a lineated poem presenting a disassociated clarity marked by absence, survival’s persistent interlude. Pick up your copy here.

5. full-metal indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead

It’s always a good time to revisit Joshua Whitehead’s full-metal indigiqueer. 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 reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods. They dazzlingly and fiercely take on the likes of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and John Milton while also not forgetting contemporary pop culture figures such as Lana Del Rey, Grindr, and Peter Pan. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time – they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world. Order your copy here.

6 Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations 1–170 by Fred Wah

The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. The poetics that generates these texts arises out of a lifelong poem project that has its roots in the long poem genre of the ’80s and its interest in the resistance to closure and the containment of meaning characteristic of the lyric. This collection was shortlisted for the 2021 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Get your copy here.

7. The Place of Scraps by Jordan Abel

The collection that won the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 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 Nation. Drawing inspiration from Barbeau’s canonical book Totem Poles, Jordan Abel explores the complicated relationship between First Nations cultures and ethnography. His poems simultaneously illuminate Barbeau’s intentions and navigate the repercussions of the anthropologist’s actions. Pick up your copy here.

8. Wayside Sang by Cecily Nicholson

Cecily Nicholson’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry–winning collection 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 states. Nicholson reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it criss-crossed these borders in a study that engages the automobile object, its industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyond the Great Lakes region. Order your copy here.

9. Rom Com by Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli

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. How to tell if you are compatible with this book: Are you equally versed in literature and pop culture? Are you a film-savvy fan of contemporary poetry? Are you an academic with interest in literature and cultural studies? Are you in general a cool, sad person? This book might just be the sassy best friend you’ve wanted. Get your copy of Rom Com here.

Happy Poetry Day to all of the poets and poetry lovers! May your day be full of verse, form, line, metaphor, and words that make you Feel Things.