Memory generates memory. Grief slumbers. There are membranes of regrettable sorrows. And, there is that catch-breath of love.Born in England, she was three and he was eleven when their family came to Canada. In a few years, he would be swept into the pulsing generation of peace and love. She remembers how he held her hand walking across College Street on the way to the Beatles concert. Once, he picked her up in the VW and they went to the country in search of the full moon....

With pieces from 1992's Good Bones and 1983's Murder in the Dark, this collection of works that defies easy categorization was brought together in 2001 as Good Bones and Simple Murders. Here, Margaret Atwood offers wickedly sharp prose poems, flash fiction, and micro-fables that challenge and up-end the myths, fairytales, and stories we all know and love, showcasing her at her most playful and subversive.Among the miniatures gathered here...

One of the most respected artists in popular music today, Jewel is much more than a music industry success with her debut album selling more than 10 million copies.Before her gifted songwriting comes an even more individual art: Poetry.Now available in paperback, A Night without Armor highlights the poetry of Jewel taken from her journals which are both intimate and inspiring, to be embraced and enjoyed.Writing poems and keeping journals since childhood, Je...

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

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 rubs it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws ...

Science, birds, Billy the Kid, and lots of feathers surround The Feather Room, Anis Mojgani's follow up to his Pushcart-nominated work, Over the Anvil We Stretch. In The Feather Room, Mojgani further explores storytelling in poetic form while traveling farther down the path of magic realism, endowing his tales with a greater sense of fantasy and brightness. The work recounts loss and heartbreak while discovering lightness and beauty on the other side. Throughout the book, Mojgani opens tre...

In Leaving Now Arleen Paré, winner of the 2008 Victoria Book Prize, weaves fable, prose and poetics to create a rich mosaic of conflicted motherhood. Set in the volatile 1970s and '80s, when social norms and expectations were changing rapidly, Leaving Now is the emotionally candid story of a mother's anguish as she leaves her husband to love a woman. In this second book, Paré masterfully blends aspects of her personal journey with her own version of a well-loved fairy tale. Gudru, the five...

In selecting The Lists of the Past as her nomination for reissue, Cheryl Strayed was moved by "the intelligent, emotional depth and breadth" of the stories, all but two of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Julie Hayden's New York hums with eccentric observation, humor and grit. Her leisurely Connecticut countryside is fresh with tilled soil, distant lapping waves and the summer breeze. Whether describing a child astonished with new perceptions, a distraught wom...

This new gathering of Marge Piercy’s poems—energetic, funny, political, full of vitality—brings us the heart of her mature work, the first selected since Circles on the Water in 1982.Here are poems that chart the milestone events and fierce passions of her middle years: the death of her mother, whom we meet first as a young woman, “awkwardly lovely, her face / pure as a single trill perfectly / prolonged on a violin,” and again as an older woman musing on what the afterlif...

“Everything is new. Everything is strange. Everything is possible.” – Yumi SakugawaThe Fairy Tale Museum is an alchemical curiosity-cabinet-as-novel that showcases the original, spectacular, grotesque, endearing, and otherworldly. You’ll meet bird-headed lovers, a cyborg cyclops, a fortune teller, revolutionary ventriloquists’ dummies, a narcoleptic vampire, Eros and Thanatos, and a host of woodland creatures. A celebration of hybrids, creativity, and transformation, this ...

A love affair chronicled--from obsession to heartbreak, foolhardiness to faith. In Love Outlandish, Barry Dempster undoes all the clichés that have barnacled our love lives and, with the zest and courage typical of his work, explores their torrents and eddies afresh. As in his previous books, Dempster responds to D.H. Lawrence's plea that we should discover and articulate what the heart really wants rather than some idealized version of it. Thoughtful, passionate, full of humour and self-a...

Sharon Olds's dazzling new collection is a sequence of poems that reaches into the very wellspring of life. The poems take us back to the womb, and from there on to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of childbirth, to the wonder and humor of parenthood--and, finally, to the depths of adult love.Always bold, musical, honest, these poems plunge us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, beautifully organized collection from one of the finest poet...