Jesse Patrick Ferguson brings music and poetry into conversation with each other in this compelling debut collection. Modelled on the fundamental tones and overtones of the harmonic series, poems in Ferguson’s arrangement riff on one another, and words, phrases and images resonate sympathetically, with all the energy and buzz of a firmly plucked mandolin string. Throughout, Ferguson pays homage to poetic traditions, infusing age-old forms like the sonnet and the villanelle with an astute a...

Deluxe redesign of the two-time Griffin Award winner's first poetry collection. Includes new material. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the first of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of Short Talks features a foreword by the poet Margaret Christakos, a "Short Talk on Afterwords" by Carson herself, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. First issued in 1992, this is C...

Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Book AwardMarooned in the shiftless, unnamed space between a map of the world and a world of false maps, the poems in Methodist Hatchet cling to what’s necessary from each, while attempting to sing their own bewilderment. Carolinian forest echoes back as construction cranes in an urban skyline. Second Life returns as wildlife, as childhood. Even the poem itself -- the idea of a poem -- as a unit of ...

Gods, giants, violence, the undead, theft, trolls, dwarves, aphorisms, unrequited love, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, the creation of the cosmos and a giant wolf are just some of the elements dwelling within these Norse poetic tales. Committed to velum anonymously in Iceland around 1270, they were flash frozen from much-older oral versions that had been circulating throughout Northern Europe for centuries. The Poetic Edda is an epoch-making cache of mythological and hero...

From the early years, when he morphed from celebrated poet to provocative singer-songwriter, to his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Leonard Cohen has endured as one of the most enigmatic and profound figures-with a uniquely compelling voice and unparalleled depth of artistic vision-in all of popular music. The aesthetic quality and intellectual merit of Cohen’s work are above dispute; here, for the first time, a team of philosophers takes an in-depth look at its real signifi...

Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) once wrote of a desire to leave behind "one poem, one story / that will tell what it was like / to be alive." In an abundance of memorable poems, he fulfilled this desire with candour and subtlety, emotion, and humour, sympathy and truth-telling. For many years, Nowlan has been one of Canada's most-read and -beloved poets, but only now is the true range of his poetic achievement finally available between two covers, with the publication of Collected Poems of Al...

His body, like yours, would liemute as a plumuntil a vigilant limb cameto a decision. As you might have guessedI've come to one myself.Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know 'you' is you? What good is it to decorate a headstone? What if you think of the perfect ...

Pauline Johnson was an unusual and unique presence on the literary scene during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Part Mohawk and part European, she was a compelling female voice in the midst of an almost entirely male writing community. Having discovered her talent for public recitation of poetry, Johnson relied on her ancestry and gender to establish an international reputation for her stage performances, during which she appeared in European and native costume. These poems were la...

Nominated for a Griffin Poetry PrizeIn Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake,they rage against despair, they speak against death and wre...

Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. A play of resonance between pronouns and persons, freely percussive between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions, White Piano offers readers a 'language that cultivates its own craters of ?re and savoir-vie.'

Steven Price’s second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous beings—half-ghost, half-muse—whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on. In poems that ...

In Fauxccasional Poems, Daniel Scott Tysdal imagines himself into poetic voices not his own, writing to commemorate events that never occurred, for the posterity of alternative universes — and the delight of our own. From the reign of the first philosopher king once envisioned by Plato, to the twelfth-century Iroquois colonization of Europe, to Barack Obama's career as a poet, to the lasting peace to come under the rule of the Democratic Kampuchea Global Party, Tysdal envisions the paths n...