Winner of the 2020 Nelson Ball PrizeCareful attention reveals that, even in moments that seem insignificant, our minds are constantly navigating disjunctions among registers of experience. Our intellect silently reminds our eyes that the car that appears to be moving between leaves is actually behind them and much larger. The sound of the vacuum cleaner in the next room is noise to be ignored. The phrase that arises in mind belongs to a conversation earlier in the ...

Warning: this book may encourage a series of ungrammatical thoughts!Welcome to the poetic landscape of Mark Truscott, where less is more than you bargained for. Said Like Reeds or Things is a book of micropoetic and linguistic koans. With a quirky, off-centre sense of humour, these poems uncover a language that has malfunctioned only to find itself in the form of a gesture.Minimalist in form, these small gatherings of words, a.k.a. 'poems', seek strangeness in fami...

A hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies. "Denied the leap and dash up the ice,what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monkand cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhereas they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apartin bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.But...

As a child my favourite play time was to imagine. My imagination took me places no one else knew about, places that were fairy tales and places I actually created. Unless I was just imaging this, but were always places of fun. As a woman at 45 I still thrive on my imagination to work the same way. As a writer I try and share with my reader what it is I have to offer, not what I have to sell. Unnecessarypoetry I hope touches your imagination in a way maybe it has not been before. After all,...

The first work of 'living poetry' in the world, by the author of the bestselling book EunoiaShortlisted for the 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Alberta Literary Awards)Internationally renowned poet Christian Bok has encoded a poem (called ‘Orpheus’) into the genome of a germ so that, in reply, the cell builds a protein that encodesyet another poem (called ‘Eurydice’). After having illustrated this idea in E. coli, Bok...

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...

A poem-by-poem engagement with Sylvia Plath's Ariel and the towering mythology surrounding it. When I am a bitch I feel in such good company. Nice girls never gave me anything but trouble, Eating the ground out from under me, then waving As I fall. Pity one has to die to see how liberating Bad can be. But what news had I of my own self? Words landed like razors, hours tinkled, suitors arrived. Listen, you'll think otherwise, but I tell you, betrayal Is your Get Out of Jai...

Jon Paul Fiorentino's new collection is a whip-smart poetic investigation of anxiety in all its many manifestations. Anxiety caused by geography, anxieties of influence and looming worries about loss inform the poems as they weave narrative threads that highlight both the treachery of language and its necessity in shaping human experience.The poems here build on Derrida's ideas about the psychological implications of memory and the archival impulse and on philosopher Charles Sander...

In 1934, Gertrude Stein asked 'What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose.' Throaty Wipes answers this question and many more! How does broadband work? Does 'chuffed' mean pleased or displeased? What if the generations of Adam had mothers? Through her signature fusion of formal innovation and lyricism, Holbrook delivers what we've been waiting for.'Here is language that has a joyous physicality, reminding usthat language and, therefore, poetry is first and...

Like the “page turned down to make another / page,” Dog Ear explores the marks we leave on a world whose social and political markers are constantly shifting. In his fourth book of poems—and most powerful work to date—Jim Johnstone establishes himself as an exquisite observer of decay, both physical and spiritual. This is a universe where man resembles “the final / generation of a species branching / towards an in-between.” Johnstone’s poetry blurs past and present, private and public in a...

Considered one of the finest of Canada's early poets, the raw intellect and emotional appeal of Isabella Valancy Crawford's poetry drew author Elizabeth McNeill Galvin on a personal journey that traced Isabella's life which began in Dublin, Ireland, and ended in Toronto, Canada.Isabella emigrated to Canada with her family around the year of 1858. After settling first in Paisley, Ontario, the family later lived in Lakefield and Peterborough. As a young woman, Isabella became fascina...

Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something — Paul Vermeersch’s fifth collection of poetry — is, as its title suggests, a lyrical meditation on written language and the end of civilization. It combines centos, glosas, erasures, text collage, and other forms to imagine a post-apocalyptic literature built, or rebuilt, from the rubble of the texts that came before.