Nelson Ball has had a significant impact on contemporary Canadian poetry not only as a poet but as an editor, with his Weed/Flower Press in the 1960s and 70s. Certain Details provides a major overview of the breadth and many paths of Ball’s poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains sel...

Having developed an impressive reputation for his many novels and non-fiction works, Richard Wagamese now presents a collection of stunning poems ranging over a broad landscape. He begins with an immersion in the unforgettable world where “the ancient ones stand at your shoulder . . . making you a circle / containing everything.” These are Medicine teachings told from the experience of one who lived and still lives them. He also describes his life on the road when he repeatedly ran away at...

This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay’s best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay’s afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process—its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis.Don McKay has published eight books of poet...

Paul Vermeersch’s new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body’s experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the ac...

Copper Woman and Other Poems is a collection of poems that announces a humanistic vision, dealing with such themes as rebirth (physical and symbolic), mythology, memory, bondage, blood, family, identities in flux, migration, politics and flights of fancy. The contents move back and forth between the past and the present, and project into the future, envisioning a new world/a new creation. The message that we are our brothers and our sisters keepers and that the earth is our home – a home t...

**A Globe and Mail Best BookA debut collection from a startling new voice in Canadian poetry.**The poems in Admission Requirements attempt to discover what is required of us when we cut across our material and psychic geographies. Simultaneously full and empty of its origins, the self is continually taxed of any certainties and ways of being. The speaker in these poems is engaged in a kind of fieldwork, surveying gardens, communities, and the haphazard cit...

The river winds through Above and Below the Waterline, the first collection of poetry from novelist, Marianne Paul. The author navigates the joy and the grief that is life in the process of being lived, those events and passages that mark the flow of time, the undercurrents of family, the rough waters and calm waters, the challenges and dysfunction - but beneath it all, love. Water speaks volumes, Marianne Paul tells us. The paddler learns to read river in the same way a child learns t...

On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fourth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of A Really Good Brown Girl features a new Introduction by Lee Maracle, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. First published in 1996, A Really Good Brown Girl is a fierce, honest and courageous account of what it takes to grow into one’s self and one’s Metis h...

The poetry in Furious is charged with Erin Moure's characteristic energy and wit as she explores the limits of pure reason and the language of power. There is, too, a fresh and often celebratory look at love, and, in an unusual finale, The Acts, Moure challenges us to explore a feminist aesthetic: of thinking, of the page, of working life and the possibility of poetry. Furious was the winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1988.

This stunning collection will break your heart and put it back together again, as Pamela Porter unravels a long-held family secret in a moving personal search for redemption, face to face with the question of her own identity. As she says, “It was this way when Rome was burning, / and was not so different / when dark fires flared / outside the walls of Eden.” These poems brim with deep longing, remorse, the beauty of the natural world, an abiding thirst for the truth, and finally, acceptan...

These fresh, fire-bright poems are barbed blooms petalled with wise cautions and unexpected joy. Kevin ConnollyFlaunting a painterly attention to the seductive textures of menacehere are portraits, still lifes, fables and allegorical tableaux that enrapture the ear with the textures of language itself. Suzanne BuffamRichardson writes for the ear, eye and mouthyoull want to read these lush poems out loud. Matthea Harvey