Digsite draws on Nicholson’s experience working in the Alberta oil sands and arboreal forest, taking an archaeological lens to its subject, and in this way, reimagines tens of thousands of years of human existence. These poems grow from a schism between the current place of living and the ones in which we are pulled back to, in particular, the places we no longer occupy.Nicholson’s language draws on his archaeological and fieldwork background as he burrows and grinds the p...

In To the Barricades we move back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. At once elegy (poems dedicated “to” past revolutionary figures and scenes) and a call for renewed struggle in the here and now, this collection of “social lyrics” and serial explosions seeks to drive apathy from the fi...

Skin Divers is award-winning writer Anne Michaels’ dazzling third book of poems. These poems develop the concern with love, transience, and memory evident in her earlier work, and at the same time signal a definitive turning point towards a new thematic landscape.Michaels is a writer whose thoughts take shape in sensuous images, verbal music, and sinuous lines. Her short lyrics, like the longer monologues based on the lives of historical figures, explore an inner world flu...

A temporary move to Toronto in the winter of 2000, a twisted ankle, an empty house -- all inspired Moure as she read Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa's classic long poem O Guardador de Rebanhos. For fun, she started to translate, altering tones and vocabularies. From the Portuguese countryside and roaming sheep of 1914, a 21st century Toronto emerged, its neighbourhoods still echoing the 1950s, their dips and hollows, hordes of wild cats, paved creeks. Her poem became a translation, a transc...

An elegant and sinister collection of dramatic monologues. Hooked is a stunning new collection of seven poems about seven famous or infamous women: Myra Hindley, Unity Mitford, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Carrington, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, and Elizabeth Smart. Each of these women was hooked on, and her life contorted by, an addiction or obsession. Here we have seven variations on the insoluble conundrum of sexuality; each in a remarkably distinct, authentic voice. "I am conversant with ...

Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada’s most recognized poets. The first part of the book, Dangerous Sound,” contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. Muskrat Woman,” the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The ...

Going into deep thought, Kennie wonders if happiness does exist

Reading Glenn Forbes Miller’s poetry shows him to be as versatile a poet as he is a writer of prose, as demonstrated by his two travel books, Dreaming Kathmandu and Dancing at Ghunsa.The proof is here in this collection, of time and moving water. These are poems that took root and shape by heeding those moments when the emotions swell and give way to thought and the challenge of arranging words.This elegant collection of poetry is one for a cloudy day when you are ensconced...

Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices of the past and present into a stitched song lifted and sounded toward the next century. Haunted by ‘time's frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas,’ O’Meara's new book explores aspects of culture, art, war, rebellion and technology, offering defiance amid decay.‘O’Meara is a poet of the personal. Of the person. In and amongst the social documentary and human observation at w...

Tuft: "A bunch (natural or artificial) of small things, usually soft and flexible, �fixed or attached at the base." OEDWith Tuft, Kim Minkus takes us on flights of poetic fancy into futures where we "observe the green elite" and "iceplants bloom in the monotony of paved paths." We tangle and climb into language and are swept into the lives of the animals that haunt the shores of our city's waterways. This is a world where worker, lover, animal and poet unite. Minkus bring...

fur(l) parachute claims as its surrogate the Old English poem "Wulf and Eadwacer." Declining from a mutant echo of this nineteen-line fragment that appears in the tenth century Exeter manuscript as a text that might be a riddle, or an example of a woman's lament, or even a broken elegy, the language of fur(l) parachute is further disrupted by such texts as instructions on how to make a parachute lure for fly fishing or the misreading of mathematical knot diagrams. Wryly troubling origins, ...

A selection of poetry works from Anthony Arsenault. These are poems that reflect his life, experiences and view on the word around him. Twenty nine poems were chosen, and as they are shared with the reader, the author provides a brief explanation or description of each poem. They are poems from the heart and touch on many different things.