Acclaimed singer-songwriter Rodney DeCroo's second poetry collection, Next Door to the Butcher Shop, explores the permeability of memory and uncovers heart-wrenching beauty from shadowy grit.How quickly agedescends on us. Our memories are mapsto places that don't exist. I was an emperoron a green lawn wearing a white sheetand a paper crown. The birds sang my praisesfrom the hedges and the treesDeCroo unsentimentally recounts momen...

People who rely on stereotypes are often vilified. But really, is there a better way to classify people? There are some taxonimical difficulties, though. Exactly how many types of people are there? What behaviours are characteristic of each particular group? How do you know if you’ve spotted an armchair psychologist or a kleptomaniac? Gabe Foreman's A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People is not your average reference book. It turns a series of sociological case studies into a...

**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...

When We Arrested James SpaderIt was the saddest thing I’d seen. How he kept thinking he was a cat and he wouldn’t get out of that filthy litter box.And then, in the back of the cruiser, meowing for his cat brothers to save him.Deliciously wicked satires about local and international celebrities, the poems in Portable Altamont evince an irrepressible grasp of the zeitgeist, its machinations and manipulations, its possibilities and puerility. Who other than artist and...

A new collection ablaze with urgency and radiant inquiry from a 2015 finalist for the Trillium Book Award for PoetryA demand and promise; an obligation and challenge; a protest and call: I have to live.Juiced on the ecstasy of self-belief: I have to live.A burgeoning erotics of psychic boldness: I have to live.In which sensitivity is recognized as wealth: I have to live.Trumpeting the forensic authorit...

Teenage angst and reflection. An emotional journey expressed in a collection of journal poems written by a teen aged girl. The poems reflect on and explore love, life and the world around them. From first loves to lustful feelings to heart warming prose on nature.

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...

Reno Tibljas is like everyone else in the world: he has loved and lost. In his debut collection of poems, he reflects on the beautiful disorder of life and explores the meaning of love.Tibljas leads others down a lyrical path through the peaks and valleys of love in a variety of poems that offer a glimpse into his heart as he searches for his soul mate. While contemplating loneliness, the agony of heartbreak, and the joy of romance, Tibljas illumin...

In the 144 poems of For as Far as the Eye Can See, Robert Melançon re-imagines the sonnet as a "rectangle of twelve lines," and poetry as "a monument as fragile as the grass." Impressionistic, seasonal, allusive, in language sharp and clean, this form-driven collection is both a book of hours and a measured meditation on art, nature, and the vagaries of perception.Robert Melançon is one of Québec’s most revered contemporary poets and a two-time winner of t...

ZARFan oddly specific collection of poems for a tiny niche audienceA zarf (plural: zarfs, zuruuf, zarves) is a holder, usually of ornamental metal, for a coffee cup without a handle… Also, the cardboard ones you wrap around your Americano-to-go because we don't want you to burn your fingers….

Winner of the 2015 Quebec Writers' Federation's A.M. Klein Prize for PoetryIf you tore off the tops of canola --yellow canola flowers -- would youjump in a tub of canola margarinejust to make the best of despair?Implored by concerned readers to be 'classy' and 'real' for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical noteÂbooks on all things 'poetic' and 'poetical.' Birds! Flowers! History! Sad lea...

The celebrated poet hailed by Ursula K. Le Guin as a "storyteller, truth-teller, and visionary" gives us a mesmerizing new collection of poems that are funny, wise, moving, and surprising.How many gods can dance on the head of Lorna Crozier's pen?The poet Lorna Crozier has always been brilliant at fusing the ordinary with the other-worldly in strange and surprising ways. Now the Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk...