On August 30, 1995, 18-year-old Torontonian Stacey Levitt, out jogging after her shift as a lifeguard, was struck and killed by a car. Her death caused an outpouring of grief not just among family and friends but in a larger community shocked by the tragic loss, so early, of such a beautiful life. She was a superior dancer and athlete, a top student, and a friend to many.And she was a gifted young poet. From the age of eight, Stacey demonstrated an extraordinary ability to capture ...

All day the sun has shone into my little attic, a bitter sunshine that brightened yet did not warm. And so as I toiled and toiled doggedly enough, many were the looks I cast at the three faggots I had saved to cook my evening meal. Now, however, my supper is over, my pipe alight, and as I stretch my legs before the embers I have at last a glow of comfort, a glimpse of peace.

Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Award for PoetryWinner of the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for PoetryIn My Shoes are Killing Me, poet Robyn Sarah reflects on the passing of time, the fleetingness of dreams, and the bittersweet pleasure of thinking on the "hazardous . . . treasurehouse" that is the past. Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collection from one of C...

Speaking a language we understand, Rona Shaffran’s poems tell the story of remarkable things that can happen in a broken relationship. These poems inhabit the sharp edges and rich depths of a union too long untended. Ignite begins in wintry suburbia with a man and woman who have lost emotional and physical connection. A magic-realist plunge into the atavistic tropics of desire breaks this barren matrix. The exotic landscape sparks resurgent passion, which leads to a dramatic and healing tu...

Nominated for the 1999 Governor General's Award for Poetry, the 1999 Pat Lowther Award and the 1999 Gerald Lampert Award and Globe 100 book for 1999 The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen years. Deeply centred in domestic life, Goyette's work is informed by a muscular lyricism. These are poems that push the limits, always true to their roots.

Billeh Nickerson is author of the poetry collection The Asthmatic Glassblower (Arsenal, 2000) and the essay collection Let Me Kiss It Better (Arsenal, 2002); he also co-edited Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets (Arsenal, 2007). A long-time resident of Vancouver, he recently relocated to Toronto.

Picking up and pulling at the vibrant threads of Robert Priest's last book of poems, Reading the Bible Backward, this collection explores new themes while spanning multiple strands of thought. One strand leads, with unabashed candor and elegance, through the author's love life; another, through fields of praise; a third experiments with automated metaphors and delivers a challenging new selection of mash-ups that Priest calls meme splices. A fourth thread rekindles the author's lo...

"I wanted this to be a narrative. So finally Jean-Luc went all the way: every line in the script a quotation from somewhere else. Every blessed line. Love doesn't die. It's people who die. Love just goes away." -from "NOUVELLE VAGUE / New Wave (1990)" Stephen Scobie celebrates "the greatest film director of his age" with poetry exploring 44 of Godard's films. Subtle yet profound unities play from poem to poem. Characters, locations, images, and the generous use of quotation jump-cut and re...

Ever wanted to open my book and wonder who I am in real life... Mr Nice Guy...

From the monk who sets himself on fire in a crowded intersection of Saigon (the familiar corded tendons of his hands, become / a bracken of ashes, a carbon twine of burnt”), to the salmon run in British Columbia (The salmon word / for home is glacierdust and once-tall trees unlimbed, / a taste, no matter where, they know”), Johnson writes of topics varied and eclectic, unified by a focus on moments both declining and revenant.Startling and haunting, the poems delve into the ways ...

Here green-leafed memories invade the mind; Here our young profuse acts luxuriate; And then leaf-fallen times can be defined; And then the old, snow-fallen thoughts await. These poems explore our ages by the season: Child's adventure in untidy garden With its ancient, stooped gardener; young poet Begging in Seattle; celebrations Of birth, birthdays and of deaths; old Ibsens, Restless in their solace; backyard elegy; And more beside, all etched in shifting verse.

Shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry PrizeShortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for TranslationThe heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning...