Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott’s poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott’s artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of ...

Winner of the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes), shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award for first book and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards.Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it's hard to believe this is a first book. Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to a...

Following her widely acclaimed Autobiography of Red ("A spellbinding achievement" --Susan Sontag), a new collection of poetry and prose that displays Anne Carson's signature mixture of opposites--the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse.In Men in the Off Hours, Carson reinvents figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon. She views the writings of Sappho, St. Augustine, and Catullus through...

Ten years, ten authors, ten critics. The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne reaches into its ten-year archive of Brown Bag Lunch readings to sample some of the most diverse and powerful voices in contemporary Canadian literature. This anthology offers readers samples from some of Canada’s most exciting writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each selection is introduced by a brief essay, serving as a point of entry into the writer’s work. From the east coast of...

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...

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...

Book of poetry, first published in 1921. According to Wikipedia: ""Bliss Carman (April 15, 1861 June 8, 1929) was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years. In Canada Carman is classed as one of the Confederation Poets, a group which also included Charles G.D. Roberts (his cousin), Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. Of the group, Carman had the surest ly...

Taking its inspiration from the Melville’s famous line “If man will strike, strike through the mask!”, Based on Actual Events punches through the surface of visible things, grabbing wild at the drifting actual. Calling himself a “a realist in fabulist clothing,” Robert Moore gives us a book-length sequence of sleek, fiercely comic, colloquial poems whose aphoristic storytelling is pegged to a desire for sublimity. His project is to find new frames of reference for our estrangement...

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 ...

A simple, heartfelt wandering of life and its happenings, "Un-Orthodox Boy" is a collection of poems about faith and the steady, sustaining love of God. As a text, "Un-Orthodox Boy" seeks, in its own way, to probe at the subtle boundaries of poetry; James' poems attempt to put on display a measured offering of human feelingthe bright visions, the deep despairs, and the spaces of the heart in-between them. Throughout "Un-Orthodox Boy", James' verse exhibits moments of both levity and gravit...

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...

A Night for the Lady explores the terrain of poetry conversation. Each poem arises from conversations with poets, colleagues and intimate friends.Poems range from a 1998 conversation on healing programs and the fundamentals of world change to a sequence of recent indigenous literary events on the prairies. Within the context of these conversations, an exploration emerges of the roles of woman within local as well as historic literary and global situations. The poems draw t...