The career of Eli Mandel (1922–1992) was one of the most prolific and distinguished in all of Canadian literature, yet in recent years his work has gone unsung compared with that of such peers as Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page. Though he was a critic, anthologist, and editor of national prominence, Mandel’s legacy resides most securely in his poetry, which earned many accolades.From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel prese...

This selection of poems by Leonard Cohen, one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters in the world, is accompanied by twenty-four of his striking and provocative drawings.Cohen first made his name as a poet more than half a century ago and since then his achievements in poetry and music have made him an internationally revered figure. These fifteen poems, including “Death of a Lady’s Man,” “On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken,” and “The Embrace,” are drawn from across his remarkable c...

A long poem that limns the incremental mourning of living with a person who has frontotemporal dementia. Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk -- to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould's second poetry collection, is a sequence of fragments written in dialogue with all of these meanings. Stitched together, these fragments form a poem that runs from the ranch land of Alberta into the hea...

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 ...

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

Poetry kills the beautiful people. The Fat Kid , Paul Vermeersch's second full-length collection of poetry, chronicles a childhood troubled by obesity, poor body image, and low self-esteem. The media's perfect faces, societal expectations, family concerns, and primitive socialization rituals collide with the already horrendous physical and emotional tribulations of adolescence to drive Calvin Little over the edge. He'll stop at nothing to become beautiful and weightless, but he must concea...

"Tumultuous, vibrant, tragic and over too soon." --NewsdayHandwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and language, as the poet contemplates scents and gestures and evokes a time when "handwrit...

In his second book of poems, Jason Guriel cuts a dazzling figurewhip-smart, charismatic, with a mischievousness always eager to play for more serious stakes. Guriels way of seeing the world is low-key and sly: he tries to show us the big picture by enumerating all the small oneswhat he calls the way tiny things / cant help being, next / to nothing, something. Although a zealous celebrator of ordinariness, his tightly-turned lines have the courage of their own spiky oddity.The poems in Pure...

Urgent and precarious, the poems in The Rapids, Susan Gillis’ third collection, take us to places lost and reclaimed: a balcony high over the St. Lawrence River in downtown Montreal, upstream to the Lachine Rapids, and beyond, to landscapes as far apart as Greece and the B.C. coast.

All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet's instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet's quest for insight into himself andhis writ...

This collection focuses on physical experience and contemplates the beauty of everyday life – the objects, the stories, and the people that drift in and out. It finds the extraordinary in the ordinary.

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...