Whether you’re looking for creative inspiration, something emotionally touching, or just wanting to dip your toe into poetry to see what’s out there—we’ve got you covered! Explore poetry through All Lit Up’s New Year, New Me selections below.
In this debut collection of poetry, sparse text resonates and creates an impactful presence as the poet unpacks past trauma. Divided into four parts, this essential collection delves into the magic of resilience in finding one’s way through past pains. The poet’s words harness both shadow and light, the contrast creating new directions and perspectives.
brat is an anthology of forest creatures, lost girls and tiny precious moments. In this collection of poetry, smallness begets uprising, rats signify life rather than death and bunnies are slutty woodland sprites. brat makes smallness into power, resilience and survival. In these poems, to be a brat is to be a scamp, an upstart, an agent of mischief: to cause trouble; to riot; to right wrongs; to enact change because it is right, regardless of a corrupt legal system. If brathood is the irreverent claiming of ownership over all good things, then this collection is the quintessential brat.
2022 Governor General’s Literary Award Shortlist * 2022 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry Finalist. This is a rare text able to hold the full velocity of a survivor’s hurt and rage alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the extent and complexity of harm. In their honest accounting of a wide array of bad encounters, these poems point us, again, toward compassion, tenderness, and solidarity.
Meditating on exile, loss, diaspora, authoritarian law, and altered ecologies, Joanne Leow’s debut collection spans from the would-be Eden of hyper-planned and surveilled Singapore to an uneasy settling in the Canadian Prairies, seeking answers to the question of what is lost in intensive urban development and the journey across continents. Reflecting on relationships between lovers, parents and children, state and citizen, land and body, seas move away asks what we owe each other across borders and what endures in times of great flux and irreversible ecological change.
First Time Listener explores the ramped up 21st century digitalization of the social world, while reaching back to the most ancient of manuscript cultures. In Part 1, all is queried: Gilgamesh, God, the Cloud, the Bible, Bob Dylan, technologies of the book, and CNN’s Crimes of the Century. Part 2, Retrospective of the North in Gold, turns contemplative, reading the colours and astrological signs of the digital and urban 21st century worlds. The book concludes with Lost Time, an ambitious long poem that maps Zilm’s girlhood in Surrey—located on the south bank of the Fraser River in Metro Vancouver—onto Proust’s Combray, exploring cracks in the interesections of class, sex, gender, and language.
Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies is a double-stranded book of intense lyric reflections on the fundamental essences of things. The two modes of attention — Jan Zwicky’s words and Robert V. Moody’s photographs — are presented as fully co-equal. Neither one serves as an illustration of the other, yet there are many deep connections between the two. They are brought together here in a resonant conversation, steeped in the pregnant silence of the living world.
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