Allodynia

By Nisa Malli

Rooted in the indescribability and disembodiment of pain, Nisa Malli’s Allodynia looks outward to space and the future of humankind, as well as inward to the body. In “Pain Log”, a suite of body-horror poems, she explores illness as a haunting or possession: “At home, my ... Read more

Grappling Hook

By Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang

Taking its title from Tomas Tranströmer, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang’s Grappling Hook sifts the debris of the twenty-first century for insights into identity, desire, and the everyday struggles inherent to motherhood. In doing so, she presents vivid portraits of the joys and perils ... Read more

From the Shoreline

By Tad-y Steffi

Steffi Tad-y's debut collection brings forward diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness. Family history and work lyrics occur against a tonal backdrop of the carceral. Yet Tad-y brings a tenderness to these fraught circumstances, finding beauty in detail and ... Read more

How Beautiful People Are

By Pirani Ayaz

In How Beautiful People Are, his third collection, Ayaz Pirani continues to write his people's pothi: a trans-national, inter-generational poetry of post-colonial love and loss animated by the syncretizing figure of Kabir and drawn from the extraordinary diwan of ginan and granth ... Read more

Orion Sweeping

By Anne Marie Todkill

2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist

Anne Marie Todkill's debut recalibrates the anxiety of the present. It gives doubt a hearing, finding resilience in fragility and grace in unexpected places.

The poems assembled in Orion Sweeping take nothing at face value. What are ... Read more

MONUMENT

By Manahil Bandukwala

2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist

MONUMENT is a conversation with Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, which moves her legacy beyond the Taj Mahal.

MONUMENT upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mumtaz Mahal's story. The collection ... Read more

Vox Humana

By Adebe DeRango-Adem

Vox Humana (Latin for "human voice") is driven by a sense of political urgency to probe the ethics of agency in a world that actively resists the participation of some voices over others.

In and through literary experiments with word and sound, utterance and song, Vox Humana ... Read more

Quiet Night Think

By Gillian Sze

“Quiet Night Think is a stunning work. ” — Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time,” writes Wallace Stevens. In Quiet Night ... Read more

HARROWINGS

By Cecily Nicholson

HARROWINGS takes place mainly in the rural and reconnects with a history of Black intellectual and artistic history in relation to agriculture. The poems include pulses of memoir from the poet’s childhood growing up in the country on a farm. These experiences connect to her ... Read more

Streams that Lead Somewhere

By Fareh Malik

Winner of the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, 2022
Longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 2023

Fareh Malik's debut collection aims to explore the intersection between mental illness and social racialization. The poet dives deep into his long history with Islamophobia, ... Read more