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Poetry Month 2025

National Poetry Month 2025: Tributaries

This National Poetry Month on All Lit Up, Tributaries brings together 23 poets in a month-long celebration of verse, connection, and inspiration. Each day, a featured poet will share their own work alongside a recommendation—highlighting the words that have shaped them, challenged them, or deepened their love for the form. Like the many streams that feed a river, these voices converge in a space of discovery, inviting you to explore the poetry that moves us. Whether you’re a lifelong reader of poetry or just beginning to wade in, Tributaries offers a place to listen, reflect, and celebrate the power of language. Join us as we follow these currents, one poem at a time.

MA|DE's author photo. Jade Wallace is on the left; they have bright fuchsia hair. Mark Laliberte is on the right wearing a werewolf mask.

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“A set of variant covers in a bookstore might be thrilling and mysterious”: An Interview with MA|DE

The cover of Trading Beauty Secrets of the Dead by Erina Harris. The cover features the painting In the Dark by Dana Hoist, showing a small girl holding her knees in a floral wallpapered room next to a couple of exotic birds. The painting appears to spill out of its frame, and is set against a wildly coloured sky with some clouds near the bottom of the cover.

Beautiful Books

Beautiful Books: A chat with Kilby Smith-McGregor, designer of Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead

The cover of Walking and Stealing by Stephen Cain. The cover features stadium lights and an airplane flying through the sky.

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Two Poems: Walking & Stealing

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2025 Al & Eurithe Poetry Prize Finalists

The cover of West of West Indian by Linzey Corridon. Against a vibrant painted background, a figure in dark blues and greys sits with their shoulders slumped. The floor is reflective, like water, showing the brilliant colours in reverse. A torn edge reveals the book's title against a cream coloured background.

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Poetry in Motion: Linzey Corridon + West of West Indian

The cover of The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet, a poetry collection by Irene Marques. The cover features brightly coloured speech bubbles in different patterns, as well as a large quotation mark.

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Poetry in Motion: Irene Marques + The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet

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Poetry in Motion: Craig Francis Power + Total Party Kill

2025 League of Canadian Poets Longlist

In the Key of Decay

Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imag….

What Fills Your House Like Smoke

In these poems, E. McGregor combines the lore of family history with personal memory, vividly parsing patterns of inheri….

Good Want

By (author): Domenica Martinello

What if poetry and prayer are the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion that hooks y….

Precedented Parroting

Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity o….

echolalia echolalia

Interviewed on CBC BooksCBC Best Poetry Book 2024 Relentlessly inventive poetry that proclaims a diasporic, queer, and d….

Graphis scripta / writing lichen

By (author): Clare Goulet

Clare Goulet considers how things are and also are not what they seem, grounding her poems in the natural history of lic….

Dayo

By (author): Marc Perez

An elegant debut collection that illuminates the contours of un/belonging. Dayo: a Tagalog word referring to someone who….

Weather

Living with his wife and young children in a small apartment during the pandemic lockdown, Rob Taylor developed a habit ….

Blood Belies

Contributions by: Ellen Chang-Richardson

In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems t….

impact statement

By (author): Jody Chan

A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so….

Oh Witness Dey!

By (author): Shani Mootoo

Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no r….

Ox Lost, Snow Deep

By (author): Alice Burdick

“I’m just going to break this, okay?” writes Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick in her sixth full-length poetry collection. ….

I Hate Parties

By (author): Jes Battis

Fifty poems to dance (awkwardly) between queer and anxious spaces. Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a cur….

Aqueous

By (author): Nathanael Jones

Aqueous by Nathanael Jones is a collection of prose poems that address the ways in which post-colonial realities in the ….

The Work

By (author): Bren Simmers

The poems in The Work engage with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portio….

In the Key of Decay

Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imag….

What Fills Your House Like Smoke

In these poems, E. McGregor combines the lore of family history with personal memory, vividly parsing patterns of inheri….

Good Want

By (author): Domenica Martinello

What if poetry and prayer are the same: intimate and inconclusive, hopeful and useless, a private communion that hooks y….

Precedented Parroting

Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity o….

echolalia echolalia

Interviewed on CBC BooksCBC Best Poetry Book 2024 Relentlessly inventive poetry that proclaims a diasporic, queer, and d….

Graphis scripta / writing lichen

By (author): Clare Goulet

Clare Goulet considers how things are and also are not what they seem, grounding her poems in the natural history of lic….

Dayo

By (author): Marc Perez

An elegant debut collection that illuminates the contours of un/belonging. Dayo: a Tagalog word referring to someone who….

Weather

Living with his wife and young children in a small apartment during the pandemic lockdown, Rob Taylor developed a habit ….

Blood Belies

Contributions by: Ellen Chang-Richardson

In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems t….

impact statement

By (author): Jody Chan

A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so….

Oh Witness Dey!

By (author): Shani Mootoo

Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no r….

Ox Lost, Snow Deep

By (author): Alice Burdick

“I’m just going to break this, okay?” writes Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick in her sixth full-length poetry collection. ….

I Hate Parties

By (author): Jes Battis

Fifty poems to dance (awkwardly) between queer and anxious spaces. Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a cur….

Aqueous

By (author): Nathanael Jones

Aqueous by Nathanael Jones is a collection of prose poems that address the ways in which post-colonial realities in the ….

The Work

By (author): Bren Simmers

The poems in The Work engage with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portio….

In the Key of Decay

Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imag….

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