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Sheryda Warrener’s second poetry collection touches on the illusion of remaining grounded and a sense of belonging. A retired cosmonaut returns from a record-breaking 438 days in space and attempts to re-immerse himself in the world. One speaker considers reinvention from the top floor of the World’s Tallest building; another, our complicated future from Reykjavik, post-eruption of Eyjafjallaj�kull. Confessions and aspirations suspend in air. Ghosts float in and out; inheritance and connection are called into question. Morrissey, Cindy Sherman, and Pancho Barnes make cameo appearances. Influence and personal lineage are traced back to the Vikings, demoted Pluto, artists frequenting a Parisian bar. One speaker confides: “Yes, she’s longing to be elsewhere. Just past the sun deck there’s something invisible worth having.” In Floating is Everything, a resolution lies nearly always out of reach.

A stunning collection from Governor General’s Award winner Roy Miki, Flow presents all of this critically acclaimed writer’s poetry – from his collections Saving Face, Random Access File, Surrender, There, and Mannequin Rising – as well as a substantial chapter of new, previously unpublished works. Including a foreword by poet and critic Louis Cabri, extensive interviews with Miki by the collection’s editor, Michael Barnholden, and an exhaustive bibliography, Flow is the definitive edition of Miki’s work. Also included are numerous full-colour photographs and photocollages, a practice Miki has become increasingly drawn to in recent years; in the book’s previously published sections and in the much-anticipated section of brand-new work, Miki’s poems and photographic works engage in a mutually enriching dialogue.

A Member of the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Roy Miki is one of Canada’s preeminent poets; he is also an influential critic, founder of the literary journal Line, and noted activist, instrumental in the movement for Japanese Canadian redress. All of Miki’s roles and concerns coalesce and interpollinate in his perceptive poems, which remain precisely attuned to the complex relationships between race, language, and power as they map and interrogate the layers of history enfolded within place and identity.

This is the fourth volume in a new series of collected works published by Talonbooks. The first three are Phyllis Webb’s Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems, Fred Wah’s Scree: The Collected Early Poems, 1962–1991, and Daphne Marlatt’s Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968–2008.

Jeffery Donaldson’s Fluke Print is a collection of imprints, opposites and offsets-poetry that reflects on and reimagines creativity, emotion and intellect. For, as Donaldson writes, `Both ends of this dull pencil have their say / and go together.’

In the third book of Steven Ross Smith’s multi-volume fluttertongue, Smith turns his keen trickster’s eye on the poem itself, and the ways in which it is presented.Smith pushes the boundaries not only of verse, but also of language, and or our ability to know what surrounds us and how to articulate it. Smith excercises the malleabililty of language and meaning and explores moments of grace and dislocation. His improvisatory and aleatory methods capture the fleeting and flirtatious nature of mind and event in their certainty and disorder.Smith views the narrative and syntactic line as a wall at which to throw words, waiting to see what sticks and what patterns emerge from the disarray. The result is a book that, like improvisational jazz, reveals more each time it is experienced.