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This is an experimentalist, gourmet poetic cook book, “full of bratwurst, currywurst, perfect ripe tomatoes, soft white mozzarella in tiny bags like water balloons… lightly-frosted beer” – a mind feast, an epicurean smorgasbord, where, as Peter Dale Scott puts it, “vignettes of a drunken world from Europe to Saskatoon vie with a fine rendition from the Lyra Graeca.” In 1996, Swedish sculptor Lars Vilks founded the one square kilometre micro-nation Ladonia to protect his piece “Nimis” from demolition by local authorities. Inspired by the same “anarchaesthetic” spirit, Ladonian Magnitudes morphs the topography where poetic imagination meets realpolitik to inaugurate “a change of dimension / not just locale.”

Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices is a long, narrative poem based loosely on the lives of the poet’s maternal grandparents, Russian Jewish immigrants to Montreal in the early part of the twentieth century. Her grandmother arrived in Canada as a child; her grandfather was already a young man in his early twenties upon his arrival in this country. The poem is inspired by the intense courtship and sixty-year marriage of the poet’s grandparents, the experiences that necessitated their departure for North America, and their difficult settlement in Montreal. The poem is told in two voices that frame, overlap, embellish, and question one another. Laike’s voice and Nahum’s voice are heard in counterpoint across a poem that probes the hold of culture, tradition, and gender expectations on women and men in the rapidly changing society of Montreal during the twentieth century. Panofsky’s work charts the emotional and physical trials of impoverished immigrants who were deeply affected by the Great Depression and the Second World War and who struggled to establish themselves in Canada. This volume unveils the sacrifices and victories of a Jewish, working-class couple that experienced firsthand the lash of racism and the balm of community.