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Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions demonstrates how seductive everyday wordsÑthose euphemisms and new ‘expressions’Ñ often mean more than we think they do: how when we speak them we can be tricked into saying more than we’ve meant to say. In these mischievous poems about mischievously charming language, Davey shows us how words can be more nimble than we are ourselves, how they take us places we may not have wanted to go, and how likely it is that you’ve already been there.
Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press / Evergreen in the U.S.A. and the U.K., burst onto the literary scene in 1960 to become the single most important and influential book of poetry in the English language published in the second half of the 20th century.
Conceived originally as a collection intended to augment the anthologies of the 1950s with the work of American poets whose careers had flourished since the Second World War, it became, through the influence of Charles Olson (Donald Allen was his editor at Grove Press), a radical and revolutionary manifesto that echoed around the world.
Spanning the period from the modernists through the poets of Origin and The Black Mountain Review, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, the New York poets of the Poet’s Theatre, to the first mapping and performance of a new poetry and poetics from the racial, sexual, aboriginal and cultural margins of a formerly Euro-centric and chauvinist poetry, The New American Poetry became as liberating a movement in writing and letters worldwide as abstract expressionism has been in the visual arts, and as jazz has been in music.
Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen tells the story of how that happened.
In this study of Dorothy Livesay’s love poetry, Nadine McInnis focuses on Livesay’s maturing sense of herself as an artist, exploring the sexual/ textual conflicts present in much of Livesay’s love poetry and their later resolution.”McInnis is an important young poet. Poetics of Desire is a perceptive and persuasive account of Livesay’s lifelong poetic struggle with the personal and social implications of love.”–David Staines, Editor, Journal of Canadian Poetry
Poetry in Place is a curated anthology for readers who love both poetry and the land. The subject matter addresses a very specific territory: the “land between the waters” of Lake Ontario and the Grand River, west of Toronto and east of London, in southern Ontario. The anthology includes poems by more than forty contemporary poets of different ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds. They pondered the natural world around them, and asked themselves, “What is it that the land has to say to us?” In these days of climate disruption, biodiversity loss, a new awareness of the dire history of colonized Indigenous peoples, and the spectre of global pandemic, how can we hear the voices of the natural world? We suggest that poetry offers a powerful mode of attention and analysis, now as it always has done.
Combining eloquent lyrics and edgy anti-lyrics, the poems in Poetry is Blood both rehearse and flout conventions of lyric poetry to speak with deep-rooted melancholy about family and tribal history, ancient walls, paintings, monuments, martyred poets, and genocidal madness. These pieces have the wide cross-stylistic reach of elegy yet fearlessly resist any redemptive rhetoric.
Dive into the powerful narrative of Poetry Marching for Sindy as Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau examines the haunting disappearance of Sindy Ruperhouse in 2014, a woman from the Abitibiwinni First Nation. In this poignant seventh literary work, Bordeleau navigates the raw emotions of anger, sadness, and compassion that echo across the continent due to the vanishing of too many Indigenous women.
Through this evocative longform poem, Bordeleau delves into the depths of societal contempt and hatred towards Indigenous women, igniting crucial reflections on the root causes of violence against them. With a blend of spirituality and profound sensitivity, she crafts a compelling narrative that urges readers to join in her quest for justice and understanding.
Poetry Marching for Sindy serves as both a lament for Sindy?s absence and a celebration of women?s voices and the resilience of communities in the face of tragedy. Join Bordeleau on a journey of grief, longing, and hope as she honors Sindy’s memory and amplifies the voices of those who demand justice and closure. Poetry Marching for Sindy is a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit and the unwavering power of collective action.
Advertising constructs us, always addressing, “You.” But who is this person, this “you” that advertising addresses? Poets and Killers answers this question by telling the life story of a man through advertising. Beginning in the 1940s when he is born, working up to 2009 when he dies, Poets and Killers uses lines taken directly from advertisements to write the main character’s biography. This book examines what it means to be an individual in a world where we are all sold the same individuality, exploring what possibilities for a non-utilitarian humanity still exist between the lines of advertising copy. By using the language of advertising to create something fundamentally unmarketable and useless, that is, the story of a fallible human life expressed through experimental poetry, Poets and Killers shows that despite the pervasiveness of advertising and its efforts to rob us of the ability to express ourselves without commodifying ourselves, we can still speak.
A dark debut from a rising literary talent
Brandon Galloway is a 29-year-old nobody, fumbling between dead-end jobs in a town full of drunks and prostitutes. When he lands a position with a pest control company and meets 21-year-old wild-child Melanie Blaxley while fumigating her apartment for bed bugs, Brandon’s life skips from hapless to hectic in no time. He is both attracted to and repelled by Melanie’s vulgar sensuality and reckless promiscuity, but when her world of crazy sex and petty crime starts to take its toll on his sanity, Brandon wonders how much more of her he can stand.
When she disappears, Brandon’s left to put the pieces together. Is it all just a prank, or have Melanie’s wild ways put her in peril? A hair-raising thrill ride through the bars and backstreets of a small college town, Poison Shy is a darkly funny and fast-paced novel about obsession, fear, and the threat of other people.
Winner, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award
In this experimental long poem sequence, Alyda Faber transforms the portrait poem into runic shapes, ice shelved, sculpted, louvered on a winter shoreline. Twenty years after her mother’s death, Faber untethers herself from the mother she thinks she knows with wild analogies: depicting her mother variously as King Lear’s Kent, a Camperdown elm, a black-capped chickadee, Neil Peart, Pope Innocent X, and a funnel spider.
While embodying the passionate relationship between mother and daughter, Faber’s poems also expose the thorn in the flesh — the inability of mother and daughter to give each other what they most want to give. Endlessly discovered, yet ultimately unknowable, the poet’s mother is complex, mystifying, and unwavering: courageous in her decision to leave all that she knew behind; bewildering in her fidelity to a damaging marriage; steadfast in her devotion to a God who is at once adamant and the source of ephemeral beauty.
What is a terrorist doing at a remote research station in the Canadian North? How does he hide his true identity and deadly intent? The polar bear research station at Cape Churchill on the Hudson Bay is menaced by winter storms while the researchers and visiting media are beleaguered by bear attacks. But another force–a malevolent force–is also at work in this isolated camp on the tundra. Polar Circus introduces photojournalist Allsun Skelly and her friends, ecologists Neal Casimir and Guy Thorpe, who attempt to protect both men and bears in this spectacular and dangerous setting.
“Polari,” from the Italian “polare” (“to talk”) is a coded language, originating in the UK and dating as far back as the 16th century. Overheard in outdoor markets, the theatre, fairgrounds, and circuses, it was appropriated by gay men to provide them with cover as well as with a way to assert personal and shared identities. It spread around the English-speaking world via the Royal Navy, the merchant marine, and cruise ships, adding and subverting many foreign-language words — like polari — along the way.
While Polari does not employ this jargon or probe its success as a mode of connection between gay men, the language of Barton’s poems may be viewed as an effective tool for communicating a sense of history, politics, and aesthetics. Think of Polari as a cross-sectional scan of a living tree that reveals ring after ring of Barton’s experience of language, with the new buds at the tips of its branches adding colour, movement, and ornament.
Most of these poems were written using set forms drawn from Robin Skelton’s The Shapes of our Singing: A Comprehensive Guide of Verse Forms and Metres from Around the World (Spokane: Eastern Washington University Press, 2002). While the forms Barton has appropriated are not by themselves the vehicles of a particular sociolect or an anti-language, except, say, of poetry itself, he have nevertheless twisted them to follow the turns of his point of view and aesthetics.
When it comes to time, geography, and subject, Polari covers a lot of ground: from child memories to the frailties and deaths of ageing parents; from Queen Victoria’s coronation to the first ascent of Everest; from the October Crisis to the trial of Omar Khadr. The titles of nine poems are borrowed from the Diagram Prize, an award given out by the UK magazine, The Bookseller, for the oddest book title of the year. The titles chosen — an example is “Highlights in the History of Concrete” — may sound frivolous, even absurd, but the poems are less or more so. The serious nature of their themes being at odds with their titles gives them an engaging tension, and will be read as signature of his particular brand of polari.
Polaroids of Tomorrow captures the ache of living in an age of collapse—personal, political, and spiritual. In these unflinching poems, Andrew Lafleche photographs the present with the precision of an infantry soldier and the vulnerability of a man stripped bare. From war memories and failed marriages to late-night wanderings through Costa Rica’s shadowed streets, Lafleche writes with a clear-eyed intensity that refuses sentimentality. The voice is confessional yet controlled, raw yet deliberate—an honesty few poets risk. Through sharp, cinematic verse, the collection confronts alienation, addiction, and the absurdity of modern survival. What emerges is a portrait of endurance: a poet wrestling to stay human in a world that keeps eroding. Polaroids of Tomorrow is both documentation and protest—a fierce, unsparing vision of what it means to persist when everything else has already been consumed by the flame. It’s what remains when tomorrow finally arrives.
Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction is the only anthology of Polish-Canadian writing in Canada and includes many internationally acclaimed and award-winning Canadian writers. What is the literary and cultural benefit of a diaspora anthology? It presents work from a community, a family of writers. It represents a cultural contribution to Canadian literature. It makes it known where they come from personally and metaphorically, what inspires them. The contributors to Polish(ed) are all writers who share Polish-ness, in whatever ways they define it: as a part of their personal story, be it through similar experiences or influences; as a perspective on the world; as a sense of history and of who they are. The collection also features Canadian writers who have no Polish roots, but are interested in various aspects of Poland and Polish culture.
From one of Canada’s most loved and lauded children’s writers comes a new tale about the joy of making things, the strength of community, and the warm reach of generosity. This beautifully illustrated storybook blends poetry and prose, infused with Fitch’s trademark wit and playfulness, to tell the story of Polly MacCauley, a bit of a mystery in her community of River John, who spends her time making wondrous things with wool. When Star, a very special lamb, is born on a nearby farm, Polly knows that with Star’s wool she can make her “finest, divinest, wooliest gift of all.” But the greedy Count and Countess of far-off Wooland have learned about the lamb’s arrival, too, and are determined to add her to their flock.
Will the good folk of River John join together to see that Star gets to her rightful home? Will Polly be able to finish her masterpiece? Darka Erdelji’s gorgeous illustrations have just the right amount of whimsy, perfectly capturing the spirit of Fitch’s touching yarn.
Divided into nine short sections, this is a grand book to share aloud, or read alone. It will appeal to children of all ages. And to knitters, weavers, spinners and the warm-hearted everywhere.