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In Take Us Quietly, Armstrong explores life, sickness, death and the importance of paying attention to the wider world, filtered through her own unique sensibility. Nothing is taken for granted in this new collection.

Whether travelling through Spain, mining a memory from a rural New Brunswick childhood, or exposing the concessions of love in a long-term relationship, Armstrong creates poems that leap from thought to thought, from one emotional tone to another, propelled by torque and tension.

Startlingly beautiful with unexpected intensity, Take Us Quietly draws us into the mind’s deepest truths. By turns nightmarish, erotic and full of delight, her third collection of poems drills through the surface into the artesian well of memory.

The first-ever collection of the major serial poems by Canada’s inaugural Parliamentory Poet Laureate, George Bowering, Taking Measures includes work from each of the last six decades, beginning with Bowering’s engagement with process-based long poems in the 1960s and 1970s and moving through his continued exploration of the form in recent decades. Containing well-known Bowering texts, including Allophanes, Autobiology, Delayed Mercy, Genève, and Kerrisdale Elegies, as well as Baseball, At War with the U.S., Irritable Reaching, Smoking Mirror, Do Sink, His Life, and Los Pájanos de Tenacatita, Taking Measures offers a new and revealing look at this acclaimed and prolific author’s poetic development and contribution to Canadian writing.

The serial poem is a hybrid genre, stitching short lyrics together into sequential, long (typically book-length) poems; Bowering’s innovative use of the form, always rooted in an engagement with place, with language, and with the intertwining of the two, shows him at his experimental and irreverent best, his trademark playful seriousness extended and expanded, producing poetry that remains compelling, complex, and exciting decades after its composition. Edited by the award-winning poet Stephen Collis, Taking Measures offers a career-spanning and revelatory sample of one of Canada’s best-known and most versatile writers.

Philip Kevin Paul is a rare young poet with the voice of an elder. A WSÁ,NEC Indian from BC’s Saanich Peninsula, Paul’s oral tradition and life perspective are as old as the hills themselves, but their addition to Canadian poetry is long-awaited and increasingly vital.Philip Kevin Paul’s poems rise from the belly of awareness. With the movement of a snake, he weaves through the mind and digs into the senses with the grace and concentration of a master. Paul has a remarkable ability to present the natural world infused with wonder and mystery, and his lyric narratives invite the reader to ponder the bigger questions. His precision with words shows deep and exceptional knowledge and understanding of his First Nations oral tradition and language, which he blends into poetry to produce a compelling and forceful new voice. Though he has made few appearances in magazines and anthologies (as “Kevin Paul”), by word-of-mouth his work has attracted an impressive following of admirers that includes Daniel David Moses, Roy Vickers, Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Patrick Friesen, Tim Lilburn, David Zieroth, Karen Connelly, the late Al Purdy, Gregory Scofield and the Irish Whitbread-Award winner Paul Durcan.