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M. Travis Lane’s fourteenth poetry title is a meditation on loss and reorientation, continuity and memory. Widowhood and mortality are at the centre of this quiet collection, but fear and self-pity are not to be found here: only a clear-eyed coming-to-terms. Lane’s metaphors are unforced, natural yet always surprising: a beggar sitting at the midpoint of a footbridge “like the small bubble balancing/ midway in a plumber’s level,” trees in a night plaza that “hold/ like dark peaches the late street lamps.” Her acute powers of observation are entwined with historical and cultural awareness, attunement to the natural world, and a music that holds it all together.

From Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander and Ridgerunner, nominated for the Giller Prize

Neogothicism, the surrealist snapshot, feminist Western and postmodern parable are just some of the elements that feed Gil Adamson’s second collection of poems. Adamson creates a world fully awash in violence and history, the absurdities of the frontier, the gorgeous terrors of death. Everything is simple, and yet nothing is as it seems.

Moving easily from prose poem to lyric, verbal portrait to improbable biography, Ashland leads us on a macabre tour of our nightmares, perverse secrets, and death-focused mythologies: “In the end we see ourselves. We last longer. The night opens its mouth, and we step in.”

The poems in Ashland lay the groundwork for Adamson’s award-winning and internationally bestselling fiction.

We look away from his open mouth,
look instead at the corn, the crows
floating above the river in their private worries.
Tonight, when we turn in,
the candle will sputter and blow.
Pinched out easily, all flame
gives way to this wide black wing.

— excerpt from “Black Wing”

Asking for Directions is open and accessible debut collection. This book is a happy hour of poetry that blurs the lines between straight-up realism, goofy weirdness, linear narrative, dreamscape, lovestruck awe, wonder and joy. Poetry for Firth is under every rock. Poetry is the handyman who should be tiling a kitchen backsplash but instead relives lost dreams of hockey glory. Poetry is a creepy and distracted high school geography teacher. Poetry is snowmobilers on a patio drinking beer next to a thawing, late-March lake. Poetry is impending heart surgery, birds, the dead, skinny strippers, euchre parties, funerals, graffiti, Sunday morning hotel rooms, ashtrays, blue flowers, desiccated chipmunk carcasses, and, of course, sex, love, and laundry. There’s all this and more in this bold, beautiful, and ballsy collection of new poems from a writer who has shifted over from short fiction without missing a beat. Come on it; read it and feel what it’s like to have faith in “warm touch/at the altar/of your hips.”