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In Verbal Violence, the language of the professional managerial class is unravelled, dissected, and shredded. The master’s house and tools are in flames, fire fanned from within, as their colosseum is turned quarry. Verbal Violence registers the absurdities of a purposeless people “just doing their job,” critically straining the email thread, the Freedom of Information Request, and the white paper through an aesthetics of anger that appropriates their last gasps at relevancy. Hacking up neoliberal doublespeak, ideological reproduction, and progressive-except-Palestine rhetoric, Verbal Violence spits it out time and time again, scheduling a meeting to verbalize the what and the who that liberal democratic institutions systematically shut down with their silence. Verbal Violence confronts capitalism’s managerial style guide for saying nothing at all with the fiery and empathetic conscience of the managed, their cri de cœur cracking the straight-faced bureaucracy of our most banal communications.

George Bowering has always maintained many of his poems are germinated in secret ways—secrets he has, until now, assiduously kept to himself. In suddenly giving most of those secrets away, Vermeer’s Light, much of it written while Bowering was “in office” as Canada’s first poet laureate, constitutes an extraordinary gesture of generosity from a poet to his readership who has so honoured him. Its alphabet series A, You’re Adorable, by “Ellen Field,” a pseudonym Bowering often used in the nineties; Imaginary Poems for AMB , addressed to his late wife Angela; He Is Not, a micro-translation of Shelley’s Adonais; Q&A, which dares to take on the most fundamental questions of the human condition with levelheaded honesty and wit—the list of revelations and the pyrotechnics of Bowering’s craft presented here are spellbinding.

But the greatest astonishment about this celebratory collection from a poet at the height of his powers is that it contains all eight variations of “Grandfather,” Bowering’s most anthologized poem to date, set into an essay, Rewriting My Grandfather, like eight jewels in a crown at the end of the book. It is here that the poet presents his readers with a voyage of discovery; that the buried treasure of his invisible but adamantine craft is to be found; and the gift of entrance into how George Bowering creates his work is revealed.

Viaticum: provisions or an official allowance of money for a journey. Viaticum: Nova Scotian poet Heather Pyrcz’s latest collection of poetry, in which she investigates the journeys we take and the things that sustain us along the way.

Pyrcz journeys outward to new forms, new technologies and new continents, and inward to dreams and interior spaces, defamiliarizing and rediscovering the things we often take for granted. This is a collection in which “each poem is its own leaving and arriving. Each poem is its own journey, but speaks to a larger one” (Sandra Barry in Atlantic Books Today). Putting a new spin on the perennial archetype of the journey, Pyrcz connects cultural discoveries with innate sensibilities in verses that take us abroad and bring us back home again.