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What if red ran out is the assured first collection from one of Canada’s finest young poets. Provocative, funny, and brash, the poems in this collection leap from one surprising image to another, from poignancy to an outlandish, teasing delight. The sheer tonal range of Grubisic’s poems is remarkable. They shimmer with playfulness yet deepen into contemplative gravity.

These street-smart poems register the pulse of contemporary commodity culture’s off-kilter pacing; “the hyena at the bodega,” as she calls it. They peer into back alleys of thought and bring forth our fears. But then, all at once, they race down the street again, laughing, reminding us of all we love and how we might hold onto it.

In What If Zen Gardens, Henry Beissel, often considered the master of the long poem, turns to the time-honoured tradition of the haiku to help bring to light what he calls “the world’s hidden affairs.” Included in the collection are a series of black-and-white illustrations by Arlette Francière, themselves polished gems that highlight, reflect and enhance the poems.

What Lies Behind, Luann Hiebert’s debut collection of poetry, explodes the notion of the common and everyday. The seductive songs of motherhood and love and spingtime on the prairies are confronted with illness, death, and the coldness of time marching on without us. With the weight of history behind her, Hiebert arrests the patterns of daily life and in their place leaves a beautiful truth that is more awesome and delightful than memory could serve.

Shortlisted for the 2009 Pat Lowther Award

Surreptitious breasts of the brain’s inside, crammed with
reptilian lights, uv or incandescent, zoom lens for the purpose of
petalled heights. Sherry-Mary saw him hunkered and hiding, grasping
leapable bells in his greasy palms. Smarmy knots.

Where does the fragile, robust self reside when ‘personal’voice is sent out online into an ironic masquerade ball of alias identity and wanton proxy? What stirs us? Can there be anything authentic about feeling anything anymore?

In What Stirs, Margaret Christakos looks at our primal appetite for attachment through the modern norms of codependency and co-existence, understanding that the postmodern digital era has created an atmosphere where the vulnerability and tenderness of the individual are both profanely exposed and brazenly reinvented with the arrival of virtual identity.

Often playful but never trifling, Christakos’s work layers the ecstatic possibilities of lyric poetry, the mundane and intimate extremes of motherhood, and her continued curiosity with experimental poetics in a thoughtful collection of sensual, language-focused, and wonderfully aural poems. Weighing lyric and anti-lyric inclinations, What Stirs pulls readers toward the music of poetry, and then again pulls them to dissonance, a desire for the otherness of music’s sundering.

Praise for What Stirs:

‘Stirring both emotionally and in a bold experimentalism.’

– Winnipeg Free Press

‘What Stirs is the first poetry book to capture perfectly this bewilderment brought about by the intersection of life and the impact of the Internet, the feeling that thereis a language being spoken that is not communicating what we wish it to … Christakos offers us a ladder out of this tower of Babel by reminding us of human relations of the most intimate and tactile sort … Beautiful and disturbing, poetry naming the world we are creating.’

– The Danforth Review

When not-very-religious Montreal poet Jason Camlot’s father died, he decided to practice the strict one-year period of mourning of the religious Jew, which included attending synagogue every single day. What The World Said, Camlot’s fourth full poetry collection, is an updated Kaddish for the post-google age, exploring the meaning of ignorance in the face of deathÑignorance of how to practice sadness and rituals of mourning, and of how properly to experience longing and loss. Camlot manipulates a wide range of forms to mine the relationship between the most intimate kinds of grief and the impersonal flood of discourse that the world pours upon us.