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Books for World Poetry Day
Celebrate World Poetry Day with our list of must-read poetry collections that capture the beauty, power, and depth of the form.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 30 results
a body more tolerable
$19.95Ferocious and vulnerable poems about redefining acts of creation, destruction, deconstruction, and recreation, from a singular Indigiqueer point of view
a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.
In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.
A Thousand Tiny Awakenings
$20.00A Thousand Tiny Awakenings is a collection of genuine and heartfelt expressions from young and marginalized creators who challenge the oppressive structures that shape our world. These narratives, poems, and artworks echo across Turtle Island, transcending borders to offer a stirring testament to resilience and hope. Discover 15 young writers, and 23 unique and powerful pieces that embody the spirit of resistance and resurgence; uplifting the upcoming generation in their pursuit to dismantle boundaries that define their bodies, lives, and futures. Through art and storytelling, these voices call for action and inspire revolution, reminding us that our words have the power to transform the world.
All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain
$20.95A captivating search through one family’s history, All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain is a stunning examination of intergenerational trauma and its effect on Indigenous voices. Aftershocks and fragmented memories ricochet through this collection, bringing with them strength, intensity and uninhibited beauty. Recalling pivotal work by Billy-Ray Belcourt, jaye simpson, Joshua Whitehead and Emily Riddle, Sarain Frank Soonias makes his poetic debut with a splash that ripples far outside his own work, and marks the entrance of a new, important voice in contemporary poetry.
Arabic, between Love and War
$23.00In Arabic, the word for love حب is one letter shorter than the word for war حرب
Here, translators gather to perform an intimate labour, moving words from Arabic into English, or reversing such direction as language dissolves into cities, landscapes, or portals that open to rubble, or only air.
These poems reverberate in the space between there and here, silence and voice, original and translation, and the polarities of war and love.
“May the poems gathered here – in translation, and in their original voice – spark introspection, remedy, and acts of imagination in between.”
Yasmine Haj, “To Speak with Each Other” (introduction)
George Abraham, Eman Abukhadra, Omar Aljaffal, Norah Alkharashi, Lamia Abbas Amara, Nour Balousha, Samar Diab, Najlaa Osman Eltoum, Miled Faiza (& Karen McNeil), Zeena Faulk, Ibrahim Fawzy, Daad Haddad, Yasmine Haj, Mayada Ibrahim, Rana Issa, Mahmoud Khudayyir, Hiba Moustafa, Suneela Mubayi, Mariam Naji, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Nashwa Nasreldin, Kamal Nasser, Nofel, Qasim Saudi, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Fadwa Tuqan.
Beauty of Vultures, The
$23.95The interplay between photography, nature and poetic form is on full display in Wendy McGrath’s and Danny Miles’ collaborative new work The Beauty of Vultures. This innovative collection takes readers into the surprisingly chatty world of birds, whose avian artistry and poignant plumage mimics the formally and structurally inventive tones found in each poem. The language wings its way between funny and serious, poignant and morbid, while always drawing parallels between the poet’s thoughts and the camera’s eye. From peahens telling off their elaborately festooned romantic partners, robins’ empty eggs recalling air raid tests after WWII, to seagulls serving as harbingers of humanity’s ongoing crimes against nature, each unit of photography melds seamlessly with its poetic doppelgänger.
Buzzkill Clamshell
$19.95Amber Dawn’s latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power
As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.
With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby – gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.
Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer – not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.
Crowd Source
$19.95Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.
Elegy for Opportunity
$20.00In her debut collection, Natalie Lim asks: How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises? Anchored by elegies for NASA’s Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, this collection explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift’s cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Confessional, funny and bursting with joy, Elegy for Opportunity extends a lifeline from Earth that will leave you feeling comforted, challenged and a little less alone in the universe.
Existing Music
$19.95Trillium Book Award-winner Nick Thran explores the companionship of wistful music in his fourth collection.
The poems in Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the “sad song.” The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians—from the long gaps between one artist’s records, and grief over another’s suicide, to the marvelling at another’s ability to write “beautiful songs about potatoes.” The long poem “The Minim” considers the sad song from the point of view of an amateur musician at practice, using language that riffs upon an existing dictionary of musical terms with an eye towards making “vigorous chambers, frivolous rooms.” Lastly, the collection considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages.
Goalie
$20.00The poems in Goalie follow our narrator’s journey as he progresses throughout his hockey career, from novice all the way to retirement. These poems explore topics such as role models, relationships, ambitions, failure, and the minutiae of everyday Canadian life in as genuine and authentic a way as possible between these pages.
How I Bend Into More
$21.95Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza’s grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation. Paper-quilled shapes represent the poet’s body on the page; these shapes weave between lines of verse and with them the reclaimed disabled body is made. How I Bend Into More is a distinctive poetic debut that challenges ableist perceptions of normalcy, and centres “the double architecture / of ( metamorphosis (.”
I Used to Live Here
$20.00The driving impulse of Amy LeBlanc’s new collection of poetry, I used to live here, is an examination of chronic illness, disability, and autoimmunity. The collection also aims to find moments of magic and ritual within the experience of illness and to find new metaphors for illness and autoimmunity that do not rely on militarization, self-cannibalism, or suicide. LeBlanc thinks deeply about autoimmunity and the poetic representations of the body that self-destructs and that cannot recognize itself? specifically, she asks: What does a body feel like when it doesn’t feel like a home? What does it look like when a body self-destructs? How do we write through and about bodily doubt?
In a Cage of Sunlight
$25.00In a Cage of Sunlight features the selected works of poet, singer-songwriter and essayist Joseph Maviglia. It covers a period of 30 years of Maviglia’s work in different genres. From his early work in poetry to his engaging and energetic style in essay and prose, this selection also includes lyrics from his original song compositions and the details of music production and the cross-over of writing in various mediums. For fans of both music and poetry and how a writer moves between forms, this selection shows a voice expanding and experimenting with vibrancy and an infused dynamic sense of the written, spoken, sung and performed word.
In Your Nature
$23.95Poems that show us a world in which precedent for gender transition is everywhere if you know how to look.
“I delete my history / badly,” writes Estlin McPhee in this searing, witty, lyrical, and elegiac debut collection of poems about intersections of trans identity, magic, myth, family, and religion. The line refers at once to a young person’s browser data that reveals an interest in gender transition; an adult’s efforts to reconcile complicated relationships; a culture’s campaign to erase queerness and transness from the historical record; and a religion’s attempt to pretend that its own particular brand of miraculous transformation is distinct from the kind found in folktales or real life. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.
No One Knows Us There
$22.95From wherever I am, I will
send word like a golden thread,
roll an unravelling ball through time
towards myself.In this stunning debut collection, Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two distinct and moving portraits of early womanhood. The first is that of the devoted, caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realities of palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older, compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenek rewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing.
At once sensual, visceral, and dreamlike, No One Knows Us There takes us from the sterility of the hospital into the sumptuous natural world. We face horror in a manicured garden and discover beauty in a suncapped lake. A theoretical mathematician leads us to an elk encounter, the crooked bodies of birds are found in the spring thaw, and we become our own pet snail in a mason jar.
Ultimately, grief is radically transformed through plainspoken yet lyrical language, and this keen examination of trauma evolves into a striking celebration of the inevitability of change.
Re: Wild Her
$22.95In nature, rewilding restores biodiversity and ecosystems. In this new collection from award-winning poet Shannon Webb-Campbell, it is a form of Indigenous resurgence and pleasure.
Drawing upon ecology, traditional knowledge, and sexuality, Re: Wild Her is a personal and poetic awakening. In these pages artistry and nature are intertwined, speaking to the sensual musings of lovers in Paris, driftwood and death cycles, and the rise of wild swimming and cold dipping. Throughout, reclaiming one’s divine femininity is celebrated as a powerful act of resistance and rejuvenation.
These “poem spells” each offer a different prism with which to rewild ourselves, answering the call: How does joy help us cope with the harsh realities and complexities of life? How does poetry help us move forward? Re: Wild Her is an invitation to catapult into the otherworldly, to dive with the muses, and to resubmerge ourselves in joy.