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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 resultsSorted by latest
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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.
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The Sweet Spot
$22.95The Sweet Spot is a journey beyond survival and thrivance, a place of being, of calm, of assurance, trust, and balance. Pasipanodya’s poetry manifests into a wave of actions, observations, dreams, premonitions, and one-line capsules. Each measure of verse acts as a sensual invitation to find one’s center after swinging from one side of the pendulum to the other. Welcome to the sweet spot.
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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.
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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.
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Ring of Dust
$23.95A poem sequence that embraces the ruptures a lyrical turn makes possible.
In Ring of Dust, Quebec poet Louise Marois delights in poetic feints, temporal leaps, asides, tangents, sleights of hand, call-backs and echoes. This ambitious collection of sequences populates plural dialogues between then and now, family and entourage, lover and nature, mother and death, work-person and artist, fables and confidences, limits and new reaches, home and escape, city and field, queer life and a blood red world. It’s a proposition that enters the mess of memory in hopes of reconciling, one disharmony at a time, the many voices who inhabit what keepsakes remain. This book is past and present at war with each other; it’s also the future emerging from the page-by-page bout, all born anew in an exuberant translation by D.M. Bradford.
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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.
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The Inferno
$24.95“Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state.” So begins Lorna Goodison‘s astonishing new translation of The Inferno by Dante, a poet she once described as “uncompromising as an old testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder.”
For the last two decades, Goodison has translated and reimagined Dante’s cantos, setting the original poem into her native Jamaica and employing Jamaican expressions and sayings. In doing so, she has attempted to do for Caribbean vernacular what Dante did for his Italian language in the fourteenth century-endow it with an entirely new vocal music and power. In recreating the journey through the “unpaved and rocky road” of Dante’s Hell for a contemporary audience, Goodison has given us a dazzling and profound new narrative of spiritual yearning for our era.
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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.
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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.
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Crowd Source
Crowd 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.
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Tabako on the Windowsill
$23.95An altar is a door; wonder is the key.
What losses and intimacies bring you to this threshold? Tabako on the Windowsill contends tenderly with such questions, initiating through them the work of transformation.
To shape an entire book around portals and thresholds is to search for living myth. Hari Alluri’s poems build from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. Following an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, Alluri offers multiple lived and ancestral spaces in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, the U.S., and Canada. Guided by a burning attention – to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings – Alluri creates moments where we can expand through the personhood of perception into wider, overlapping worlds of perspective and possibility.
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Stolen Plums
$19.95The poems in Alice Turski’s ravenous and playful Stolen Plums explore the ways we consume and are consumed by those we love and the histories they embody. Poignantly navigating uncertainties of self, country, and family, Turski contemplates the precarities of immigration, belonging, matrilineage, and marriage in unsparing language that straddles the border between ode and elegy. She captures not only a world “ready to eat whatever / you can bear abandoning,” but also the desire animating “tines of light that make [a] tense face beautiful.” Stolen Plums is a singular and singularly voracious debut.
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ZZOO
$21.95At a time when binaristic and hierarchical relations are being readily interrogated, MA|DE — a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third — takes up a critique of the human-animal divide in their full-length debut, ZZOO. From the depths of the oceans to the outer reaches of the sky, a menagerie of species trade off time in the limelight, none of them solely occupying the central space on the global stage. MA|DE’s collaborative practice foregrounds interdependence, outward focus, shared spaces and non-hierarchical thinking, all of which emerge allegorically in interzonal poems that are as richly realized as they are formally eclectic. This wild-blooded collection turns conventional exhibitionism on its head, treating humans and animals as equal subjects of art, science and selfhood. ZZOO is a bestiary for the modern world.
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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 (.”
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Woman Life Freedom
$25.00This international anthology marks a world-historical moment: the first ever feminist revolution. The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran is Woman, Life, Freedom, and it encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. This anthology echoes that cry. The poems here might be reflections on the present moment, denunciations of injustice, examinations of the poet’s own conscience, laments for the fallen, bitter curses, prayers, celebrations of life, and visions of a better future. Bänoo and Cy aim to raise awareness of the women’s revolution in Iran and show the world that this cause is alive and will not be put down.
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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.