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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 17–30 of 30 results
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.
Speech Dries Here on the Tongue
$22.00Speech Dries Here on the Tongue is an anthology of poetry by Canadian authors exploring the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health. This threat of environmental collapse has brought with it a sense of impending annihilation and has contributed to the current mental health crisis, made crueller by a global pandemic that highlighted our fragile nature. These are poems by writers who have used their words to both articulate and navigate this crisis, unpacking the complex interplay between mental and environmental health in order to alert, inform, and inspire readers.
Sprocket
$20.00Sprocket is a series of breathless prose-poems capturing poet Al Rempel’s childhood adventures spent roaming free in the idyllic setting of Arnold, BC, a small farming community tucked into the corner of Vedder Mountain, near the US border. Each poem presents a snapshot of one or two memories, sometimes involving the author’s siblings, his two “summertime only” school friends, or any number of other local characters. From climbing up the mountain “with handholds wet with moss and banana slugs” to finding the best way “to run full blast through a cornfield just before harvest,” Rempel takes his readers through an age where, as long as you were home by suppertime, you could go almost anywhere on your bike.
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.
Supergiants
$20.00For millennia humanity has looked upward and traced stories in the night sky, projecting our human wants and desires outward. In Supergiants, Kyle Flemmer turns his gaze in the other direction. What does our reach for the stars say about us? Working with the technical language of engineering and astrophysics, Flemmer reorients the reader within our galaxy. Families of asteroids expand to contain their physical attributes, the mythic stories of their names and the histories of real people. We see the course of lunar exploration through the fate of the flags planted on each mission. Nebulae, blue giants and black holes enfold us. Interspersed throughout are a series of found/collage poems that visually reconfigure the elements of space exploration and our understanding of it. Through it all, Flemmer shows how we turn to the stars to make sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.
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.
Taslīm
$20.95These poems by an author of Coptic (Egyptian Christian Orthodox) daughter of immigrants, depict, explore, and question the burden of Taslim (“Commandments”) on Coptic girls. Taslim is the “oral transmission of heritage and ancestral knowledge.” The poems highlight the ways in which diaspora Coptic women navigate taslīm or the responsibilities of transmitting ancestral knowledge while reckoning with its costs: deferred joy and pleasure until the afterlife, an almost compulsory notion of motherhood, and a gendered comportment of ascetic and martyr living, even in diaspora. Taslim in the insecure Christian minority of Egypt became a rigid bind in the immigrant communities abroad.
The Great Wake
$19.95In this new collection, Nina Berkhout skillfully illuminates quiet moments in our bustling world. Through poignant reflections on childhood, loss, and the relentless passage of time, she captures the subtle yet luminous events of the everyday. Writing about the animals and people of her neighbourhood, Berkhout introduces us to the talking toad in her garden, and her favourite late-night grocery store couple. She takes us to a restaurant for a birthday dinner, and aloft in a hot air balloon on garbage day. We follow two Dobermans to a park at sundown, guided by willows, transcending the boundaries of mortality. Sustained by icicles on the eaves, neglected violets, and the ethereal presence of departed loved ones, the poems in The Great Wake help us make sense of the sorrows and joys of ordinary life.
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.
The Problem with Having a Body
$20.00The Problem with Having a Body unites Jessica Popeski’s preoccupations with intersectional ecofeminist poetics and the genetic inheritance of fractured, grandmaternal generational lines. It examines how political and geographical rupture, war zones, and genocide generate traumatic, ancestral memory by chronicling the speaker’s experiences of moving through the world with physical dis/abilities and anorexia. These poems ask loud questions about why depression has decorated the medical notes of the author’s family, manifesting as cyclical bouts of anxiety and depression, physical illness, voicelessness, and disordered eating. By granting these recurring intergenerational cadences value in the present, the collection seeks to transform a legacy of depression into greater consciousness.
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.
Things a Bright Boy Can Do
$24.95In Michael Chang’s latest, all the world’s a vaudeville stage, and this poet is its jester with a knife.
Like an elongated diss track, Chang’s poems go from flirty to righteous, wrathful to lackadaisical, all in the span of one page. The titans of pop culture and poetry wrestle at Chang’s whimsy, their poems a series of flings and retorts at the end of a late-night spree.
Like a compendium of American poetics, this collection breezily changes style and mood as easily as a prom queen smiles beneath the crown. With nods to O’Hara and Ashbery, the poems in Things a Bright Boy Can Do flit from the sewage of Americana to the heights of ecstatic experience. Each poem is a playground meant to delight readers before they skip along.
With each successive book, Michael Chang showcases a poet at home in the twenty-first century; nothing is too silly or too morbid for the page. When reading Chang’s poetry, the madness of interpreting the social media age suddenly makes sense. You can’t help but join in on the heckling, sticking your tongue out in the face of our strange world.
“Michael Chang is back, with their signature irrepressibility: the voice that bubbles with endlessly exuberant wit, encyclopedic pop culture references, playful orthography, and intense emotion. Oh, yes – these poems are in their feelings! Are you here for poetry that can lure Superman, Dolly Parton, and Prince allusions together? Are you up for parataxis with a vengeance? If wordplay and irreverence are music to your ears, tune into Things a Bright Boy Can Do.” – Evie Shockley, author of Suddenly We
“Michael Chang’s Things a Bright Boy Can Do pushes and pushes, and then pushes some more. It’s provocative, fearless, and relentless, unafraid to reinvent tone, grammar, and just about everything else that dares to enter the path of Chang’s perception. Things a Bright Boy Can Do is a ride on the back of a new modern language.” – Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything
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.
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.