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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 resultsSorted by latest
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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.
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Speech Dries Here on the Tongue
$20.00Speech 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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Taslīm
$21.95This volume of pithy, defiant poetry and prose explore the burden of taslīm–an oral transmission of heritage and ancestral knowledge–on Coptic Orthodox women. These poems highlight the ways in which Coptic women navigate 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 sacrifice and submission, even in diaspora. Taslīm in the Christian minority of Egypt becomes an even more rigid bind in immigrant communities abroad. This book is ultimately a feminist manifesto for freedom, and the choice to live and desire out loud.
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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.
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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.
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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 poems, 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.
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No One Knows Us There
$22.95From wherever I am, I will
send word like a golden thread,
roll an unravelling ball through time
toward 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.
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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 Eltom, 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.
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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
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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.