Bookville – Poetry

Get lyrical (or concrete, or freeform, and so on…) with Bookville’s poetry selection.

All Books in this Collection

Showing all 4 results

  • A Brief Relief from Hunger

    A Brief Relief from Hunger

    By: Spenser Smith
    $20.00

    A brief relief from hunger is a poetry collection about the yearnings of a young man – cocaine, human connection, fast food – and the ravenous world in which he lives. In Vancouver, the speaker binges Big Macs post-rehab while others consume fentanyl-tainted drugs. Growling bodies are everywhere, including on Facebook where people post cruel comments about drug users in the face of British Columbia’s toxic drug supply crisis. At the heart of the collection are poems that respond to these comments from the perspective of the speaker, now sober but still hungry, whose friends are dying from the contaminated drug supply. The speaker knows at least one reliable source of contentment: Grandma’s kitchen, where, at his lowest points, he finds cabbage rolls, acceptance, and a tenderness he wishes to absorb into his masculinity.

  • Crushed Wild Mint

    Crushed Wild Mint

    By: Jess Housty
    $19.95

    Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet’s motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing—held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing.

    Housty’s poems are textural—blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow—and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader’s whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors’ bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty’s exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community…

    Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality.

  • Swim / into the North’s Blue Eye

    Swim / into the North’s Blue Eye

    By: Annette Lapointe
    $18.00

    Annette Lapointe’s poetry collection swim / into the north’s blue eye explores the gothic anxieties and bodily discomforts of constant travel. Some of its journeys are global, but many are more regionally oriented: from one prairie city to another, between small towns, from city to cottage-country, from prairie to coast.

    The collection also follows Lapointe’s family migrations around western Canada, particularly into fly-in communities of northern Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 70s. Those settlements, which make every trip monumental, provide a frame for years of restlessness and desire, and for meditations on the still world and its swarming occupants.

  • Uncomfortability

    Uncomfortability

    By: Roxanna Bennett
    $20.00

    Uncomfortability, Roxanna Bennett’s third book with Gordon Hill Press, pandemic conditions are explored in their individuated awfulness but also their paradoxical solidarity, the unifying collective status of being somehow constrained, life radically changing due to social proscription. Continuing her development and renovation of the sonnet form established in her previous books, but building on the form by arranging the text into seasonal divisions like a Book of Hours, Uncomfortability is devoted to this question from “Life Without Weather”, “Could we begin to love each other?s pain?” The book answers, “No one needs to fight. We are all the same.”