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LCP – Member Appreciation Week 2024
Attention, League of Canadian Poets members! Get 15% off selected poetry collections from fellow Canadian poets with the code WELOVEPOETS (and enjoy free shipping, Canada-wide!)
All Books in this Collection
Showing 33–48 of 61 results
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Most of All the Wanting
$21.95How do we speak what feels unspeakable?
Exploring the landscape of grief in the wake of divorce, Most of All the Wanting is a treatise on intimacy in the face of change. Throughout, Amanda Merpaw’s poems attend to the fluidity of queer desire, documenting the complexities of intimacy, longing, and joy where “there’s burning beyond / the cusp of our cups.” Set in an environment of political and ecological upheaval, Most of All the Wanting asks what queerness makes possible within the self and the world. An essential debut.
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Moving to Delilah
$19.95From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman’s journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home.
In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.
Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen’s relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah’s previous inhabitants, and Owen’s triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond — though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.
In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic forms.
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Nucleus
$18.95Svetlana Ischenko tackles the creative tension between her identity as a Ukrainian poet, with deeply Ukrainian sensibilities, and that of an immigrant poet enthused by her adopted country.
In Nucleus readers will see through a Ukrainian immigrant’s eyes as she looks back at the land and traditions of her original country. This collection illuminates Ischenko’s poetic transformation, from a heroic crown of sonnets to freer, lyrical pieces, but all within the dynamic of Ukrainian and Canadian subject matter and sensibilities. A powerful collection, made even more profound in light of recent events in Ukraine.
Nucleus includes a fascinating introductory essay that explores the immigrant’s translation of self in a new country. -
Oh Witness Dey!
$20.00Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no record of where they were from in India or whether it was kidnapping, trickery, or false promises of wealth that took them to the Caribbean.
In Oh Witness Dey! Mootoo expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These vibrant poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence through saints and spices, rebellion and joy, to reimagine tensions and solidarities among various diasporas. They circumvent traditional conventions of style to find new routes toward understanding. They invite the reader to witness history, displacements and the legacies of our inheritance.
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Oldman’s River
$44.95Sid Mary is a voice to be reckoned with.
Beloved for his intimate, lyrical poetry, Marty’s depiction of selfhood, connection to place and to landscape have proven him a unique and dissenting voice in Canadian literature as well as a consistent presence in the Canadian environmental movement. These are poems, often strongly resonant of western speech, that celebrate all the vicissitudes of rural life, the loves and losses, the valleys and peaks of life on the prairies, foothills and in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia.
This first-ever collected works, featuring forward written by Kit Dobson and Owen Percy, and interview conducted by Pamela Banting, brings together old and new poems, published and unpublished works, in a celebration of the career and artistry of a Western Canadian icon.
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People You Know, Places You’ve Been
$23.00The latest poetry and artwork collection from Hana Shafi examines the unlikely connections we make to the people and places we encounter. Despite the infinite variations of our lives, every urban dweller has sparred with a neighbour they disliked, seen beautiful strangers on public transit, told secrets to their hairdresser. We interact with these supporting characters on a daily basis—and often we are them for others.
Shafi celebrates the Antiheroes of the world (the alcoholic at your local bar, teenage girls); examines those in Beautiful Leading Roles (the hot professor, the rich couple); lauds older generations of Wizards and Crones; and flags the Nemeses (men who think they’re allies, competitors for produce at farmer’s markets). We sink into recognition at depictions of Palaces such as the greasy spoon, Dungeons of public transit, and the Liminal Spaces of checkout counters or waiting rooms (including that one at the end of the cosmos).
People You Know, Places You’ve Been is an insightful, charming collection that offers a sense of shared recognition and nostalgia, ultimately asking: what if seemingly mundane places are actually the foundations of who you are?
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Pink Moon
$21.95Pink Moon is part anthem of decolonization, part oracle of the times. Earthy, magical, and steeped in ancestral connection, Roshan James fuses her lived experience as a Tibetan-Indian born in Scarborough, Ontario, with a tangible connection to nature, humanity, and realms of consciousness. Growing up in the South Asian diaspora, but feeling disconnected from her cultural roots, James makes peace with the tension between her self-identities through poetry.With lyrical ease and simplicity, James resonates off the page, holding the reader in a space, almost trance-like, of quiet confidence. Infused with street-style and deep contemplation, ancient tones and child-like questioning, this collection is a journey through abstract expression. Pink Moon sits at an intersection of timely themes: anti-oppression, melanated lived experience, climate action, social justice, and personal spirituality. The collection will be of interest for discussion in academia, literary circles, and among people who are passionate about art, mindfulness, meditation, holistic health, and nature.
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Precedented Parroting
$21.95Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”
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Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead
$20.00Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead is a beautiful collection of Catherine Graham’s award-winning poetry. Spanning twenty years of writing these poems trace Graham’s arc from ARC Poetry Magazine’s initial observation that “Graham is a young poet whose work should be closely attended to” to the Toronto Star writing “Catherine Graham’s seventh book of poetry is an intricate reverie.” Poems within this collection circle around profound themes, including family, healing, loss and love, but they are written with a delight in the natural world, a delicate line and ethereal imagery. Here, birds are gathered in bouquets, a ghost is a fold in the mind and the snow holds light. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead is a must-have volume from a much-loved poet.
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Queers Like Me
$20.00Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith’s latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.
In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the awkward dinners, the funerals, and the uncertainty of navigating fraught dynamics, bringing us into these most intimate moments of family life while outrunning deep grief. Smith moves from first home to first queer experiences: teenage crushes, video cameras, post-club hookups, fears and terrors, closeted lovers, and daydreams of confronting your childhood bully.
Queers Like Me is an enveloping book— a meditation on family complexity and a celebration of personal insight.
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Realia
$20.00In Realia, Michael Trussler grapples with the black fire of mental illness, revels in the joy inherent to colours, and probes what it means to be alive at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Perfectly clear, perfectly opaque, Trussler’s poetry implodes the lyric to channel the bright disintegration of our contemporary moment. These are poems requiring Jonah and Little Red Riding Hood to change places if we are to measure diagnostically homeless oceans, surveillance capitalism, and the vulnerable human body. Shambolic and precise, these poems are unskinned. Including a mini-essay on the author’s OCD and another on how a Caspar David Friedrich painting is an uncanny neighbour to ourselves, Realia is fluent in mitochondrial psychology and the diaries of Katherine Mansfield. It also offers lessons in extinct Barbie Doll arrangement.
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Rebellion Box
$20.00This explosive debut collection pushes against the limitations of gender roles, race, bodies and minds, and explores our insignificance and impotence in the universe. The concept of otherness afforded by a marginalized and neurodivergent perspective is brilliantly represented in this book.
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Remedies For Chiron
$20.00In the astrological tradition, Chiron represents our deepest wound, and our lifelong efforts to heal it. Remedies for Chiron is a collection of poems that journey through the days of a young, queer, Black, and newly disabled poet trying to find a place to root and exist in the entirety of those intersections. Moving between cycles of grief and self-discovery, Remedies tells the story of a prismatic existence while also offering a balm for the hurts we all experience and the humility that comes with healing.
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Selvage
$22.95We don’t choose the stories we inherit, but we can stitch new futures from the threads of our past.
Selvage is a work of salvaging and selving, of salvaging a self from disparate elements. Fragments from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the language of trees talking to one another through mycelial networks, familial stories, and ruminations on the cusp of motherhood are literally and lyrically torn apart, spun, and sewn together to create a collage of what it means to be human, which is to say, what it means to be incomplete and fragmented. Mashing up the traditional lyric with innovative form and visual poetry, this experimental work is deeply personal, but it also attempts to gesture towards the human experience by showing the unfinished seams of our existence: the messy ends, beautiful twists, and unexpected new beginnings sewn together with intertwined threads of intergenerational trauma and love.
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Sunny Ways
$21.95An off-beat examination of the denials that underpin extractive capitalism.
From the cratered lake of Chennai, India to the environmental racism of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Tokyo-3, Sunny Ways oscillates between images of environmental collapse and resistance.
Standing waist deep in the massive tailing ponds of Alberta’s Tar Sands, Sunny Ways wades through the tangled complicities of climate catastrophe. In the process, the book grapples with the failure of political hope and the intransigence of climate change denialism. Fitzpatrick channels his experiences growing up in the big sky economic pragmatism of Calgary, where oil pays the rent and puts food on the table, into an essayistic pair of long poems that echo the ecological poetics of writers like Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, and Juliana Spahr.
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Sweetest Dance On Earth, The
$19.00Since her debut in 1987 with questions I asked my mother, Di Brandt has remained curious, still asking questions and pushing poetic bounds. Now for the first time, the best work of this Griffin Award winning poet has been gathered together in one place. Distilled into one collection is Di Brandt’s insatiable desire to understand, question and show the world in a new light. From her feminist work to her eco poetics, readers will get a chance to see the breathtaking career of one of Canada’s most influential poets.