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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 49–61 of 61 results
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The King of Terrors
$22.95CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023
What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves?
Written after a brain tumour diagnosis, The King of Terrors is a treatise on living with illness and the way that language, relationships and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Johnstone’s poems oscillate between the personal and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we’re never quite sure what we are seeing, no matter how familiar.
“There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, ‘each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.’ These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone – despite a future only as certain ‘as the body // it inhabits’ – offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself.” – Randall Mann, author of Deal: New and Selected Poems
“The King of Terrors is a luminous meditation on the otherworld of illness and treatment, contemplating the mysteries of death and the frontiers of mind and body with sharp clarity and radical vulnerability. These mesmerizing, urgent poems admit us not only to waiting rooms and brain scans, but also to the intimate fears that accompany the estranging experience of being unwell, or, as the poet says, living ‘between / age and agency.’ Haunting, stark, and lyrical, The King of Terrors is charged, as all the best poetry is, with the shock of the mortal.” – Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The Jaguar
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The Lantern and the Night Moths
$23.95the lantern light seems to have written a poem;
they feel lonesome since i won’t read them.
—“lantern” by Fei MingThe work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal yet often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry.
In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China’s most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.
Wang’s translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and accompanied by Wang’s personal essays reflecting on the art, craft, and labour of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts.
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The Mask
$20.95The mask has become emblematic of the age of the Covid pandemic. It is also an important symbol of Japanese classical culture. For Terry Watada, it not only conceals and protects but also reveals the hidden truths of the wearer. Watada’s The Mask reveals a deep sense of grief, loss, and injury, and love of family. Employing vivid imagery and powerful language, he expresses the isolation of the times, the vagaries of old age, and the mysteries of the mystical.
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The Wind Has Robbed the Legs off a Madwoman
$19.95A rare new book of verse from one of the most recognized and distinguished names in Newfoundland poetry and drama, Agnes Walsh.
This exciting new collection by a beloved Newfoundland poet at the height of her craft focuses on nature and women, with strong imagery and an innate sense of line. It considers the permeable barrier between inside and outside, between self and world. These deceptively simple poems convey wisdom and a profound depth of perception in their evocation of beauty, illness, vulnerability, and place.
The poems of The Wind Has Robbed the Legs off a Madwoman draw from myth, folklore, local history, the unique dialect of Irish Newfoundland, and the edges of feminism and patriarchy.
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Tilling the Darkness
$20.00In Susan Braley’s debut poetry collection, Tilling the Darkness, a young woman born into a family of eleven navigates the inequities of gender roles on the farm and in the church. In this dramatic rural setting—birth and death sudden in the barn, the seasons vivid over the fields—she experiences first-hand how swiftly seedlings become stalks ploughed down, how easily she and her sisters are discounted. Tilling the Darkness explores how we all undertake this tilling ritual, season after season, in the finite field of our lives. Our darkness may be a calamity we seek to escape—a grave, a war, a grief—and our wish is the promise of renewal. In these powerful poems, it is often women who, even in the face of injury and erasure, turn dark to light. Braley’s poetry traces how this woman, after leaving the farm, comes to appreciate the complex, bountiful legacy of her early life.
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Tumbling for Amateurs
$22.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 FIDDLEHEAD POETRY BOOK PRIZE
A reimagining of an instructional text on tumbling supports poems about the amateurishness of being human.
Tumbling for Amateurs is a reimagining of James Tayloe Gwathmey’s 1910 book of the same name, published as part of Spalding’s Athletic Library. Bookended with “Propositions” on why tumbling is a skill that everyone should learn and “Extracts from Letters of Support,” each verso poem in this collection pairs with a recto illustration based on drawings from the source text. In the spirit of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, word and image work for each other, creating something more than just an instructional manual.
Tumbling is, well, a metaphor for everything. And we all are, well, amateurs. Experimentation abounds in these poems and manipulated pictures. There are anaphoras, list sonnets, erasures, palimpsests and concrete poems, all working from tumbling’s limited vocabulary and central focus of acrobatics and gymnastics. In this experimentation of form and text is a search for the lyric, for an emotional connection when one isn’t always possible, in bodies, in movement, in desire. “We measure our lives by what our bodies can do.”
“We have no other way to touch each other. / Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other.” Like the tumbling acts from which they spring, Gwathmey’s poems are delightfully performative. They leap, loop, and reconfigure familiar forms into fresh and acrobatic new intimacies. Slyly queering his source text — an early 20th century tumbling manual for young men salvaged from the dusty closet of family history — Gwathmey transforms instruction into seduction as he conducts a tender and playful archeology of desire.” – Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book
“Matthew Gwathmey’s poems, springboarding from a genre of fitness manual popular in the early twentieth century, tumble us into the present through tests gamily set for body and mind. As ripped as his gymnast protagonists—evoked so fetchingly in the book’s illustrations—Gwathmey writes a poetry eschewing the lyrical in favour of a stripped-down, athletic language that gives shape to ‘what must remain / nameless.’ There’re so many ways to read ourselves into Tumbling for Amateurs. Go toe to toe with these poems and they’ll tone up your grip on what poetry is.”
– John Barton, author of Lost Family“Gwathmey’s poems go together like a troupe, somersaulting through the vocabulary of the way a body moves. They turn the still past into this moving present.” – Paul Legault, author of The Tower
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Us From Nothing
$20.00From the big bang to the emergence of Homo sapiens to Kushim and the first recorded use of writing in 3200 BCE to the moon landing in 1969, Us From Nothing is a sprawling history of humanity. Striving to answer the big questions – Who are we? Where did we come from? How did we get here? – Geoff Bouvier has created a sweeping collection of poetry that gracefully captures the arc of our universe. Fifteen billion years ago, there was nothing, not even light. Now, we live in a universe that plays host to trillions of galaxies with uncountable stars, worlds and maybe even other life. Us From Nothing recounts this epic tale in richly imagined, yet crisp, prose poems that are carefully grounded in historical fact. The result is a remarkable poetic retelling of history that challenges us to think deeply not only about where we’ve come from, but also about where we’re going.
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Vixen
$20.00Winner of the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Sandra Ridley’s latest book offers a breathtaking, harrowing immersion in cruelty behind different veils: the medieval hunt, ecological collapse, and intimate partner violence.
Sparked by a haunting chance encounter with a fox, and told in six chapters of varying form, Vixen is as visceral as it is mysterious, sensuous as it is terrifying.
“Thicket” introduces us to stalking being akin to hunting; the similar threat of terror and—too often—a violent end. “Twitchcraft” locates the hunt in the home, the wild in the domestic, while “Season of the Haunt” explores the unrelenting nature of hunting. “Stricken” asks common questions that often implicitly justify such violence: Is the harassment ‘bad enough’ to allow us to label it criminal? Has all control been taken? Is the fear reasonable?
Vixen propels us to examine the nature of empathy, what it means to be a compassionate witness, and what happens when brutality is so ever-present that we become numb. This is a beautiful, difficult, wild tapestry of defiance and survival.
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We Follow the River
$20.00We Follow the River tells the story of one family’s escape from military violence in Myanmar, their exiled existence in Thailand, and their immigration to Canada with only a pile of beat up suitcases on a luggage cart. It is about growing up as a foreigner in a foreign land, sifting through family history and grief, and alighting across cultures and continents to find a home.
Onjana Yawnghwe’s third poetry book reveals an expertise in language—at times joyful, disobedient, wild, and other times condensed and restrained. A work of over twenty years, these poems are written and rewritten through the retroactive prism of experience, polished and honed, eroded and erased. Sweeping in scope, intimate and honest, these poems tell of the quiet moments, the unruly moments of rage and sorrow, the rough distillation of self, both hated and loved. These poems reside behind the secret, dark door of the self.
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West of West Indian
$20.95West of West Indian constructs the Queer Caribbean experience as a simultaneously individual and collective one, embracing the language that continues to unsettle queer life. The collection is, at once, a summons and a love letter to familiar figures like the Bullerman, the Chichiman, the Funny man, and the Anty man. The poetry collects a distinctly queer Vincentian Canadian account of love and autonomy, and while it represents a written journey that demarcates queer pain, it is also an exhibition of pleasure flowing from the bodies and minds of the collection’s many subjects.
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What Fills Your House Like Smoke
$19.95In these poems, E. McGregor combines the lore of family history with personal memory, vividly parsing patterns of inheritance, particularly through the maternal line.
What Fills Your House Like Smoke begins and ends at the deathbed of the writer’s Metis grandmother. In between, McGregor composes an incomplete and wildly imaginative biography of the grandmother, interrogated by family photographs, stories, and the scant paper trail she left behind.
McGregor sifts through the complexities of motherhood, daughterhood, anxiety, intimate relationships and addiction, weaving family history with memory to make sense of what is carried on. Especially affecting are poems about childhood, and the people who disappear from a child’s life, and the struggle to live as a societal outsider, finding strength in self-definition and the power of narrative.
As these poems unfold, they move us toward an understanding of maternal inheritance, shifting identities, forgiveness, and finally love.
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you
$20.00From poet Chantal Neveu, author of the award-winning collection This Radiant Life, comes a book-length poem that plunges us more deeply into the notion of the idyll and into the polyhedric structure of love.
you demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship.
Personal autonomy and the formation of “self” are nourished here by multiples—I, you, s/he. The voice in you reclaims life from change and time and affirms it anew.
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Zong!
$25.95Zong!