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LCP – Member Appreciation Week 2025
Attention, League of Canadian Poets members! Get 15% off selected notable, new, and forthcoming poetry collections from fellow Canadian poets with the code WELOVEPOETS (and enjoy free shipping, Canada-wide!)
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 68 results
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10:10
$22.00Longlisted, Nelson Ball Prize
Escaping from the evils of the modern world into the vivid colours of a bird’s plumage, Michael Trussler’s 10:10 plunges into the mystery and horror of living at the beginning of the Anthropocene. How can there be both terrible violence and extraordinary beauty in the world? How can birdwatching coexist with genocide? How can nature be loved and destroyed all at once?
Trussler’s poetic voice is delightfully fluid: moments and images from movies, aesthetic theory, and animal life collide in each poem, sometimes in a single line. From lyrics to prose, high art to emails, Trussler sifts through the shards of society to seek refuge in the beauty and strangeness of words, the beguiling richness of images, the intensity of the natural world.
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A Bouquet of Glass
$20.00What are you left with when glass shatters? Emerging from a mind with a propensity for the otherworldly and an unsuitability for the worldly, A Bouquet of Glass gathers the fragments of different realities into a vivid, piercing collection. These poems are the extra-ordinary stories of a poet living with a naturally psychoactive mind and a life-altering disability. From heightened altered states to spacious musings and playful concoctions, they are disarmingly human notes of love and loss. At once elegy and wild romp, they invite different pieces of a life to exist together uneasily, gracefully, precariously. You may wish to curl up with this book on one side of the glass, but only once a whirling storm has rushed through.
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Accidents After Happening
$24.95For readers of Leonard Cohen, Sharon Olds, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Jacques Prévert, George Elliott Clarke, Sylvia Plath, Warsan Shire, and Natalie Diaz.
The accidents of Priest’s collection are definitely not all “happy.” They move through a full range of human emotions: dread, grief, anger, ecstasy, lust, and empathy. Plus some magic levity. This is poetry you will want to recite aloud: lyrical love poems, sonnets, satires, ghazals, curses, and bitter invective. These are not snobby poems — they want and welcome readers who love euphony, who enjoy tasteful eroticism, who rage at injustice. People who grieve and gush — smart people who think critically and form their own opinions. And for those with a taste for “brevity forever.” Accidents After Happening also contains a whole new catalog of Priest’s aphorisms, proverbs, maxims, and sayings — the kind of work that recently prompted Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood to take to Twitter and praise Priest’s “snappy, funny, spot-on micro poems — plus much more.”
Priest is a people’s poet who believes that humanity harbors a deep and ancient biological need for the spirit and time-binding experiences of the incantatory and shamanistic and that these can only be acquired through the poetic outlook. His words have been quoted in the Farmers’ Almanac, posted in the Toronto transit system, sung in churches, denounced in the legislature, embedded in pavement, and turned into two hit songs. “Sometimes,” as one of Priest’s micro poems has it, “it is the book that opens you.”
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An Orange, A Syllable
$24.95The latest book by Gillian Sze, author of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award–winning book Quiet Night Think
This prosimetrical work is a meditation on motherhood, language, and art. The central speaker witnesses the earliest utterances of her child and launches into a poetic inquiry of words themselves, asking, How to measure one’s mouth by its words? The speaker seeks an answer amidst the language that surrounds her — words misspoken, mispronounced, remembered, unwritten — and, in doing so, struggles with signification and significance.
Each prose poem in the five-part collection darts between the many meanings of “fit” — as in “a sudden burst of emotion” or “to be the right size and shape,” and the archaic “fytte” (a section of a poem). A text becomes an open mouth, a square day of a calendar, or a bare fragment of a narrative. The final section of the book is an intimate and ekphrastic engagement with the work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. Drawn to Hammershøi’s paintings of the empty rooms of his apartment, the speaker recognizes a familiar space of art’s insistence.
An Orange, A Syllable details a period of maternal and artistic transformation.
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Baby Cerberus
$20.00The poems in Baby Cerberus are ethereal, soul-stirring and suffused with a playful intelligence.
Natasha Ramoutar’s second collection traces joy and kinship across a multitude of lives and lived experiences. Shifting deftly from classical mythology and folklore to video games to speculative futures, each poem asks us to consider how we care for one another. As we move through sentient galleries, swashbuckling adventures and the doors of Atlantis, the collection reorients us in each section with a riddle, always inviting the reader to play along, tugging on the invisible threads between us all, trying to find what tethers us together and, in turn, what keeps us here. Joyous and multilayered, this is a book that’s fast enough for the speed of information and powerful enough to stop you in your tracks.
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Bad Weather Mammals
$21.95“The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing,” Ashley-Elizabeth Best writes in her second collection. Bad Weather Mammals navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, she traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance. In poems that explore a variety of formal constraints, such as the suite “ODSP 1, 2, & 3,” which infuses government forms with lyric poetry, she suggests all the ways the medical and bureaucratic systems can dehumanize and traumatize our most vulnerable citizens. By digging deep into her own experiences, Best has archived the ways we fail each other in our most desperate times — while at the same time outlining how we can show up to revel in disabled joy and community. Bad Weather Mammals disassembles dominant narratives about how disabled individuals should be and reconceptualizes the embodied experiences that recenter us in our own narrative.
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Bare Bones of Our Alphabet, The
$20.95The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet is a collection of poetry that reveals an all-consuming yearning: the desire to find a language that can tell the most about our existence. What the poet asks for, works obsessively to tap into, is a native tongue, a vernacular that bypasses the traps of a supposed rationality and objectivity forged in a body-politic consumed by self-interests that reduce our ontological experience. The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet calls for an activation of our primary ways of seeing that perceive spontaneously, without deliberation, which have been subdued by the material beneficiaries of our world and deemed non-intelligent. The poems invite us to re-enter our truly bare bones–our empty, sparkling space–before the codified verb, with its imposed grammar, placed us in a consented incarceration. The poet endeavours to uncover the bare alphabets we must return to–the redeeming letters–where the possibility of rebirth resides, for all and everything that has been annihilated by an unethical rhetoric, a verbosity of lies, engendered through undemocratic paradigms crafted by humans.
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Blood Belies
$22.00In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as she brings her father’s, and her own, stories to light, writing against the background of the institutional racism of Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late 1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s, Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?
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Blood Root
$22.00Reflecting on a dual upbringing in two villages, Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone), Jessica Hiemstra’s new collection of poems delves into her relationship with home. In Blood Root, she interrogates questions of legacy, land, belonging, and the breathtaking intimacy of death.
One moment tender, the next moment dark, hard, and raw, Blood Root blends diary entries, drawings, and lyricism to hold up a polished mirror to colonialism and its echoing impact. Considering beauty and horror in equal reverence “so I’m not human once removed,” Hiemstra cuts through pretence, bearing witness to humans as they confront and connect to one another and the larger world.
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Commonwealth
$19.00Commonwealth is a profound lyrical meditation on the pre- and post-colonial migrations of the Lenape population throughout the American Midwest, from the watershed of Weli Sipu (the Ohio River) in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to Indiana and beyond. This is a book that transcribes the languages of rivers, highways, rail lines, and buffalo traces. It seeks—or is pushed toward—destinations that are always over the horizon. It is about the fluidity of space and time, and the tangibility of history. As the Lenape journey ever northward and westward, they both create and are created by a collective body of stories: stories of belonging and exclusion, of freedom and confinement, of aspirations and hard truths. Commonwealth explores the ways landscape and people inform one another, and does so in a way that is as clear as a broad Ohio sky.
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Devotional Forensics
$22.00With dazzling wit and brittle tenderness, multi-award-winning poet Joseph Kidney catches all in his highly anticipated debut collection. Kidney’s rich, innovative imagery finds the durable in the contemporary and articulates a new vision of human vitality from inside a world that always seems on the verge of ending.
Channeling influences as wide as Shakespeare and Anne Carson, Virgil and John Ashbery, Devotional Forensics takes full advantage of the liberties of language, playing with its boundaries. This formally inventive collection exalts the ordinary and fleshes out the metaphysical, constructing theologies out of wildfires, classical music, and garbage collection, while engaging seamlessly with everything from renaissance literature to family intimacy, from modern art to biological science. At once timeless and urgent, Kidney’s poems dance through all the miniature apocalypses that compose the evolution of time into history.
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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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Existing Music
$19.95Trillium Book Award-winner Nick Thran explores the companionship of wistful music in his fourth collection.
The poems in Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the “sad song.” The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians—from the long gaps between one artist’s records, and grief over another’s suicide, to the marvelling at another’s ability to write “beautiful songs about potatoes.” The long poem “The Minim” considers the sad song from the point of view of an amateur musician at practice, using language that riffs upon an existing dictionary of musical terms with an eye towards making “vigorous chambers, frivolous rooms.” Lastly, the collection considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages.
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Get Well Soon
$22.95In the spring of 2020, Jamie Sharpe was in New Brunswick, purportedly studying the famed Magnetic Hill outside Moncton. A dog-walker discovered Sharpe in a ditch, disrobed except for his backpack containing a manuscript …
With his fifth collection, Get Well Soon, Sharpe reaffirms “he is utter master of his language. Whether [Sharpe’s] poems are the result of long lucubration or the inspiration of the moment, they bear no mark of effort, and it is not without admiration, nor even without astonishment, that one is carried along — by the noble, unswerving amble of those gorgeous stanzas, proud white hackneys harnessed in gold — into the glory of the evenings. Rich and subtle, [Jamie Sharpe]’s poetry is never merely lyrical; it always encloses an idea within the garland of its metaphors, and however vague or general that idea may be, it serves to strengthen the necklace; the pearls are secured by a thread that, though sometimes invisible, is ever sure.”
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Ghost Work
$21.95How do we redefine the self when memory begins to deteriorate?
This question is at the heart of Ghost Work, a suite of poems that explores a son’s gradual loss of his father from dementia. In compassionate, well-crafted pantoums, triolets, ghazals, and sonnets, Rob Colman probes family connection, digging into the liminal space memory preserves between our natural and built environments. Ghost Work is at once a tribute to a lost family member, and a testament to the fragility of the human condition.
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Goalie
$20.00The poems in Goalie follow our narrator’s journey as he progresses throughout his hockey career, from novice all the way to retirement. These poems explore topics such as role models, relationships, ambitions, failure, and the minutiae of everyday Canadian life in as genuine and authentic a way as possible between these pages.