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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 33–48 of 68 results
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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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NMLCT
$24.95Imagine The Matrix retold by the reanimated cyborg bodies of the Brothers Grimm.
Fables and fairytales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul Vermeersch responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn’t, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by The Algorithm. In a “post-truth” society rife with simulations, misinformation, and computer-generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of “real life” still exists.
These poems — all precisely 16 lines long, identically formed as though mass-produced — are themselves artificial creations, products of the imagination, sometimes disorienting but always vivid. They hold up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. In NMLCT, Vermeersch gives us his answer to an existence in thrall to the artificial. But it also foretells a different future, one where the air and the grass and the trees, and all the life they engender, might always be genuine and sensed and safe.
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No Credit River
$22.95“It is a confusing thing to be born between generations where the one above thinks nothing is trauma and the one below thinks everything is trauma.”
From acclaimed novelist and television writer Zoe Whittall comes a memoir in prose poetry that reconfirms her celebrated honesty, emotional acuity, and wit. Riving and probing a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation, No Credit River is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself.
Open and exacting, this is a unique examination of anxiety in complex times, and a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally inventive as it is full of heart.
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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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Non-Prophet
$22.00Raw, reverent, and bursting with searing vulnerability, Non-Prophet canvases the electric tension between devotion and doubt to gods both personal and ubiquitous, and reflects on the natural and built worlds in their claims to the sacred. Winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize, Qurat Dar’s bold debut collection explores what it is to grapple with faith that’s “just another language you’re losing, or one you never learned to speak.”
Weaving through the boundaries of language and form, Non-Prophet meditates on things “just mundane enough to be holy / just holy enough to be mundane” — the death of a bird, the cries of mid-nightmare prayers, the misplaced shame of what it is to bleed. Dar’s poems both rage and reconcile, holding gently the pieces of a fractured identity.
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Nostos
$21.95i came from the sea / first on fins then on fours
Taking its title from Ancient Greek, Tracy Wai de Boer’s Nostos is a hero’s journey rooted in the quest for selfhood from elemental beginnings to an unknowable end. “Nostos” translates to homecoming and is one of the root words of nostalgia; the other, “algos,” means pain, making nostalgia a painful return home. This etymology acts as guide for de Boer’s “i” when she imagines homecoming as less a moment of arrival and more about desire to move through pain and mystery in the formation of self. Nostos is an essential debut from one of Canada’s fastest rising poets.
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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. -
Parade of Storms
$18.00In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather. Never having thought of herself as an environmental poet, the author found that under the strictures of the pandemic the recent effects of climate change became more and more intrusive and unavoidable. Storms, floods, wildfires, environmental devastations sent news headlines leaping out in sharp relief – “a river in the sky,” “atmospheric rivers,” “parade of storms,” “heat dome” – and in such poetic terminology. Weather, both physical and emotional, forms the backdrop to this new collection.
Other themes that appear in the author’s previous work – relationships, the body, aging/illness/mortality, place, mood disorders, the shadows of the past – are explored here too.
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Permission to Settle
$20.00Permission to Settle fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration – the anxiety, and the bureaucracy of application, identity, foreignness, and inadequacy – all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler.
The poems investigate the implicit biases in the forms and the gaps between the messy reality of life lived and the structured and colonial system of boxes and check marks that still seek to categorize “the other” and to harness it in the face of reconciliation. The reader is drawn in through the guise of the familiar, while the playfulness and self-revealing tone of the work reveals a poignancy of meaning and language.
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Phial of Passing Memories, A
$20.95James Yékú’s second collection lingers on a poetics of elsewhere, as seen through poems that evoke various memories. In A Phial of Passing Memories, the poems offer shifting sceneries that record the everyday and chronicle vagrant seasons. This collection presents the vivid imagination of a keen mind documenting the passing rhythms of the abiding and the mundane, unfurling in a dance of elegance and lyrical beauty. The poems meander but remain anchored in particular geographies, from where they engage the varied cadences of the human condition. They blend the strange and the familiar into a meditation on the power of unforgetting, the enjambments and stoppages of journeys, and the nature of things themselves.
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Post Mortem of the Event
$21.95“Recording the event say, I am the event.”
The event represents the lyrical, but an attempt at defining the event endlessly defers meaning—poetry readings, death, belonging, the digital and— Post-Mortem of the Event is a cyclical archive that twists back to recorded readings of Klara du Plessis’s earlier Hell Light Flesh and leans forward to invoke a still unwritten manuscript. Here poetic composition encompasses audiovisual media, transcription, wave form visualization, and digital humanities and interdisciplinary methods. With the maturity of three previous collections, Du Plessis presents a brilliant expansion of her musical yet essayistic poetics.
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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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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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Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies
$24.95Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies is a double-stranded book of intense lyric reflections on the fundamental essences of things.
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Songs From the Asylum
$19.95For over twenty years, Nehiyawak-Metis artist and author John Brady McDonald’s day job has been working with youth. Over half of that time was spent as a Frontline Youth Outreach Worker on the streets of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. During that time, John would write down his thoughts and feelings on scraps of paper and in little black hardcover notebooks, chronicling the struggles and traumas of the youth he worked with and which he himself had also experienced. Never being quite the right fit for his other poetry books, John took these poems and hid them away for years, until now. Recently rediscovered in his archives, John has compiled them, using a 54-year-old typewriter, into a work which gives voice to the experiences and resilience of those youth, along with his own experiences, thoughts and recollections of a poet in the midst of a turbulent moment in time amongst the concrete and asphalt of the city.
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Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells
$19.95In their second poetry collection, Tawahum Bige explores belonging and voice of a Two-Spirit Dene youth.
These poems are a stark plunge—an answer to how voice emerges for a young Two Spirit growing up in so-called “Surrey, BC,” far from his Łutselk’e Dene territories. The fundamental thrum in which vocal cords produce sound to whisper, cry, holler and laugh—these inner workings are made corporeal through moments of growth from childhood to young adulthood to show how the seeds sprouted for someone who needed to learn to express to find their path.