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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 49–64 of 68 results
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Supergiants
$20.00For millennia humanity has looked upward and traced stories in the night sky, projecting our human wants and desires outward.
In Supergiants, Kyle Flemmer turns his gaze in the other direction. What does our reach for the stars say about us? Working with the technical language of engineering and astrophysics, Flemmer reorients the reader within our galaxy. Families of asteroids expand to contain their physical attributes, the mythic stories of their names and the histories of real people. We see the course of lunar exploration through the fate of the flags planted on each mission. Nebulae, blue giants and black holes enfold us. Interspersed throughout are a series of found/collage poems that visually reconfigure the elements of space exploration and our understanding of it. Through it all, Flemmer shows how we turn to the stars to make sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.
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Taslīm
$21.95This volume of pithy, defiant poetry and prose explore the burden of taslīm–an oral transmission of heritage and ancestral knowledge–on Coptic Orthodox women. These poems highlight the ways in which Coptic women navigate the responsibilities of transmitting ancestral knowledge while reckoning with its costs: deferred joy and pleasure until the afterlife, an almost compulsory notion of motherhood, and a gendered comportment of sacrifice and submission, even in diaspora. Taslīm in the Christian minority of Egypt becomes an even more rigid bind in immigrant communities abroad. This book is ultimately a feminist manifesto for freedom, and the choice to live and desire out loud.
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Teeth
$19.95This is a book about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines.
Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. Dallas Hunt grapples with the material realities and imaginaries Indigenous communities face, as well as the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still this collection seeks joy in the everyday, in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples in the elsewhere, in worlds to come.
Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.”
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Terrarium
$19.95Shortlisted, Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Raw, confessional, and often messy, Terrarium continues Matthew Walsh’s exploration of Queer identity and desire against the lonely highs and lows of depression and addiction.
In this new collection, Walsh begins where their debut collection, These are not the potatoes of my youth, left off. Writing in their trademark conversational style, Walsh wanders from Toronto parkettes “with remnants of magnolia leaves” to California, “a long/black cocktail dress the night lights/amethyst and citrine against the arm/muscle of the sea,” their voice intimate and exposed, a whisper between friends or lovers.
And then, when they ruminate on influences and themes as diverse as the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Gwendolyn MacEwen, the vagaries of Instagram, and the reimagination of Miss Havisham in a Toronto bathhouse, they offer readers the opportunity to think deeply or laugh loudly, reaching out to close the gap between us.
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The Anstruther Reader
$24.95Compiled to celebrate ten years worth of limited edition chapbooks and broadsides, The Anstruther Reader tracks the evolution of Anstruther Press, one of Canada’s most prominent micropresses. Featuring notable authors such as Klara du Plessis, Tolu Oloruntoba, David Ly, Rebecca Salazar, David Barrick, Fawn Parker, and T. Liem, The Anstruther Reader makes a case for the press’s reputation as a launching pad for emerging and established poets alike, and spotlights its mandate to publish poetry that both pushes against and expands the boundaries of Canadian literature.
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The Long Burnout
$19.95The Long Burnout is the poetic chronicle of a doctor’s burnout, beginning with and continuing past the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, burnout is a primary concern facing the medical profession today, and probably all of society. The anxiety created by the virus and its endless variants was amplified by difficulties in caring for people, preexisting pressures, and ever-worsening resource scarcities. And, when things seemed darkest, the author suffered the loss of his father, which added grieving to the ordeal. However, a slow process of recovery began thereafter, thanks to a supportive family, exercise and healthy habits, the catharsis of writing, and the tincture of time. These poems express a year of suffering and healing playing out among existential contexts, our place in a world which we are degrading, and a universe we still can’t understand. If only we could reverse our own civilization’s long burnout to achieve a respectful state of equilibrium with our surroundings: homeostasis, biologically, or the Buddhist idea of Oneness with the world.
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The Mountains of Kong
$22.95Splendid and surprising prose poems from one of Norway’s most imaginative poets
The sixty-one prose poems collected in The Mountains of Kong find magic in the little absurdities of everyday life and are populated by an unpredictable cast that includes kings and codfish and elephants, a couple looking for a surrogate for their tears, and a lemming on the run.
Presented here in both English translations and their original Nynorsk, and with an introduction by acclaimed poet Stuart Ross, Straumsvåg’s poems are a new kind of map that will deliver you to places you’ve never imagined.
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The Reign
$22.00In this utterly unique modern fairy tale, Shane Neilson steps clairvoyantly into Enniskillen, an expropriated New Brunswick community abandoned just before it became part of a military base. Intellectually disabled and left behind, the story’s protagonist, Willard, fades into the land and into love with Casey — a tyrannical industrialist who is also a magnificent whitetail buck.
The Reign is the swirling, ever-shifting story of a land that endures industrialism and a love that refuses subordination. From lyrics to prose, images to echolalia, this unforgettable myth drifts effortlessly through a wide range of forms and registers to deliver a breathtaking, unparalleled tale.
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The Siren in the Twelfth House
$21.95“Truthfully I can only tell you what’s missing” writes the heartbroken protagonist at the beginning of Victoria Mbabazi’s The Siren in the Twelfth House. But this isn’t a book that succumbs to grief. Mbabazi’s poems are siren songs, reclaiming love from pain, and rediscovering joy through the destruction and eventual rebuilding of astrological houses. Prepare to slow dance through this profound and powerful debut.
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Total Party Kill
$22.95A raw, beautifully-composed collection exploring addiction, trauma, poverty, and the journey toward recovery and spirituality through the vernacular and iconography of the popular roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.
Total Party Kill (TPK): tabletop roleplaying slang for the situation of all characters dying in the same in-game encounter.
At turns nightmarish, hilarious, brutally honest, and heart-breaking, TPK maps an unforgettable course into the fantastic dark of back-alley dive-bars, demonic underworlds, various rock bottom floors, and a whole host of monsters, both imagined and frighteningly real.
TPK is a strange and deadly beast combining the imagery of Dungeons & Dragons with a real, life-or-death struggle for sobriety. Entirely unique in perspective and voice, the autobiographical speaker within changes fluidly between the poet, a variety of D&D characters, and combinations of both. The text within comprises a genre-bending quest where nothing—especially continued sobriety—is for certain. Operating less like traditional poetry and more like brief monologues or confessions—but still concentrating on metaphor, meter, and sound—TPK will appeal not only to lovers of the world’s bestselling roleplaying game, nor just to lovers of poetry, but for anyone whose life has been touched by addiction.
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Toxemia
$22.95In this alchemy of anger and love, history and memoir, Christine McNair delves into various forms of toxicity in the body—from the effects of two life-threatening preeclampsia diagnoses to chronic illness, sexism in medicine, and the toll of societal expectations.
With catharsis and humour, Toxemia pieces together the complexities of identity, motherhood, and living in a body to reveal deeply recognizable raw truths. McNair captures the wrenching feeling of loss of control in the face of an overwhelming medical diagnosis and the small, endless moments in life that underscore it: worrying about mortality in the middle of the night, revolving medical appointments, self-doubt, and all the ways in which illness interrupts.
Toxemia unravels the toxicities that haunt the human body from within and without. Combining lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs, and more, this hybrid work dips between the sacred and profane, exposing—and holding—some of our greatest fears.
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Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead
$22.00In Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead, Erina Harris works with fairy tales, children’s literature, mythology and feminist literary history to ask important questions of gender, of queerness, of misogyny and of the role of art in social change. These are brilliant, innovative poems, where Harris displays an exceptional mastery of both traditional and experimental forms to examine versions of our endangered future. Vibrant, disruptive and always questioning, Harris invites us all to upend tradition and engage deeply with the modern world.
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UNMET
$21.95This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.
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Unwashed
$20.95Unwashed is a deeply personal collection of poetry, centering on themes of growing up, loss of innocence, love, the immigrant experience, and alienation. The title of the collection is a reference to the urgency of the work. These are not romantic or quiet poems; they are loud and in-your-face. They speak directly to the collective anxieties of urban life and reflect the author’s experience as an immigrant in Canada and a family man in the diverse setting of Toronto. What we are given here is a tapestry of intense, image-rich poetry.
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Walking and Stealing
$22.95In this triptych of serial poems steeped in baseball and Toronto, Stephen Cain considers urban affairs and culture through playful, revelatory devices.
“Walking & Stealing” was composed between innings of his son’s little league baseball games. The sport becomes a site for explorations of duration, association, and subjectivity. The ninety-nine poems of “Intentional Walks” follow mapped routes throughout the city to study the relationship between thinking and walking. The nine cantos in “Tag & Run” are constructed using baseball’s magic number nine, creating a literary puzzle in which the author “tags” a series of moments in time.
Together, these works skewer traditional, masculinist, and often-solipsistic perspectives on where we live and inhabit, instead offering a new way to consider the relationship between culture and space. Walking and Stealing is where memes meet psychogeography in a collection from a brilliant poet at the top of their game.
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Walking Upstream
$19.95A debut poetry collection, both lyrical and surprisingly playful, about overcoming a harsh evangelical upbringing and seeking consolation from the beauty of the natural world.
This collection by the author of three books of nonfiction takes readers into one man’s struggle to escape the corrosive effects of a punishing religion. We meet the small, frightened boy afraid of hell-fire and eternal guilt, and decades later, the man kicking free of the habit of self-excoriation.
There is humour in the observation of the antics of birds, especially magpies and other corvids, and profound humility in the struggle to resist a confining culture.
Magpie, I love you morefor your flight and strut
than for your
squawk,
but can’t vilify a creature
ten times tougher than I am
and a hell of a lot more handsome.
We walk with the poet-as-flaneur through neighbourhoods and along the river in a small prairie city, observing the incongruities, absurdities, and startling images and sounds of city life. And as the mystic who believes in something far beyond himself, so the beetle he sees on a path is “a little Buddha,” and the wind and the flowing river are “irresistible forces,” while a pine teaches him “how you move / without going / anywhere.”