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Poetry Litspace Lists
Browse the books in the All Lit Up Poetry Litspace by category.
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Awards Winners
Award-winning and otherwise notable poetry collections.BIPOC Poets
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Showing 41–60 of 196 results
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Cries from the Ark
$20.00A pitch-perfect debut and a call to act in the service of Earth through radiant attention.
Humankind, at present, has breached floodgates that have only been breached before in ancient stories of angry gods, or so far back on geologic and biological timelines as to seem more past than past. Against this catastrophic backdrop (at the end of consolations, at the high-water mark), and equipped with a periscopic eye and a sublime metaphorical reach, poet Dan MacIsaac has crowded his debut vessel with sloths and gipsy-birds, mummified remains and bumbling explorers, German expressionists and Neolithic cave-painters.
MacIsaac knows that in order to render a thing in language, description itself must be open to metamorphosis and transformation; each thing must be seen alongside, overtop of, and underneath everything else that has been seen. With the predominant “I” of so many poetic debuts almost entirely absent, Cries from the Ark is catalogue and cartography of our common mortal–and moral–lot.
“These poems are fecund as black dirt, as carnal and joyous. Each piece is an owl pellet, a concentrate of bone and tuft, of bison, auk and Beothuk. Not since Eric Ormsby’s Araby have I read a book so empathic and so glossarily rich. Fair warning, MacIsaac: I’ll be stealing words from you for years.” –Sharon McCartney
“MacIsaac sings a raven’s work, sings the guts from our myths, sings our world with the breath that ‘for a century/ of centuries / only the wild grass / remembered.’ Present but acquainted with antiquity, MacIsaac’s instrument is our own breathing as we say these poems of reverence to ourselves.” –Matt Rader
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Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road
$20.00A culvert anchors a key scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The 39 Steps and a scene in Two for the Road starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Culverts appear in books by Tony Burgess, Dennis Cooley, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, and Virginia Woolf. Culverts called to Brenda Schmidt’s imagination as well. As a child she played in and around their steel dark openings and took risks. In the daring poetry and prose of Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road the risk-taking continues. In her journeys, she asked people from all walks of life — construction workers, farmers, biologists, writers, musicians — about their culvert stories. Their recollections of experiences with or near culverts, both dark and light, gave voice to her own experiences, providing another sense of the connections we share and the way stories emerge and flow. Schmidt does this by using the stories as a jumping off point when they call up her own memories. She expands on interview quotes, stretching and bending them to create new stories and poems.
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Dark Set, The
$18.00A tenderman is a crew member of a fishing vessel, a fisherman, someone who hauls live fish to the shore every day. In The Dark Set, the Tenderman is a character from another time, a worker in a lost resource culture, who is both a breathing artifact of a rough-edged, wilder past and a representative of uncomfortable human traits that rise out of ignorance and a failure of empathy. A fiercely independent everyman, the Tenderman is Bowling’s way of wrestling with his own conflicted feelings about masculinity, history, citizenship and power. The division between the poet and the tenderman is wide, but he is a kind of shadow brother, a solitary visitor from a world North America repeatedly tries, and fails, to leave behind.
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Davie Street Translations
$16.95To the street that is a village, Daniel Zomparelli conveys a liveliness and wit that rhetorically towel-flicks its way from the sardonic bathhouse banter of ancient Rome to the cinematic musical machismo of the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, with each poem “translating” another chapter in his documentary of gay male culture in Vancouver.
To the tune of mononymous deities Beyoncé, Madonna, Barbra and Gaga, this home-brewed Catullus flirts with the very concept of “translation,” not only representing the movement and conversion of event, time and idea to the written word, but also deploying a crafty methodology that in the style of Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer emphasizes an aesthetic sensibility and musicality that pervades the pretty wireless shell of personal relations. These are also letters to the anonymous, the proud, the panicky, the petrified and particularly the lonely, written everywhere—upon ripped bodies and diner napkins, upon bathroom stalls, and in Craigslist personals and Miss Lonelyhearts columns.
Ranging from the rhapsodic to the epigrammatic with his dangerously experimental narrative that snorts the alphabet, Daniel Zomparelli imbues the fast-paced drug and party culture of Davie Village’s young gay males with grand poignancy and pathos. Stitching serial poems into this imaginary patchwork in the fashion of Robert Duncan, with drag queens and porn fantasy figures in tow, Zomparelli brashly faces up to fears of HIV and gay bashing. On this poetic street that is a universe, we turn away from violence, “dance fight, or turn it into a musical / West Side-like.”
With poetic tributes to his Vancouver idols Billeh Nickerson, George Stanley and Michael V. Smith, Zomparelli demonstrates, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, that the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
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Deaf Heaven
$15.95As the title suggests, this new collection of poetry from Garry Gottfriedson of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation deals with the ways in which the world is deaf to the problems First Nations people face in Canada today. Gottfriedson examines such issues as the Truth and Reconciliation movements as well as the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. The poems focus not only on postcolonial issues but also on First Nations internal problems. Although the book speaks of age-old themes, it explores them through fresh modern eyes offering thought-provoking and engaging prespectives. Eloquent and witty, these poems are power-packed with imagery that uncovers the raw politics of race. There is nothing polite about them. While frequently offering a bleak view of present-day First Nation conditions, the poems also provide a sense of optimism: “the hope/that the coldest day in winter/will promise serenity in spring.”
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Decomp
$24.95In the summer of 2009, poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott traveled to five distinct ecosystems in British Columbia, leaving a single copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to decay for a year in each remote outdoor location. A year later the texts were retrieved, photographed and documented, and worked into Decomp, an extended photoÂessay and prose poem. The poets allowed nature to make ‘selections’ from Darwin’stext, via decomposition. Each distinct ecosystem offered a different ‘reading’ of (and through) the rotting book’s pages. As evolution works, in Timothy Morton’s words, ‘Âthrough constant rewritings of the DNA sequence,’ so the poets found themselves faced with a constantly rewritten Darwin. The final text is ‘made up of all kinds of viral code insertions so you can’t tell which bit is original.’
Through colourful photo reproductions and prose meditations on their found texts, Collis and Scott have produced a work that moves beyond the typical dualisms of nature and writing  dualisms still active in Darwin’s own book.
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Devil in the Woods
$20.00A collection of letter and prayer poems in which an Indigenous speaker engages with non-Indigenous famous Canadians.
D.A. Lockhart’s stunning and subversive fourth collection gives us the words, thoughts, and experiences of an Anishinaabe guy from Central Ontario and the manner in which he interacts with central aspects and icons of settler Canadian culture. Riffing off Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, the work utilizes contemporary Indigenous poetics to carve out space for often ignored voices in dominant Canadian discourse (and in particular for a response to this dominance through the cultural background of an Indigenous person living on land that has been fundamentally changed by settler culture).
The letter poems comprise a large portion of this collection and are each addressed to specific key public figures–from Sarah Polley to Pierre Berton, k.d. lang to Robertson Davies, Don Cherry to Emily Carr. The second portion of the pieces are prayer poems, which tenderly illustrate hybrid notions of faith that have developed in contemporary Indigenous societies in response to modern and historical realities of life in Canada. Together, these poems act as a lyric whole to push back against the dominant view of Canadian political and pop-culture history and offer a view of a decolonized nation.
Because free double-doubles…
tease us like bureaucratic promises
of medical coverage and housing
not given to black mold and torn-
off siding. Oh Lord, let us sing anew,
in this pre-dawn light, a chorus
that shall not repeat Please Play Again. (from “Roll Up the Rim Prayer”) -
Disintegrate/Dissociate
$16.95Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers (Writers’ Trust of Canada) and the Indigenous Voices Award; finalist, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity. Weaving together a past made murky by uncertainty and a present which exists in multitudes, Arielle Twist poetically navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness.
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Divided
$18.00Looking deeply into humanity’s interactions with the animal world, Linda Frank considers our fascination with and fear of nature, as well as our exploitation of all species. These poems catalogue not only the beautiful and sometimes deadly complexity of our natural world, but investigate the ways we have sought to understand it, highlighting the struggle of women scientists to push past misogyny. In these poems Nabokov’s butterflies live on beside flea circuses and von Frisch’s bees are as detailed as the habits of the jewel wasp. This is a collection written with a botanist’s eye and a scientist’s attention to cause and effect, both a lament and paean to a world that is vanishing.
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Dividing the Wayside
$18.95Winner: 2019 Archibald Lampman Award. Finalist: 2019 Gerald Lampert Award
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Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes
$20.95Translated from French by Howard Scott
Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes is a poetry collection of great sensitivity. Above all it is a cry from the heart, as if empathy and poetry were dazzled by the eruption of a volcano. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine reveals herself as a poet and Innu woman. She loves. She weeps. She shouts… to come into the world, again. The book is first of all a journey deep inside the self, with joy and love, taking the body on a path to expectation and ecstasy, a quest sustained by incisive, inventive writing, which can leap from impressions of nature to references to a Dali painting. The energy of the images and the power of this luminous, concise language amaze us.
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Dream of Me as Water
$19.95Moving beyond the themes of race, identity, and personhood navigated in Mythical Man, David Lys second book of poetry, Dream of Me as Water, explores ways of being that are not beholden to the expectations of others. Using water as his central metaphor, Ly meditates on how identity is never a stagnant concept, but instead something that is intangible, fluid, and ever-evolving. Dream of Me as Water revels in the nuances of the self, flouting outside perceptions for deeper, more personal realities. .
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East and West
$17.95<East and West, Laura Ritland‘s astonishing debut, is a book of visions. These are roving poems drawn to defamiliarizing points of view, and are exquisitely attentive to the way the world exceeds our senses (“Cloud deduced cloud / after cloud and cloud.”) Beckoningly tender, lucid and intelligent, elegaic without being maudlin, East and West explores the thresholds–or “middle ground”–of childhood and family, diaspora and migration, and how new cultural ideas can disrupt traditional perspectives. “My bedroom window an escape hatch / to endless sights of coastal stars.” Ritland takes the measure of herself”I’m an integer of my own society”–in one of the most distinctive and beautifully turned styles in Canadian poetry.
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Eating Matters
$18.00Kara-lee MacDonald is a survivor. The poems in Eating Matters are sophisticated explorations of anorexia and bulimia, from within and in retrospect, as the semiautobiographical narrator faces and overcomes her complex drives and compulsions. Through a variety of poetic forms, she explores the deep structures of body images and societal pressures that create and promulgate eating disorders and the culture of shame surrounding them. The poems will strike a chord in those who have experience with the illnesses and subtly educate those who have not. Throughout MacDonald maintains an edgy authenticity that will both horrify and inspire. From Princess Diana to the problem with baking and the tyranny of mirrors, Eating Matters brings new life to a topic often discussed but seldom understood. Part trauma travelogue, part self-analysis, part cultural critique, part healing journey, MacDonald addresses the hidden world of the binge/purge purgatory. You will share in her struggle and triumph.
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Ekke
$18.95Winner: 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Finalist: 2019 Gerald Lampert Award
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Elemental
$18.00Usually, we take for granted or plain ignore the Earth we walk on, the Sky above, the Water we drink and bathe in or that falls as rain, the Fire we assume for heat, and the Wood that makes up our landscape and building materials. But over fifteen years as a construction carpenter, Kate Braid began to pay more attention to the materials she worked with and depended upon. Out of these she has crafted an intimate picture of what it is like to be wholly engaged with the elemental materials of earth, sky, water, fire and wood that we depend upon every day.
Elemental is a poignant, intelligent collection that asks us to look more closely at ourselves and the details that construct our rich and delicate world.
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Endangered Hydrocarbons
$18.00Fracking – tar-sand runoff – dirty oil extraction. This is the language of our oil-addicted 21st century society: incredibly invasive, blatant in its purpose, and richly embedded in mythological and archetypal symbolism. The ultimate goal of the industry: To core the underworld.
Endangered Hydrocarbons, Lesley Battler’s first full-length collection of poetry, shows that the language of hydrocarbon extraction, with its blend of sexual imagery, archetype, science, pseudoscience and the purely speculative, can be as addictive as the resource it pursues.
Using pastiche and wordplay, Battler shines a floodlight on the absurdity and pervasiveness of production language in all areas of human life in the oil fields, including art, culture and politics. Incorporating texts generated by a multinational oil company, and spliced with a variety of found material (video games, home decor magazines, works by Henry James and Carl Jung), Battler deliberately tampers with her found material, treating it as crude oil–excavating, mixing, and drilling these texts to emulate extraction processes used by the industry.With traces of Dennis Lee’s Testament, Larissa Lai’s Automaton Biographies, and Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers, this lively and refreshing take on a polarizing topic will resonate with readers of contemporary poetry who connect with environmental issues and capitalist critique.
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even this page is white
$16.95Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature winner
Lambda Literary Award finalist
Longlisted for Canada Reads
As a writer, musician, performance artist, and filmmaker, Vivek Shraya has, over the course of the last few years, established herself as a tour de force artist of the highest order. Vivek’s body
of work includes ten albums, four short films, and three books, including the YA book God Loves Hair (A Quill and Quire and Canadian Children’s Book Centre Best Book of the Year) and the adult novel She of the Mountains (a Lambda Literary Award finalist).Vivek’s debut collection of poetry, even this page is white, is a bold, timely, and personal interrogation of skin–its origins, functions, and limitations. Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of
what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible, and undeniable. -
False Spring
$20.00Poems about commitment and catastrophe,
from a voice of intense lyrical skepticism and wonderful tonal mobility.False Spring, Darren Bifford’s second collection of poetry, is a book largely concerned with various forms of collapse and cultural disintegration. These are poems of considerable weight and great energy at once, so that the impression is of a large-muscled animal that is also nimble. They are the work of an engaged moral imagination, alive with the conceptual issues of the times embedded in experience; their “philosophical” import speaks out of the poetic act itself.
Bifford seems always in active conversation, dialogue, dispute with figures from literary and classical traditions. There is also a set of “translations” of a Polish poet of Bifford’s invention, which permit him to write, Pessoa-like, in another voice–even if it shares a few features (as a disillusioned Pole writing of general collapse) with his own.
While non-confessional in intent, the poems do attend to the inner pitch–like a white noise–which the events of the world sound. The book thus contends with a nostalgia for old forms without belying any sustained confidence in their veracity.
It’s like in a cartoon, all the forest fires
Leapfrogging fires. Small civilizations caught
In the dirty, say they’re sorry and plead their cases
Ad hoc and brilliantly. “Scared as shit”
Is my summary.
(from “Habitable Earth in the Last Analysis”) -
First
$22.95Governor General’s Award-winning poet Arleen Paré combines the story of two first best friends with questions of the mystery of cosmic first cause.
The poems in First, Arleen Paré’s seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings.
This layered evocation of the past–of childhood in 1950s Dorval, “a green mesh of girls friendships and fights”–and the intensity of the desire to know, give First its haunting beauty. “[T]he word though old fashioned,” Paré writes, “is whence . . . unconditioned origins” when “no worthy question is ever answered on the same plane that it was asked; how to frame the question not knowing the plane on which I must ask it.”
“Arleen Paré’s First is an intriguing Gertrude Stein as Nancy Drew mystery. Using prose poem narrative and an intense syntactic poetics, Paré discovers the cracks in memory as she documents the search for her first best friend. The cracks in this lyrical puzzle are heightened by a very active and assertive poetic language that compels as it decodes the investigation of childhood memory and desire. The writing in First demonstrates a powerful juxtaposition of the continuous present with the continuous past.” –Fred Wah
“This brilliant collection revolves around firsts, especially a first friend, ‘the impress of her never gone.’ So too with these poems–tough, sweet and poignant, so surely rendered and musically rich–the impress of these poems never gone.”–Lorna Crozier