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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 61–80 of 196 results
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Flyway
$18.00This Meditation on the impact of human and ecological trauma explores the cost of survival for three generations of women living between empires. Writing from within the disappearing tallgrass prairie, Sarah Ens follows connections between the Russian Mennonite diaspora and the disrupted migratory patterns of grassland birds. Drawing on family history, eco-poetics, and the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, Flyway migrates along pathways of geography and the heart to grapple with complexities of home.
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full-metal indigiqueer
$18.95This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods. They dazzlingly and fiercely take on the likes of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and John Milton while also not forgetting contemporary pop culture figures such as Lana Del Rey, Grindr, and Peter Pan. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time – they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world. “Do not read me as a vanished ndn,” they ask, “read me as a ghastly one.”
full-metal indigiqueer is influenced by the works of Jordan Abel, Tanya Tagaq, Daniel Heath Justice, Claudia Rankine, Vivek Shraya, Qwo-Li Driskill, Leanne Simpson, Kent Monkman, and Donna Haraway. It is a project of resurgence for Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer folk who have been ghosted in policy, page, tradition, and hi/story – the very lives of Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer youth are rarely mentioned (and even dispossessed in our very mandates for reconciliation), our lives are precarious but they too are precious. We find ourselves made spectral in settler and neocolonial Indigenous nationalisms – if reconciliation is a means of “burying the hatchet,” Zoa seeks to unearth the bones buried with those hatched scalps and perform a séance to ghost dance Indigiqueerness into existence. Zoa world-destroys in order to world-build a new space – they care little for reconciliation but rather aim to reterroritorialize space in literature, pop culture, and oral storytelling. This project follows in the tradition of the aforementioned authors who, Whitehead believes, utilize deconstruction as a means of decolonization. This is a sex-positive project that tirelessly works to create coalition between those who have, as Haraway once noted, “been injured, profoundly.” Zoa stands in solidarity with all qpoc folk who exist as ghosts with intergenerational and colonial phantom pains – they sing with Donna Summer, RuPaul, Effie White, and Trixie Mattel. The space made is a post-apocalyptic hub of sex and decolonization – a world where making love is akin to making live.
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fur(l) parachute
$18.00fur(l) parachute claims as its surrogate the Old English poem “Wulf and Eadwacer.” Declining from a mutant echo of this 19 line fragment that appears in the 10thC Exeter Manuscript as a text that might be a riddle, or an example of a woman’s lament, or even a broken elegy, the language of fur(l) parachute is further disrupted by such texts as instructions on how to make a parachute lure for fly fishing or the misreading of mathematical knot diagrams. Wryly troubling origins, this poem multiplies its outlawed longings for all that cannot cross.
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Garden
$20.00A rock-littered backyard in east-end Ottawa slowly becomes a garden in Monty Reid’s looping cycle and re-cycle of anti-paradisial poems. With his companion species, the shovel, Reid digs and un-digs, turning up the playful, the prickly, and the dangerous. Garden is yet another example of Reid’s original vision and restlessly independent voice.
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Gatecrasher
$17.95Poems that revisit and revise concepts of self and land.
The poems in Gatecrasher reimagine social and familial relationships, personal and collective failures, and false nostalgias. Part surreal autobiography, and part observation of how physical and conceptual human-made structures are collapsing, this wildfire debut dreamwalks through the liminal space between expectation and disappointment, and the poet’s relationship to the BC landscape.
“We are in the presence of a formidably original poetic talent… This is an impressively mature first book.”—The Ormsby Review
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Girlwood
$20.00A linguistically inventive exaltation, a wild ride down into the privacies, the here-and-goneness of girlhood.
In Girlwood, Jennifer Still’s second collection, her poems come of age: they take the dare; they cross out of sapling and into maturity’s thicket. But the poems don’t leave the girl behind, they bring her along: as sylph, as raconteur, as witness, as pure, unstoppable bravado. These songs of liberation and confinement arise from the rich and mysterious connection between mother and daughter. Here, the mother figure is as vulnerable as the daughter, caged by domestic duty, by the fear that snakes through sexuality, the longing and the repulsion that accompany mortal desire. The daughter is at once compassionate and defiant. This is the paradox at the heart of this collection. “Mother, divine me,” Jennifer Still writes, and later, “Mother, spare me.” Between these two phrases, which are both plea and command, we experience all the tangled pathways between mother and daughter, the cries of devotion and the congested laments.
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Glass Float
$20.00Griffin Award-winner returns with new poems that are spacious with interiority, alive with a hard-earned lightness.
Waves carried a glass float–designed to hold up a fishing net–across the Pacific. Beached it safely. Someone’s breath is inside it.
In Glass Float, her seventh collection, award-winning poet Jane Munro considers the widening of horizons that border and shape our lives, the familiarity and mystery of conscious experience, and the deepening awareness that comes with a dedicated practice such as yoga. This book is about connections: mind and body; self and others; physical and metaphysical; art and nature; west and east, north and south.
In “Convexities,” the book’s opening poem, Munro quotes the grandfather who taught her to paint: “art is suggestion; art is not representation.” No concavities, he said. Only the “little hummocks” that her pencil outlined as she did contour drawings. Munro’s deft suggestion, her tracing of convexities, conveys underlying complexities, not by explication, but by looking with eyes and heart open to where mysteries almost surface.
US
bubbles
says the baby, looking
out the window at snowflakesthe old man tears up
two
characteristics
of the human animal–
to speak, to weepboth
move me
are you moved
by words–by tears“Like glass floats themselves, these neat, clear poems contain Munro’s breath. They cross oceans. Jane Munro’s Glass Float–part travelogue, part journal, part meditation–picks up where Blue Sonoma ends: the speaker finds herself alone, at the live edge of her life. … You are not merely called on to look at yourself but to ‘receive your face.’ A gift.” –Ian Williams, author of Reproduction
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Good Arabs, The
$17.95Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker’s communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.
The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.
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Grey All Over
$22.95“Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment…”
Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness. An assemblage of “evidence” recovered from emails about paranormal encounters sent and received by Jeff (greyallover@yahoo.com), junk mail from false prophets, an annotated excerpt from Laura (Riding) Jackson’s The Serious Angels: A True Story, and transcripts of Actis’ dreams, conversations, and messages to the dead, Grey All Over not only celebrates a rare, close, complicated father-daughter bond, it also boldly expands the empathetic and critical capacities of poetry itself. In pulling us outside the comfort zones of received aesthetics and social norms, Actis asks us to embrace with whole seriousness “the pragmatics of intuition” in all the ways we read, live, and love.
“When a loved one dies, there’s all this stuff to deal with, and in the midst of grief we begin to collect, sort, document, store, and discard. Andrea Actis has taken the stuff surrounding her father’s death and created a book that is, like grief, in turns heartbreaking, wise, chaotic, drunk, wry, and always unflinchingly honest. This powerful testament of survival is for anyone who has felt the ‘déjà vu in reverse’ of grief. It is for the living.” –Sachiko Murakami, author of Render
“Love letter, experimental poem, meditation, conversation with the dead–Andrea Actis’s compelling debut is unlike any memoir I’ve ever read. In one passage, Actis digs out the biggest piece of bone she can find in the vessel of her father’s ashes and gently bites on it. Reading Grey All Over I had a similar sensation. Ash. Bone. Love.” –Jen Currin, author of Hider/Seeker
“This absolutely beautiful work makes plain that seriousness feels like love.” –Aisha Sasha John, author of I have to live.
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Hard Light
$20.00New light on Michael Crummey’s classic depiction of Newfoundland and Labrador’s past.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fifth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Hard Light features a new Introduction by Lisa Moore, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
In Hard Light, first published in 1998, Crummey retells and reimagines his father’s and others’ stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery. These deeply felt poems are rooted in the places where “human desire comes up against rock” (John Steffler).
I have a fair trial on the fishing line now,
being three summers out from home, two summers on
the French Shore, four down on the Labrador,
and three trips this year to the Banks of Newfoundland,
and this is what I have learned to be the price of fish
–“‘The price of fish.’ (September, 1887)”“In these stories and poems, an intimate, bright world flares up, glowing in the darkness of recent history, full-blown and vivid.” –Lisa Moore, from the Introduction
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Hear and Foretell
$15.95“Hear and Foretell” is a compelling poetry collection with spotlight on urban Aboriginal life in Canada. The poems illustrate deep spiritual transformation and understanding of the ever-present feeling of being hunted by not so distant historical past. This collection of poems emphasizes cultural struggles, articulates everyday rituals through decisive narrative, and appeals to human compassion. “Hear and Foretell” is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of Canadian Aboriginal literature that will not soon fade away. It is an exceptional reading experience to be enjoyed and savoured.
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Homesickness is a Forgotten Art
$17.95“Homesickness Is a Forgotten Art” is a compelling poetry collection that resonates with the echoes of a subtle presence. Open and attuned to what is, the poems portray complex reflections of deep human emotions and contradictions. Joël Pourbaix is curious about the world and he explores the enigma of the everyday: “I walk the line between the visible and the invisible; what more could you ask for?” The French-language edition of this book won the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry in the French language.
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Hooked: seven poems
$19.00 -
how the gods pour tea
$19.95This new collection by Lynn Davies, her first in eight years, abounds in departures: words and communities die, trout-lilies and passengers vanish, even the King and Queen of Fairies disappear.
In poem after poem, Davies’s powerful imagination blends observation and fancy, passion and playfulness, producing strikingly fresh metaphors. Squirrels paddle away on twig-rafts; giant horses take to the sky. Some poems give simple weight to the details of everyday life; others evoke an imaginative world inhabited by giant beavers, elf-thugs, and the great caw-dragon.
Throughout this magnificently fresh collection, the ocean, the rain, and the river suggest something big on the move in our lives even when we feel stranded. Displaying a dexterity of tone and an understated bravura, she writes of the extremities of losing and then awakening, honouring gratitude with “as many words as new leaves.”
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How to Draw a Rhinoceros
$18.00How to Draw a Rhinoceros, the first book of poems by Canadian writer, scholar, and lawyer Kate Sutherland, mines centuries of rhinoceros representations in art and literature to document the history of European and North American encounters with the animal–from the elephant-rhinoceros battles staged by monarchs in the Middle Ages; the rhinomania that took hold in response to the European travels of Clara the ‘Dutch’ Rhinoceros in the mid-1700s; the menageries and circuses of the Victorian era; the exploits of celebrated twentieth-century hunters like Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway; and the trade in rhinoceros horn artefacts that thrives online today. Along the way, it explores themes of colonialism, animal welfare, and conservation, combining Robert Kroetschian documentary poetics with the meticulous research and environmental passion of Elizabeth Kolbert, to successfully examine the centuries-long path of the rhinoceros that’s brought it to the brink of global extinction.
Readers of contemporary poetry, as well as those interested in natural history, animal welfare, and conservation, and people who have followed Sutherland’s scholarly and literary careers, will relish the rich detail and odd tales of historical rhinoceroses and the people who have kept, shown, and traded in them, as depicted using a range of poetic techniques that only a critical eye like Sutherland’s could deliver.
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Hymnswitch
$19.95Shortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Standing in the granite of his own voice.
Remembering your gathering body.Hello, My Forever Ago, don’t worry,
you won’t be reading this much longer.You will have already returned
in a snowcloud, which is suggestively,fashionably, only ever one second old.
Yes, Darling, it’s me, it saysas proof that in space
though there are many silences,fleeting isn’t the opposite
of infinite, but its perfect match.Four years ago, Ali Blythe arrived with Twoism, a remarkable debut collection, every line shimmering with life and shivering with erotically charged glimpses of completeness. Now in Hymnswitch, Blythe takes up the themes of identity and the body once again, this time casting an eye backwards and forwards, visiting places of recovery and wrestling with the transition into one’s own skin. Readers will find themselves holding their breath at the risk and beauty and difficulty of the balance Blythe strikes in the midst of ineffable complexity.
Combining a stark, tensile precision with musicality that lulls and surprises, Blythe, a surreal engineer of language, has once again created an unusually memorable collection. Imbued with emotional awareness, these stunning poems will imprint readers with startling images and silences as potent as words.
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I Am a Body of Land
$18.00Finalist for the 2019 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry
Edited, with an introduction by multiple award-winning writer, elder, and activist Lee Maracle.
If poetry is a place to question, I Am a Body of Land by Shannon Webb-Campbell is an attempt to explore a relationship to poetic responsibility and accountability, and frame poetry as a form of re-visioning.
Here Webb-Campbell revisits the text of her earlier work Who Took My Sister? to examine her self, her place and her own poetic strategies. These poems are efforts to decolonize, unlearn, and undo harm.
Reconsidering individual poems and letters, Webb-Campbell’s confessional writing circles back, and challenges what it means to ask questions of her own settler-Indigenous identity, belonging, and attempts to cry out for community, and call in with love.
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I Am the Big Heart
$20.00A love story to the emotional self–this heart is tender, but it also has a savage bite.
What does it mean to be the big heart? Or to hope to be the big heart? Or to fail to be that big heart? How far can a heart stretch? How does being a parent stretch it further? How does a heart manage under the pressure of children, of self, of hospital technician, of partner, of death? In this collection, big heartedness is both demand and desire. It emerges from family life–the kid who says to your face that she prefers her other parent; the father monkeying around in the art gallery; the mother who “gets on with it” in silence; the husband, distant and intimate under the marriage yoke. There is also in this collection the stirring of wilder desires than family is supposed to nurture, feelings more fiercely self-assertive than a parent–a mother particularly–is supposed to admit. This collection asks how to rise to the occasions that family presents and also how to let oneself spill over the bounds of familial roles.
Venart’s poems reach into the past but don’t get lost there; they look the present in the face–they have to: the clock is ticking, the children calling, there are hot dogs to be sliced and the dog won’t walk itself. The title is ironic. And also kind of secretly stoically hoping that it’s not ironic. But it is:
…And now everyone is arrow
arrow, arrows. Everyone harpoons.
And I am the big heart, aren’t I?
When my black dog was being put down, in her last
second I whispered, Squirrel.
(from “Epiphany”) -
î-nitotamahk kîsik (Cree Edition)
$16.95î-nitotamahk kîsik is a poetry collection in Cree that describes deep personal experiences and post-generational effects of the Canadian Aboriginal residential school confinements in the 1960’s when thousands of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in these schools against their parents’ wishes. Many were forbidden to speak their language and practice their own culture. Rosanna Deerchild exposes how the residential schools systematically undermined Aboriginal culture across Canada and disrupted families for generations, severing the ties through which Aboriginal culture is taught and sustained, and contributing to a general loss of language and culture. The devastating effects of the residential schools are far-reaching and continue to have significant impact on Aboriginal communities.
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I’d Write the Sea Like a Parlour Game
$14.95***2019 E.J. Pratt Poetry Award WINNER******2018 J.M. Abraham Poetry Prize FINALIST***Richly imagined and evocative, I’d Write the Sea like a Parlour Game explores the diversity and resilience that inhabit life at the margins, from tuckamore trails to the streets of a coastal city, with intimacy and often wry humour. This debut collection heralds an imaginative new voice, steeped in curiosity, and takes a fresh look at ageless poetic terrains.