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Poetry Litspace Lists
Browse the books in the All Lit Up Poetry Litspace by category.
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Award-winning and otherwise notable poetry collections.BIPOC Poets
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Showing 81–100 of 196 results
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If You Discover a Fire
$20.00Precision-built poems that attempt CPR on their own irregular meter, on their own unreliable meaning.
Vancouver poet Shaun Robinson’s If You Discover a Fire is a debut collection of poems that make a virtue of their failure to communicate. They forage through the syntax and vocabulary of late-night voicemails, letters to the editor, songs invented in the shower, professional jargon, “Witness Wanted” signs, technical manuals, and text-message typos to assemble verbal collages that raise more questions than they answer. In settings ranging from Montreal’s Mile End to a commercial flight above the Midwest to a wildfire in the mountains of British Columbia, these are poems rooted in working-class Canadian experience, poems that flirt with both safety and danger, that drone on like drunken strangers in a bar. Gathering reference from weather reports, football announcers, aerial disappearances, and the movie Groundhog Day, these poems sound their forlorn yawp through the alleys of East Vancouver.
Out on the porch, between shots, he tells you
things you’ve always known, how the past
and the future are lovers spooning
in bed, and the present is how they don’t
quite fit together. (from “Carpe Dos and Carpe Don’ts (FT. Panda Bear)”)“Darkly comic, or just plain dark, these poems offers no assurances, but as the particulars accumulate – all-night gyms, boredom, plastic flowers, rec rooms where children in blindfolds swing wildly at air – they generate a vital, unpredictable force. Like the octopus that sets loose the lid of the jar it’s been placed in, If You Discover A Fire has the imagination to outsmart the world’s relentless conditions.” –Sheryda Warrener
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In the Silhouette of Your Silences
$15.95David Groulx’s latest book of poems is as smooth as a mirror, but as cutting and dazzling as shards of glass, reflecting back to us the collective voice of fractured lives. Weaving the ephemeral with the infinite, and the present with the past, he speaks with the strength and confidence of scarred experience, drawing the reader into a compelling narrative that confronts reality with black humour and raw beauty. Remarkable in its brilliance, and brilliant in its candour, In the Silhouette of Your Silences illuminates the delicate threads that bind us together, proving yet again that the distinctive voice of Aboriginal Canadians must and shall be heard.
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Indianland
$18.95Indianland is a rich and varied poetry collection. The poems are written from a female and Indigenous point of view and incorporate Anishinaabemowin throughout. Time is cyclical, moving from present day back to first contact and forward again. Themes of sexuality, birth, memory, and longing are explored, images of blood, plants (milkweed, yarrow, cattails), and petroglyphs reoccur, and touchstone issues in Indigenous politics are addressed = (Elijah Harper, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, forced sterilizations, Oka). Anishinaabemowin throughout. Time is cyclical, moving from present day back to first contact and forward again. Themes of sexuality, birth, memory, and longing are explored, images of blood, plants (milkweed, yarrow, cattails), and petroglyphs reoccur, and touchstone issues in Indigenous politics are addressed (Elijah Harper, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, forced sterilizations, Oka).
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Injun
$16.95Award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s third collection, Injun, is a long poem about racism and the representation of indigenous peoples. Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 – the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America – Injun then uses erasure, pastiche, and a focused poetics to create a visually striking response to the western genre.
After compiling the online text of 91 of these now public-domain novels into one gargantuan document, Abel used his word processor’s “Find” function to search for the word “injun.” The 509 results were used as a study in context: How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What was left over once that word was removed? Abel then cut up the sentences into clusters of three to five words and rearranged them into the long poem that is Injun. The book contains the poem as well as peripheral material that will help the reader to replicate, intuitively, some of the conceptual processes that went into composing the poem.
Though it has been phased out of use in our “post-racial” society, the word “injun” is peppered throughout pulp western novels. Injun retraces, defaces, and effaces the use of this word as a colonial and racial marker. While the subject matter of the source text is clearly problematic, the textual explorations in Injun help to destabilize the colonial image of the “Indian” in the source novels, the western genre as a whole, and the Western canon.
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Insomnia Bird
$20.00The poems in Kelly Shepherd’s Insomniac Bird are a cartography and a geography of Edmonton. The poems which shift between short, individual lyric pieces and found text emulate a black-billed magpie’s nest with the subject-matter and also physically, with the words and lines. The poems generate the theme of home (the bird’s nest, the city), and not feeling at home; sleeping, and the inability to sleep. The magpie (the insomnia bird) is the protagonist and the muse, the thread that connects everything to everything else in this work.
As such, Shepherd’s poems move across the surface at speed, like Edmonton’s NAIT train, and dive like magpies after the occasional tasty image or crumb of detail. The city as it spreads out across the Prairies, can do nothing to prevent urban sprawl, and grows taller with each new highrise building and office tower and sinks deeper into the ground, which is memory!
The city with purple fingers and black feathers
is bending branches outside the window.
In the photosensitivity of morning,
The city is an open window that can’t hear itself think.
While Shepherd’s poems are at times critical of Edmonton’s automobile culture and urban sprawl, his tone remains ironic rather than moralizing and he is consistent in his use of dark humour to avoid being didactic. With such guidance the poems effectively disclose what is not seen, what is repressed, what lies behind the scenes in the city he shares with magpies.
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Iskotew Iskwew: Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl
$17.95Iskotew Iskwew/Fire Woman is a poetry collection written during a period of trauma while the author was working as a Counsel to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2017. This book is about memories and experience growing up on the Pelican Narrows Reserve in northern Saskatchewan in the 1980s: summers spent on the land and the pain of residential school. With this collection, the author wants to teach and inform Canadians of her experiences growing up as an Indigenous woman in Saskatchewan. She believes it is important to share her stories for others to read.
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It Begins With The Body
$18.00It Begins With The Body by Hana Shafi explores the milestones and hurdles of a brown girl coming into her own. Shafi’s poems display a raw and frank intimacy and address anxiety, unemployment, heartbreak, relationships, identity, and faith.
Accompanied by Shafi’s candid illustrations that share the same delightful mixture of grotesque and humour found in her poems, It Begins With The Body navigates the highs and lows of youth. It is about feeling like an outsider, and reconciling with pain and awkwardness. It’s about arguing with your mum about wanting to wax off your unibrow to the first time you threw up in a bar in your twenties, and everything in between. Funny and raw, personal and honest, Shafi’s exciting debut is about finding the right words you wished you had found when you needed them the most.
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It’s a Big Deal!
$16.95So many things seem like a BIG DEAL: buying clothes, food trends for healthfulness and coolness, what’s trending online, your personal problems, what someone else has said, the political landscape, an Instagram post, avocado toast. This list could go on and on. What’s a big deal to someone might be nothing to another. It’s a Big Deal! questions the way modern society values, interprets, and roasts or embraces these ideas. How do these big deals affect us, and the way we interact with others? Is the way we measure “bigness” different than it used to be? Does it mutate as time goes on? From popular trends in health and wellness to the big deals of life like death and work, love and politics, and into the extinct megafauna that used to walk this earth, this book looks at the ways we interpret those things. This collection is wry, sensitive, bitchy, and honest. With a unique voice that holds humour and heart, the poems reflect the ever-changing big deals we encounter in the world.
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Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets
$20.95Step into the crater of East Africa and meet the grain of sand from Sindh. Taste the pearls from Indian Ismaili ginans and attend to the True Guru.
Aglow with postcolonial loss, wryly defiant of what they reveal, the poems in Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets describe a warm estrangement and salty gratitude for being on Earth. It’s not war-reporting and Ayaz doesn’t solve crimes. He doesn’t have his head in the lion’s mouth. He draws from Kabir’s Bijak, Ghalib, and the oral granth and ginan traditions to plot a lifelong and generational immigration.
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Kingdom, Phylum
$18.00Ecologically aware poems, hardwired to the intellect and the heart in equal measure.
Adam Dickinson’s poems, with firm intellectual bite and imaginative scope, reach fresh levels of poetic — and ecological — awareness. Sometimes reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, sometimes of Christopher Dewdney, and with the ghost of Foucault always in attendance, they ply a language that is cool and precise on the surface to open into the deep resonance of geologic time. Imaginative and contemplative, this writing is bound to refresh the vision of the most world-weary reader.
For some time, we expected
the end of the world
to be a mushroom.
A vengeful good, a good
of fire, clouded thought.
But every spring they come out of the ground
like universal suffrage,
a writ of habeas corpus,
speech before writing.
They say, dirt. They say, get up.from “The Good, part I”
The poems in Kingdom, Phylum push the boundaries of thought and language. Bringing lyrical and unsystematic modes of understanding into play, and keeping his ear tuned to the many disruptions involved in taxonomical arrangement, Dickinson shows how poetry both participates in, and unsettles, the provisional orders which develop between word and world.
” … a poet intensely, intricately, and metaphorically engaged with the world, the natural world in particular.” — League of Canadian Poets website
” … Dickinson’s poems are luminous, subtle, and exceptional.” — Books in Canada
Adam Dickinson is a professor of poetry and poetics at Brock University. His first book, Cartography and Walking (1-894078-22-5), was shortlisted for an Alberta Book Award. He lives in St. Catharines.
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Kiskajeyi- I AM READY
$19.99Kiskajeyi- I AM READY is a ground breaking Indigenous poetry book that also includes ancient Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) hieroglyphics. In 2020, Kiskajeyi- I AM READY won the Canadian Indigenous Voices Award (IVAs) for Published Poetry (English category). Indigenous artist and writer, Michelle Sylliboy blends her poetry, photography, and Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) hieroglyphic poetry in this unprecedented book.
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KITH
$20.00kith [noun] one’s friends, acquaintances, neighbours, or relations.
In Kith, award-winning writer Divya Victor engages Indian-American diasporic culture in the twentieth century, via an autobiographical account that explores what ‘kith’ might mean outside of the national boundaries of those people belonging to the Indian and South East Asian diasporas.
Through an engagement with the effects of globalization on identity formation, cultural and linguistic exchange, and demographic difference, Kith explores questions about race and ethnic difference: How do ‘brownness’ and ‘blackness’ emerge as traded commodities in the transactions of globalization? What are the symptoms of belonging? How and why does ‘kith’ diverge from ‘kin,’ and what are the affects and politics of this divergence? Historically-placed and well-researched, Kith is an unflinching and simultaneous account of both systemic and interpersonal forms of violence and wounding in the world today.
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Kitotam: He Speaks to it
$20.00The Neyhiyawak (Plains Cree) word “Kitotam” translates into English as, “He Speaks to It.” This is a collection of free-verse poetry by Indigenous poet and artist John McDonald. Written in two parts, these poems chronicle John’s life and experiences as an urban Indigenous youth during the 1980s. The second half of the book is a look into the inspirations and events, that shaped John’s career as an internationally known spoken word artist, beat poet, monologist and performance artist.
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Lake of Two Mountains
$20.00A hymn to a beloved lake, a praise poem in forty-five parts, a contemplation of landscape and memory
Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake’s northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.
flint-dark far-off
sky on the move across the lake
slant sheets closing insky collapsing from its bowl
shoreline waiting taut
stones dark as plums
~from “Distance Closing In” -
Landfall
$18.95In Landfall, Governor General’s Award-nominated poet Joe Denham revisits the plaguing environmental issues in the poetic journey he began ten years ago with his second collection, Windstorm. Writing in long elegy form, using a voice harnessed by concern, pathos, anger and empathy, Denham’s fourth collection is the result of age, time and love, drawing on the poet’s relationship to the world we think we know. Denham’s latest is a frustrated call to arms, told with the directness and compassion we’ve come to expect from him.”When we finally make landfall, when we torch the landfill or fall from the pedestal we’re perched upon, precarious precipice–when the men and women who want war want war to end: send me a postcard with a picture of your god pinned to a corkboard and the word of your god etched in desert sand in the hand of the first witness to survive… which ism should we use as filter?”–“Landfall”
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Learned
$20.00Set in the 90s, alternating between the storied quads of Oxford University and the dank recesses of London pubs given over to public displays of queer BDSM, Learned chronicles poet and Rhodes Scholar Carellin Brooks’ extreme explorations of mind and body. In these poems, the speaker trembles on the verge of discovery, pushing her physical limits through practices of pain, permission, and pleasure. But her inability to negotiate the unspoken elite codes of Oxford begs the question: how to unlearn a legacy of family dissolution and abuse? Bold, nuanced, and ultimately triumphant Learned chronicles an intimate education in flesh, desire, and bodily memory.
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Ledi
$18.00Ledi, the second book by Vancouver-based poet Kim Trainor, describes the excavation of an Iron Age Pazyryk woman from her ice-bound grave in the steppes of Siberia. Along with the woman’s carefully preserved body, with its blue tattoos of leopards and griffins, grave goods were also discovered–rosehips and wild garlic, translucent vessels carved from horn, snow-white felt stockings and coriander seeds for burning at death. The archaeologist who discovered her, Natalya Polosmak, called her ‘Ledi’–‘the Lady’–and it was speculated that she may have held a ceremonial position such as story teller or shaman within her tribe.
Trainor uses this burial site to undertake the emotional excavation of the death of a former lover by suicide. This book-length poem presents a compelling story in the form of an archaeologist’s notebook, a collage of journal entries, spare lyric poems, inventories, and images. As the poem relates the discovery of Ledi’s gravesite, the narrator attempts simultaneously to reconstruct her own past relationship and the body of her lover.
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Light Light
$18.00Shortlisted for the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry.
Moving from the Enlightenment science of natural history to the contemporary science of global warming, Light Light is a provocative engagement with the technologies and languages that shape discourses of knowing. It bridges the histories of botany, empire, and mind to take up the claim of “objectivity” as the dissolution of a discrete self and thus explores the mind’s movement toward and with the world. The poems in Light Light range from the epigrammatic to the experimental, from the narrative to the lyric, consistently exploring the way language captures the undulation of a mind’s working, how that rhythm becomes the embodiment of thought, and how that embodiment forms a politics engaged with the environment and its increasing alterations.
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Listen Before Transmit
$18.00Dani Couture’s latest poems are transmissions that travel across the cosmos, the spaces we live in, as well as within the more intimate distances we navigate between one another. Distances we hope to bridge with contact, often to profound or disastrous effects. With language rooted in science, sociology, memoir and aesthetics, she questions the limits of our bodies, both human and celestial. Like the subtle cues we lend one another and the hopeful messages we send into deep space, these poems broadcast our greatest aspirations and vulnerabilities.
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Little Housewolf
$17.95Medrie Purdham‘s Little Housewolf delves deeply into the world of domestic miniatures, a realm where thimbles, baby teeth, push pins, keyholes, teacups, and wedding rings become meticulously realized scale models of one’s terrors and joys. Purdham uses the fine-grained signatures of her poetry–close observation, exact detail, precise sounds–not only to examine childhood and its fascination with size and scale, but also to measure herself against the larger, untamed landscapes she feels increasingly alienated from (“It is all anachronism, / grasses vintage wild”). Marked by bold emotion and arresting imagery, Little Housewolf is a brilliant debut.