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Poetry Litspace Lists
Browse the books in the All Lit Up Poetry Litspace by category.
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Showing 101–120 of 196 results
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Love in the Chthulucene (Cthulhucene)
$18.00In a collection grappling with #MeToo, climate change and political turmoil, Natalee Caple strives to discover a way forward in charged times. These poems look to acknowledge struggle, to re-evaluate society and to rethink our approach to art. This is a challenging collection, but also a personal one. As Caple explains in her acknowledgements, she “wrote these poems as gifts.” They were gifts to the people who have shaped her as a writer and a thinker, and now they are gifts to readers to show how one might try and find a way to keep creating that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all things, human and non-human.
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Lyric Sexology Vol. 1
$19.95Largely written before the current cultural visibility of trans lit, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is Salah’s prescient contribution to a canon of self-determined literature that explores transness. In this case, the author sidesteps the “I” in the text and instead draws on archives–sexological, anthropological, psychological, among others–to demonstrate the shifting and shifty nature of our identities, affiliations, and narratives.
This 2017 edition is the first to be published in Canada and features four new poems and a new cover design by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li.
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Maunder
$18.95Maundering is a both a physical and verbal process. One can walk in a maundering, aimless fashion and one can verbosely maunder on. Claire Kelly?s debut collection, Maunder, contains poems about the physical act of walking and the mental act, what is seen and what is reflected on. These poems allow the reader to do their own idle walk across the page, stepping from image to image, place to place, striding, pivoting in different, unexpected directions.
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Moldovan Hotel
$20.00Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora.
In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women’s lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.
With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick’s poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. “No one ever thinks they might be the dragon,” Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together.
“If Leah Horlick’s second book invited us to witness, this time she draws from her Jewish heritage and takes us back to show us how to read the landscape and mind-scape and tell us what the texts left out. This is an accounting, a calling, an invocation, a return, a skilful mediation on how to remember when the ‘names of the oppressors are blotted out’.” — Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days
“Every poem in Moldovan Hotel is a room thick with ghosts. Here, Horlick takes the language of the past–used to dehumanize and unmoor–and crystalizes it around revelation after revelation. A graceful, striking collection.” — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
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Monkey Ranch
$19.00Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us what is sufficient, what will suffice?
… a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grapple with this unanswerable conundrum — sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window. Julie Bruck’s third book of poetry is a brilliant and unusual blend of pathos and play, of deep seriousness and wildly veering humour. Though Bruck “does not stammer when it’s time to speak up,” and “will not blink when it’s time to stare directly at the uncomfortable,” as Cornelius Eady says in his blurb for the book, “in Monkey Ranch she celebrates more than she sighs, and she smartly avoids the shallow trap of mere indignation by infusing her lines with bright, nimble turns, the small, yet indelible detail. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.”
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Myrmurs
$18.00Myrmurs is an innovative variant of the sestina form (a medieval mechanism of desire that spirals around six end words). Connecting medieval textuality to contemporary politics and poetics, this poem explores living systems: cities and languages as self-organizing entities; ants; interspecies entanglements; strange attachments; neocolonialism and how to break free of it. Following on her critically acclaimed debut collection fur(l) parachute (published by BookThug in 2013), this is the second volume in Shannon Maguire’s planned medievalist trilogy.
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nakamowin sa for the seasons
$17.95Rita Bouvier’s third collection of poetry is a response to the highs and lows of life and represents an attempt at restoring order through embracing others, reconciling the traumas caused by the deep scars of history, and soaring beyond life’s awkward and painful moments in order to live joyfully. Inspired by the metaphor of a voyageur sustained by song on his journeys up and down the rivers of Northwest Saskatchewan, these “songs for the seasons” draw heavily on images from nature as well as the joys, heartaches and transgressions Bouvier has witnessed and experienced as a Métis woman. Using imagery strongly connected to the natural environment, Bouvier evokes earth’s regeneration through the seasons as inspiration for moving forward.
Whether discussing the joys and trials of family life with poems such as “nigosis is sweet and sixteen” and “my grandmother’s hands”, offering her own take on history in “songs to sing” and “measured time”, or exploring Métis identity in “I have something important to say” and “Indigenous Man 2”, Bouvier captures the essence of a life that can be “joyful/one minute and then. agony”. Yet she always encourages the reader to become “caught in the movement and beauty/of life – dance, breathe, listen” and, of course, sing. -
Narrow Bridge
$15.95Lyric poems that are open to readers; Strong imagery; Poems that describe the need to build “bridges” between people; Interesting accounts of a single woman in Italy; The difficulties involved in learning to age gracefully; The act of writing as a means of living with courage in crossing the narrow bridge of life. COMPARATIVE TITLES: The Road in Is Not the Same Road Out by Karen Solie (Anansi, 2015); The Wrong Cat by Lorna Crozier (McClelland & Stewart, 2015); The Waking Comes Late by Steven Heighton (Anansi, 2015).
“All the world is a narrow bridge,” states Rabbi Nachman of Bresnov. “The important thing is not to be afraid at all.” These poems, Barbara Pelman’s third collection, explore bridges both real and metaphoric: the bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden where her family lives; the bridges she has travelled across Europe; and the bridges we build through words and actions to overcome our separateness from one another. The poet writes about lovers, mothers, daughters, ex-husbands, grandchildren, and her attempts to construct solid foundations for the heart to travel easily across time and space. Pelman writes of her love of landscapes and the things in them, and the everyday epiphanies that happen in one’s backyard. These are poems that explore the tension between living in one place but wanting to be in another, the losses and freedoms contained in solitude, the process of learning to age gracefully. The act of writing, Pelman says, is itself a talisman against fear, a mantra of boldness and courage to live con spirito. -
Night Work
$20.00A new edition of a hockey saga, wrapping the game’s story in the “intense, moody, contradictory” character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.
Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it’s their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves.
– from “One of You”In compact, conversational poems, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate upper-body equipment and no player representation. But no summary touches the searching intensity of Maggs’s poems. They range from meditations on ancient/modern heroism to dramatic capsules of actual games, in which the mystery of character meets the mystery of transcendent physical performance. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is illustrated with photographs mirroring the text, depicting key moments in the career of Terry Sawchuk, his exploits and his agony.
This 10th anniversary edition of the book marks both the 50th anniversary of the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup and the 100th anniversary of the Leafs as a team. With rich reflections on the book by novelist Angie Abdou and Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean, as well as excerpts from scores of reviews by the likes of Gord Downie and Dave Bidini, this new edition of Night Work is a must-have for lovers of hockey and poetry alike.
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No Rainbow and Other Poems
$13.95Beautiful imagery infuses this collection of lyrical poetry from a rising Indigenous poet steeped in the rich culture of her ancestors.
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No TV for Woodpeckers
$18.00In the pages of Gary Barwin’s latest collection of poetry, No TV for Woodpeckers, the lines between haunting and hilarious, wondrous and weird, beautiful and beastly, are blurred in the most satisfying ways. No stranger to poetic experimentation, Barwin employs a range of techniques from the lyrical to the conceptual in order to explore loss, mortality, family, the self and our relationship to the natural world.
Many of these poems reveal a submerged reality full of forgotten, unknown or invisible life forms that surround us?that are us. Within this reality, Barwin explores the connection between bodies, language, culture and the environment. He reveals how we construct both self and reality through these relationships and also considers the human in relation to the concepts of “nature” and “the animal.”
As philosophical as it is entertaining?weaving together threads of surrealism, ecopoetics, Dada and more?No TV for Woodpeckers is a complex and multi-layered work that offers an unexpected range of pleasures.
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Obits.
$19.95WINNER OF THE 2019 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
Can poems mourn the unmourned? In Obits. a speaker tries and fails to write obituaries for those whose memorials are missing, those who are represented only as statistics. She considers victims of mass deaths, fictional characters, and her own aunt, asking what does it mean to be an ‘I’ mourning a ‘you’ when both have been othered? Centring vulnerability, the various answers to this question pass through trauma, depression, and the experience of being a mixed-race queer woman.
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Odes & Laments
$18.00Through poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat. Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes, this wide-ranging and diverse collection plays with the yin and yang of everyday existence, employing lyricism, narrative, humour and an occasional dash of irreverence and fun through visual play with text and typography.
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Off Leash
$18.95Everyone has a dog story, from the salesman at Home Depot to the passenger on a plane who confesses about the scar on his face. The poems in Mahoney?s third collection explore the concepts of identity and ownership through rich linguistic textures and voices. From a boy?s fascination with Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred to uniquely imagined Biblical dogs, Off Leash delves into the anguish of dogs loved and lost, and the joy of homecoming.
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Oona River Poems
$20.00Peter Christensen began his writing career at the University of Lethbridge in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Creative Writing. While there, he started up one of Alberta’s first literary magazines,Canada Goose with fellow writing student, Lorne Daniel.
Christensen juggled his literary writing career with his passion for exploring wilderness mountain areas of Alberta, BC, Yukon and NWT. He worked at various times as a guide, ranch hand, and Park Ranger. As a result, his working, writing, and literary career is diverse; his relationship with the natural world became his muse and is reflected in this collection. He lived in Oona River in the years it took him to write this collection.
Peter has published four books of poetry with Thistledown Press and one “best seller” of creative non-fiction stories with Heritage House Publishing. Several chapbooks were published by small presses in Canada and USA.
His poems have been published in numerous anthologies, writing journals, and literary magazines in Canada, Denmark, and USA, and he has performed many readings throughout Canada and the US. Peter collaborated with New Music Composer Robert Rosen, writing three librettos for the outdoor operas Canyon Shadows that were performed across Canada. “Hailstorm”, the title poem from his first book with Thistledown Press was arranged for voice and orchestra by Robert Rosen, performed internationally, was most recently sung by Michelle Todd at Carnegie Hall in New York, 2017.
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Operations
$18.00From poet-provocateur Moez Surani comes Operations—a book-length poetic inventory of contemporary rhetoric of violence and aggression, as depicted through the evolution of the language used to name the many military operations conducted by UN Member Nations since the organization’s inception in 1945.
With Operations, Surani draws on contemporary poetic traditions, including conceptual and inventory poetics, to accomplish two important things: On the one hand, he shows that no word is free from connoting violence, while on the other hand, he provokes readers to consider whether their personal values match the values of the military operation that are conducted by their countries.
By pulling military language away from euphemism–effectively, making it account for its doublespeaking ways—Operations gives voice to the many lives lost in conflicts around the world, in a volume that will speak equally to lovers of contemporary poetry, language, and linguistics, as to readers interested in politics, international relations, and public discourse.
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Other Houses
$20.00From acclaimed fiction writer and playwright Kate Cayley–poems that illuminate the deep strangeness of the familiar.
In Other Houses, Kate Cayley’s second collection of poetry, objects are alive with the presence of the people who have handled them. Myths and legends are interwoven with daily life. Visionaries, mystics, charlatans, artists, and the dead speak to us like chatty neighbours. An imaginary library catalogues missing people. Reading becomes a way of remembering the dead. Home is an elsewhere we are “called to,” a mystery that impels children to wander off, and adults to grow in unexpected directions.
Cayley couples a rich, meaty lyricism with the intimacy of direct address, creating a poetry that is at once embodied and spectral. She directs us to wonder, “Did light and dark have a taste and texture, like food?” At the same time, her command of voice and narrative is masterful–each of these poems unfolds with the sweep and precision of a compressed novel.
…Walking alone, you come upon a single glove, or shoe, pressed into the light snow.
Or find a handprint on the wrong side of a windowpane.
Or find a collection of marbles, still grouped carefully together in the backyard.
Messages.(from “The Library of the Missing”)
Praise for Other Houses:
“Beware of Kate Cayley. With an agility stolen from some other world she flicks this one open and invites us to watch our certainties scuttling away. Predatory and unsettling, these exquisitely crafted poems suggest that we are at our most human when yearning to reach beyond the visible.” –Martha Baillie
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Otolith
$19.95Winner, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Longlisted, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial AwardOtolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader’s attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of British Columbia’s coastal rainforest, these poems are full of life and decay; they carry the odours of salmon rivers and forests of fir; salal growing in the fog-bound mountain slopes.
This astonishing debut, at once spare and lush, displays an exquisite lyricism built on musical lines and mature restraint. Nilsen turns over each idea carefully, letting nothing escape her attention and saying no more than must be said. Combining a scientist’s precision and a poet’s sensitivity, Otolith examines the ache of nostalgia in the relentless passage of time.
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Our Latest in Folktales
$20.00Poems of serious wordplay–an affirmation and celebration of the spectacles we make of our lives.
On-stage in Matthew Gwathmey’s debut collection are agitated 19th century horsemen, 80s comic book beetles, plaid-clad suburban grunge enthusiasts, Korean aunts turned traffic cops, Parisian mimes–in short, “a multitude of horns.” Meanwhile, the “understories,” the sub-spectacles of these poems, are the everyday trials and thrills of marriage and family, the search for meaningful love and friendship, and the palpable relief at being able to perform not as a primary character in the cultural narrative, but as a member of an elemental audience, as “water/ at the bottom of the wind.”
Working a hand-mixer in one hand and a spade in the other, Gwathmey writes formally accomplished, linguistically playful poems with deep roots. He couples an implicit understanding of the stories passed down to us as necessary blueprints, with an occasionally nihilistic (in the spirit of the modernists) and occasionally giddy (in the spirit of the New York School) pull toward embellishment and reinvention, making these folktales rhythmic, humorous, and full of unexpected turns.
“Down out of the pilgrim wilderness of the shapeshifting, apocalyptic carnival midway of Parnassus, trailed by an entourage of troubadours, poet pro-wrestlers, lunatics, comic strip superheroes, brain scientists, cyberpyrotechnicats, emoticons, coders, and a covey of Acadian midwives spouting ancient spells, comes Matthew Gwathmey, twenty-first-century soothsayer….” –Lisa Russ Spaar
“Our latest in poetry, Matthew Gwathmey’s debut is a mishmash in the best sense, smushing superheroes, Mars colonies, psych wards, Radiohead, and a hundred other eclectic subjects into a blender for your poetry protein shake. Regardless of the reference, Gwathmey clicks words into place like Lego bricks, for precise, fun, colourful poems.” –Jonathan Ball
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outskirts
$19.00A powerful diptych juxtaposing our rootedness in family love with a report from the precipice of planetary disintegration.
Sue Goyette’s outskirts is a tour de force. Its originality lies in Goyette’s refusal of despair, her conviction that the connections among people, their conversation, curiosity, empathy and awe, can help us see a way forward. Her aim is to find energy in human love, a way to walk the darkness rather than hide from it. This book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.
… Leave the gossip to the rivers. Photographs will be buried at the base of diseased trees. All eyes are distractible, smiles are especially alluring. The sump-pump
can’t get rid of the water and god, I am told, is a canoe-shaped hole in all of us. Books, those old grandmothers, are losing their teeth. Stay focused. Those aren’t stars, they’re
flashlights. Add, don’t divide. Love best those who have forgotten how. There are no favorites in this dark. Now scatter.
— from “Resist”