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Poetry Litspace Lists
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Showing 121–140 of 196 results
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page as bone – ink as blood
$16.95Death, desire, and divination are the threads running through Jónína Kirton’s debut collection of poems and lyric prose. Delicate and dark, the pieces are like whispers in the night – a haunted, quiet telling of truths the mind has locked away but the body remembers. Loosely autobiographical, these are the weavings of a wagon-goddess who ventures into the double-world existence as a mixed-race woman. In her struggle for footing in this in-between space, she moves from the disco days of trance dance to contemplations in her dream kitchen as a mother and wife.
With this collection, Kirton adds her voice to the call for the kind of fierce honesty referred to by Muriel Rukeyser when she asked, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Kirton tells her truth with gentleness and patience, splitting the world open one line at a time.
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Paper Caskets
$18.95Emilia Danielewska’s debut book of prose-poetry reveals the dead. Divided into four parts, Paper Caskets proposes a poetics of the box — as coffin, as prose parameters of the page, as photograph, and as state of mind and body in the face of death. From the act of photographing the dead, to mourning the dead, and to preparing for death that is coming, here is work startling in its clarity, which exposes, as a photograph does, the complicated relationship humans have with mortality.
Paper Caskets looks beyond grief to see the dead as dynamic places where memory and body collide, where flesh rots and fluid seeps and we de/compose prose-poetry.
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PERFACT
$16.95PERFACT is a series in three parts, beginning with an interrogation into the structure of experience, language, and identity. The title poem, “PERFACT,” is an approach to materiality and consciousness in which each intersect, partaking in a coded interchange. This interchange precedes the stage play, 物の哀れ (“mono-no-aware,” an untranslatable Japanese term which might be expressed as an empathy or awareness of things), a “dark night of the soul” whose dramatic interchange leads a feminine “I” inwards and back again, countering the coherence of singular identity with the threat of sublimation. This mystical junction makes way for “MINE,” a lineated poem presenting a disassociated clarity marked by absence, survival’s persistent interlude.
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Phantompains
$20.00Therese Estacion survived a rare infection that nearly killed her, but not without losing both her legs below the knees, several fingers, and reproductive organs. Phantompains is a visceral, imaginative collection exploring disability, grief and life by interweaving stark memories with dreamlike surrealism.
Taking inspiration from Filipino horror and folk tales, Estacion incorporates some Visayan language into her work, telling stories of mermen, gnomes, and ogres that haunt childhood stories of the Philippines and, then, imaginings in her hospital room, where she spent months recovering after her operations.
Estacion says she wrote these poems out of necessity: an essential task to deal with the trauma of hospitalization and what followed. Now, they are demonstrations of the power of our imaginations to provide catharsis, preserve memory, rebel and even to find self-love.
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pihta ēkwa wihta (Cree Edition)
$16.95The poems in “pihta ēkwa wihta”reveal strong links to land, to family, and to the wisdom of elders. The author exposes the struggles that many Aboriginal people encounter while getting an education, dealing with family issues and abuse, learning to respect themselves and demanding respect from others, finding their place in the world, and recovering their rich history and culture. This book illustrates the resilience and strength of the Aboriginal people and the determination that they bring to their local communities across Canada.
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Pistachios in My Pocket
$24.95Poet Sareh Farmand was born in Tehran at the start of the Islamic Revolution. In this brave first collection of poems and prose a narrative arc details her family’s escape from Iran, detailing their time as immigrants in limbo, and finally, as Landed Immigrants in Canada. Using family anecdotes, memory, public documents, and images to outline her family’s story, Pistachios in my Pocket moves from the personal to the universal by exploring the influences of migration, political strife, and cultural identity on humanity. Here is a new voice to the conversation on global citizenship and multiculturalism, as themes of loss, home, and belonging are explored in a new way through a wide socio-political lens and personal accounts of a family’s unique, yet universal experiences. Ultimately, bringing forward the many ways immigrants are haunted after fleeing for safety and what it means to be Canadian.
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Playing into Silence
$18.00Growing up during the 50s and 60s in small town Alberta, Pam was keenly aware, by the age of nine, that she was a lesbian. And she also knew well to hide this about herself. Pam would search for books on the “The Island of Lesbos”, only to return from the library with a copy of Little Women. In between the vast spaces of dust and dugouts, she grows up and grows old, playing her saxophone in deep, blaring notes. Age is a constant marker throughout these poems for an otherwise long and lonely time of waiting for queer rights, for acceptance, for love.
Poet Tina Biello unearths just about everything from beneath the Alberta ground-dinosaur bones, a family’s firstborn, missing cows. A voice from within the Prairies, Playing into Silence is a look back at a dry time in lesbian identity.
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Practical Anxiety
$18.95These poems dwell in the hearth of domesticity, but they look beyond the confines of the home with clear eyes. Boldly unafraid, they confront the realities of climate change, the desecration of habitat, some quiet truths about aging and death. There is no doubt that these are poems written by a woman. But even though many of them deal with the domestic world long considered the ‘domain’ of females, they reach well beyond the realm of the kitchen and tradition. They are a celebration of the quiet glory ensconced in the ‘practical’ nature of the everyday world, even though that world may often feel overwhelmingly filled with ‘anxiety’
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Precious Energy
$18.00Precious Energy, the fourth collection of poetry from Hamilton-born poet and playwright Shannon Bramer, is a uniquely playful collection of vibrantly sad, peculiar, and often funny poems about domestic life, motherhood, and the baffled child that remains within us all even as we grow up and into whatever person we keep trying to become. Featuring a coterie of subjects, from fish sticks and LEGO pieces to mothers too tired to have sex and solitary swans in everyone’s basement, these poems dexterously navigate a landscape of domestic isolation, insecure attachments, and confused personal boundaries with honesty and unexpected humour.
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Problematica
$34.95A best-of collection from one of Canada’s most ambitious poets
Problematica — a scientific term used to describe species that defy classification. See unidentifiable.
George Murray is a strange beast. Lauded as one of Canada’s leading poets, his work has been published around the world, but here at home, he has never really “fit in” with his contemporaries. By turns archly formal and thoughtful, insouciant and hilarious, each of his six books seems intent on staking out its own identity, standing alone in stark contrast to all others.
Yet, in this judicious selection of new and selected poems spanning Murray’s 25-year career, we see threads and patterns emerge like fractals. From early narrative poems to lyrical explorations of the metaphysical to investigations of the colloquial and contemporary, Murray’s work roams a landscape that includes everything from happiness to regret, love to loss, doubt to faith, anxiety to acceptance.
This collection not only represents the best of Murray’s earlier poems, but also surprises readers with a section of never-before-seen new work, revealing a life spent wrestling with what it means to arrive, live, and leave. Problematica is a considerable body of poetry from a mind that obsessively wanders the edges of thought and language, working to identify what boundaries may or may not exist.
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Radiant
$18.95Radiant is a poetic exploration of one hopeful person’s healing journey through cancer–from missed appointment, to mammogram, to diagnosis, to surgery, chemo, and radiation, through hysterectomy, genetic testing through to wholeness. Kate Marshall Flaherty’s luminous poetry is raw, honest yet radiant and life-affirming. The poems are chronological, yet timeless; they are courageous and graphic, yet tenaciously realistic and positive. These poems are unflinching in their exploration of “fear, death, the whole shebang.” They vary in form from odes to eulogies, from free verse to prose poem to “notes to self,” “welcoming angels,” “lighting up the night,” voicing, blessing, questioning, raging, and eventually settling into a radiant space, of acceptance and gratitude.
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Rag Cosmology
$18.00Winner of the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry
BookThug is proud to introduce a groundbreaking debut collection of poems by Erin Robinsong. In this time of ecological precarity, Rag Cosmology is an urgent invitation to reinvent our modes engagement with the environment we not only inhabit, but are. Refusing the lamentation that leaves us as resigned witnesses to devastation, Rag Cosmology counters fatalist narratives with the pleasures of ecological entanglement and engagement.
Tracing relationships between seemingly irreconcilable things–economy and ecology, weather and lust, bills and inner voices, wages of avoidance and wages of listening–Rag Cosmology offers the intimate and lush language of thought that yearns for an imaginative reinvention of how we understand what we are part of and what we are losing.
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Re-Origin of Species
$18.00Winner of RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers
Winner of CBC Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial AwardFrom hybrid bodies to shifting landscapes, Re-Origin of Species blurs the lines of the real. These poems journey through illness and altered states to position disability and madness as evolutionary traits; skilled adaptations aligned with ecological change.
A lyric contemplation of our relationship to the environment, this book looks at the interdependence of species. Weaving personal narratives with a study of the insect kingdom, it draws parallels between human illness, climate change, and the state of peril in the natural world.
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Reckon
$20.00Anxious, twitchy, urgent poems–a collection that’s at once sardonic and “chronically wishful.”
Reckon, Steve McOrmond’s first book of poems since his acclaimed 2010 collection The Good News about Armageddon, hones in on those fugitive moments when the parts of ourselves that have not been entirely subsumed by consumer capitalism escape their cages and come out to play–a photographer’s lifelong desire to collect snowflakes, an adolescent’s game of show-me-yours, the small, defiant act of letting a cellphone call go to voicemail. “The whole world has gone straight to voicemail,” McOrmond writes a line later.
With one foot in the physical world and one in the virtual, these poems embody the often-tense negotiations between “I” and a collective “we.” Concerned with the sweep of history and the rush of the now, McOrmond demonstrates a knack for bringing the vast and amorphous down to human size, making it personal: “How gone?/ Real gone. All our gift cards unredeemed.”
Responding to a poem from Reckon that appeared on Poetry Daily, comedian Patton Oswalt tweeted a perceptive one-liner review: “Steve McOrmond’s new poem, ‘Pure Outrage,’ is really funny and, if you read it right, kind of scary.” While at times these poems reach out from a place of isolation, across a distance greater than words, one always senses an earnest desire for connection and engagement: Here, take my hand. Maybe it’s not too late.
“Creeping dread, bemused wonder, and a species of headlong incredulity inform Steve McOrmond’s processing of the new century’s prodigious cultural jetsam, its ‘wilderness of signs’. Reckon apprehends the strangeness in the commonplace, and the anxiety humming in everyday chatter, fact and argument, whether it be live or digitized. ‘What do they open, the keys that come rotoring down from the maple trees?’ Turns out it’s complicated.” –Kevin Connolly
“The isolation and confusion of the modern age come to life in Steve McOrmond’s new book Reckon in a way that is disquieting and strangely comforting at the same time.” –Ron Sexsmith
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Riffs
$20.00Deluxe redesign of an aching solo situated at the mid-point of a long, melodious career. Includes new material.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the third of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Riffs features a new introduction by the poet Paul Vermeersch, a reprint of an extended interview with Dennis Lee about the book, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
Riffs is a story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style–with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs. We hear Bach, Bo Diddley, Bird; the news is heartache and being. Celebratory, claustrophobic, the poem tracks ways in which eros and our lives are made mutually accountable.
Tell me what you cherish, won’t
just walk; give me lifetime,
not renege. I have no other use. Living I flubbed.
But mouth to mouth I could sometimes ache into words.–from Riffs (#85)
Praise for Riffs: “Riffs is the book that unites his various voices and lyrical personae… a book in which all of his poetic attitudes are in harmony with one another.” –Paul Vermeersch, from the Introduction.
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Rising Tides
$24.95Ice melt; sea level rise; catastrophic weather; flooding; drought; fire; infestation; species extinction and adaptation; water shortage and contamination; intensified social inequity, migration and cultural collapse. These are but some of the changes that are not only predicted for climate changing futures, but already part of our lives in Canada. Although these transformations are global and dramatic, they are also experienced locally and particularly by people who are struggling to understand the impacts of climate change on their daily lives.
Rising Tides is a collection of short fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir and poetry addressing the past, present and future of climate change. Bringing stories about climate change–both catastrophic and subtle–closer to home, this new anthology inspires reflection, understanding, conversation and action. With more than forty purposefully written pieces, Rising Tides emphasizes the need for intimate stories and thoughtful attention, and also for a view of climate justice that is grounded in ongoing histories of colonialism and other forms of environmental and social devastation.These stories parallel the critical issues facing the planet, and imagine equitable responses for all Canadians, moving beyond denial and apocalypse and toward shared meaning and action.
Contributors to the anthology include established writers, climate change experts from different backgrounds and front-line activists: Carleigh Baker, Stephen Collis, Ashlee Cunsolo, Ann Eriksson, Rosemary Georgeson, Hiromi Goto, Laurie D. Graham, David Huebert, Sonnet L’Abbe, Timothy Leduc, Christine Lowther, Kyo Maclear, Emily McGiffin, Deborah McGregor, Kevin Phillip Paul, Richard Pickard, Holly Schofield, Betsy Warland, Evelyn White, Rita Wong and many more. -
Safe Words
$18.95From a student’s confrontation with a teenage streaker, to a company man’s complete undoing at his summer party, Michelle Brown’s Safe Words finds rich darkness in happy partnerships. A maiden name is “handed down / like a sweater”, a taxi ride “ends… at someone else’s life”. Played against a backdrop of pop culture, late-night swagger and vivid imaginary landscapes, Safe Words is the rare poetic debut that delivers passion and control, wielding humour and empathy in equal parts.
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Ship of Gold
$19.95A legend of 19th century French Canadian poetry, Émile Nelligan was only 16 when he fell under the influence of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and began writing taut, confidently surrealistic poems, shot through self-lacerating melancholy. Three years later, when a mental collapse led to his life-long institutionalization in 1899, he had already produced an impressive body of work. Translating Nelligan’s “essential” poems, along with a sharp introduction contextualizing his legacy as one of the “first poets to write openly about suicide, neurosis, and psychological breakdown,” Marc di Saverio has given us a rivetingly fresh version of Nelligan for a new generation.
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Short Talks
$20.00Deluxe redesign of the two-time Griffin Award winner’s first poetry collection. Includes new material.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the first of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of Short Talks features a foreword by the poet Margaret Christakos, a “Short Talk on Afterwords” by Carson herself, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
First issued in 1992, this is Carson’s first and only collection of poems published with an independent Canadian press. It announced the arrival of a profound, elegiac and biting new voice. Short Talks can comfortably stand alongside Carson’s other bestselling and award-winning works.
The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare.–“Short Talk on the Youth at Night”
Praise for Short Talks: “Short Talks is a unique form of slag-like poetic address that arises from the full formative force of Carson’s young embodiment of a northern Ontario mining-town winter of mind.”–Margaret Christakos, from the Introduction.
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Silvija
$18.00Grief is personal and unpredictable; no two people experience it the same way, and yet, each person that comes out the other side is transformed by their experience of loss and redemption.
In a sequence of five feverish elegies, Sandra Ridley’s Silvija combines narrative lyric and experimental verse styles to manifest dark themes related to love and loss: the traumas of psychological suffering (isolation and confinement), physical abuse (by parent and partner), terminal illness (brain tumour and heart attack), revelation, resolution, and healing. Pulsing with the award-winning writer’s signature blend of fervour and sangfroid, the serial poems in Silvija accrue into a book-length testament to a grief both personal and human, leaving readers with the redemptive grace that comes from poetry’s ability to wrestle chaos into meaning.
Because of its overarching themes and serial form, Silvija is best read cover-to-cover, analogous to a work of fiction, rather than a book of individual or occasional poems. In this way, and in dealing with timeless subjects of human significance, this book-length ‘requiem for loss’ bears comparisons to Anne Carson’s Nox and Daphne Marlatt’s The Given, and will resonate for the many people who have dealt with traumas of physical and mental illness, who have survived physical and/or emotional abuse, and who search for beauty after catastrophe.