Poetry Litspace Lists

Browse the books in the All Lit Up Poetry Litspace by category.

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All Books in this Collection

Showing 141–160 of 196 results

  • Simultaneous Windows

    Simultaneous Windows

    $18.95

    Simultaneous Windows is a metaphoric and narrative journey, both personal and political, in which rebellion, love and loss open windows to change. Each window is a frame through which we see the limits and possibilities of one small life. The voice is strong and the journey vivid. Poems are located in Toronto, Borneo, the Middle East, Rwanda and elsewhere.

  • Siren

    Siren

    $17.95

    Siren, Kateri Lanthier’s astonishing second book, calls us to attention. In her search for what she calls “compelling melancholy,” Lanthier’s new poems not only draw on the ghazal’s history as love poetry but remind readers of the dangerous and alluring quality of the ancient form itself. The siren was a lethal yet seductive figure, and that sense of power–and as well as her fast-taking bemusement at her own reputation–is present in lines that marry unnerving dream logic to emotional fearlessness. Siren is an uncompromising achievement: an original style at once mysterious, witty and musical that refines and clarifies the world in consistently surprising ways.” Call it playing with fire. Call it connect-the-dots lightning.”

  • Sit How You Want

    Sit How You Want

    $17.95

    Power and sex take centre stage in Robin Richardson‘s formidable third collection, Sit How You Want. Plane crashes and automobile mishaps are the backdrop for female narrators who grapple with terror, anxiety, and powerlessness: “When I say I’m fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy.” In their grim wit, sinister straight talk, and sometimes violent bawdiness, Richardson’s poems work as counter-charms against the lingering trauma of abusive relationships, both familial and romantic. The book embodies a belief in poetry as an instrument of change, a tool for transforming pain into exuberant verbal energy: “It is the thrill of ruination / makes us innovate.”

  • Skin Like Mine

    Skin Like Mine

    $15.95

    In Skin Like Mine, Garry Gottfriedson offers a suite of poems that peel away the skin of contemporary first nations society to reveal an inside view of individual experience. Gottfriedson speaks of “minds full of anticipation” yet with “tongues pointing arrowheads.” Today’s youth, he says, are “afraid of themselves.” He finds that both individuals and bands end in “tangles,” that they write “nonsense words in the sand” or exploit images painted on rocks, those “the postmodern Indian calls / visual poetic expression.” As the collection continues, however, Gottfriedson’s love for the land emerges. He draws attention to the rape of the natural environment, the skin of Mother Earth, through clear-cut logging. He speaks of the damage caused by the pine beetle, of “forests being / eaten from the inside out.” And here it is that Gottfriedson introduces the mysterious Horsechild, who is to prepare the drying racks for the returning salmon “so that beneath your skin / the mountains will be forever abundant”: a prayer for us to protect the migrating salmon on their multi-year cycles, to protect the bears and eagles that feast upon them, so as to assure that the transformations will continue, that there will be abundance for both humans and the earth itself.

  • Songs for Relinquishing the Earth

    Songs for Relinquishing the Earth

    $20.00

    Songs for Relinquishing the Earth contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperilled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky’s experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario.

    Songs for Relinquishing the Earth was first published by the author in 1996 as a hand-made book, each copy individually sewn for its reader in response to a request. It appeared between plain covers on recycled stock, with a small photo (of lavender fields) pasted into each copy. The only publicity was word of mouth.

    Part of Jan Zwicky’s reason for having the author be the maker and distributor of the book was a desire to connect the acts of publication and publicity with the initial act of composition, to have a book whose public gestures were in keeping with the intimacy of the art. She also believed the potential audience was small enough that she could easily sew enough copies to fill requests as they came in. While succeeding in recalling poetry’s public life to its roots, she was wrong about the size of that audience and her ability to keep up with demand as word spread, Hence, this facsimile edition. In publishing it, Brick Books has attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the spirit of those original gestures, while making it possible for more readers to have access to this remarkable book.

  • Sotto Voce

    Sotto Voce

    $20.00

    Poems that give full attention to a world in shambles, a world in which “mercy is failing.”

    Maureen Hynes, in her fifth book of poetry, speaks tenderly yet vehemently about the threatened worlds that concern her. From Toronto, where she lives and walks the city’s afflicted watershed, she turns her attention to the near and far, shifting it from the First Nations’ stolen lands to Syria and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean; from the deaths of family and friends to the newborns into whose care our endangered planet will pass; and from love’s transient regrets to the sustaining love two women share. Hynes’ is a gaze that grieves quietly, delights humbly, and, in the search for solace, never rests. Each poem in Sotto Voce is a recitative of healing. Hear the music in every word and, despite the damaged environments Hynes gives voice to, be restored.

    This is a book that bears witness to the “dynamite stick of injustice,” one that balances fear and hope, misfortune and renewal, calamity and natural beauty. Sotto Voce carries the complexity and seriousness of its themes lightly–it’s important to know when to speak loudly, and when to whisper.

  • Spit On The Devil

    Spit On The Devil

    $17.00

    How do the words we use shape our thoughts and actions? Can poems disrupt passivity, or is art one of its conduits? Spit on the Devil is a lyrical evocation of these questions and a searing interrogation of progressive sentiments during a time of regressive politics. Combining outrage and robust hope, this collection breathes new life into classic poetic styles and deftly explores the tensions between repetition and change, past and present. Shaped by love and ancestors in many forms, by lost homes, city spaces, and motherhood, Bernstein’s poems embrace the whirl of life and sing insurrection against apathy and fear.

  • Stained With the Colours of Sunday Morning

    Stained With the Colours of Sunday Morning

    $18.95

    Isabella Caro, born in Florence at the de-occupation of Italy in WW2 is a woman shaped by the resilience of her country and a thirst for knowledge.

    In this fictional Novel-in-Verse we take a journey through one woman’s life, told from the perspective of three characters: Isabella, her daughter Alina and her granddaughter Georgia. Three voices weave through a lifetime in and out of harmony as they tell us a story of innocence, feminism, intellect, motherhood, immigration, understanding and loss. Ancient mythology is weaved through the poems and the character’s voices ring with the echoes of the maiden, the mother and the crone.

    This is the story of a feminist and scholar and the story of mothers and daughters that takes us from 1944 Italy to the the Prairies in 2014. We meet Isabella as a child and follow her story as she marries, suffers from postpartum depression, immigrates to Canada, struggles to connect with her teen daughter, takes on the care of her grandchild and finds peace in old love. In poems both blunt and confessional a woman’s story is revealed, page by page.

    This debut collection by Rayanne Haines is a creative threading of perspectives and memories about the fictional life of Isabella Caro, by three women who are fictional and yet remarkably real.

  • Standing in the Flock of Connections

    Standing in the Flock of Connections

    $20.00

    Poems that skitter between life and death, “sleep and hurry,”
    at their heart a kind of tender panic.

    By turns funny, frank, mysterious, and heartbreaking, Standing in the Flock of Connections, Heather Cadsby’s fifth collection of poetry, is one hundred proof associative thought. These poems testify to the human mind’s capacity to “do”–taking into account all of the performative, causal, athletic, and sexual connotations of that verb. Many of them come in on an overheard conversation or monologue–mid-fight, mid-stride–and the absent details and specifics often function to open up a space for things to become other things, for the flock of connections to swarm.

    I love a pentagram. You can draw that thing
    all day freehand, sloppy. Five-star
    hotels, movies, generals. Throw it around
    like it was a love number, which it is.
    Cut an apple horizontally, there it is.
    Draw one inside its centre pentagon and so on
    nesting smaller forever. Till you call it quits
    and start singing Holy etc.
    (from “Sunday geometer”)

    Praise for Heather Cadsby:
    “…verse that demonstrates wit and levity as well as a seriousness at its heart … capable of blasphemy … an honest inquiry into life and the inherent duality of the moment.” –Gillian Harding-Russell, Prairie Fire Review of Books

  • Stations of the Crossed

    Stations of the Crossed

    $18.95

    When Carol Rose GoldenEagle was a child, attending Easter church services, she recalls the annual ritual of the priest presenting plaques depicting the stages of Christ’s persecution to his resurrection, referred to as the “stations of the cross”. Using these early teachings as a springboard for critical reflections, poems look back, but more importantly, look forward to reclaiming the gifts given by Creator within Indigenous culture. GoldenEagle’s searing new poetry collection examines the dark legacy of the residential school system, church and government doctrine, and the ongoing impacts on Indigenous peoples’ lives across Turtle Island.

  • Still No Word

    Still No Word

    $16.95

    EGALE Canada Human Rights Trust OUT IN PRINT Literary Award Winner! Shannon Webb-Campbell’s Still No Word seeks the appearance of the self in others and the recognition of others within the self. Patient, searching, questioning, and at times heartbreaking—these poems reveal the deep past within the present tense and the interrelations that make our lives somehow both whole and unfinished. And though Webb-Campbell is political at times, this is not politics for the sake of politics: here, it’s a matter of the human heart. Ranging from reflective to angry, from sensual to humourous, her poetry inhabits that mercurial space between the public and the private, making Still No Word a remarkably accomplished debut collection.

  • Still Point

    Still Point

    $16.95

    Still Point examines North America as unified whole and disrupted centre

    The poems in Still Point contrast the calm and tumult of Hurricane Katrina, the deconstruction of Detroit, the financial crisis of 2008, and the BP Gulf oil spill, weaving lyrical sequences and individual pieces into a coherent whole focused on humanity’s relationship to itself and to nature. Still Point tells a story of beauty and horror, and how normalcy stubbornly persists amid history’s arc.

    “E Martin Nolan’s Still Point is [a] debut of remarkable talent.”Canadian Literature

    “When a book is this good, what to say? Without rhetoric, in intimate detail, Nolan nails it.”—Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter

  • Stranger

    Stranger

    $17.95

    In Stranger, Nyla Matuk’s provocative, unabashedly sensual voice leads us to revelations about how our lives are increasingly disembodied by social media’s flattened, outward identity markers. In place of this contested sense of self, Stranger reckons with a range of possible states of unknowing. Have we over-determined our identities, and thus diminished our appetites? “I fell asleep between two cold rivers,” Matuk reports, “while the blue shadows of uncomplicated / conifers leaned into their own.” Bold and spontaneous, piling images and ideas on top of each other to create opulent sound patterns, these poems reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder.

  • Table Manners

    Table Manners

    $17.95

    Carnal, flamboyant, visceral and bold, Table Manners is a rich meal. Catriona Wright’s debut introduces us to the image of the poet as “gastronaut,” a figure who seems to live entirely between table and a stove and who steeps her surroundings and relationships in complex emotional flavours. “My life,” she writes, “is now tuned to bone marrow donuts and chef gossip. I’m useless at any other frequency.” Wright’s wild narratives are sometimes funny, sometimes frightening and always ravishingly observed. Table Manners is what might have emerged had Julia Child written like Sharon Olds, or if Anthony Bourdain knew his way around a line-break.

  • Talking to the Diaspora

    Talking to the Diaspora

    $19.00

    In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, Lee Maracle has earned the reputation as one of Canada’s most ardent and celebrated writers. Talking to the Diaspora, Maracle’s second book of poetry, is at once personal and profound. From the revolutionary “Where Is that Odd Dandelion-Looking-Flower” to the tender poem “Salmon Dance,” from the biting “Language” to the elegiac “Boy in the Archives,” these poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which Lee Maracle is beloved and revered.

  • Tar Swan

    Tar Swan

    $19.95

    Shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award!
    Finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!

    Tar Swan is a multi-voiced reckoning that surveys the mythos of the Alberta oil sands with an approach that is both lyrical and experimental. The poems feature four voices: an oil sands developer, his plant mechanic, an archaeologist excavating the remains of the operation in the present day, and a mythical swan. David Martin’s debut collection is comprised of expansive and richly written poems, built on a lore-laden language, which explore the human and environmental cost of drawing too much from the land. As the three humans come into contact with the otherworldly swan, the voices bubble and churn together, and what is distilled is a psychological breakdown paralleling the toll taken on the earth.

  • That Light Feeling Under Your Feet

    That Light Feeling Under Your Feet

    $19.95

    Finalist for The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize at the New Brunswick Book Awards!
    Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

    That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers. These masterfully crafted poems challenge perpetuating colonial and class relations, as well as the hedonistic lifestyle attributed to the employees of these floating resorts. Kayla Geitzler’s debut collection interprets isolation, alienation, racism and assimilation into the margins as inevitable consequences for the seafaring workforce of the most profitable sector of the tourism industry.

    Exploring the liminal space between labour and leisure, the poems in That Light Feeling Under Your Feet are at once buoyant and weighty, with language that cuts like a keel through the sea.

  • The Cyborg Anthology

    The Cyborg Anthology

    $20.00

    Poems written by Cyborgs in the future – this collection melds sci-fi and poetry, human and machine.

    The Cyborg Anthology takes place in a future where there was a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs living peacefully beside Humans, but a disaster destroyed all Robot and most Cyborg life.

    The book is organized like a typical anthology of literature, split into sections that include a biography of each poet and a sample of their poetry. It covers early Cyborg poetry, political, celebrity, and pop culture poets, and ends with the next generation of Cyborg poets.

    The narrative takes place in the time after a cataclysmic event, and the collection wrestles with this loss. Through the lives of the poets, the book chronicles the history of personhood for technological beings, their struggle for liberation, and demonstrates different ways a person can be Cyborg. The poems and biographies together tell the story of a complex and enthralling world-to-come, exploring topics that are important in the future, and also urgent right now.

    “With mordant wit and a playful satiric touch, these Cyborg poems showcase a dazzling range of poetic forms and ideas: imaginative and charmingly subversive. Move over Norton Anthology of Poetry, there’s a new force in town, and they are a delight.” –Renée Sarojini Saklikar, author of Listening to the Bees and Children of Air India

    “The premise of this collection alone is fabulous. The poems are potent and powerful. With echoes of Le Guin, Brunner and Monáe, Lindsay B-e’s debut is layered and smart, provocative, and deeply satisfying. I was moved and fascinated. Speculative poetry at its best.” –Hiromi Goto, author of Chorus of Mushrooms and Darkest Light

  • The Darkhouse

    The Darkhouse

  • The Day-Breakers

    The Day-Breakers

    $19.95

    Longlisted for the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize • Longlisted for the 2023 Raymond Souster Poetry Prize • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022 • Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry

    Saturated with locutions lifted from the late 19th century, The Day-Breakers deeply conceives of what African Canadian soldiers experienced before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War.

    “It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the selflessness of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War, of whom hundreds were African-Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their brethren and the dawning of a new day. Brilliantly capturing the rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is an homage to their sacrifice and an unforgettable act of reclamation: the restoration of a language, and a powerful new perspective on Black history and experience.