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Women Poets
All Books in this Collection
Showing 33–48 of 125 results
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Elemental
$18.00Usually, we take for granted or plain ignore the Earth we walk on, the Sky above, the Water we drink and bathe in or that falls as rain, the Fire we assume for heat, and the Wood that makes up our landscape and building materials. But over fifteen years as a construction carpenter, Kate Braid began to pay more attention to the materials she worked with and depended upon. Out of these she has crafted an intimate picture of what it is like to be wholly engaged with the elemental materials of earth, sky, water, fire and wood that we depend upon every day.
Elemental is a poignant, intelligent collection that asks us to look more closely at ourselves and the details that construct our rich and delicate world.
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Endangered Hydrocarbons
$18.00Fracking – tar-sand runoff – dirty oil extraction. This is the language of our oil-addicted 21st century society: incredibly invasive, blatant in its purpose, and richly embedded in mythological and archetypal symbolism. The ultimate goal of the industry: To core the underworld.
Endangered Hydrocarbons, Lesley Battler’s first full-length collection of poetry, shows that the language of hydrocarbon extraction, with its blend of sexual imagery, archetype, science, pseudoscience and the purely speculative, can be as addictive as the resource it pursues.
Using pastiche and wordplay, Battler shines a floodlight on the absurdity and pervasiveness of production language in all areas of human life in the oil fields, including art, culture and politics. Incorporating texts generated by a multinational oil company, and spliced with a variety of found material (video games, home decor magazines, works by Henry James and Carl Jung), Battler deliberately tampers with her found material, treating it as crude oil–excavating, mixing, and drilling these texts to emulate extraction processes used by the industry.With traces of Dennis Lee’s Testament, Larissa Lai’s Automaton Biographies, and Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers, this lively and refreshing take on a polarizing topic will resonate with readers of contemporary poetry who connect with environmental issues and capitalist critique.
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even this page is white
$16.95Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature winner
Lambda Literary Award finalist
Longlisted for Canada Reads
As a writer, musician, performance artist, and filmmaker, Vivek Shraya has, over the course of the last few years, established herself as a tour de force artist of the highest order. Vivek’s body
of work includes ten albums, four short films, and three books, including the YA book God Loves Hair (A Quill and Quire and Canadian Children’s Book Centre Best Book of the Year) and the adult novel She of the Mountains (a Lambda Literary Award finalist).Vivek’s debut collection of poetry, even this page is white, is a bold, timely, and personal interrogation of skin–its origins, functions, and limitations. Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of
what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible, and undeniable. -
First
$22.95Governor General’s Award-winning poet Arleen Paré combines the story of two first best friends with questions of the mystery of cosmic first cause.
The poems in First, Arleen Paré’s seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings.
This layered evocation of the past–of childhood in 1950s Dorval, “a green mesh of girls friendships and fights”–and the intensity of the desire to know, give First its haunting beauty. “[T]he word though old fashioned,” Paré writes, “is whence . . . unconditioned origins” when “no worthy question is ever answered on the same plane that it was asked; how to frame the question not knowing the plane on which I must ask it.”
“Arleen Paré’s First is an intriguing Gertrude Stein as Nancy Drew mystery. Using prose poem narrative and an intense syntactic poetics, Paré discovers the cracks in memory as she documents the search for her first best friend. The cracks in this lyrical puzzle are heightened by a very active and assertive poetic language that compels as it decodes the investigation of childhood memory and desire. The writing in First demonstrates a powerful juxtaposition of the continuous present with the continuous past.” –Fred Wah
“This brilliant collection revolves around firsts, especially a first friend, ‘the impress of her never gone.’ So too with these poems–tough, sweet and poignant, so surely rendered and musically rich–the impress of these poems never gone.”–Lorna Crozier
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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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Hooked: seven poems
$19.00 -
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. -
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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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.