Your cart is currently empty!
Women Poets
All Books in this Collection
Showing 81–96 of 125 results
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Simultaneous Windows
$18.95Simultaneous 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
$17.95Siren, 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
$17.95Power 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.”
-
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth
$20.00Songs 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.
-
Spit On The Devil
$17.00How 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
$18.95Isabella 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
$20.00Poems 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
$18.95When 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
$16.95EGALE 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.