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Women Poets
All Books in this Collection
Showing 113–125 of 125 results
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This Will Be Good
$18.00Mallory Tater’s This Will Be Good tells the story of a young woman’s burgeoning femininity as it brushes up against an emerging eating disorder. As the difficulties of her disease reveal themselves, they ultimately disrupt family relationships and friendships.
These poems deftly bear witness to the performance of femininity and gender construction to reveal the shrinking mind and body of a girl trying to find her place in the world, and whose overflowing adolescent hope for a future will not subside.
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To Love The Coming End
$18.00In To Love the Coming End, a disillusioned author obsessed with natural disasters and ‘the curse of 11’ reflects on their own personal earthquake: the loss of a loved one. A lyric travelogue that moves between Singapore, Canada, and Japan, this debut from Leanne Dunic captures what it’s like to be united while simultaneously separated from the global experience of trauma, history, and loss that colour our everyday lives.
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Totem Poles and Railroads
$18.95Totem Poles and Railroads succinctly defines the 500-year-old relationship between Indigenous nations and the corporation of Canada. In this, her fifth poetry collection, Janet Rogers’ expands on that definition with a playful, culturally powerful and, at times, experimental voice. She pays honour to her poetic characters–real and imagined, historical and present day–from Sacajawea to Nina Simone. Placing poetry at the centre of our current post-residential school/present-day reconciliation reality, Rogers’ poems are expansive and intimate, challenging, thought-provoking and always personal.
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Two Hemispheres
$18.00Imagining the lives of nineteenth-century women asylum patients, Nadine McInnis charts her descent into, and recovery from, depression.
In the afterword to Two Hemispheres, McInnis describes her first encounter with the remarkable photographs that illustrate this moving volume. Patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, these women’s names and stories are lost to history. McInnis imagines their experiences of mental illness as she explores her own journey through clinical depression, and finds in these haunting photographs solace and community.
“In the medical world, the body is often described metaphorically as a machine. Physician-poet William Carlos Williams invoked a similar metaphor when he noted that a poem is a machine made of words. What intrigues me about Nadine McInnis’s insightful collection of poems is how the mechanics of poetry serve to explore what can happen when we as human machines break down. Equally captivating in these evocative and sometimes disturbing poems is the historical impetus for their creationVictorian medical photographs. Two Hemispheres truly acts as a causeway between past and present, health and illness, and the supposed vastly different worlds of arts and biomedicine.” — Dr. J.T.H. Connor, John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland
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Waiting Room: Poems
$18.00You’re welcome to take a seat in (the) Waiting Room, the first full-length collection of poetry from award-winning writer Jennifer Zilm. Featuring a m�lange of styles and forms (sonnets, erasures, unsent emails, footnotes, session notes, CVs, tweets, and other disparate source materials–including, the Gospels and the Dead Sea Scrolls), Waiting Room subverts, shares, and repurposes the vocabularies of psychiatry, dentistry, the Bible, and academia in a humorous investigation of the contained intimacy of appointments and therapeutic relationships. Ultimately interested in how we learn, the experimental and lyrical poems in Waiting Room seek lessons in what it means to wait, to be a patient and to be patient, to be a student and to be a teacher, to be a healer and to be healed.
In four unique sections, Zilm invites readers to investigate the curious boundaries of various therapeutic terrains–from an exploration of the esoteric world of graduate school, where the subject is religion, to a mash-up of Dante’s vision of purgatory and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), to the improbable written intersections of van Gogh’s doctors and Sylvia Plath’s therapist.
Lovers of avant-garde and lyrical poetry will immediately connect with Zilm’s engaging, observant, and probing work, as will readers familiar with the realms of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods, in particular the DTES. And because of its many idiomatic forms (e.g., emails, tweets, recipes, etc.), its integration of a wide range of source materials, and its relatable settings and subject matter, Waiting Room could serve as a “gateway collection” for readers who don’t always connect with poetry, but enjoy other forms of literature.
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We Are Malala
$18.95We Are Malala is an imagined dialogue between Nobel Peace winner Malala Yousafzai and the poet about historical, cultural and spiritual themes. Malala’s autobiography, I Am Malala, inspired this collection. Judaism, Islam and Christianity are in increasingly and dangerously hot conflict. This volume of poetry, also inspired by Karen Armstrong and Sally Armstrong, two unrelated conciliators/activists, attempts to bridge the gap between those religions through dialogue and respect for other belief systems. This collection also includes artwork by the poet.
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What Became My Grieving Ceremony
$17.95Cara-Lyn Morgan joins those young Canadian poets who are driven by family experience to communicate with their pasts in order to inform their futures. Morgan’s complex cultural history that was generated from her M?tis mother and her Afro-Caribbean father necessitates an exploration of their struggles as distinctive cultures. It also insists on understanding the connectivity of her ancestral, cultural roots and the disparate values that shaped her.
“What Became My Grieving Ceremony draws us into a sprawling family, and we rub shoulders with Fr. Ed; Patrick, the daemonic uncle; Margrette Monkman; Leotha and with the author herself as she conducts her personal and familial archeology, locating the self in its web of relations. Morgan is also on a linguistic search for a lost Michif, that unique Western Canadian tongue, born of the union of two races. Following her, I was led to the wakes, the barns and various kitchens of her people, where I found myself both a stranger yet also home.” – Tim Lilburn
“Elegant and empathic, this fine book plumbs not only grief, but takes us through its rites: the anticipation of loss and its initial sting; the shouldering of a despair so vivid it hurts to succumb to memory’s unheralded quietude. Drawing from her M?tis and Trinidadian heritage, Morgan counterpoints the unassuaged suffering of her people with her family’s, experiencing them as only one alert person can. Open yourself to these poems, become their host, and live their affirmative message as your own.” -John Barton -
What the Soul Doesn’t Want
$16.95In her newest collection, Lorna Crozier describes the passage of time in the way that only she can. Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who – not unhappily – finds that cockroaches are drawn to her.
“God draws a life. And then begins to rub it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws a world in What the Soul Doesn’t Want, and then beckons us in. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.
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Whatever, Iceberg
$17.00“What if love existed but you didn’t have your notification settings turned on?” This is the first question Tara-Michelle Ziniuk asks in Whatever, Iceberg. The answer is a raucous portrait of love gone wrong (and sometimes right) in the Internet age. These are poems that capture the nervous intensity of longing and heartbreak as they explore how to be in a world where gender is ambiguous–as a lover, parent, activist and writer. Ziniuk knows that love and sex get messy and mixed up and she is fearless and funny in documenting the tumult of expectation and loss. Readers will find here a poet whose truth-telling bravely faces up to the most intimate details.
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Where the Blood Mixes
$16.95Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some, like Floyd, the legacy of that trauma has been passed down through families for generations. But what is the greater story, what lies untold beneath Floyd’s alcoholism, under the pain and isolation of the play’s main character?
Loring’s title was inspired by the mistranslation of the N’lakap’mux (Thompson) place name Kumsheen. For years, it was believed to mean “the place where the rivers meet”—the confluence of the muddy Fraser and the brilliant blue Thompson Rivers. A more accurate translation is: “the place inside the heart where the blood mixes.” But Kumsheen also refers to a story: Coyote was disemboweled there, along a great cliff in an epic battle with a giant shape-shifting being that could transform the world with its powers—to this day his intestines can still be seen strewn along the granite walls. In his rage the transformer tore Coyote apart and scattered his body across the nation, his heart landing in the place where the rivers meet.
Can a person survive their past; can a people survive their history? Irreverently funny and brutally honest, Where the Blood Mixes is a story about loss and redemption. Caught in a shadowy pool of alcoholic pain and guilt, Floyd is a man who has lost everyone he holds most dear. Now after more than two decades, his daughter Christine returns home to confront her father. Set during the salmon run, Where the Blood Mixes takes us to the bottom of the river, to the heart of a People.
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Wild Madder
$20.00Poems that stride bravely into the day-to-day, recovering the misdirected intensity at its core.
Brenda Leifso’s Wild Madder is about way-finding–through those moments in which you no longer recognize where you are. It’s about not knowing–who you are anymore, how to be in the world, how to love. It’s about what’s unspoken and about what speaks–conversation with the wild and animate world. It’s about marriage, family, motherhood–the drudgery in them and the quiet beauty.
This is lyric poetry wracked with pain, rage, and longing. In the beginning, the collection may read as though it’s been steeped in bitterness. Family can ask everything of a partner and parent and then turn around and take even more; Wild Madder feels like a note in a bottle washed up on the shores of a rough sea. But Leifso is not one to stand still or cling to darkness; in fact, we end up so far into the darkness that when she breaks through into light, it’s a conflagration of all the things that make us human.
These frank, bracingly recognizable poems will be irresistible–and cathartic–for anyone who has ever felt their life chewing them into little pieces.
“Brenda Leifso writes fearless poetry. Wild Madder turns the domestic inside out, revealing the ‘promise of thunder’ in the familiar. Hers is a generous voice, yet at the same time it is a charged one, calling us into the ‘long-toothed sun’. This is a book of fierce delights.” –Anne Simpson
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Woman Who Went to the Moon, The
$14.95The Woman Who Went to The Moon captures in poems, six days spent in the tiny community of Igloolik in the Arctic winter of January 2006. Ice-locked to the Melville Peninsula, Igloolik lies west of Baffin Island. This is the year of the Circumpolar Moon, where the full moon sweeps the heavens at the lowest point of its curve in its 18.6-year cycle. The poems are suffused with its light and the slow ebb of its celestial brightness in the days that follow, as the sun for first time in four months creeps over the horizon, heralding the approach of spring. The poems weave women’s igloo art, a community’s grief for teenage suicides, the immensity of landscape, and the tension between the Elder’s intuition and the outsiders’ science. Shifting between mythic tale-telling and the vibrancy of town life, these poems will speak to those for whom body, soul, and naming are not divisible.
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Yellow Crane
$20.00Inviting, human, capacious poems that grapple with ideas while also lightly grieving our capacity for ruin.
Yellow Crane, Susan Gillis’s fourth collection of poetry, is a book of many views, many voices. A long look at the changing landscape of a Montreal neighbourhood becomes at once a lament and a love poem. A sequence of poems inspired by Japanese tanka take on the cultural weather, core-drilling into the contradictions and uncertainties of the everyday. Writers, artists, thinkers, cooks, and others congregate in a hammock on the edge of a hayfield to compare notes on what we value. A bear turns up on a path near a quarry. The poems of Yellow Crane study, with a lover’s tender yet critical eye, the world we occupy and the way we occupy it: art, industry, environments both built and natural; the simultaneous flux and agelessness of our daily habits; the long human story of appropriation of wilderness; the fragility, resilience, and questionable worth of what we make, especially under political, economic, and social pressures; concern about our changing times; grief over what we leave behind. This is a book that argues with itself, then rests. At once precise and loose, wise and nimble, it will make you both feel and think–and care about the world along with it. We know the tree stands for promise
and for the desire, which comes much later, for atonement.
We stand at the west-facing window
and let the buildings opposite turn gold, then back to brick.
(from “Morning Light”)/