Subjects & Themes
25
By Richard Harrison
Richard Harrison's The Hero of the Play has been in print continuously for twenty-five years, with a tenth anniversary edition released in 2004. 25 is a celebration of this fact, as well as a meditation on twenty-five years of hockey poetry. This collection is a cataloguing of ... Read more
A Bee Garden
By Marilyn Gear Pilling
At the heart of this luminous collection, Pilling's fifth, is a searing sequence of poems tracing a family's grief at the suicide of a girl on the threshhold of womanhood: daughter, sister, niece, about-to-be-aunt. Yet in these, as in all of the poems, what comes through is ... Read more
A Calendar of Reckoning
By Dave Margoshes
With careful attention to detail, and evocative turns of phrase, Dave Margoshes introspectively looks back on youth. Intriguing metaphors, reminiscent of pastoral imagery, create a sharp contrast between the heavy subject matter of one’s own mortality, and the beautiful, evocative ... Read more
A Cemetery for Holes
In A Cemetery for Holes, poetic language bends and breaks, resists and reforms under the stress of family trauma. Consensual reality shifts with nonconsensual harm. It is this history of violence which is ultimately confronted, fought against, and overcome. While engaged in ... Read more
A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People
By Gabe Foreman
People who rely on stereotypes are often vilified. But really, is there a better way to classify people? There are some taxonimical difficulties, though. Exactly how many types of people are there? What behaviours are characteristic of each particular group? How do you know ... Read more
A Few Words Will Do
By Lionel Kearns
These brief but concentrated pieces of literary work seem at first simple in their approach and straightforward in their intent: designed to be read easily and then to be carried away in our memories. As if they were ours. But when one person writes “this is what happened, ... Read more
A Generous Latitude
By Lenea Grace
Lenea Grace’s debut collection maps a series of relationships within a greater exploration of Canadiana, barreling through shield and crag, river and slag. A Generous Latitude is not afraid of beer, bears, internal rhyme, David Hasselhoff, sediment, or sentiment. It does, ... Read more
A History of the Theories of Rain
By Stephen Collis
A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe through its dissolution of the categories of “man-made” and “natural. ” How do we go on with our ... Read more
A History of Touch
By Erin Vance
Bearing witness to women in history.
A History of Touching is a poetry collection about women in folklore and history who were ill, disabled, or otherwise labelled ‘hysteric. ’ The work bears witness to the lives of women with varying experiences, such as a woman whose epilepsy ... Read more
A Is for Acholi
By Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
A is for Acholi is a sweeping collection exploring diaspora, the marginalization of the Acholi people, the dusty streets of Nairobi and the cold grey of Vancouver. Playfully upending English and scholarly notation Bitek rearranges the alphabet, hides poems in footnotes and slips ... Read more