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Poetry shop

The ALU Poetry Shop

Happy National Poetry Month! Explore our Poets Resist collection, featuring poetry that challenges, inspires, and pushes back, published by independent Canadian presses. From bold new voices to award-winning collections and powerful collaborations, there’s something here for every reader ready to engage with poetry as an act of resistance.

While we encourage shopping directly through All Lit Up, we also offer a Shop Local option so you can support your nearest indie bookseller—just click the Shop Local button on any book page to locate your nearest indie.

Enjoy browsing our collections, below.

Prize-winning and Acclaimed Resistance

Don’t take our word for it: these books have some serious literary awards cred.

“Disabled people don’t forget each other / even when everybody else obliterates / or never cared to know in the first place”

–Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha,
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other

“Truth and Reconciliation, / anti-Blackness, anti-racism, / Indigenization, all play hide and seek.”

–Delores V. Mullings, Black Girl in the Ring

Graphic reading “Poets Resist (Again)” with an illustrated hand holding a megaphone.

Poets / Resist

For NPM, we interview 21 poets about their work and share poems for a month-long celebration that reminds us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices and impose control over how we live and imagine.


“I shall not forget the beauty of home.”

–Jide Salawu, Contraband Bodies

“My mother tells me: / the greatest proof that God is a man / is what He lets happen to women.”

–Qurat Dar, Non-Prophet

Collective Resistance

Teamwork makes the dream work in these collaborative collections.

Resist the Patriarchy

Unapologetic poetry about women’s experiences.

“The world is what we pretend the Earth to be.”

–Richard Harrison, My Mother Joins the Resistance