Poems 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.

Poetry that explores how accidental voyeurism can force reconsideration and reconciliation
 

White⋅out: n. a surface condition … in which no object casts a shadow, the horizon cannot be seen, and only dark objects are discernible …

Whiteout: when the heavy weather of daily life establishes the measure of the measureless; when the predatory nature of the accidental conjures cowboys and the comatose; when the sickly sweet pop of life underfoot contrasts the televised image, shrinking to a pinprick.

Whiteout: calques and towers, twin polar storms, falling, burning.

Whiteout: “a book of white nothing.”

George Murray’s sixth collection has been a decade in the making. At once taut, tender and terrifying, haunted and haunting, Whiteout shatters convention in the collision of order and rage, formlessness and hard-won serenity.

in the poem / of the world / there once / was a map / of the map / composed in / the likeness / of a poemIn this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereaboutspowerfully charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the polemics of self and other.Taking on cartographic distortions and dynamics of the map metaphor, "thereabouts (or the mapmaker's dilemma)" playfully confronts the quandaries of personal navigation when the wants and needs of the esemplastic mind are forever devising new places to be. Exploring the brain, its neurons, and serpentine synaptic connections, "hereabouts (in fourteen scans)" advances a poetry of rhizomic communication capturing networks of thought and feeling that spring from both conflict and caress. Within a relationship's countless masquerades and revelations, "whereabouts (the lovers' discourse)" invites the reader to eavesdrop on a series of intimate conversations wherein lovers argue and act out their richly populated inner lives, addressing issues of gender, pleasure, communication, control, and sex.

Three Canadian soldiers awaiting deployment to Afghanistan beat a homeless man to death on the steps of their armoury after a night of heavy drinking. The poet, whose downtown Toronto home overlooks the armoury and surrounding park, describes the crime, its perpetrators, the victim, and a cast of homeless witnesses that includes the woman, a prostitute, who first alerts police. The subsequent trial evokes reflection on the immigrant experience the poet shares with one of the accused, and on the agony of that young soldier's mother. From Kandahar to Bridgetown to Mississauga, Ontario, Where the Sun Shines Best encompasses a tragedy of epic scope, a lyrical meditation on poverty, racism and war, and a powerful indictment of the ravages of imperialism.

Under the covers of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, David Eso and Jeanette Lynes collect letters and epistolary poems from more than 120 Canadian poets, including Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Louis Riel, Alden Nowlan, Anne Szumigalski , Leonard Cohen, John Barton, and Di Brandt, and many others, encompassing the breadth of this country's English literary history. Presented in order not of the chronology of composition, but according to the poets' ages at the time of writing, the poems in the book comprise a single lifeline. The reader follows an amalgam of the Poet from the passionate intensity of youth, through the regrets and satisfactions of adulthood and middle age, and into the reflective wisdom of old age. All the writings are about love, but love in a dizzying array of colours, shapes, and sizes. Deep, enduring love, unrequited love, passionate love, violent love. Here are odes and lyric ecstasies, tirades and tantrums, pastoral comforts and abject horrors — all delivered with the vibrancy, wit, and erudition of our finest poets. Where the Nights Are Twice as Long is more than an anthology: it is an unforgettable journey into the long night of love.

In his first collection of poetry, Max Layton takes the post apocalypse to new heights. Satirical in places, full of longing and remorse in others, the poems (each beginning with "When the rapture comes ...") bring together memories of family, trips to fantasylands, and outrageous humour. Life, in other words, in all its varied colours and shapes -- despite the shadow of when the rapture comes.

Edited by Mark Abley; Preface by Hilary Clark; Afterword by Mark Abley

” … one of Canada’s major poets. The audacity – the courage – of her imagination teaches us, gives us our better selves.” — Tim Lilburn

This posthumous collection will be a delightful surprise for readers who thought they had heard the last of Anne Szumigalski’s nimble, sideslipping, otherworldly voice. Szumigalski’s poetic universe is as beguiling and unpredictable as dreams and myth, and like them, her universe can be enchanting, visually lush, and suddenly dangerous.

Untitled (“glory to the queen …”)

glory to the queen whoever she is
wherever she finds herself as she moves
up and down round and round
all the spaces that are hers

once she was a young thing and jumped
easily over any fence any line
now she’s an old woman thick and earthy

by tomorrow she hopes to leap
out of this skin and into a new one
a skin like petals like leaves

The poems deal with ultimate questions. What is time? What is memory? Is it invented or real? Is death a kind of dream? Is life? Is God a man, a woman, or a Sacred Reptile? The imaginative leaps in When Earth Leaps Up are as easy as looking up at the prairie sky, as simple as turning your head to the side to catch a glimpse of an idea as it skips past you in the form of an interesting stranger, a passing cloud, the face of a loved one, long dead.

Mark Abley is the editor or author of 10 books, including the internationally acclaimed Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Abley is the literary executor for Anne Szumigalski.

What We Carry is a profound exploration of the weight of human history at three levels: the individual, the cultural, and environmental. From her brilliant "Extinction Sonnets"--odes to various disappearing species--to a spirited examination of everyday salutations, Susan Glickman's range astonishes: ice storms, sugar maples, early love on the Orient Express, an archaeological dig at Mycenae. Serious but not solemn, full of linguistic and imagistic playfulness, the collection is anchored by poetic translations of Chopin's 24 Preludes, opus 28--his most experimental and characteristic compositions. The intimacy of Chopin's project has inspired sound-rich poems that, once again, prove Glickman's gift for capturing the frailty of human connections in a damaged world.

What does it mean to be a man now? These poems' answers are bold and deeply moving.