A long poem dramatizing the clash in visions of the land which occurs when a white settler builds on a sacred Iroquois site.

Résumé Une femme perd sa voix. Elle écrit pour reprendre possession de son corps abîmé. Elle chemine ainsi, s'ancre par l'écriture dans sa voix intime, qui résonne avec d'autres silences et paysages de terre, d'eau... La guérison est amorcée avec cette symphonie de voix. Une multitude de visages, de corps et de voix se tissent et se racontent à travers les routes qui n'en finissent pas. Ce livre est un grand silence, une halte entre nous et le vivant ; un bruissement qui dit la relation, la tendresse, l'existence, d'où la musique des mers, des fleuves et des forêts. Extrait « Après m'être amarrée à ce lac, après avoir tissé des liens avec autrui sur la base de cet espace partagé, j'ai fini par lui accorder une place privilégiée parmi les lieux du monde. D'où me vient ce désir de retourner au lac Marie-Le Franc chaque année en y amenant à chaque fois des personnes différentes, des gens du Québec, de France, de Belgique ? À l'été ou à l'automne, suivant un rythme régulier, la marée dépose au bord du lac des gens d'ici et d'ailleurs. J'ai la nette impression que tout cela dépasse de loin ma propre volonté et que l'endroit lui-même est désormais soumis au mouvement du ressac. Le lac s'est ouvert au vent du large, il est devenu dans mon esprit un lac transatlantique. » Point de vue de l'auteure Tisser les voix répond au mouvement général qui traverse le livre. Quand j'ai perdu la voix, je me suis mise à écrire, mais aussi à écouter davantage. J'ai fait plus de place à la parole des autres. Quand je tisse les voix, la mienne se fonde dans un ensemble, elle va à la rencontre des autres, c'est ce mouvement qui me permet d'avancer. Quand la voix se brise, quand elle s'absente, il faut tout reconstruire, cela ne peut se faire que dans l'intimité. Apprivoiser le silence. L'auteure Originaire de Bretagne, Rachel Bouvet a émigré au Québec après un séjour en Égypte. Sa fascination pour le désert, la mer et la forêt l'a poussée vers la géopoétique. Professeure au département d'études littéraires à l'UQÀM, elle a publié des essais et des récits.

Debut poetry collection by Nakawe writer, illustrator and graphic artist NShannacappo, the poetry best encapsulates the idea of someone who is Asunder. Being broken, but not staying broken and perhaps not being quite whole in the end because we are never truly broken and nor are we ever truly whole. Instead, we are always aspiring to be both unbroken and whole.

In THOU, Aisha Sasha John knows the day – biblically. What if time itself was an object of desire? And the book was a theatre for that? Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time. Which is why she discipled in it. For three years. Also for three months. Also for three months at 33. Ya. Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time and discipled in time, moving it across her body, watching it, um, course the day. She slowed it down and thought along it, she cut it up. She slowed it down and thunk along it and sped it up. She cut it up and spaced it out and rhythmed it down and laid it flat and looked at it hard. Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time. She did it. She did time. It was gross and funny and it was hard and it was good. The result is/was – THOU.

Shortlisted for the 2016 ReLit Award

A razor-sharp eye for detail roams and redeems imperfections
both personal and collective.

The world in Carolyn Marie Souaid’s latest collection is both an act of the imagination and a responsibility. Souaid’s poems zoom in and out, shifting focus to accommodate varied dimensions of experience. We move from the breakdown of a relationship to primordial ooze to a suicide bomb to a son doing his math homework. In a disarmingly personable voice, Souaid investigates our darker moments, faces up to losses and failures both intimate and public, often with wry humour. If our world is an imperfect invention, it is also, for Souaid, a source of wonder— where “the trick was not to fall asleep but to notice everything / in its brevity.”

I’ve no idea what it is to be moss or jade
in the spectrum of green. There are no patterns;
there is no good light to measure anything by.
The laws of physics drop like an ax.

In the end, the body doesn’t keep.

—from “Where Night Takes Me”

Praise for This World We Invented:

“These bold, important poems have grappled with beauty and chosen honesty … [T]hey offer no easy consolations, but because they are made things … they reflect a hope for change.” —Stephanie Bolster

In this stunning long poem, Chantal Neveu draws from the lexicons of science, art, revolution and corporeal movement to forge intense and extended rhythms that invoke the elements and spaces making up our world. This is poetry capable of holding life and death, solidarity and love. Renewal. Breathing.
In its brevity and persistence, This Radiant Life is a material call for action: it asks us to let go, even just a little bit, of our individuality in favour of mutuality, to arrive separately yet in unison at a radiance in which all living beings can thrive.
Praise for This Radiant Life:
"This Radiant Life strikes a resonant chord with its sparse minimalism. This indexical poetry records private activities, travels, daily living, details the body’s nervous system alongside sudden explosions of brutal events and media frameworks. A capacity for complexity through elliptical building blocks.  Violence side by side with train journeys. Collective brutality side by side with personal intimacy or physiological flow. Very few words are hosted on each of these aerated pages. Turning the page in itself confirms the implicit need for breathing space, or for trying to make some sense of it all, while being carried along the currents of one’s own time. Everything intermingled. Inescapable as the butterfly effect. Words work like knots of awareness down the rope of lines." —Caroline Bergvall
"Oscillating between various subatomic particles, spaces, and word matter that make life life—i.e. the stuff and messiness of being, the macro and the micro, the chemistry, biology, geology, language of experience/experiment—This Radiant Life entreats us to slow down, attend to, and cherish the elemental. In so doing, we will have access to an inexhaustible force for resistance and resilience; we will be able to truly see and be seen by others. Powerfully embodied and chiselled by Chantal Neveu and deftly and intricately translated by Erín Moure, This Radiant Life is urgent, alive, and absolutely present. —Oana Avasilichioaei"
"As Chantal Neveu and Erín Moure mine the mono dimensional sediment of language they liberate a vocabulary of synaesthetic perception. This Radiant Life crushes narrative and reference, not into parts of speech but into illuminated particles, 'words as such.' In this trans-collaboration, words reciprocate the speed and spaces on the perimeter of public sensibility. Gangues of language like 'eye to eye' 'word flow' in the face of the Arab Springs, 'the sound of paper,' 'coffee/ reheated/ on the hob,' 'zig?zag' float by as radiant flecks and syllables on a perceptual horizon. Each turn of the page carries an echo of isolate light, the answer to what happens next." —Fred Wah

These are poems about what it means to be from the north ; a town divided along colour lines ; and a family dealing with its history of secrets. At it's core, this collection is about the life of a Cree girl and the places she finds comfort and escape .... Rosanna Deerchild is Cree from South Indian Lake, Manitoba.

COCKEYED: askew, crooked, intoxicated, absurd; marked by bends or angles; incongruous, not straight. In other words, Jim Christy, Canada's most iconoclastic and irreverent poet, views this cockeyed world the way it is; not only with 20/20 but x-ray vision and often through laughter and tears.

Winner of the 2007 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and the 2007 City of Saskatoon Prize and nominated for Book of the Year (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards

Fierce and delicate poems from a young poet reminiscent of Jane Hirshfield and Jan Zwicky

Rapt, musical, passionately engaged, the poems in Thin Moon Psalm move towards their own inner stillness, while also bearing witness to the power of relatedness – to family, lovers, and the prairie landscape itself. Many of them are poems of remembrance and deep grieving, recalling in etched details the rigours and joys of life on a prairie farm, and those iconic moments which are alive with the unspoken – moments between father and daughter, mother and child, sister and sister, lover and lover, poet and friend. Especially they take on the burden of what is lost, knowing “There is always a room we will never return to” and “we return only through loss: the place where we began.”

The great horned owl underfeather you found
suspended on brome teaches you about the near
imperceptibility of grief. About thinness.
How light, hardly snared by down,
filters through and changes just-so
and so grief wears you, makes
you its slight shadow.

From “The Breath of Looking”

Sheri Benning grew up on a small farm in central Saskatchewan and now lives in Saskatoon. She has also lived in St. Petersburg (Russia), Fredericton, and Edmonton. Her first book, Earth After Rain, won the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Prize (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and the Brenda MacDonald Riches First Book Award. An earlier version of Thin Moon Psalm won the 2004 Writers Federation of New Brunswick Alfred G. Bailey Prize for unpublished manuscripts.

‘In Thin Moon Psalm Sheri Benning performs an uncanny trick: she uses words as a means of hearing as well as saying things. As we read her graceful generous poems we join with her in drinking the world in – its darkness and loveliness and nameless potencies. ” — John Steffler