Longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards

Carla Hartsfield sings praises to the unusual: a rose blooming in December; an angel dancing on a cardiologist’s scanner; Glenn Gould playing Brahms at Angelo’s Garage. But these are common occurrences in Your Last Day on Earth, the everyday world and the metaphysical realm sharing the same ecstatic poem. Hartsfield transforms the contents of her psyche into music that we can all hear, the kind that replays for days in the dark, dreamy parts of our selves.

She was here inside the purple-eyed daisies
and honeysuckle lining the fence —

arriving seconds after visiting the moon,
her starched, white dress

cascading from frothy clouds —
but even more white like the light

that is said to emanate from reverence.

from “Nightshine”

“Carla Hartsfield is, like a figure in one of these vivid poems, ‘a charming pyromaniac.’ Under her magnifying glass, the world bristles into smoke: the ‘starched hexagons’ of Queen Anne’s Lace ‘quiver with cocaine bloom’ and water drops become ‘diamonds’ on the speaker’s skin when she plays Bach naked after a shower. Sometimes these fires liberate, sometimes they celebrate, sometimes they memorialize, and always they transform.” – Stephanie Bolster

A poetry that is at once harrowing, angry, and achingly beautiful

Patrick Woodcock has spent the past seven years engaging with and being shaped by the people, politics, and landscapes of the Kurdish north of Iraq, Fort Good Hope in the Northwest Territories, and Azerbaijan. His powerful new collection offers a poetry that simultaneously explores hope and horror while documenting the transformative processes of coping. You can’t bury them all follows the narratives we construct to survive the tragic failures of our humanity to their very end: everything that’s buried by snow, dirt, and ash, just like everything that’s buried by politics, homophobia, sexism, racism, religion; and history is resurrected, demanding to be heard and addressed.

In Woodcock’s poetry, how we deal with what resurfaces is the key. What do those who suffer really mean to those who have abandoned them to small, conscience-soothing charitable donations or the occasional tweet? How can the poet, or anyone else, sleep at night knowing homosexuals are being thrown off building tops, after one steps into a hole and finds an abandoned corpse in an Azeri cemetery, or after the elders of an Aboriginal community are left helpless against those who only want to exploit them? Still, You can’t bury them all demonstrates that the world is not just the horrific place the media often portrays. In each of the worlds he touches, Woodcock discovers a spirit and strength to celebrate.

Inviting, human, capacious poems that grapple with ideas while also lightly grieving our capacity for ruin.

Year Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along songlines as though following passages of Koto music. In Brian Henderson’s poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed by awareness of the paradoxes at the heart of language, that language wants you for itself, and that what is named, falls. Whether focusing on the dying of a parent or fellow poet, or on the coming-to-be of a child, this poetry is alive with the truth that “The dead burn through us/ the not yet born.”

“What a wonderful book this is! Henderson tells the old story how dear ones die, and new lives come to be. In a world that’s dense, opaque, yet lit with random hints of something being uttered. The result is a marvel of passionate, glancing eloquence. I wanted it never to end.” –Dennis Lee

In this Ottawa writer's first volume of verse, there are trees, of course—catalpas on stained-glass transoms, an ever-present crabappel, nameless species in whose bare branches the winter solstice lurks. There is music, too—a whorehouse tango, a string quartet enthralling a favourite cat, the silky caress of a clarinet along the remembered flesh of adolescence. And visual art, from the Middle Ages through Matisse, is reenacted in vignettes of desire or dereliction.

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards

Whatever their subject — the unwinding of lovers, childhood as the foundation of being, the metaphorical life of everyday objects and events — S.E. Venart’s poems show us a kind of courage that is quotidian. Surviving childhood, surviving failed love, finding solace in the self, and reinvigorating that self: this is the world Venart reveals to us, in all its prescient detail. A honest and lyrical first book.

…The car gained momentum, sped down hills.
Over one tanned sister’s shoulder I saw vivid fields

locked behind white lengths of birch. Wires loped
between attendant poles. Strapped into our seats,

we had in common things we couldn’t get at.
Up on the wires, small birds alighted, fluttered off

as if together they’d all heard
the same charged message.

from “Power Lines”

“Venart’s poetry reveals itself in the world of mysteries that lies between ‘one bright orange next to one bright knife.’ Such is the domestic tension she creates, where home is turned inside out so the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Yet the power of her writing shows how simple things, observed with clarity, are lit from within. This is a book to read, then read again: once for the bright orange and once for the bright knife.”

-Anne Simpson

Tragic-comedic genius emerges in this first book by Chris D’Iorio, kaleidoscopically vivid poetry that is commoditized with the placid title of Without Blue, innocently confessing a condition of lack-lustre lack. A few disarmingly personal lyrics usher us into a book that seems rather sincere and contemplative. Then the intensely capable drive of the poet shifts gears into his Grand Prix artistic race that pits the mud of cynicism against poetry’s slickly navigable satirical engine of agency. Homer, Mallarmé and Ginsberg cohort with D’Iorio in a serious call out of our culture’s infatuation with breakneck profit, profligate glamour and political impunity.

These poems are steeped in loss and lament as they concern the death of the poet’s family members, particularly her father and the premature death of two brothers two years apart. The collection’s tone is often elegiac, but rarely maudlin, and the clipped narrative is frequently imbued with lyrical strains.There is an abundance of quotes and hat-tip allusions that act as sign posts along the grieving journey.

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.