YYC POP is the legacy project by Calgary Poet Laureate, Sheri-D Wilson. A collection of poetry written by current and ex-pat Calgarians, the works contained in the collection celebrate ordinary and extraordinary Calgarians. She asked the community to write about someone who represents or captures the essence of Calgary as we are today.

You won't always be this sad, her mother, who also lost a son, reassures her, while a close friend encourages her to pick up the pen and write it all down. Capturing her own struggles as she emerges from shock in the wake of her son's unexpected death at age thirty-seven, author and storyteller Sheree Fitch writes unabashedly, with deep sorrow, unexpected rage, and boundless love. She discovers that she 'dwells in a thin place now,' that she has crossed a threshold only to find herself in 'the quicksand that is grief.' The result is a memoir of immense power and pain, a collection of moments, and a journey of resilience that lyrically combines prose and verse. Readers, bearing witness to the immeasurable depths of a mother's love, will be forever changed.

A moving collection of poetry about navigating mid-life, full of humour and wit, from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor. This debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor is both an intimate deep dive and a humorous glance at the tumultuous decade of her forties. Through crisp and vivid language, Doctor explores mid-life breakups and dating, female genital cutting, imprints of racism and misogyny, and the oddness of sex and love, and urges us to take a second look at the ways in which human relationships are never what we expect them to be.

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

Reading Julie Berry’s poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. “like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this,” Berry writes in “Touching Ground.”  “Like this” is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues. Her images are so completely unexpected and yet so thoroughly right that you are left wondering why you never imagined “the minute hand [falling] into the refrigerator and breakfast/ . . . clattering across the lawn/ its spoons and bowls and burning toast.” Her eye is keen and quirky; its wide embrace enfolds the highways and cemeteries of southwestern Ontario, flying pianos, her lover’s ex-neck, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, furniture cleaners, suicides and mass strandings. And of course her reader. Here is a poet whose honesty and wry humour loosen the tangles of the heart.

“When you walk into the world with these poems in your head, the world has a new clarity, more light. The most startling and unforgettable book of poetry I’ve read in a long time.” – Susan Musgrave

"From Ian Williams, author of Reproduction, winner of the Giller Prize and a June 2020 Indie Next Great Read Frustrated by how tough the issues of our time are to solve - racial inequality, our pernicious depression, the troubled relationships we have with other people - Ian Williams revisits the seemingly simple questions of grade school for inspiration: if Billy has five nickels and Jane has three dimes, how many Black men will be murdered by police? He finds no satisfaction, realizing that maybe there are no easy answers to ineffable questions. Williams uses his characteristic inventiveness to find not just new answers but new questions, reconsidering what poetry can be, using math and grammar lessons to shape poems that invite us to participate. Two long poems cut through the text like vibrating basenotes, curiosities circle endlessly, and microaggressions spin into lyric. And all done with a light touch and a joyful sense of humour."--

Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada's most recognized poets. The first part of the book, "Dangerous Sound," contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. "Muskrat Woman," the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, "Ghost Dance," raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield's poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From "Killer," Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: "I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you."