Juhan Liiv (1864-1913) has the same significance for Estonian culture that Federico García Lorca and T.S. Eliot have for modern culture created, respectively, in Spanish and English. Liiv's existential-patriotic and intimate-holistic lyrics have had an impact across Estonian society. Rebellion against all models and fashions existing in poetry unites Liiv with Walt Whitman: noble and proud, always in search of original expression, ever aspiring to resemble God in the inimitability of creation.

Shortlisted for the 2001 Pat Lowther Award and the 2001 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes)

Hear the rustle all down the block as people unwrap the box of the Fifties. Life will be a clock, a pet, it will wag its tail and lie down. Food will glisten in mounds on the breakfast tables and skirts will go taffeta-taffeta. — from “Aldredge Place”

In her second book, Slow-Moving Target, Sue Wheeler unwraps more than the Fifties. She unwraps a whole shopful of environments and events, and winds them up and sets them down to delight her readers. There is no sentimentalizing here – either of people or of other places and times – and yet the writing is so consistently sharp, perceptive, and clear, that the overall direction is always towards hope, towards the light.

“Here is a poet who keenly observes the world and its people with humour and love. I will return to these pages again and again for their verbal surprises and unflinching honesty. While highly intelligent, these poems are not intellectual; they speak to us in language that packs a passionate wallop.” – Patricia Young

Longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards

Slovenly Love is Méira Cook’s third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. “A Year of Birds” sensuously explores erosion of self in the gain of new life in motherhood; “Blue Lines” concerns a woman and her double, the imperishable self she “left” to become the self she is; “Trawling: a biography of the river” introduces Heraclitus into the Winnipeg Flood of 1997, the Red River becoming a river of the mind; “Kiss by the Hôotel de Ville,” an extended meditation on varieties of dislocation between art and reality, focuses on Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph of the same title; “Tempestuous” is a passionate, Miranda-centred reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Each sequence is distinct, but together they explore a life of gap, fragment, flux. “Ah swift-wingèd youth,” says a voice in “Trawling,” “the world is, was, and ever will be full of wonder.” Slovenly Love, in its exhilarating renovation of words and forms, gorgeously confirms that.

Says she favours tattoos, impermanent
as the memory of these blue lines. Hey,
beautiful, throw me a line, she calls,
too low to hear. Every third word slightly
erased, as if blurred by a wet thumb. Always
known we are lost in a long poem, fragmented
to gloss memory, she says.
Nevertheless, she adds, treading water,
I am not as melancholy as I seem to be
when that complaint escapes me.

from “Blue Lines”

Think Kierkegaard in a spacesuit, Kubrik in a Left Bank café.Like the neutrino observatory of its title, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande seeks "glimpses of the obscure" to carve out meaning, alternately a resistance to rationalism and its champion. It aims to tear through abstraction with the concrete, either catastrophic -- road accidents, nuclear explosions, floods, extinction, eviction, suicide -- or quotidian, finding threads of love, empathy, and belief within the fray. These poems delight in aphorism, paradox, puns, and wit, each stanza a closure that moves tangentially to the next, each poem more bricolage than narrative, more shuffle than playlist. These are poems with no middle. These are poems of beginnings, and of ends.

Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey’s Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy. Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself in demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O – offering, along the way, a sincere contemplation of mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore. Unembarrassed by its literary allusions or its hi-lo hybridity, Sitcom’s strategic and encompassing voice is prepared for each comedic disaster and is, somehow, always ready for next week’s episode. ‘McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack.’ – The Washington Post ‘[McGimpsey] finds the humanity hiding in the hilarity. This guy is as funny as David Sedaris, and more inventive.’ – The Ottawa Citizen

"Tough talk for tough times. Silencer is both lyrical and merciless-Wicker's mind hums in overdrive, but with the calm and clarity of a marksman. You have to read these poems." -Tim Seibles, author of One Turn Around the Sun and finalist for the National Book Award A suburban park, church, a good job, a cocktail party for the literati: to many, these sound like safe places, but for a young black man these insular spaces don't keep out the news-and the actual threat-of gun violence and police brutality, or the biases that keeps body, property, and hope in the crosshairs. Continuing conversations begun by Citizen and Between the World and Me, Silencer sings out the dangers of unspoken taboos present on quiet Midwestern cul-de-sacs and in stifling professional settings, the dangers in closing the window on "a rainbow coalition of cops doing calisthenics around/a six-foot, three-hundred-fifty-pound man, choked back into the earth for what/looked a lot, to me, like sport." Here, the language and cadences of hip-hop and academia meet prayer-these poems are crucibles, from which emerge profound allegories and subtle elegies, sharp humor and incisive critiques. "There is not a moment in this book when you are allowed to forget the complexities of a black man's life in America. These poems evoke so much-strength, beauty, passion, fear. There is the quiet, ironic pleasure of life on a cul-de-sac juxtaposed with the tensions of always wondering when a police officer's gun or fists might get in the way of the black body. The stylistic range of these poems, the wit, and the intelligence of them offers so much to be admired. There is nothing silent about Silencer. What an outstanding second book from Marcus Wicker." -Roxane Gay "Marcus Wicker's masterful and hard-hitting second collection Silencer is exactly the book we need in this time of malfeasance, systemic violence, and the double talk that obfuscates it all. Wicker's poems have the wit and rhythmic muscle to push back against the institutional flim-flam. He writes the kinds of vital, clear-eyed poems we can turn to when codeswitching slogans and online power fists no longer get the job done. These are poems whose ink is made from anger and quarter notes. They remind us that to remain silent in the face of aggression is to be complicit and to be complicit is not an option for any of us." -Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke and finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize"Silencer is an important book of American poetry: wonderfully subtle, wholly original, and subversive. Politics and social realities aside, this is foremost a book that delights in language, how it sounds to the ear and plays to the mind. We have suburban complacency played against hip-hop resistance, Christian prayers uttered in the face of dread violence, real meaning pitted against materialism, and love, in its largest measure, set against ignorance. To say Silencer is a tour de force would be an understatement. What a work of true art this is, and what a gift Marcus Wicker has given to us."-Maurice M

Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty / the measure of our pain? and I will answer. To be ill is to be a body bursting with strangers. A curiosity. A narrative to interpret. Dominik Parisien's debut collection is a poignant celebration of the complicated lived experience of disability, a challenge to the societal gaze, and a bold reconfiguration of the language of pain. A powerful contribution to the field of disability poetics, Side Effects May Include Strangers is an affecting look at the multitude of ways a body is both boundary and boundless. Parisien takes bpNichol's claim that "what is a poem is inside of your body" and localizes the inner and outer lives of disabled, queer, and aging bodies as points of meaning for issues of autonomy, disability, sexuality, and language. Balancing hope and uncertainty, anger and gratitude, these poems shift from medical practice to myth, from trauma to intergenerational friendship, in an unflinching exploration of the beauty and complexity of othered bodies.

The poems in this collection originated as a response to Elmore Leonard's "Ten Rules of Writing" and metamorphosed into poetic responses to quotations and epigraphs on a variety of subjects.

A new collection of poetry by Douglas Kearney.