In her first collection of poems, Suzanne Robertson meditates on the nature of intimacy; the connective tissue that binds stranger to stranger, human to animal, soul to landscape, heart to mind. Inspired by the Buddhist paramitas– actions that spark a spiritual sojourn, the poems attempt to both transcend and stay grounded in a conventional universe. Follow the humourous, pedestrian plight of a secretary/writer grappling with her noonday demon, her love affair with Little Black, and the metamorphosis of her marriage as she harnesses the practical power of poetry, marrying words "to the wind horse," "to the lies and the gossip and the truth of the river / as it pours out the mouth of right-now." Paramita, Little Black explores acts of transformation; documenting a journey to live and love authentically amidst the transient anatomy of our twenty-first century lives.

Paradise Regained is a poem by the 17th century English poet John Milton, published in 1671. It is connected by name to his earlier and more famous epic poem Paradise Lost, with which it shares similar theological themes. Based on the Gospel of Luke’s version of the Temptation of Christ, Paradise Regained is more thoughtful in writing style, and thrives upon the imagery of Jesus’ perfection in contrast to the shame of Satan.

A selection of poetry chosen from the best works of Michael Dugan and Doug Macleod with jokes and fun, hilarious domestic life and strange forms of domestic nonsense.

His body, like yours, would lie mute as a plumuntil a vigilant limb came to a decision. As you might have guessed I've come to one myself. Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know 'you' is you? What good is it to decorate a headstone? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-­old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers. 'Ladouceur writes with an awareness of queer history, documenting it faithfully, but with his own twist … This is poetry motivated by an honest wit.'-- John Barton, Arc Poetry Magazine

Longlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award

Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness.

With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination-those supposedly incompatible room-mates-into electrical connection. The result is a poetry of daring honesty, close observation, and humanity, executed with exhilarating verve and humour.

Each day’s a notch on the oven dial
the sadistic hand of summer turns. The locals here
wear mirrored glasses with the mirrors reversed!
Was I ever filled with sweetness and courage?
For miles and miles the asphalt unwinds, the river’s
evil twin. So is desire your enemy’s friend,
goes the jazz of imagined footsteps

slapping the city’s impervious skin. So each day
lapses, un-spools each night as I go scheming
ways to continue, safe within and darkly through
an immaterial sublime. But the walls are sweating
and the windows here peer in towards this sheltered
corner of the universe-where I’m in trouble again
with words, and other people’s lives.

– from “Cross-Sections”

“A tender work of trouble and troubles, cracked language, courage. Peer into the cocked eye of this book and discover yourself staring back. A maker of strange and wonder, Chris Hutchinson writes poems that ‘shimmer, break softly open, at once ourselves, and other.'” – Matt Rader

Le travail de Dionne Brand a toujours été « un creuset de lyrisme incantatoire et de cinglante critique sociale » (Barbara Carey). En effet, couvrant à la fois l’intime et le collectif, Ossuaires opère un désancrage des mots  : délestés de leur contexte immédiat, bardés d’images contradictoires, ils font perdre pied au lecteur. Bien que le constat soit résolument noir, des espoirs demeurent : dresser une généalogie de créateurs et d’activistes qui ont lutté contre la répression, et répertorier les multiples aspects de la fragile beauté du monde.

Orioles in the Oranges is a collection of poems that tells the story of love and loss as they find common ground in a Metis legend and in modern times. The poems weave the contemporary voice of a young woman who finds herself on Pelee Island letting go of a lover with the telling of the Pelee Island story of a Metis woman who plunges to her death in Lake Erie after being abandoned by her English husband. The narratives dovetail, and grapple with the pull of physical and psychic places that we all find in the experience of finding and losing love.

A polyphonic hymn to Northern British Columbia by one of its boldest, most exciting writers.

Orient is the third collection from one of Western Canada’s most accomplished poets. Composed mainly of three long poems—an extended meditation on the connection between man and fish, the lament of a big-souled cowboy poet looking up from rock bottom, and a historical envisioning of an intimate relationship between a pioneer and a powerful crone—orient leaps, sings, burrows down, and orients the reader within its rich ecosystem. The appeal of these poems lies partly in their blend of humility (the open-minded approach), in their force (the taut style, the original vision) and in an astonishing boldness. Wigmore is a ‘poet of place’ in the best sense: “about the big picture.”

I had a job and then I didn’t

but once I spoke a tavern sermon
that came to me in darkness
and men I knew who crossed the street

who shunned me in daylight
they wept
and that’s something

—from “tavern”

Gillian Wigmore is the author of two previous books of poems: soft geography (Caitlin Press, 2007), winner of the 2008 ReLit Award, and Dirt of Ages (Nightwood, 2012), as well as a novella, Grayling, (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2014). Her work has been published in magazines, shortlisted for prizes and anthologized. She lives in Prince George, BC.

One False Move is Tim Conley’s debut collection of poetry. As it tightropes along meaning in language, our understandings of, and relationships with, one another, and even our continued survival, it balances elegance with clumsiness, and disenchantment with unrepentant feeling. It is a book for the disenchanted, discombobulated and dissenting, for those who do not believe in wrong numbers, for those who render schematic diagrams on their ballots, for anyone stranded anywhere and for those who long to be stranded, for anyone who thinks that there are not just two sides to the question because questions do not have sides, for those who laugh and are lonely and still laugh because they can’t help it.