Of the Subcontract is a collection of poems about computational capitalism, each of which was written by an underpaid worker subcontracted through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk service. The collection is ordered according to cost-of-production and repurposes metadata about the efficiency of each writer to generate informatic typographic embellishments. Those one hundred poems are braced between two newly commissioned essays; the whole book is threaded with references to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wolfgang von Kempelen and the emerging iconography of cloud living. Of the Subcontract reverses out of the database-driven digital world of new labour pools into poetry's black box: the book. It reduces the poetic imagination to exploited labour and, equally, elevates artificial intelligence to the status of the poetic. In doing so, it explores the all-too-real changes that are reforming every kind of work, each day more quickly, under the surface of life.

A Spoken Ink recording of Jo Shapcott reading her prize-winning collection. In 2010, Jo Shapcott published "Of Mutability" with Faber and Faber, her first collection for 12 years. The 47 poems explore the nature of change; in the body, within the natural worldand inside relationships. The book of poems was awarded the CostaBook of the Year for 2010, beating contenders in Fiction,Non-Fiction and other categories. "Of Mutability is so especially rich and resonant that itdeserves the widest possible readership, even among those who neverusually think of reading poems...And there is a dazzling variety oftone and colour and subject throughout - Shapcott's language danceslightly, and often with wit." (Sinclair McKay, Daily Telegraph) Jo Shapcott Jo Shapcott FRSL, is an English poet, editor and lecturer who has won the National Poetry Competition twice, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. Shapcott has won the National Poetry Competition twice, in 1985 and 1991. Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (2000; reprinted 2006) consists of poetry from her three earlier collections: Electroplating the Baby (1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Phrase Book (1992), and My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). "Of Mutability" is published by Faber & Faber

After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. InObit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.

Nominated for a Griffin Poetry Prize. In Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake, they rage against despair, they speak against death and wrestle with the fateful spirits of Armageddon to loosen their choke-hold on humanity. Perhaps we won't figure it out and the horizon is already on fire, and our best love will never be more than an approximation of regret, but grass still grows between the cement blocks of the sidewalk to 'grin of the wild.'

Shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Translation. The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning. Nicole Brossard, one of the world’s foremost literary innovators, is known for her experiments with language and her groundbreaking treatment of desire and gender. This dextrous translation by the award-winning poets and translators Erin Moure and Robert Majzels brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossard’s remarkable syntax and sensuality. ‘[Brossard’s] use of elliptical formulations and syntactical hijackings creates tensions between the image and the statement that result in a style that is unmistakably hers.’ – La Presse ‘A new work by Brossard is an event ... Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon is not merely experimental. It’s radical.’ – The Globe and Mail

Nights on Prose Mountain gathers all of beloved writer bpNichol's published fiction. Originally appearing between 1968 and 1983, and representing almost the entire arc of Nichol's writing career, Nights on Prose Mountain is by turns heartbreaking, playful, and evocative. While Nichol's poetry is widely studied, researched and taught, his novels have remained out of print and are overdue for a new edition. Nichol's curiosity and craft, his exploration and exuberance, his lyricism and adventurousness are all on exhibit here. From the Governor General's Award-winning "The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid" through more obscure treasures like Extreme Positions, and including Still, For Jesus Lunatick, and Andy, Nights on Prose Mountain traces Nichol's life in fiction.

A new edition of a hockey saga, wrapping the game’s story
in the “intense, moody, contradictory” character of Terry Sawchuk,
one of its greatest goalies.

Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it’s their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves.
– from “One of You”

In compact, conversational poems, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate upper-body equipment and no player representation. But no summary touches the searching intensity of Maggs’s poems. They range from meditations on ancient/modern heroism to dramatic capsules of actual games, in which the mystery of character meets the mystery of transcendent physical performance. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is illustrated with photographs mirroring the text, depicting key moments in the career of Terry Sawchuk, his exploits and his agony.

This 10th anniversary edition of the book marks both the 50th anniversary of the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup and the 100th anniversary of the Leafs as a team. With rich reflections on the book by novelist Angie Abdou and Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean, as well as excerpts from scores of reviews by the likes of Gord Downie and Dave Bidini, this new edition of Night Work is a must-have for lovers of hockey and poetry alike.

“Through his marvelous, moving poetry, Randall Maggs gets closer than any biographer to the heart of the darkest, most troubled figure in the history of the national game. This may be the truest hockey book ever written. It reaches a level untouched by conventional sports literature… His Sawchuk is real.” – Stephen Brunt, Canada’s premier sportswriter and commentator

In Elizabeth Smither's eighteenth century collection of poetry her words are as vital as ever. The poems take the everyday - mothers and daughters, cats and horses, books and bowls, slippers and shirts - and transform them into something fresh: sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, often enchanted. And throughout, the work is infused with the personality of the author: a quirky, whimsical observer of the mundane world around her, which she shows to be full of surprises.

These meticulous, skillful, and endlessly revealing poems are astounding in their restraint and delicate comprehension of the natural world. Minimal language and brief verses contribute to the precise imagery illustrated in these gorgeously spare narrative lyrics. From East Coker to Northern Ontario, the fine line between poetry and deceit lurks, inevitably, in the corners of each of our lives. Dan Jalowica illuminates precisely these in language honed, spare, pure, gorgeous.