Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption. Deeply inflected by the polyvocality and encoded rhetorics of the screen, Human Resources is perched at the limits of language, irreverently making and breaking meaning. Navigating the crumbling boundaries among page, screen, reader, engine, writer and database, Human Resources investigates wasting words and words as waste — and the creative potential of salvage. ‘In this bad-mouthing and incandescent burlesque, Rachel Zolf transforms a necessary social anger into the pure fuel that takes us to “the beautiful excess of the unshackled referent.” We learn something new about guts, and about how dictions slip across one another, entwining, shimmering, wisecracking. For Zolf, political invention takes precedent, works the search engine.’ – Lisa Robertson

Whether misreading sixth grade pedagogical materials or offering visual schematics for reading Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Jon Paul Fiorentino's sixth poetry collection asks us to reconsider our engagement with received information — but does so with a wink during detention, a dodgeball to the gut during recess. 'Needs Improvement is as a book of a new logic making its way from witty statements to slow moving alyric villanelles, achieving brilliantly a contemporary sense of streaming among words, places and "no self." Whether this feeling comes from rearranged intentions, satirical knowledge, wise and displaced arguments, each page points a finger at language and does so with "no fears."' — Nicole Brossard

Nautilus and Bone" chronicles the life and work of the radical, passionate Russian-Jewish American poet Anna Margolin on her path toward self-determination. Blending myth, surrealism, historical fact and fiction, this collection of persona poems brings to life one of the most celebrated Yiddish poets of her generation.

My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish' is a powerful collection. Karen Shenfeld's poems are filled with passionate sensuality, triggered by dazzling memories of people and places. There are short lyric poems that focus on a specific symbol to take on larger meanings, and narrative works in which the poet contemplates the Holocaust using the specifics of everyday, named objects. From Shenfeld's controlled intelligence comes an honest recollection of the past, imbued with an expansive hopefulness.

MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.

Poet Margaret Christakos, throughout her eight previous poetry collections, has created ruptures and splices inside of and against the limits of the confessional lyric, often using recombinatory procedures, cyclical and serial structure, and enmeshing intimate vernacular with highly aestheticized language in writing that explores maternality, sexuality and intimate address. In her new collection, Multitudes – where cellphone tweets snipe 'y wd I nd/ 2 spk 2 u?' alongside echoes of aria, chant and dirge – Christakos freshly pairs Whitman's 'Song of Myself' with an inquiry into the subjective thresholds of digital social media, where individuals conduct flamboyant acts of self-–portraiture, testimonial, self-commodification, erotic self-dispersal and indelible spectacle. Multitudes is a moving, witty, poetic foray into a modern frontier of public spaces (city hall square, park, cemetery, bicycle path), poetic forms, private longings and virtual relocations. With her trademark linguistic sonar, Christakos amplifies the capacity of language to discern an almost inherent swingdoor between 'moaning' and 'meaning,' while casting a discouraged eye on how human discernment is used to rigidify recognitions, inviting citizens to turn from ethical social activism to snitch on their Facebook friends after an urban hockey riot. 'Alphabetic dismantling, syntactic play, essaying words backwards and 4words (as she might say), Christakos manifests forensic clarity and telegraphic fortitude in this unsettling work.' – Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Dérouté par des amours fuyantes, le poète s’investit dans une topographie du corps masculin. Il délaisse ses jardins et ses rêves étoilés, parcourt des lieux de rencontres, tant virtuels que réels. Bains vapeurs, voyages, sites Internet où, dans une langue appauvrie, se déploie une litanie sexuelle primitive. S’y dévoilent d’innombrables corps, étalés, morcelés, soumis aux standards du moment. Toute forme d’amour semble absente. La mort veille sur des rapports humains et des désirs formatés. L’image charnelle de la morgue s’impose.

In Monster Lunch we dine with Frankenstein, attend a burgoo and a birthday party, meet a grumpy garden dude and slurp hot zoop. Each poem is followed by an interview with the main character or fascinating facts about food. This collection of yummy, yucky, messy and hot rhyming stories is bursting with rhythmical fun.

Winner of the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry

Globe 100 Book for 2012

Shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award and CAA Award for Poetry 2013

Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us
what is sufficient, what will suffice?

… a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grapple with this unanswerable conundrum—sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window. Julie Bruck’s third book of poetry is a brilliant and unusual blend of pathos and play, of deep seriousness and wildly veering humour. Though Bruck “does not stammer when it’s time to speak up,” and “will not blink when it’s time to stare directly at the uncomfortable,” as Cornelius Eady says in his blurb for the book, “in Monkey Ranch she celebrates more than she sighs, and she smartly avoids the shallow trap of mere indignation by infusing her lines with bright, nimble turns, the small, yet indelible detail. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.”

“Monkey Ranch has all the antic sensuality and thrilling precision we’ve come to expect from Julie Bruck’s work. This volume has a pitch-perfect elegance that calms the ruckus just long enough for us to glimpse the vulnerability of everyone involved.  Monkey Ranch is like the best sort of letter from a friend—full of gossip, lively observation, and serious wit.” – Sharon Thesen

Julie Bruck and Monkey Ranch – Winner of the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry – here is the Judges’ Citation – “Monkey Ranch by Julie Bruck leaps about the ordinary world with a deft detachment and flexible artistry – guiding us with its offbeat, caring and companionable sensibility. “There’s enough light to see by,” says Julie Bruck, even though the children turn their eyes away. This humane voice, quirky and patient, will see you through a world stripped of miracles.”