In this, her fourth book of poetry, one of Canada's best-loved poets takes on one of the most compelling divas of our time. In sixty-one audacious poems, Jeanette Lynes re-imagines and reanimates the peripatetic art, life, and times of Dusty Springfield.Alternating between playful irreverence and profound compassion, It's Hard Being Queen paints a compulsively readable portrait of an extraordinary life. Each page is infused with wit, drama, and, of course, music. Jeanette Lynes not only steps into the icon's shoes'she lives in her skin.

Virtuosic poems tracking two intertwined themes: the breakdown of an obsessive love affair and the vicissitudes of middle age.

Invisible Dogs, Dempster’s fourteenth collection, is a complex but deeply coherent hymn to the difficult business of staying alive. This is a book for when it hurts so bad you hope you’ll die and are afraid you won’t—not because it offers consolation or the promise of a new dawn, but because it so compellingly documents the plain, hard, ungraceful, stumbling grief of the matter, and meets it with rare self-knowledge, wry humour, and an unornamented determination to go on living.

Dempster’s metaphors are like hairpin turns taken at breakneck speed. He has nerves of steel when it comes to self-examination, and it’s this relentless honesty and the emotional torque it induces that keep the voice on the road.

…He scrutinizes

the rearview mirror as if it were a bush about to spring

into flames, the past appearing closer than it really is.

Miles of missing her, those erratic white lines.

He keeps forgetting where he’s going – city,

corner store, centre of the universe. No wonder

arrival feels so temporary, like a borrowed bathroom key.

~ from “He Said/She Said”

Introduction to the Introduction to the Introduction by André Alexis

For me, reading the Introduction was like being caught in a spring shower while waiting for the 41, and running into a library to get out of the rain and, because the rain lasts, wandering the aisles on the fifth floor, taking books from the shelves (Waley’s translations from the Chinese, a work by Roland Barthes, an oversized book about eastern birds…), draping my winter coat on a chair and sitting down to read.

My coat smells of wet coconut matting, and the library is warm, and I fall asleep, my head on the desk, and dream about a strange library filled with impossibly rare and impossibly beautiful works: Waley on birds, Barthes’ translations from the Chinese, an oversized book about rain…

And when I wake, moments later, after what seems like hours, I have the momentary and vivid conviction that, if I listened properly, I could translate water into any language at all.

Pain Not Bread is a collaborative writing group formed in 1990 by Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton. In Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, they occupy the border created by translation, allusion and echo, and make it into habitable space, a place where the subtle sensitivities of poets from the troubled late Tang Dynasty (Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, …) blend with our own millennial anxieties. What do poets do in a difficult time? It’s as though Pain Not Bread were talking and drinking with their Tang contemporaries on some old rickety ferry making its way back and forth between English and Chinese, Chinese and English, in the process weaving together a music of supreme nuance and tonal registration, a mode of speaking and feeling which is “undisfigured by sentiment” and yet riddled with its own mortality.

Awards

Pain Not Bread: Earle Birney Prize for Poetry, 2000
Pain Not Bread: Finalist and Honourable Mention, National Magazine Awards, 1998
Pain Not Bread: Winner, Malahat Long Poem Competition, 1993
Pain Not Bread: Finalist, National Magazine Awards, 1993

Vlado Kreslin will be a revelation to North American readers. His poems seem at one and the same time postmodern and pre-modern. They evoke the lost world of a resilient people in a language that resonates in its plain-spokenness with the losses that all thoughtful people in a globalized economy confront. Don’t let the ostensibly un-ironic, even folksy language fool you--his poems slyly combine simplicity of means with complexity of effect, a combination only an artist of great sophistication can pull off. Urska Charney’s translations honor both aspects of Kreslin’s style. Kreslin is lucky to have found such a sensitive and canny translator. And so are we.

Installations, David Solway’s 14th book of poetry, is haunted with transformation, Few poets possess as commanding a gift for metaphor or can use it to masterfully conjure the ever-changing landscape of the natural world. Like the jerry-rigged farmer’s contraption that stands in for “eclectic grandeur and jumbled eloquence,” this collection celebrates the way ordinary elements can be yoked to create wholly original insights. Be it through rhyme or free verse, slang or lyricism, and roaming a dazzling range of tones—satirical,  philosophical, scabrous, tender, celebratory—Installations offers up a world depicted and inhabited in all its manifestations.

Jon Paul Fiorentino's new collection is a whip-smart poetic investigation of anxiety in all its many manifestations. Anxiety caused by geography, anxieties of influence and looming worries about loss inform the poems as they weave narrative threads that highlight both the treachery of language and its necessity in shaping human experience. The poems here build on Derrida's ideas about the psychological implications of memory and the archival impulse and on philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics of 'the index.' Indexical Elegies is a rich, emotionally charged work that showcases Fiorentino's talents at their feisty, engaged best. From its Post-Prairie pamphleteering and Montreal musings to its moving elegies, this is provocative poetry that never loses touch with the reader's pleasure. Praise for Fiorentino's The Theory of the Loser Class: 'Fiorentino is smart and deft … By turns compassionate, funny and filled with self-loathing, The Theory of the Loser Class is never without the possibility of redemption.' – Globe and Mail

“In Flanders Fields,” the iconic poem which gives its title to this collection of poems and selected prose, is one of Canada’s — and the world’s — best known poems of the Great War. It was written in 1915 by Canadian John McCrae, an artillery man, poet, and medical doctor, upon the death of a friend and fellow soldier during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. This is a faithful reissue of the Canadian first edition of McCrae’s writings, originally issued by his friends in 1919 in his honour and memory. It includes the best of his poetry and selections of his letters from the front lines together with a thoughtful essay of appreciation by his friend and fellow medical officer, Sir Andrew Macphail.

Immigrant Songs is a posthumous collection of the works of Saro (Rosario) D’Agostino. It includes poems, fiction works that may be chapters of an unfinished novel, and letters. These fragments from a seminal Italo-Canadian writer whose life was cut too short are part of Canadian literary history. A poignant and significant voice from our recent Canadian literary press that we should know better.

At his death in 1985, Alden Nowlan stood in the first rank of Canadian writers. Today, his poetry is beloved by Maritimers and popular across Canada and in the US as well. If I Could Turn and Meet Myself tells his life story, from his birth to a 14-year-old mother in 1933 through his impoverished childhood, his disturbed adolescence, his newspaper career, his struggle with cancer, and his tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick. Nowlan founded his success and peace of mind on his belief that he was a composite of many selves. In 12 books of poetry, two novels, a book of stories, and 15 years of weekly columns for the Saint John Telegraph Journal, he fictionalized his own life. At the same time, he hid some of the most significant facts about his background from everyone, including those closest to him. His overall personal honesty ensured that even today people accept his "authorized version" as the full and only story. In If I Could Turn and Meet Myself, Patrick Toner portrays a more complex and more richly humane Nowlan than any previous commentator, including Nowlan himself.