Although poetry is one of the oldest art forms and cinema one of the youngest, a symbiosis exists between the two -- an interchange of metaphor, rhythm, point-of-view. No surprise, then, that so many contemporary poets write about film and the magnitude of its effect on modern life. Featuring work by some of the most acclaimed poets writing in Canada today (and three from the USA), I Found It at the Movies includes poems inspired by the full range of cinematic history -- from silent films to blockbusters, from neo-realism to cartoon, from Fred Astaire to vampires, and from all around the world. Entering this collection is an experience as beguiling as a trip to the movies itself. Among the poets included: Margaret Atwood, Don McKay, Michael Ondaatje, Steven Heighton, David W. McFadden, Karen Solie, Marilyn Bowering, Julie Bruck, Stephanie Bolster and Ken Babstock.

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

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Germanic and Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael's boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies--while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices--the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

Winner of the 2001 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2001 Regina Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards).  Shortlisted for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards.

from “Max’s Bath”

…

What happens next? Well I hold you
while Peg gets a diaper, you yell
when she heads down the hall.
And then you pee on me, my
shirt, a consecration
no one else has received. I hold you close,
like the cold spring rain
peering in at us, tapping the
blue windowpane with its
tiny dark and pudgy hands.

A wide-ranging reckless intelligence, verbal audacity and irrepressible humour — all these combine with a large-hearted embrace of existence in Ken Howe’s poems. Whether they are observing, with fine ironic wit, the vagaries of domestic life, elegizing lost ones, or raised in celebration of musical compositions, they remind us of the need to address the world with all our faculties alert, including a language alive with its native energy and luminosity.

A brilliant poetic debut about gender-based violence that dismantles received definitions of both gender and violence, Horrible Dance is an accomplished addition to transfeminist thought and theory. By turns darkly comic, emotionally connected, playful, incisive, lyrical and irreverent, Lake's poems navigate a harrowing personal and political terrain with understated, expansive wisdom. Lake persistently returns us to the search for love that lies at the core of relational trauma, even as she shows us how catastrophically such a search can be derailed. This is a rare text able to hold the full velocity of a survivor's hurt and rage alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the extent and complexity of harm. In their honest accounting of a wide array of bad encounters, these poems point us, again, toward compassion, tenderness, and solidarity.

The third book in a trilogy that explores the limits of individual expression, Honestly is an intimate, quiet, and unresolved little book about talking and listening.It begins with research into a forgotten relative who was kicked out of the author's family after he was jailed for conscientious objection to WWII, and who then moved to New York to become a composer. From there the poem swerves into a series of minor-key personal anecdotes, interlaced with conversations with friends about work and relationships. Throughout, communication is framed by the economics and psychology of the home. Dialogue takes place in close quarters—constrained by money, space, ego, and empathy.

Nima doesn't feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to belong somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself. Until she doesn't. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen, the name her parents didn't give her at birth: Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might be more real than Nima knows. And more hungry. And the life Nima has, the one she keeps wishing were someone else's . . . she might have to fight for it with a fierceness she never knew she had. The powerful novel-in-verse from Safia Elhillo.

Shortlisted for the 1987 Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Prize

The hired hand of these poems was a stupid man. Nowadays he would be known as one of the employable retarded. Tom was lucky enough to find work and a home with the family of John B. Lee, people who understood him. And John B. Lee was lucky to have his whole life coloured by the presence of an apparently limited man who turns out to have been a poem. John B. Lee has with great tact and without a shred of patronizing found the words to make this inarticulate man live.

Hired Hands is a remarkable accomplishment.

This is truly revolutionary poetry. From the corner store to the dilapidated school, from the alleys between downtown office buildings to the prison, voices that have been through too much to care and yet still struggle on, relate the post-industrial U.S. Black experience. A vortex of images, observations, inspired leaps and free associations spill forth from a choir living in oppression and transience, invisible to and dismissive of the mainstream bourgeoisie. Moments of political and spiritual convergence, gangsterism and revolution, surrealism and blunt materiality are captured in the music of metaphor and pure intention. A modern-day Mystic, a true Seer, the depth of the poet's own humanity is rooted in every line, creating a liberated space for pain and beauty through a healing love for his people.