In Fauxccasional Poems, Daniel Scott Tysdal imagines himself into poetic voices not his own, writing to commemorate events that never occurred, for the posterity of alternative universes — and the delight of our own. From the reign of the first philosopher king once envisioned by Plato, to the twelfth-century Iroquois colonization of Europe, to Barack Obama's career as a poet, to the lasting peace to come under the rule of the Democratic Kampuchea Global Party, Tysdal envisions the paths not taken and what might have been. In these poems, the crew of the Enola Gay refuse to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, John F. Kennedy evades assassination, and Karl Marx moonlights as an agent provocateur for a capitalist consortium. In a dizzying display of poetic insight, technical prowess, and playful parody, Fauxccasional Poems brings these alternate universes to life, forcing the reader to ponder the contingency of history and how each moment brings us to a thousand turning points. Despite our certainties, nothing is ever as it seems, and the future unfolds against our best designs. History is an unreliable vessel for the upwelling of our deepest hopes and fears, and in Tysdal's hands poetry shakes history by the lapels and shouts, "Wake up! Your time is now!"

Poems about commitment and catastrophe, from a voice of intense lyrical skepticism and wonderful tonal mobility.

Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962–2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice. Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi. Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky. Echoing the pastoral and elegiac modes of the Romantic poets, whose reverence for nature never prevented them from addressing it with all the ideas and sensibilities their times allowed, Sina Queyras's stunning collection explores the infrastructures and means of modern mobility. Addressing the human project not so much as something imposed on nature but as an increasingly disturbing activity within it, Expressway exposes the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. 'Cleanse the doors of perception,' Blake urged, and with that in mind, Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we've allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome — each decision can make or unmake us. 'The works in Expressway are all so tightly wound, hyper-distilled and stressed ... This is poetry for the apocalypse.' – Broken Pencil 'As a poet, Queyras is secretly romantic, writing with lyricism and a voice that's unafraid of sentiment or emotion ... Queyras' words spark like pickaxes on old asphalt.' – Eye Weekly 'Queyras show[s] what poetry can do when it simultaneously maps roadways of transportation and lines of human thought.' – Spacing 'Eclectic engagements characterize Queyras’s work, but any suggestion of characterization of her work immediately brings a morphing to something new, intelligent, and provocative ... Sina Queyras is a poet to read and reckon with.' – Lambda Literary Review

When Chava Rosenfarb arrived in Montreal in February 1950, she was already a published poet with one acclaimed volume, Di balade fun nekhtikn vald (The Ballad of Yesterday? Forest) to her credit. She was also a Holocaust survivor who, after being liberated from Bergen Belsen in 1945 had crossed the border illegally into Belgium, where she lived with her mother, sister and husband, all Holocaust survivors. In 1950 Rosenfarb? Montreal publisher, Harry Hershman, who had just published a Canadian edition of Di balade fun nekhtikn vald sponsored the entire group to come to Canada. Rosenfarb and her family settled in Montreal. Almost all of the poems in this collection were originally published in Yiddish. Chava Rosenfarb herself translated most of them into English. The poems have been arranged so that they follow roughly the chronology of Rosenfarb? life, beginning with the poems she wrote in the Lodz ghetto as a young girl and moving to the more mature poems of her years in Canada.

Exaucée est la voix d’une grande force qui fait écho au recueil précédent. L’auteur y propose une émotion dure, mais prenante. Sa poésie se veut sans détour et s’entend dans une sorte de modernité où le désir côtoie l’humiliation.

Poems about being stranded in a truth that shows no mercy, speaking from the last place you'd ever choose to go.

Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002) The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!). Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008. This new edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bök and an expanded afterword. 'Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane.' – Samuel Delany 'Eunoia takes the lipogram and renders it obsolete.' – Kenneth Goldsmith 'A marvellous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes.' – Harry Mathews 'An exemplary monument for 21st century poetry.' – Charles Bernstein 'Bök's dazzling word games are the literary sensation of the year.' – The Times 'A resounding success ... brilliant.' – The Guardian 'Brilliant ... beautiful and strange.' – Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 'Impressive.' – Sunday Telegraph 'No mere Christmas stocking filler for Countdown fans. Rather, it's an ingenious little novel ... playful and irreverent ... charming.' – Metro

Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion is a collection of found poems composed of the words of professional athletes. The content of post-game interviews and sports chatter is so often meaningless, if not insufferable, and yet there are athletes like Metta World Peace who transcend lame clichEs and rote patter, who use language in surprising ways, who can be funny and shocking and insightful and alarmingly sincere-pure poetry. Muhammad Ali offered dazzling displays of lexical wizardry, and Allen Iverson's infamous "practice" rant shifted the post-game press conference from the banal to the absurd. This book is a celebration of these rare and exceptional moments. Various poetic forms and line-breaks highlight-or, in the words of Deion Sanders, "deem to set a candor on"-the sophisticated, sublime, and surprising performances of language made by professional athletes.