Mature poems with their finger on the pulse of the dark side of the present.

Reading Edge Effects, Jan Conn’s masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion.

“Edge effect” is an ecological term that has to do with the effect on an ecosystem of the juxtaposition of contrasting environments. The poems of Edge Effects have their connection to ecological matters, but they also ride other sorts of edge throughout, entering an unstable reality in which both time and space are given to uncanny shifting, so it’s “easy to believe visible reality is merely one isolated phenomenon / among many.”

Many of the poems in the book are inspired by paintings and drawings, but none of them is the standard ekphrastic exercise: Jan Conn’s poems go deep. They are reinventions of often hyper-real environments—astonishingly rich and mobile, nightmarish, splintered, fragmentary and afflicted by flux. Readers of Edge Effects will be stirred by an involving, non-coercive, witnessing art of great power.

“Where are the sources of the self? I need to find mine
and give them a good shaking.”

(from “Disturbance in the Key of B”)

“[Jan Conn’s poetry] is embedded with contrast and contradictions, is harsh and pliable, full of starlight and fire and blood, and yet she achieves equilibrium that knocks the reader off kilter: look up from the page, steady yourself, and you are changed.” – Janet Grafton, from The Goose about Botero’s Beautiful Horses

Winner of the 1995 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry

Bert Almon’s poems are centred in local, apparently unremarkable moments which are addressed with such a fine, ironic eye that they suddenly yield their innate comedy, tragedy, paradox, tenderness. “Poetry,” he has said, “is a message slipped under the door/ You don’t even have to read it/ It wants to tell you about danger/ life and death and good parties.”

In this, his seventh collection, Almon’s locales range from the Texas of his youth to the physiotherapist’s office near his present home in Western Canada, through concert halls in London and amphitheatres in Greece.

Is this life a route or a destination? Alyda Faber's assured début examines the ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth we inhabit, and asks the question, What is left of us when we are gone? In the quiet and unsettling poems of Dust or Fire, Faber speaks from the grief following death to explore the meaning of love and family. She is not afraid of gaps and ellipses, finding music in the silences. Her unflinching gaze explores the imperfections of our fleeting existence, our ambitions and relationships, our flawed humanity. Documenting the search for home, the longing to belong, to love and be loved, she turns to the ways love can curve toward pain, how we carelessly hurt one another, but also how we find the grace to forgive and carry on. Dust or Fire is a moving collection, at once grounding and uplifting.

Selected by Kate Daniels as the winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born is the first collection of poetry from Ray McManus. The speaker in these poems searches for redemption and solace while navigating from a traumatic loss in the past to a present fraught with violence and self-destruction. The volume chronicles his attempt to glean some measure of forgiveness through acceptance of his own responsibly for his circumstances. The reader is called on to witness family stories without happy endings, landscapes on the verge of collapse and prophetic visions of horrors yet to come. From these haunting visions, the only viable salvation is rooted in hope that, out of the ruins, there remains the possibility of a fresh beginning.

A long poem in six sections, Dream House takes its cue from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space in its investigation of female embodiment, calling up such feral, liminal spaces as the pregnant body, the aging mind, snail shells, broom closets, low-ceilinged pubs and abandoned pizza boxes. Part Tardis, part townhouse, part Howl's Moving Castle, this wry, surreal and many-peopled narrative interrogates what metaphor might hold of history, both personal and social, after a mother's passing. Its migrant speaker trawls through hedgerows and recipe books to unearth stained birdsong and undead civil wars, tracing a matrilineal path across four generations while traversing the haunted margins between existence and belonging.

Following the Fratellini Family of clowns, Jeramy Dodds astonishes readers and non-readers alike. Techniques such as his patented triumph, the Grand Mal Caesura, along with other favourites, are on display inside. Dodds is a warlock of words, only to be outdone by them, enslaved by them, freed by them – maybe even loved by them. A haunting, yet hilarious depiction of a journey to and from the furthest limits of the human experiment.

The stories, poems, and sundry pieces that form Maya Sokolovski’s debut collection, Double-Click Flash Fic, are written in an experimental style that spans the epistolary, the postmodern, the lyric, and the absurd. Together they chart the inexorable path from love, to loss, to madness – and finally to hope. Eccentric, edgy, and evocative, this is flash fiction boldly brought to life.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality-the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood-and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, "some of us all at once." Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America-"Dear White America"--Where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle

A sequence of fifty dated poems, four quatrains each; lyrical arguments; quick thinking amid the rational absurdity of everyday machinery; intuitive explorations of unknown energies; a diary of the unconscious.