Cephalopography 2.0 is as much a passionate celebration of cephalopods in all their plurality and finery as it is a collection of poems exploring human identity and experience through the lens of these marine animals. Through experimental takes on traditional poetic forms such as ghazals, tankas and cinquains, as well as more contemporary forms, Rasiqra Revulva delves into ecopoetics and marine biology, creating unique and beautifully composed poems. Cephalopography 2.0 plunges into the depths of human experience to pull out diverse perspectives of how cephalopods and humanity are linked together in ways that stretch beyond the land and the sea.

Shortlisted for the 2003 Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book (Writers Guild of Alberta Award)

Without you,
I have taken to drawing maps
on the backs of photographs.
On the coast in a raincoat
your smile has been dented by a lake,
the fluting arms of rivers
have made your shoulders
look like the bark of birches.

from “Cartographer”

In Cartography and Walking, Adam Dickinson charts his own listening — an acute listening of eye and ear, a listening with both body and mind. “Cartography” is more than a metaphor for him, it’s a way of being. It is how we dwell in the world, and how intimacy enriches such dwelling. Yet “cartography” is the presiding metaphor, the structure of this book; in giving it such a place, Dickinson reminds the reader of that very human impulse to plot, to imagine. Each poem is itself a kind of mapping, through language and sound, through minute observation, until land, love, and everyday life are given new embodiment, are newly discovered, and a reader finds new countries in strangely familiar settings.

“There is a generous, ingenious listening in Adam Dickinson’s Cartography and Walking — bats, houses, bears, killdeer, honey kept under the sink, atlases open on a floor. The things seem to become themselves in this hearing. The world the ear holds in these poems is a good place to stand.” – Tim Lilburn

“The supple voice in Adam Dickinson’s poetry distills the complexities of emotion and intellect into a clarity of phrasing and metaphor. One hopes for readers who listen half as carefully to the subtleties of his poetry as he listens to the world he evokes. For Adam Dickinson, cartography provides the imaginative contour lines for mapping the features of a colloquy between human experience and the natural world, a world at once familiar and strange, that we call home.” – Ross Leckie

Carpe et chienne est l’occasion pour Janis Locas – reconnue déjà pour la vivacité de son écriture dans La maudite Québécoise – de repousser les limites des genres dans une variété de textes parcourant les extrêmes de l’humeur. Le lecteur traverse en même temps que l’héroïne de singuliers moments de dépression, d’euphorie et de psychose, sans savoir où le mène cette expérience littéraire et humaine aussi déconcertante qu’inédite. La plus grande partie de ce carnet, rassemblant des textes inclassables qui chevauchent la poésie, le récit et la prose libre, est née durant une période de manie, alors que l’auteure ignorait encore être atteinte de maladie bipolaire. C’est par choix qu’ elle a laissé une dimension étrange, parfois chaotique, à la forme finale de l’ouvrage.

At one moment, a pure abstraction; at the next, an incontrovertible presence of hooves, antlers, and fur. The beating heart of this assured début by Richard Kelly Kemick is the Porcupine caribou herd of the western Arctic. In Caribou Run, Richard Kelly Kemick orchestrates a suite of poems both encyclopedic and lyrical, in which the caribou is both metaphor and phenomenon; both text and exegesis. He explores what we share with this creature of blood and bone and what is hidden, alien, and ineffable. Following the caribou through their annual cycle of migration, Kemick experiments with formal and thematic variations that run from lyric studies of the creature and its environment, to found poems that play with the peculiar poetry of scientific discourse. to highly personal poems that find resonance in the caribou as a metaphor and a guiding spirit. Running the gamut from long-lined free verse and ghazal form to tightly controlled tankas and interwoven rhyme schemes, Caribou Run serves notice that a formidable new talent has been let loose on the terrain of Canadian poetry.

Second place winner in the 3rd Annual Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry (2016)

Remember Bonnie & Clyde?

A complex, dramatic rendering of a familiar story made new.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are the stuff of legend – why tell their story again? Chances are you don’t know the nuances – their love story and that of their accomplices Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche; their aspirations, conflicts and prayerful natures; and ultimately the sources of their tragedy. At its core, Careen is a long poem spoken by the characters, though the voices are companioned by newspaper articles often ironically at odds with the inside story. Smart lets the principal actors relate their own tale—a book of voices speaking out of the desperate Dirty Thirties.

we come shinin from the tray as real as fleshed-out fine-boned forms
even our shoes flashin, we are some fun jokers
are not coarse, cannot lie, do not limp or bleed
are kind & funny, desperately in love
we are you but better, no denyin

fix us there, that moment when you like us, want to be like us

—from “like us: the photographs left behind at Joplin”

Praise for Carolyn Smart:

“…always moving, sometimes chilling …” —University of Toronto Quarterly

“[Smart] understands loneliness in all its forms, and writes with a clarity and compassion that is powerfully affecting.”  —Anne Michaels

Shortlisted for the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award

The poems in Calm Jazz Sea reveal a world forever becoming and disappearing, watched over and handled gently by the compassionate intelligence of Mike Barnes. In the everyday and the ephemeral meals, drinks, weather, work, moments of solitude or connection he finds ways to engage the secret matter of humanity: what horrifies, astonishes, or comforts us. Like the sea of the title, restless and receptive, the language of the poems moves through many levels of voice: from an easy vernacular to the strain of conversation, or from the precise record of sensual matter to the insubstantial gestures that constitute thought.

" Et nous sommes debout maintenant, mon pays et moi, les cheveux dans le vent, ma main petite maintenant dans son poing énorme et la force n'est pas en nous, mais au-dessus de nous, dans une voix qui vrille la nuit et l'audience comme la pénétrance d'une guêpe apocalyptique. Et la voix prononce que l'Europe nous a pendant des siècles gavés de mensonges et gonflés de pestilences, car il n'est point vrai que l'œuvre de l'homme est finie, que nous n'avons rien à faire au monde, que nous parasitons le monde mais l'œuvre de l'homme vient seulement de commencer et il reste à l'homme à conquérir toute interdiction immobilisée aux coins de sa ferveur et aucune race ne possède le monopole de la beauté, de l'intelligence, de la force et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête et nous savons maintenant que le soleil tourne autour de notre terre éclairant la parcelle qu'a fixée notre volonté seule et que toute étoile chute de ciel en terre à notre commandement sans limite ". La réédition du Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, la première œuvre d'Aimé Césaire, saluée depuis l'origine comme le texte fondamental de la génération de la Négritude.

Burden is a poetry collection that tells the story of a seventeen-year-old British soldier, Private Herbert Burden, who was shot for desertion during World War I. He was one of hundreds so executed. It is now understood that many had committed no crime, but were suffering from PTSD. Burden's story is told in the voice of Lance Corporal Reginald Smith, the author's uncle. The author discovered years later in a box of papers that his uncle, Lance Corporal Smith, had befriended Private Burden but then was ultimately commanded to join in the firing squad that killed his friend.

This slim book reaches below standard indictments of war-it shows us that "terrifying," "senseless," "horrific" don't go deep enough. To utter them, the eye must already be closing over. Smith's account is an object lesson in why poetry matters. It takes us to places even the best journalism can't reach.

Nothing slips by Brecken Hancock’s deft ear as she seductively plumbs the depths of the evolution of bathing, doppelgängers, the Kraken and the minutiae of family with all its tragic misgivings. The poems in Broom Broom pervert the rational, safe parts of the world to extoll and absorb the sweep of human history.