Shortlisted for the 2012 Pat Lowther Memorial Award

An ambivalent zoo-tour, an open-eyed meander through a landscape of made and contained things. 

A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature—constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past—through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title. Informed by the author’s grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet’s combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where “arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades,” and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. This is Bolster’s best work.

“Bolster’s work demonstrates a surety of vision supported by an insider’s eye for the telling aberrant detail everywhere matched by her impeccable ear . . . ” – Judith Fitzgerald, The Globe and Mail

“What a startling voice she has . . . ” – Patrick Lane, The Vancouver Sun

Poems, both light and serious, on current concerns and all with Australian themes. Many of these poems, read by the author, are prize winners, poetic tales of the City and the Bush and the individual.

Franz Kafka's writings are characterized by an extreme sensitivity manifested in absurdity, alienation, and gallows humor. These two particular collections of short pieces, A Country Doctor (1919) and A Hunger Artist (1924), newly translated by Thor Polson, represent later works in the corpus. Poems and Songs of Love is a translation of the collection Piyyutim ve-Shirei Yedidot by Georg Mordechai Langer. Published in Prague in 1929, it contains an elegy to Langer's friend and mentor Franz Kafka, and other openly homo-romantic poems. This collaborative translation by Elana and Menachem Wolff brings the fascinating work of Langer--poems as well as an essay on Kafka--to the English-reading public for the first time, and sheds light on a hitherto unexamined relationship.

People who rely on stereotypes are often vilified. But really, is there a better way to classify people? There are some taxonimical difficulties, though. Exactly how many types of people are there? What behaviours are characteristic of each particular group? How do you know if you’ve spotted an armchair psychologist or a kleptomaniac? Gabe Foreman's A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People is not your average reference book. It turns a series of sociological case studies into a functional encyclopedia that doubles as a unique, achingly funny, always engaging collection of poems. 'Bridesmaids,' 'Day Traders,' 'Entomologists' and 'Number Crunchers' are all dutifully catalogued in a series of luminously strange, compellingly original lyric and prose poems The resulting field guide to our disparate humanity is often absurd, sometimes sad and frequently a mixture of both, as each entry unravels according to its own spidery logic.

Shortlisted for the 1997 Governor General’s Award for Poetry

Set firmly at the end of the millennium, A Broken Bowl takes on the burden of history, with its heaped atrocities, its unimaginable sufferings. This long poem is an angry lament, a summoning of fragments, a meditation in the midst of an exhausted world. By turns lyric, satiric, elegiac and incantatory, A Broken Bowl is filled with passionate elemental writing in the tradition of Howl and Crow.

“Picture-building poetry doesn’t get better than this. Patrick Friesen communicates directly to your imagination. These fragments of a broken bowl are, indeed, much greater than the sum of their parts as they spur imaginal encounters not only with Friesen but with the scattered bits of the reader’s self – each piece a new gesture to try on.” – Per Brask

“These are the end days – someone’s got a kitchen knife and is ‘looking for the government’; the river is a ‘filthy transfusion.’ Patrick Friesen sings this dark song with beauty and a guttering love. We’re long past apology, reconstruction: there’s only Friesen’s voice not nearly enough, sure, but the only thing worthy of trust.” – Tim Lilburn