The Refrigerator Memory is an exuberant, strangely funny celebration of sadness. With fable-like miniature stories and short lyric poems, Shannon Bramer creates a world littered with stolen pears and prosthetic arms and inhabited by Kindness scientists and hot-air-balloon operators. The poems invoke a world of childhood delights and demons in the context of grown-up fears and appetites: heartbreak, loss, jealousy and old-fashioned sibling rivalry. You’ll find the hopelessly misunderstood Love the Clown (never goes out without his red wig) and Noni, a forlorn young man who can’t stop crying. But while sadness plays a starring role, the true hero of the collection is the imagination; its transformative powers warm widows and drunken gods and designated mourners. You won’t forget The Refrigerator Memory: the icebox cometh to warm your heart. ‘Bramer’s “Our Prosthesis” … [is] wonderfully succinct, while still managing to convey entire lives floating beneath its surface.’ – Lee Gowan ‘[Bramer writes] poems with resonant grief, fragile glass and desperate love, carved carefully and spare out of cold, dark objects, achieving small, remarkable poems.’ – Rob McLennan

The Prophet is a book of 26 poetic essays about Al-Mustafa who has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for 12 years is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses many issues of life and the human condition. It is one of the most popular set of poems of all time.

Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is 'Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and acutely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion and invention. 'Between the freaky, funny filmmaker Guy Maddin and author Gary Barwin, Canada is producing some of the most innovative creative works of our time.' – Utne Reader

This is a collection of 20th and 21st century poets, handpicked by JoAnn Becker and Diane Croft. These are frank poems about young passions and old love, nature and nurture, work affairs and love affairs.

Written with a probingly sensitive eye, this collection of poems illuminates the subtle and poignant moments in life-moments that cause people to grow and, occasionally, to digress as individuals. Greatly emphasizing musicality, this compilation re-examines the common aspects of everyday life from a female perspective. The urban world and its intricacies are explored and, as a result, a profound zeal for nature emerges. Insightful and unique, these free verses delve deeply into human emotion.

In her third book of poetry The Perils of Geography, Helen Humphreys charts a world that opens under the prodding and promise of language. With the wit and eye for evocative detail which gained readers for both Gods and Other Mortals and Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios, Humphreys probes the immediacy of now, the intensity of this, the residue of then. Don’t be deceived by the spare appearance; her poems are resonant and full, "all angles and confidence." Light falls slant across them. She maps "what surrounds not what's made still" -- "the moving line." The line she traces connects the pull of memory and moment, open roads and winter aconite, transcendental basements and ornamental shrubbery. In "Singing to the Bees," the ten poem sequence which makes up the second of three sections in Perils, she slips inside folk wisdoms, wears them with an easy grace, all flesh and wit and possibility: dancing shoes, gifted pigs, swarming bees, airplane nuns and spectre ships. These poems make superstition delicious.

In Persian folklore, Syngue Sabour is the name of a magical black stone, a patience stone, which absorbs the plight of those who confide in it. It is believed that the day it explodes, after having received too much hardship and pain, will be the day of the Apocalypse. But here, the Syngue Sabour is not a stone but rather a man lying brain-dead with a bullet lodged in his neck. His wife is with him, sitting by his side. But she resents him for having sacrificed her to the war, for never being able to resist the call to arms, for wanting to be a hero, and in the end, after all was said and done, for being incapacitated in a small skirmish.

Compulsively confessional and cracking-wise, The Nonnets is an utterly unique alchemy of poetry and comedy. Aaron Giovanonne's latest collection is a book-length sequence of 'nonnets'-nine-line poems that Giovannone handles with ruthless dexterity. Capturing transformations from first dates to goodbye texts, from mama's boy to unrepentant shoplifter, from post-industrial downtown to eleventh-century Italian monastery, these poems present a kaleidoscopic world that careens wildly between despair and ecstasy.

With laugh-out-loud observations on the rollercoaster ride that is being a new parent, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning comedian Mike Birbiglia delivers a book that is perfect for anyone who has ever raised a child, been a child, or refuses to stop acting like a child. In 2016 comedian Mike Birbiglia and poet Jennifer Hope Stein took their fourteen-month-old daughter Oona to the Nantucket Film Festival. When the festival director picked them up at the airport she asked Mike if he would perform at the storytelling night. She said, "The theme of the stories is jealousy." Jen quipped, "You're jealous of Oona. You should talk about that." And so Mike began sharing some of his darkest and funniest thoughts about the decision to have a child. Jen and Mike revealed to each other their sides of what had gone down during Jen's pregnancy and that first year with their child. Over the next couple years, these stories evolved into a Broadway show, and the more Mike performed it the more he heard how it resonated--not just with parents but also people who resist all kinds of change. So he pored over his journals, dug deeper, and created this book: The New One: Painfully True Stories From a Reluctant Dad. Along with hilarious and poignant stories he has never shared before, these pages are sprinkled with poetry Jen wrote as she navigated the same rocky shores of new parenthood. So here it is. This book is an experiment. Sort of like a family.