Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Book Award

Marooned in the shiftless, unnamed space between a map of the world and a world of false maps, the poems in Methodist Hatchet cling to what’s necessary from each, while attempting to sing their own bewilderment. Carolinian forest echoes back as construction cranes in an urban sky …

Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things w …

Shortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

Part roving eye, part devotion, you wander hotel corridors, entering rooms not quite yours, trying on clothes, blankets, skins. Arguing with the body's limits and its trickery, you are always in disguise. Sometimes you're Leda; sometimes the swan. The rooms are haunted with gendered injuries of the past . . …

Winner, Taste Canada Gold Medal for Culinary Narrative

Commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald's birth, Sir John's Table is a refreshing look at Canada's first prime minister.

Sir John's Table traverses the colourful life of Macdonald, from his passage as a young Scottish boy in the steerage compartment aboard the Earl of …

100 days... 100 days that should not have been... 100 days the world could have stopped. But did not.

For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem—each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family's experience of displacement under the regime o …

Annie Garland Foster was born in Fredericton, NB, in 1875. She was an educator, nurse, politician, social reformer, journalist and biographer of Pauline Johnson. But she was also a bit of a mystery.

In 1939, Annie wrote an autobiography titled "Passing Through" in which she described the challenges and adventures of her earlier life: as a co-ed at U …

A unique perspective on Ontario’s most powerful political leaders.

Ontario’s fortunes and fates increasingly rest in the hands of the province’s premier. Critics say the role of premier concentrates too much power in one person, but at least that points to the one person Ontarians, and others beyond the province’s borders, ought to know al …

Julius Rothstein and his granddaughter Abby have loved each other from opposite ends of Canada since Abby was born. But now, accepted as a freshman student at the university where Julius teaches, Abby is moving in with him to be close to school and to keep her newly widowed grandfather company. The two must negotiate a new relationship as housemate …

It's 1854 at the start of Now We Are Brody. The mill is boarded up as the townsfolk attempt to bury a dark shame from their past, but the arrival of a young woman with the deed to the mill threatens to unearth its secret. In The Huron Bride it is 1834 and Hazel Sheehan has braved the perilous journey across the Atlantic to work as a hired hand at h …

In this post-lyrical era, poems can be stories, or they can just as easily be exuberant laughter set to words, an experiment in language, or an incidental collation of plays on a Scrabble board.
the pet radish, shrunken, the third full collection of poetry from the inimitable Pearl Pirie, deals in the poetics of sound, language, and play. In true …

Jamie is twenty-two years old and works twelve-hour shifts operating a wood processor, clear-cutting for pulp. At the end of each shift, he walks through the destruction he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those he can. Jamie's desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear of leaving the place where he has some st …

Following the successful reception of her first book, The Shining Material, comes Aisha Sasha John's THOU -- a powerful collection of two long, narrative poems exploring the social space that exists between the self and others. Using the language that connects these two states of being, THOU investigates the idea of "you" -- what it is and what it …

Lovers wrote letters. Letters crossed absence, longing, joy, passion, loss and heartbreak. Sometimes letters were answered. Sometimes not. And sometimes not for years, but then—
In 1948, in the exhausted aftermath of WWII, the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann met in Vienna. They began a difficult and intense but intermittent relationship …

Shortlisted for the 2014 Governor General's Award for Poetry

Shortlisted for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry.

Moving from the Enlightenment science of natural history to the contemporary science of global warming, Light Light is a provocative engagement with the technologies and languages that shape discourses of knowing. It bridges …

fur(l) parachute claims as its surrogate the Old English poem “Wulf and Eadwacer.” Declining from a mutant echo of this nineteen-line fragment that appears in the tenth century Exeter manuscript as a text that might be a riddle, or an example of a woman’s lament, or even a broken elegy, the language of fur(l) parachute is further disrupted by …

Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices of the past and present into a stitched song lifted and sounded toward the next century. Haunted by ‘time's frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas,’ O’Meara's new book explores aspects of culture, art, war, rebellion and technology, offering de …

Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal is a poetic investigation of melancholia and the baroque. As a collaborative reading of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, David Dowker and Christine Stewart have created a series of linguistic interjections that run …

Dr. Actions: What do you think it all means?
Dr. Thinking: I think it means that our collaboration is destined for great heights and the basking glory of inter-planetary fame and fortune.
Dr. Actions: But you said your dream was terrifying.
Dr. Thinking: Well, I’ve always been afraid of success.
Dr. Actions: Well, get over it, Blockbrain. Now …

A finalist for the 36th annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award!

The Combals are not unacquainted with death: they have never quite recovered from the loss of one of them in childhood. And now, on Valentine's Day, they are losing another.?

Guddy races to see her sister, Jerry and Bjarne avoid the phone and its news, Jean finds himself on a beach, and Ann …

The first word in this new collection by Phil Hall is "raw" and the last word is "blurtip." Between these, many nouns cry faith within a hook-less framework that sings in chorus while undermining such standard forms & tropes as "the memoir," "genealogy" and "the shepherd's calendar." With a rural pen, these poems talk frogs, carrots, local noises, …

A lush collection from a unique new voice whose palette of subject matter ranges from artistic anatomy to dislocation. Hiemstra-van der Horst's poems reveal a sensual awareness and an imaginative escape into intricately woven poetic worlds, rich in sensual detail and metaphor. Her gentler sketches of quotidian moments peel away to reveal an artist …

As Tammy Armstrong rode horseback on a one-month sojourn in Iceland, up rose the ley lines that crosshatched the landscape — ancient tracks rife with saga, myth, and human history. In this collection, her poems both respond to W.H. Auden's poetic travelogue, Letters from Iceland, and evoke her raw relationship to the native natural world of North …

Shortlisted, Archibald Lampman Award

In this lush collection of linguistic concatenations, Peter Richardson lines up the quotidian and the metaphysical, the personal and the fictional, and assigns equal standing to their rich complications. Whether his cast members take the ironic stance of an apostate jazz pianist or the hardball approach of a reco …

In this artfully crafted collection, Soraya Mariam Peerbaye leaps onto the stage with aplomb. She examines how naming expresses our relationship with each other and the natural world and how meaning is affected when there is no permanent human settlement to remember names.

Binding her book into three segments, she explores in exquisite detail the co …

Winner, City of Hamilton Arts Award, Established Artist, Writing

Beginning with an autobiographical account of the mind, Jeffery Donaldson's marvellous new collection moves from personal history to national history, concluding with "Province House," where the ghost of Sir John A. Macdonald has the last word on metaphor.

In his fourth collection, Dona …

Brent MacLaine's elegant, capacious, and finely crafted fourth collection, Athena Becomes a Swallow, contains twenty-seven monologues spoken by characters that appear in Homer's The Odyssey. These are not the voices of the major players, but the voices of the minor characters who received scant attention in the original. Here they are allowed to ha …

Shortlisted, New Brunswick Book Award (Non-Fiction)

From acclaimed author Mark Anthony Jarman comes Touch Anywhere to Begin, his first book of travel writing since the publication of the critically acclaimed Ireland’s Eye in 2002.

In 18 unusual, head-spinning essays, Jarman can drift through Venice amid the revelry of carnival and the arrival of th …

Shortlisted, Thomas Head Raddall Award

When Stella disappears, leaving her toddler and husband behind, her mother Sonia, a widowed farm wife and former lighthouse keeper, struggles to face the possibility that her daughter may not have slipped through the ice. She may have been pushed.

In a intensely memorable narrative with the deceptive pull of an …

Winner, Design Edge Regional Design Award

In October 2001, paint was spilled on the streets of Montreal. A stark, primitive bike symbol, looking suspiciously like the one the city used to designate a bike path; a giant zipper, pulled open down the centre line of the street on a busy commuter route; the footprint of a giant, stomping through the city …

Winner, Governor General's Award for Poetry

Shortlisted, Governor General's Award for Translation

An elegant testimony to the beautiful and the good, Serge Patrice Thibodeau's One pays homage to the vibrancy and vigor of life, backdropped against the precarious immediacy of the everyday.

From the tiny trunk of opening lines taken from Paul Valéry, Th …

Patrick Warner's Perfection — the follow-up to his award-winning Mole — makes a carnival of our most potent and dangerous obsessions. A factory outlet sells designer human parts at cut-rate prices, a midlife crisis becomes a cleansing ritual, a chocolate-chip pancake stands accused at trial, and the predatory voice of anorexia speaks to a trans …

This new collection by Lynn Davies, her first in eight years, abounds in departures: words and communities die, trout-lilies and passengers vanish, even the King and Queen of Fairies disappear. In poem after poem, Davies's powerful imagination blends observation and fancy, passion and playfulness, producing strikingly fresh metaphors. Squirrels pad …

Winner, E.J. Pratt Poetry Award
Shortlisted, BMO Winterset Award

Carmelita McGrath's Escape Velocity — the long awaited follow-up to her Atlantic Poetry Prize-winning collection To the New World — culls overlooked fragments from our domestic lives and ferries them on unpredictable journeys. A conversation with a telemarketer becomes a monologue …

"Polari," from the Italian "polare" ("to talk") is a coded language, originating in the U.K. and dating as far back as the 16th century. Overheard in outdoor markets, the theatre, fairgrounds, and circuses, it was appropriated by gay men to provide them with cover as well as with a way to assert personal and shared identities. It spread around the …

In his second collection of poems, Jeff Latosik looks to those provisional moments of arrival and anchoring in what Canadian poet Don Coles has called "the catastrophe of time."

Safely Home Pacific Western is a combination of words common to travel-package tour buses, and, as the title implies, there will be journeys to be had: into ruined stretches …

George Sipos hears the frog song at two in the morning and wonders if it is passion that drives it or the loneliness of spring. In another poem, the wet leaves of fall are described in language that cuts two ways: "I work the rake, / you the wheelbarrow. when we get tired we will change."

With quiet humour, he writes of nature, the land, and the tas …

Jonas in Frames is [choose one]: A) a series of loosely connected narrative fragments written in poetic prose; B) a maze of postcard stories bursting with literary in-jokes; C) a delicate sequence of prose poems interspersed with narrative interludes; or D) haunted by the ghost of Samuel Beckett.

In its esoteric glimpse into the disassociated, Jonas …

Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Emergencies, faith, truancy, and poverty intersect in this wry debut that volunteers a transfusion of the unpredictable for those who yearn to transition beyond a muralized Olive Garden world.

Stevie Howell's [Sharps] takes its cue from an Egyptian hieroglyph used interchangeably to represent "waters, …

The Gun That Starts the Race, alternately like a David Lynch film or an episode of The Simpsons, finds the uncanny in the everyday, surprise you, make you laugh and weep (sometimes simultaneously) with recognition at the fleeting spark of our existence. Many of these poems are like archaeological sites between the sturm und drang of people's fleeti …

Incisive and intensely felt, Stewart Cole's striking debut collection reminds us that we too live in an age of anxiety, disoriented by doubt, up late and compelled to confront the unanswerable. Sirens draw us to the inevitable fact of human suffering, black-winged redbirds perch aloof above our daily commutes, sex denies and drives our hunger for f …

In his most personal collection to date, Brian Bartlett meditates upon time and family. We share his son's discovery of newborn spiders and his daughter's first grasp of infinity as a concept. In companion poems on the births of his mother and father, Bartlett makes you feel as if you were alive at those moments in history. The opening poem, "All t …

What if red ran out is the assured first collection from one of Canada's finest young poets. Provocative, funny, and brash, the poems in this collection leap from one surprising image to another, from poignancy to an outlandish, teasing delight. The sheer tonal range of Grubisic's poems is remarkable. They shimmer with playfulness yet deepen into c …

Shortlisted, Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry and Dartmouth Book Award

In the "Boogie Nights" era of the 1970s, Betty Browning and her lover, boxer Malcolm Miles, travel from the fog-anchored grime of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sunburnt Corpus Christi, Texas, and back — meeting tragedy and bloodshed along the way. I & I smoulders with love, l …

In 1985, Gary Geddes won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region, for The Terracotta Army, a brilliant sequence of his Chinese sonnets. The nine-couplet poems were inspired by his 1981 visit to the archaeological site in China where more than 8,000 individually sculpted, life-sized soldiers and horses were interred in the third century to ac …

There's something fresh and fantastic in Aurian Haller's view of the world. In Song of the Taxidermist, he demonstrates both a fascination and unease with the independence of the body — its resistance to the self's colonizing imperative.

Employing a powerful visual and intellectual imagination, a camera and a roving curiosity, he investigates the …

Passion, obsession, addiction, vision, and despair — these are just a few of the themes explored by Mitchell Parry in this poignant portrait of Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Born in Saltzburg in the second half of the 19th century, Trakl was severely addicted at an early age. He smoked opium and later took up chloroform, alcohol, and cocaine. He was …

Shortlisted, Next Generation Indie Book Award

Heart-corroding sex with a tin woodman. A foundering marriage like a cat on the brink of death that still manages to purr. Sharon McCartney's visceral exploration of relationships — how they begin and end, the tenuous threads that hold people together, and the events that can tear them apart is unstint …

The house is still standing is peopled with charlatans, gingerbread men, children, and savants — the thousands and the particular. Adrienne Bartlett builds this nimble first collection with a supple craft. The poems deke and swerve, from the wry to the theatrical to the intimate. Whether riffing on the secret identities of public intellectuals an …

The 1940 Under the Volcano—hidden for too long in the shadows of Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece—differs from the latter in significant ways. It is a bridge between Lowry’s 1930s fiction (especially In Ballast to the White Sea) and the 1947 Under the Volcano itself. Joining the recently published Swinging the Maelstrom and In Ballast to the White …

In this illuminating essay, Neil Bissoondath explores the powerful influence exerted by narrative on the human psyche. Storytelling is a primary activity in the human experience. The stories that we tell ourselves, as well as those we hear from others, help to answer the question of who we are, "as individuals, as familial beings, as social beings. …