Inspired by the Rocky Mountains, ‘Land of the Sky’, the last poem in this collection, is a means of using detail from various distances to reflect on the socio-political and the human that is all around us. At the essence of all the poems in the collection: to explore the land through the distance of the sky and understand that which seems so g …

Ilona Martonfi’s third poetry collection, The Snow Kimono, can best described as an obsession with truth. The Snow Kimono invites the reader into a magical world where reality shimmers with the fragile beauty of the moment and the dark, haunting awareness of a painful past that lingers just out of sight. Compassionate and disturbing, witness poem …

With grace and courage Ann Elizabeth Carson looks to the past from the perspective of a contemporary feminist. A lively evocation of her aunts and their home in Cheltenham, Ontario, reveals the rich and powerful ground for the poet's own emerging sense of herself. As Toronto in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s comes to life in a rare blend of poetry a …

Titled after the Latin term for “unknown land”—a cartographical expression referring to regions that have not yet been mapped or documented—Terra Incognita is a collection of poems that creatively explores various racial discourses and interracial crossings both buried in the grand narratives of history and the everyday experiences of being …

Dancing on a Pin is Katerina Fretwell’s eighth poetry, and art, collection. Honest, stark, brave, and at times a humorous evoking of feelings and ideas, this collection of evocative poems is focused on the poet’s husband's illness (cancer) and eventual death, her close sharing of this process, and the frustration of dealing with modern medical …

Passing Stranger is a memoir in verse of one woman’s life. Poems weave through a marriage, a desire for motherhood, considerations of fertility and infertility, an eventual divorce and a woman finding herself in late middle age, ready to experience life to the full. Its themes will speak to all women who have experienced the joys and the tribulat …

This book tells a story that nobody knows because at the time the story happened, nobody cared. The individual lives of the labouring Irish were unrecorded, irrelevant. The Hungry Grass weaves the threads of daily routine, annual cycles, religious faith, fairy belief, communal practice, and political reality to show as clear a picture as possible o …

Understories is an exploration of things visible mostly to the inner eye and memory, things below the surface. The book began as a riff on Mark Strand's brilliant title, "Planet of the Lost Things," and it is an exploration of loss, but also of recovery through memory and language. The first part, "A Perfect Afternoon" follows an unfulfilled romanc …

This book of poetry brings you the journey of a life lived in turbulent times. Its many stories are distilled from personal experience, honed and deepened into the shape and rhythm of poetry. The arc of this life begins with the child who has no fear of bombs — war being the only way of life she has known — but is afraid that she might reveal a …

Class Acts, Katerina Fretwell’s seventh poetry (and art) collection, establishes a posthumous relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft, the first suffragette, whose works have carved a path for feminists for hundreds of years. In the first section of the collection, “Our Mirroring Centuries,” Fretwell uses Wollstonecraft’s life and writings as …

The poems in this collection are a voyage of self-discovery. They are poems of disclosure, of exposure, of allowing one’s self to be vulnerable, of telling truths. The poet touches upon myriad themes such as bird-watching, illness, accidents—but through all of these, she examines the complexity of human feeling and relationships. These relation …

Black Canadian women must constantly incorporate changes to their identities to face the challenges of living in a multicultural society. Naturally Woman: The Search for Self in Black Canadian Women’s Literature examines the ways in which Black immigrant women must adapt to survive in a multicultural country such as Canada without losing their se …