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From the Top of a Grain Elevator
by Barbara NickelShort-listed for the 1999 CLA Book of the Year for Children Award Award-winning poet and playwright Barbara Nickel returns to her Prairie roots in a beautiful collection of seasonal poems that chart, with a bird’s-eye view of the western landscape, nature’s glorious playground. Nickel’s experimental verses are perfectly complimented by Kathy Thiessen’s black-and-white etchings, making this ideal for any young Canadian – Prairie-dweller, would-be poet, or otherwise.
Fugue With Bedbug
by Anne-Marie TurzaThe much-anticipated second collection from the author of The Quiet. Anne-Marie Turza’s Fugue With Bedbug is part musical reference, part portraiture, a series of uncanny poems attending to time and mortality, an eccentric essay, and a musical score. Using the fugue form as a quiet compositional strategy, Turza argues that the mission: “in afterthought, was Jell-O, a salad of delicate intent and shimmy …”
Full Moon of Afraid and Craving (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)
by Melanie PowerA hometown is a data centre / where the past is storedFrom a darkly humorous perspective, this book charts a young person’s navigation of narrow definitions of faith, femininity, and family.Confronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving explores the strange combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Across settings rural and urban, Melanie Power’s poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters: a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle’s hooch. Interrogating lineage and inheritance, she traces the unsettling shadows that border joy. A series of ambivalent odes pay a winking, Proustian homage to the sense memories of a Roman Catholic millennial upbringing in Newfoundland. The long poem “The Fever and the Fret,” written during pandemic lockdown in Montreal, considers how we re-examine and consolidate our personal and civic pasts in times of crisis, drawing timely parallels to John Keats’s confinement due to illness exactly two centuries prior.At times wry and lighthearted, at others elegiac and plaintive, the voices in these poems are controlled and confident. Just as the stars in the sky are best viewed at night, this collection embraces darkness to illuminate rays of moonlight.
Game Face
by Shari GreenThirteen-year-old Jonah is determined to prove that anxiety won’t stop him from succeeding as his hockey team’s goalie in this dynamic novel in verse. What-ifs rattle around his brain at the worst times, like when he’s in the middle of a playoff game. What if he lets his teammates down? What if he can’t make it pro? And the biggest what-if of all, the one he keeps to himself — what if he’s like his dad, whose life is controlled by anxiety that has only gotten worse since Jonah’s mom died in a car crash? To prove that he’s not like that, Jonah is determined to succeed in the high-stress role of goalie. He and his best friend Ty have big plans for their hockey futures. But when Ty suffers a medical crisis during a pivotal game, Jonah’s anxiety ramps up to new levels It takes courage to ask for help, but Jonah starts to realize that his team goes beyond the people who lace up their skates with him every week, and maybe it’s okay to look for support on and off the ice. From the adrenaline rush of sudden-death overtime to the weight of worrying about letting your teammates — and yourself — down, this novel in verse will hook readers from the first line. Key Text Features dialogue poems Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.5 Explain major differences between poems, drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of poems (e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) and drama (e.g., casts of characters, settings, descriptions, dialogue, stage directions) when writing or speaking about a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.
Ganymede's Dog (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #51)
by John Emil VincentTook all this time to actually in fact bite our own tail to learn that that hurts; I guess it was worth it. / Developed a taste for tails. The prose poems of Ganymede's Dog startle myths back to life, whether Ganymede's abduction by Zeus in the form of an eagle, his abduction by a century's worth of Budweiser labels, Sophocles's boozy boy-chasing, or the dancing plague of 1518. John Emil Vincent teases his materials into surreal, joyous, dirty, sometimes gruesome animation. His revelations arrive in the guise of other characters, and throughout, there are dogs. Dog-themed philosophy, dog-headed saints, dog-worshipping island rituals, and just plain dogs invite the reader to puppy-pile with Petronius, Catherine the Great, and Saint Christopher in a sapiosexual orgy with autocorrect handling the towels. Deeply infused with gay culture and mythology, Ganymede's Dog is a collection of smart, knowing, allusive, often ironic poems that ponder the boundaries of legend and the privileges of youth and beauty.
Ganymede's Dog (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #50)
by John Emil VincentTook all this time to actually in fact bite our own tail to learn that that hurts; I guess it was worth it. / Developed a taste for tails. The prose poems of Ganymede's Dog startle myths back to life, whether Ganymede's abduction by Zeus in the form of an eagle, his abduction by a century's worth of Budweiser labels, Sophocles's boozy boy-chasing, or the dancing plague of 1518. John Emil Vincent teases his materials into surreal, joyous, dirty, sometimes gruesome animation. His revelations arrive in the guise of other characters, and throughout, there are dogs. Dog-themed philosophy, dog-headed saints, dog-worshipping island rituals, and just plain dogs invite the reader to puppy-pile with Petronius, Catherine the Great, and Saint Christopher in a sapiosexual orgy with autocorrect handling the towels. Deeply infused with gay culture and mythology, Ganymede's Dog is a collection of smart, knowing, allusive, often ironic poems that ponder the boundaries of legend and the privileges of youth and beauty.
Gathering Wild
by Marianne BlugerMeditative, meticulously-crafted poems that nonetheless take seriously the idea that all poetry is a form of praise, and that "the habit of sadness just isn’t enough/ … / because it isn't joy." Gathering Wild is Marianne Bluger's second book.
Gay Girl Prayers
by Emily AustinA collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to affirm and uplift queer, feminist, and trans realities, Austin invites readers into a giddy celebration of difference and a tender appreciation for the lives and perspectives of “strange women.” Packed with zingy one liners, sexual innuendo, self-respect, U-Hauling, and painfully earnest declarations of love, this is gayness at its best, harnessed to a higher purpose and ready to fight the powers that be.
Ghost Country
by Steve Noyes"In a sober and carefully understated voice I say: this is a damn good poet." Al Purdy on Backing into Heaven Ghost Country enters the difficult electric air between cultures and lovers, alive to the fierce exoticism of desire but also to its confusions, its political and personal dissonances. Set in contemporary China, these poems spring from the intense anguished observations of the lover of a culture who is also, inescapably, the outsider. Lyrical, candid, tough, they are rooted in a passionate honesty that refuses to sentimentalize or look away. In Steve Noyes we have a writer who has steadily hewed to his own course, producing writing with its own unforgettable tang. I turned from you. One look back - your face wet, eyes downcast - then one look back ramified, became a city of return, where mind as emperor holds court endlessly with the heart. From "The Middle Kingdom" "Ghost Country is not so much a book of poetry as the rangefinder of an exquisite camera, in which two worlds merge to form a single, rich vision. To read this book is to walk into this vision, to breathe its air, to speak its language. It's a journey worth taking, one that will linger long after the last page is turned." -- Terence Young
The Gift of Country Life
by Victor Carl FriesenMemories of farming in the 1940s conjure up images of horse-drawn farm machinery, grain stooks in fields, hay meadows, free-range chickens and cords of wood strategically placed for fuelling the kitchen range – all before farming became the highly technical, big-time operation it is now. Author Victor Carl Friesen was born and raised on a quarter section farm in Saskatchewan and still owns the "home place." It is there he still goes to renew his inner being. His poems, grouped into seasonal activities or observations, celebrate the rural world. Written in traditional blank verse, his poetry includes activities of yesteryear, his personal connections to rural life and his reverence for nature. Nature, as Henry David Thoreau said, is "one and continuous." Victor Carl Friesen lives and writes in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, but photographs nature anywhere. The first recipient of the Alberta Book Award, he is the author of five books including The Year Is a Circle.
The Girls with Stone Faces
by Arleen ParéA long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award–winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada’s greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists—and most importantly their work—to appear in Canada in many years. Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré’s collection is art loving art, woman loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.
Girlwood
by Jennifer StillShortlisted for the 2012 Aqua Lansdowne Prize for Poetry Winner of the 2012 John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer A linguistically inventive exaltation, a wild ride down into the privacies, the here-and-goneness of girlhood. In Girlwood, Jennifer Still's second collection, her poems come of age: they take the dare; they cross out of sapling and into maturity's thicket. But the poems don’t leave the girl behind, they bring her along: as sylph, as raconteur, as witness, as pure, unstoppable bravado. These songs of liberation and confinement arise from the rich and mysterious connection between mother and daughter. Here, the mother figure is as vulnerable as the daughter, caged by domestic duty, by the fear that snakes through sexuality, the longing and the repulsion that accompany mortal desire. The daughter is at once compassionate and defiant. This is the paradox at the heart of this collection. "Mother, divine me," Jennifer Still writes, and later, "Mother, spare me." Between these two phrases, which are both plea and command, we experience all the tangled pathways between mother and daughter, the cries of devotion and the congested laments.
Glass Float
by Jane MunroLines that attend to shore, air, water, sand, birds, other women; in their gathered particulars they bring us close to the concavities, the complex familiarity and mystery of conscious experience.
God's Geography
by Helen HumphreysPrecisely etched meditations on public and private experience, charged landscapes and reconceived Greek myths.
God's Geography
by Don GutteridgeDon Gutteridge approaches his home town of Point Edward, Ontario, with an array of listening and recording devices, mixing poetry, documentary newspaper collage, interviews and photography. A milestone in the documentary poem.
Going Around with Bachelors
by Agnes WalshShortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award and the 2009 Heritage and History Book Award [Writers Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador], nominated for LGBT Poetry (2008 Lambda Literary Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards The spirit of the departed -- source, origin, heritage, history -- is the essence of this book, rich with the tang of Newfoundland speech. Agnes Walsh's first book, In the Old Country of My Heart, is one of the most read and best loved books of poetry to come out of Newfoundland. Going Around with Bachelors continues and extends Walsh’s distinctive subject matter: the past in the present, Ireland and Portugal in Newfoundland, weather internal and external, the Cape Shore. Here are poems of place and of people in place, of family both immediate and extended. They are also absolutely contemporary poems by a poet, gifted with a remarkably flexible and distinctive voice, who is planted, in her own words, "straight up and down into what’s new."
The Good News About Armageddon
by Steve McOrmondPoems that occupy the difficult territory of contemporary crisis with great candour and trenchant wit. Steve McOrmond’s unflinching take on contemporary life, with its saturnine candour and ironic focus, may remind readers of the anti-poetry of Europeans like Zbigniew Herbert: intense, humanistic and deeply sceptical of inflationary gestures or stagy rhetoric. Shedding illusions, but equally refusing the consolations of despair, McOrmond’s well-tempered satire is carried home on its own crisp music. The title poem has, as it narrative background, the encounter between the narrator and a young door-to-door missionary, one who sets his worldly and jaded scepticism against her innocence and faith. The Good News about Armageddon poses questions that are difficult and durable (“In these hours of prolific / doubt, how will we acquit ourselves?”), as well as those that are topical (“Are Paris Hilton’s 15 minutes over yet?”) and probes with accurate wit (“We are an argument / for unintelligent design”). This is essential poetry for our time – astute, informed, bitingly satirical, yet grounded in its quest for words that, like Cordelia’s, reverb no hollowness.
Grey All Over
by Andrea Actis“Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment…” Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness. An assemblage of “evidence” recovered from emails about paranormal encounters sent and received by Jeff (greyallover@yahoo.com), junk mail from false prophets, an annotated excerpt from Laura (Riding) Jackson’s “The Serious Angels: A True Story,” and transcripts of Actis’ dreams, conversations, and messages to the dead, Grey All Over not only celebrates a rare, close, complicated father-daughter bond, it also boldly expands the empathetic and critical capacities of poetry itself. In pulling us outside the comfort zones of received aesthetics and social norms, Actis asks us to embrace with whole seriousness “the pragmatics of intuition” in all the ways we read, live, and love. “When a loved one dies, there’s all this stuff to deal with, and in the midst of grief we begin to collect, sort, document, store, and discard. Andrea Actis has taken the stuff surrounding her father’s death and created a book that is, like grief, in turns heartbreaking, wise, chaotic, drunk, wry, and always unflinchingly honest. This powerful testament of survival is for anyone who has felt the ‘déjà vu in reverse’ of grief. It is for the living.” —Sachiko Murakami, author of Render “Love letter, experimental poem, meditation, conversation with the dead—Andrea Actis’s compelling debut is unlike any memoir I’ve ever read. In one passage, Actis digs out the biggest piece of bone she can find in the vessel of her father’s ashes and gently bites on it. Reading Grey All Over I had a similar sensation. Ash. Bone. Love.” —Jen Currin, author of Hider/Seeker “This absolutely beautiful work makes plain that seriousness feels like love.” —Aisha Sasha John, author of I have to live.
The Grey Islands
by John StefflerSince its first publication in 1985, The Grey Islands has become a classic of Canadian wilderness writing to set beside the works of Thoreau, Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold. Using a broad range of forms and styles – lyric, anecdote, field notes, documents and pseudo-documents, ghost story, tall tale – Steffler relates the story of one man’s pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. Often comic, and always deeply passionate and sensuous, The Grey Islands tells of the sharpening of perceptions whetted by solitude, wind and rock, and of the pilgrim’s people – living and dead – who have striven to exist under its harsh regime. As in his other books, like That Night We Were Ravenous or his acclaimed novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Steffler’s writing delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.
The Grey Islands
by John StefflerDeluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada’s former Parliamentary Poet Laureate.Includes new material. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. The Grey Islands is the story of one man’s pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.
Grief Notes & Animal Dreams
by Jane MunroJane Munro's poems are explorations of the mysteries of inner experience. What are the truths of emotion? What can the body know? In Grief Notes & Animal Dreams, Munro's third collection, we enter the condition Gaston Bachelard has called reverie, strange and miraculous beauty glowing in the suspended underwater light of the heart.
Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology 2024: A Selection of the Shortlist (The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology)
by Nicole Lambe Edited by Albert F. MoritzThe prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best poetry in English from the shortlist of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.
Grotesque Tenderness (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #48)
by Daniel CowperAfraid to be alone / we met by lamplight, trading stories: // Sin of Man was one, // Age of Science, another. More // prayers than answers. Daniel Cowper's debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, speaks for an unrooted age, for unrooted people. In these poems, city-dwellers long to ally themselves with some sympathetic culture or the evolutionary logic of nature, but those alliances remain conditional, ambiguous, or dangerous. A tsunami smashes a harbour city into “tide-rows of burning debris”; children chase snakes in summer meadows. The primordial past spins off “rogue by-products and flawed replicas,” while lonely office workers get high on back porches and drink themselves to sleep. The musical and kinetic energy of Grotesque Tenderness is driven by our urge to understand pain and our hunger to reach an imperfect reconciliation with the problems of guilt and suffering. But in the tradition of William Blake, these poems affirm again and again that “the lit / world goes on living” and life justifies itself through its own workings. From elegant lyrics of alienation and heartbreak to long-form mythopoeia and lament, these poems approach beauty, ugliness, even criminality in a spirit of wonder and vulnerability.
Growing Old Together: And Other Poems
by Robert W. NeroNaturalist, ornithologist, avocational archaeologist and poet, Winnipegs Dr. Robert W. Nero has authored nine books dealing with his amazing spectrum of interests. Growing Old Together is the newest collection of poetry by this gifted writer, revealing his sensitivity and keen observation of the natural world. In his frequently passionate poetry Nero pays tribute to his wife, Ruth, who has, over many years, encouraged Bob to write and to pursue his outdoor interests – all the while sharing him with "Lady Grayl," the great gray owl he found injured and starving in 1984. From that time on, Lady Grayl toured with Bob Nero to raise funds for numerous environmental projects and to educate thousands of children and adults about conservation. This remarkable association ended in October of 2005 with the passing of Lady Grayl at age 21.5. It is fitting that Manitoba Day 2005 honoured the Great Gray Owl, the official provincial bird – and, yes, Lady Grayl was involved.
Gun Dogs: Poems
by James LangerWhat is a Gun Dog? An uncontrolled creature purportedly under our control? These poems strain at the lead. The torque is felt in the line, the verb, the wild thinking in metaphor. The maturity of James Langer's vision reveals itself here in the cumulative effect of his rhetoric. He won't land on his quarry -- Love, Forgiveness, Respect of Place, Clarity of Memory. He will, however, attain wisdom within these poems, a measured equanimity that can be traced back to the Stoics. These lines are like those of Les Murray, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Robin Robertson. Here is a debut from a genuine, fully formed talent whose poems reach the sublime.