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Woodshedding
by S. E. VenartLonglisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards Whatever their subject -- the unwinding of lovers, childhood as the foundation of being, the metaphorical life of everyday objects and events -- S.E. Venart's poems show us a kind of courage that is quotidian. Surviving childhood, surviving failed love, finding solace in the self, and reinvigorating that self: this is the world Venart reveals to us, in all its prescient detail. A honest and lyrical first book.
Words for Trees
by Barbara FolkartIn this Ottawa writer’s first volume of verse, there are trees, of coursecatalpas on stained-glass transoms, an ever-present crabappel, nameless species in whose bare branches the winter solstice lurks. There is music, tooa whorehouse tango, a string quartet enthralling a favourite cat, the silky caress of a clarinet along the remembered flesh of adolescence. And visual art, from the Middle Ages through Matisse, is reenacted in vignettes of desire or dereliction.
worn thresholds
by Julie BerryReading Julie Berry's poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. "like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this," Berry writes in "Touching Ground." "Like this" is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues. Her images are so completely unexpected and yet so thoroughly right that you are left wondering why you never imagined "the minute hand [falling] into the refrigerator and breakfast/ . . . clattering across the lawn/ its spoons and bowls and burning toast." Her eye is keen and quirky; its wide embrace enfolds the highways and cemeteries of southwestern Ontario, flying pianos, her lover's ex-neck, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, furniture cleaners, suicides and mass strandings. And of course her reader. Here is a poet whose honesty and wry humour loosen the tangles of the heart.
Xanax Cowboy: Poems
by Hannah GreenThe Xanax Cowboy has a reputation like a rattlesnake. She might as well be a strike-anywhere match in a gasoline town. Her whiskey is mixed with vengeance like her mind is mixed with pills. The last doctor who told her she ain't nothin' is still spitting blood through a split lip.
The Year Is a Circle: A Celebration of Henry David Thoreau
by Victor Carl FriesenHenry David Thoreau is remembered as a foremost nature writer. He was an ecologist before the term was invented. A man of many parts, including social critic, he is known to have had an influence on such internationally recognized leaders as Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "Victor Carl Friesen, author of The Spirit of the Huckleberry, an astute analysis of Henry David Thoreau’s prose, again demonstrates his affinity for the Walden sage with this unique volume of poems and photographs. Taking a series of quotations demonstrating Thoreau’s sensuousness, he writes a poem for each and then illustrates them with outstanding colour photographs. The poems, mostly written in the blank verse form, have sturdy strength and remarkable insight into both Thoreau and nature."- Walter Harding, Founding Secretary, The Thoreau Society Inc., State University of New York, Genesco "Friesen is particularly qualified as a Thoreau scholar, for his personal interests extend well beyond literature to include natural history, a subject very much at the centre of Thoreau’s writings."- Canadian Book Review Annual
The Year of My Disappearance
by Carole David Donald WinklerWinner of the 2016 Prix des LibrairesWinner of the 2016 Quebecor Prize for the Trois-Rivières Poetry FestivalCarole David's The Year of My Disappearance is a searing, surreal, darkly comic descent into a woman's psyche. From Governor General's Award winning translator, Donald Winkler, into English, comes this pitiless assault on the author's own torments and pretenses. Present here are figures lodged in her memory: lovers, strangers, her mother, and Bosch-like apparitions out of her dreams and imaginings. Through it all, a fierce combat is being waged between immolation and survival. As David has written, "I gave free range to the lives that dwelt within me." It's down this road the blind spot sings.
Year Zero
by Brian HendersonYear Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along songlines as though following passages of Koto music. In Brian Henderson's poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed by awareness of the paradoxes at the heart of language, that language wants you for itself, and that what is named, falls. Whether focusing on the dying of a parent or fellow poet, or on the coming-to-be of a child, this poetry is alive with the truth that "The dead burn through us/ the not yet born."
Yellow Crane
by Susan GillisInviting, human, capacious poems that grapple with ideas while also lightly grieving our capacity for ruin.
You Still Look the Same
by Farzana DoctorA moving collection of poetry about navigating mid-life, full of humour and wit, from acclaimed novelist Farzana DoctorThis debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor is both an intimate deep dive and a humorous glance at the tumultuous decade of her forties. Through crisp and vivid language, Doctor explores mid-life breakups and dating, female genital cutting, imprints of racism and misogyny, and the oddness of sex and love, and urges us to take a second look at the ways in which human relationships are never what we expect them to be.
Your Last Day on Earth
by Carla HartsfieldLonglisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards Carla Hartsfield sings praises to the unusual: a rose blooming in December; an angel dancing on a cardiologist's scanner; Glenn Gould playing Brahms at Angelo's Garage. But these are common occurrences in Your Last Day on Earth, the everyday world and the metaphysical realm sharing the same ecstatic poem. Hartsfield transforms the contents of her psyche into music that we can all hear, the kind that replays for days in the dark, dreamy parts of our selves.