National Network for Equitable Library Service

Delphine Almquist and her husband Hugo are living the hobby farm life of her dreams on the Canadian Prairies, far from the world of climate change concerns and global conflict. The only thing missing is a spectacular new kitchen, a tiny bistro to call their own. When she accidentally orders one online, her attempts to remedy the situation threaten her marriage to Hugo. The pressure explodes when her brother Paul arrives with end-of-the-world paranoia and plans to save the whole family on his hidden rustic homestead.

While much of small-town living remains the same: farming is always reliant on the weather regardless of new technology, after all, there is a sense of urgency and a need to escape in Chelsea’s poetry; her stories of growing up on the prairies include references to cell phones and modern farmers who are more like businessmen.

What begins as a look back at a different time in history quickly takes a dark turn in Bob Currie’s latest collection. Embodying a variety of characters, often in different voices – both those of well-known classic poets as well as the voices of Saskatchewan poets past and present – Currie ponders the collective human experience. With razor-sharp precision and telltale imagery, these poems explore domestic and public life: bad marriages, infidelity, poverty, gun violence, and in a final section, death – and how these experiences change (or don’t) between one generation and the next.

Covering Indigenous adventures from Wahpole Island to Northern Saskatchewan to the West Coast, #IndianLovePoems is a poetry collection that humorously delves into the truths of love and lust within the Indigenous communities, leading to reflection on the complexities of sex, race, culture, and intention within relationships.

An exquisite series of meditations on memory, evanescence and the land. Randy Lundy draws deeply from his Cree heritage and equally from European and Asian traditions. Readers will be reminded by turns of Simon Ortiz, Per Lagerkvist, and Jane Hirshfield. This is the mind of prayer, a seeing and re-seeing of the immense cyclic beauty of the earth.

Louis Riel prophesied that a polyglot Metis nation would rise on the prairies five hundred years after his death, and that it would be called by the "joyous name" of the House of Charlemagne. This new polity would be built on the principles of Riel's Massinahican, a radical philosophical system which now survives only in fragments. Its hallmarks would be justice, ontological accord, and the blurring of all separations dividing women and men, the earth and human beings.

Spaces are not exterior to bodies. They influence and affect the way bodies exist in the world. A quarry is an unnatural place within a natural territory. At any moment, it can be abandoned. A body is not separate from the spaces it inhabits. They exist together, in a mutual state of interrelation and instability. Quarry relays a year in the life of a body in transition as it changes with other bodies; human, animal, and mineral. It examines queer social spaces and contested natural spaces, asking how they affect each other.

Visible Cities prompts readers to reconsider their relationship to the landscapes of cities. Poems explore streets in cities all over the world, while the photographs find beauty in back lanes, observe people taking their coffee breaks, capture people playing with a work of public art or pulling a ladder onto the roof of a downtown building. The language of the poems creates a poetic style that expresses the challenges and joys of living in cities. The photographs come from all over the world--Regina, Saskatoon, Chicago, New York, Paris, and Venice.

A poetry that is at once harrowing, angry, and achingly beautiful