National Network for Equitable Library Service

“Required reading for the untamed soul . . . reminded me how to love others and myself.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed. A transformative collection of intimate and lyrical love letters that offer a path toward compassion, forgiveness, and self-acceptance. What happens when we imagine loving the people—and the parts of ourselves—that we do not believe are worthy of love? Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world.

Peering inside eyeballs, pondering the paradox of absent stars, and meditating on street scenes by André Kertész, these poems squint sidelong at our ways of seeing the world. Through playful poems about photography and visual perception, Hollett dissects auroras and quarks, atmospheric phenomena, potatoes, bomb craters and peat bog cadavers. This darkly comic collection is shadowed by entoptic paparazzi, haunted by peripheral visions.

A book of poems and interruptions, recording instances of love, self-realization, and recovery in non-binary, queer, and autistic lives. In their stunning debut collection, A. Light Zachary draws power from a vision of life - especially queer and neurodivergent life - as a journey of continuous self-realization. These poems record the experience of locating oneself over and over again, within gender, language, family, labour, sexuality, fear, and love.

Sid Mary is a voice to be reckoned with. Beloved for his intimate, lyrical poetry, Marty's depiction of selfhood, connection to place and to landscape have proven him a unique and dissenting voice in Canadian literature as well as a consistent presence in the Canadian environmental movement. These are poems, often strongly resonant of western speech, that celebrate all the vicissitudes of rural life, the loves and losses, the valleys and peaks of life on the prairies, foothills and in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia.

In March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems. Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a "fancy academic" who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex.

The body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence. In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body.

Poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei's Eight Track is a transliterary exploration of traces. Sound recordings, surveillance cameras, desert geoglyphs, drone operators, refugee interviews, animal imprints, and audio signals manifest moments of inspired wonder, systems of power, slippages, debris.

A stunning new collection from a master poet celebrated for her singular voice. From the award-winning poet known for her bracing honesty and sharp yet compassionate gaze, here is a new collection of poems that explore life, marriage, addiction, death, and heart-wrenching grief. By turns fiercely tender and incredibly wry, these poems urge us to confront the difficult aspects of life head-on.

"Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart."

Monument is a conversation with Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, which moves her legacy beyond the Taj Mahal. Monument upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mumtaz Mahal's story. The collection layers linear time and geographical space to chart the continuing presence of historical legacies. It considers what alternate futures could have been possible. Who are we when we continue to make the same mistakes? Beyond distance, time, and boundaries, what do we still carry?