National Network for Equitable Library Service

Governor General's Award-winning poet Don Domanski's posthumous last collection once again melds perception-expanding environmental poetry and metaphysics into a seamless, moving lyric whole.

Field Requiem bears witness to the violence inherent in the shift to industrialised farming in prairie Canada. Sheri Benning's poems chart the ways in which a way of life collapses, the world of the family farm, even as the speaker suffers, too.

"At the center of the garden the heart," she writes, "Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff." As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris's poems map the garden as body and the body as garden-her words at home in the phytological and anatomical-like birds in a nest.

When Carol Rose GoldenEagle was a child, attending Easter church services, she recalls the annual ritual of the priest presenting plaques depicting the stages of Christ's persecution to his resurrection, referred to as the "stations of the cross." Using these early teachings as a springboard for critical reflections, poems look back, but more importantly, look forward to reclaiming the gifts given by Creator within Indigenous culture.

Exploring what it means to be alive in this increasingly contradictory, unjust, and frightening era in human history, award-winning poet Michael Trussler grapples with the beauty and violence of the present in his new collection, The History Forest. Trussler's vivid, sensory, surreal writing explores the myriad ways that wonder can exist alongside suffering. He ruminates on nuclear war, school shootings, and ecological destruction, alongside his own experiences with mental health, aging, and loss.

What We Carry is a profound exploration of the weight of human history at three levels: the individual, the cultural, and environmental. From her brilliant "Extinction Sonnets"--odes to various disappearing species--to a spirited examination of everyday salutations, Susan Glickman's range astonishes: ice storms, sugar maples, early love on the Orient Express, an archaeological dig at Mycenae.

Poems about Montreal's metro stations and streets to pastoral mise-en-scènes. William Vallières' first book.

The belief in translation as an act of self-portraiture drives Afterwords, Geoffrey Cook's ambitious reimagining of German poems by Goethe, Heine, Rilke and Brecht. Cook's versions not only transform these foreign texts into English poems in their own right, but enrich and expand his uniquely prismatic voice. Cook brings a contemporary and Canadian tone to his adaptations, which also showcase the exacting craftsmanship for which his first collection, Postscript, was praised. Afterwords is a book that daringly celebrates authorship as a shared project.

A rogue moose wanders into a suburb near Quebec city, tramples lawns and gardens, stumbles in and out of a swimming pool, is tracked by three gun toting heads of family who shoot it down just as a school bus goes by wherein a little girl is trilling “Three Little Kittens.” Thus begins No Grave For This Place, Judy Quinn’s bleak, ironic, and at times darkly comic tribute to Auberivière, the neighbourhood where she grew up.

Power and sex take centre stage in Robin Richardson's formidable third collection, Sit How You Want. Plane crashes and automobile mishaps are the backdrop for female narrators who grapple with terror, anxiety, and powerlessness: "When I say I'm fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy." In their grim wit, sinister straight talk, and sometimes violent bawdiness, Richardson's poems work as counter-charms against the lingering trauma of abusive relationships, both familial and romantic.