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A pinball wizard stars in this urban romance, set where the blues meet jazz in London, Ontario's historic York Hotel.

Readers of Colleen Thibaudeau's selected poems, My Granddaughters Are Combing Out Their Long Hair, will feel at home in The Martha Landscapes, where domestic dearness and the exotic, like strangers, "make their first acquaintance….. in a blur of words." The cross-relationships that occur, in a poetry of technical virtuosity that feels as easy as breathing, are sensed to be permanent.

J.A. Hamilton distinguished herself with Body Rain (1991) a tough, passionate lyrical book written out of a woman's anger and a woman’s love. Steam-Cleaning Love, Hamilton’s second book of poetry, is "ginger root tough and jelly edgy" -- spicy, sweet, biting; it overwhelms, inundates, the palate. This new book revives the angry, biting, funny, loving, randy voice that won readers to her first volume, but sets that voice in a gentler space. These are passionate poems that celebrate women as friends and lovers, and the beauty, the delight, the desire of women's bodies.

Rediscovered Sheep takes its origin generations ago when an ancestor of John B. Lee began to raise Lincoln sheep in Ontario. John B. may never take up his inheritance as Master of the Flock, but his understanding of sheep husbandry is woven into the woolly fabric of his work. The first poems in Rediscovered Sheep are about real modern-day shepherds and actual sheep. Then the sheep get loose. They spill out into human roles -- policeman, guest speaker, ballerina -- which they occupy exuberantly and sometimes with a disquieting naturalness.

A long poem dramatizing the clash in visions of the land which occurs when a white settler builds on a sacred Iroquois site.

Longlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award Hooked is a stunning new collection of seven poems about seven famous or infamous women: Myra Hindley, Unity Mitford, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Carrington, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, and Elizabeth Smart. Each of these women was hooked on, and her life contorted by, an addiction or obsession. Here we have seven variations on the insoluble conundrum of sexuality – each in a remarkably distinct, authentic voice. Carolyn Smart brilliantly recreates seven lives of great colour.

Verve, energy, wit, piquance and pure linguistic excitement: Mia Anderson's poetry is a whole cookbook of poetic experiences. Anderson is always ready to take big risks, and her work shows her love of life in its manyness and accident, as well as a delight in the intricate prism of language. Appetite includes the long poem sequence "The Saugeen Sonata" which won The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize in 1988.

Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster's fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck--the "three-leaf clovers" so much more plentiful than the four. Dempster's wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to lif'’s ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities.

John B. Lee's first collection of poetry.

Poised and buoyant, musing among ironies; alive to the psychologies of weather, night noises, mowing the lawn and putting it off; knowing the many mindscapes of neighbourhood, detecting the places where myth surfaces into a backyard or long weekend, where a situation teeters on the brink of art and "imagined creatures are making / real connections" -- what is Closer To Home is domestic life that has been given back its dance, the bite and mystery that both provokes and eludes the grasp of the mind.