National Network for Equitable Library Service

-nitotamahk k sik is a poetry collection in Cree that describes deep personal experiences and post-generational effects of the Canadian Aboriginal residential school confinements in the 1960's when thousands of First Nations, M tis, and Inuit children were placed in these schools against their parents' wishes. Many were forbidden to speak their language and practice their own culture.

Intimate, nostalgic, and surprising, the poems in I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? spark connections that alter trajectory and carry lasting resonance. Encounters across phone lines, over drinks, through walkie-talkies, and unspoken recognitions between queer bodies fill this collection with explorations of what it means to be seen.

The debut collection from small press editor and publisher Cameron Anstee, Book of Annotations deploys a number of minimalist strategies-including erasure, found, lyric, haiku, one-line, one-word, concrete/visual, cento, restricted vocabularies, and lists-to question how small a poem can be made, and how can a small poem be made expansive? Engaging with contemporary and historical modes of minimalism, Book of Annotations is a dialogue in shorthand with work by H. D. , Nelson Ball, Lorine Niedecker, Aram Saroyan, Phyllis Webb, Robert Lax, and dozens of others.

Sideshow Concessions is the first book from queer performer and scholar Lucas Crawford. A collection populated by the circus-like bodies and experiences of a narrator navigating rural pasts and urban presents, Sideshow Concessions is the unofficial story of someone who is both a bearded lady and the fattest man in the world.

Poems about British Columbia, the author's relationship to the land, reconciliation, nature.

Half wisecracking tour guide and half flirtatious trick, the poems in Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe examine how we respond to overwork, anxiety, and overstimulation. McCann’s third collection speaks to a world that is too busy and too anxious, delivering the material with zero reverence and with loads of self-deprecating, disarming, observational—and sometimes catty—humour. Inviting readers to be his “bandmates / on life’s slutty bus tour,” Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe marks a fresh new direction in Marcus McCann’s poetics.

In this compelling collection of poems and art, the colour of living is red with excitement, pain, sunsets, blood, and tropical flowers. Along the way, the poet paints herself into the works of Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and Maud Lewis. Diane Driedger confronts the body in two different contexts: through her participation in the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival and through her experience of undergoing breast cancer treatment and of being chronically ill. This is poetry that celebrates the body in all its varied forms.

Hiraeth is about women supporting and lending strength and clarity to other women so they know that moving forward is always possible-- and always necessary. It documents a journey of struggle that pertains to a dark point in Canadian history that few talk about and of which even fewer seem aware. Poems speak to the 1960's "scoop up" of children and how this affected the lives of (one or thousands) of First Nations and Métis girls-- girls who later grew to be women with questions, women with wounds, women who felt like they had no place to call home.

In Approaching Fire, Michelle Porter embarks on a quest to find her great-grandfather, the Métis fiddler and performer Léon Robert Goulet. Through musicology, jigs and reels, poetry, photographs, and the ecology of fire, Porter invests biography with the power of reflective ingenuity, creating a portrait which expands beyond documentation into a private realm where truth meets metaphor.

Originally produced for the stage by Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland and For the Love of Learning, transVersing features some of Newfoundland's most vibrant and necessary trans-youth voices. Gathering the work of Violet Drake, Daze Jefferies, Fionn Shea, Perin Squires, Taylor Stocks, and Dane Woodland, and including the dramatic text by Berni Stapleton and Sharon King-Campbell, transVersing is where Shakespeare meets slam poetry and the fiddle meets soapbox rant. These are the creative and courageous voices charting our course to understanding and social justice for all.