National Network for Equitable Library Service

aFebruary 2021 to March 2022 was a period of great reflection for two of Canada's most celebrated poets. Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt wrote collaborative poetry, formatted like a call and response. Ariel intended to write about urban Manitoba, the city and its trees, and Brenda was to write about rural Saskatchewan and birds. Over the course of the year, the matter of place took over and the intentions branched and flew apart. The poets wrote about the natural world and people making their way through it all.

Following her critically acclaimed first collection of poetry, What Fox Knew, poet Mary Barnes' sophomore collection, Moving Upstream reveals a tempered grace. Barnes brings her Ojibwe roots to the fore and elegantly coaxes out the seemingly quiet world we often take for granted. In this masterful new collection, we are transported to place and time, to the heart and soul of the poet's love for the natural world.

Poet Sareh Farmand was born in Tehran at the start of the Islamic Revolution. In this brave first collection of poems and prose a narrative arc details her family's escape from Iran, detailing their time as immigrants in limbo, and finally, as Landed Immigrants in Canada. Using family anecdotes, memory, public documents, and images to outline her family's story, Pistachios in my Pocket moves from the personal to the universal by exploring the influences of migration, political strife, and cultural identity on humanity.

This evocative new poetry collection speaks with a fierce tenderness of many aspects of the poet's life: a childhood spent on the banks of the Churchill River, the death of a beloved one, the struggle to try to find forgiveness for wrongs done and the weariness of trying to redress those wrongs. And, most poignantly, a beautiful rebellion reaches one hand back to Louis Riel and one hand forward to future Metis generations.

Finalist for The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize at the New Brunswick Book Awards!Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers. These masterfully crafted poems challenge perpetuating colonial and class relations, as well as the hedonistic lifestyle attributed to the employees of these floating resorts.

Sonja Ruth Greckol's Monitoring Station enters a slipstream of space and planetary language, circling time, embodying loss and longing, generating and regenerating in a faltering climate. Orbiting through a mother's death, a grandbaby's birth, and a pandemic summer, these poems loop and fragment in expansive and empathetic ways. The title poem locates a settler voice revisiting Treaties 6 and 7 and the Métis lands of her Alberta childhood, while the overall collection is tethered to Toronto shadowed by northland prairie.

In there's more, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike takes on the rich concepts of home and belonging: home lost and regained, home created with others and with the land, home as "anywhere we find something to love." Giving voice to the experiences of migrant and other marginalized citizens whose lives society tends to overlook, this collection challenges the oppressive systems that alienate us from one another and the land.

Indie Rock candidly focuses on a queer poet/musician's life in Newfoundland and his personal struggles with addiction, OCD, and trauma. This intelligent and punchy collection is steeped in musicality and the geographies and cadences of Newfoundland. With an astute attention to form, rhythm, and aesthetics, Joe Bishop tells an honest and contemporary coming-of-age story about an artist alienated from, but fascinated by, the world he inhabits.

In this, her fourth book of poetry, one of Canada's best-loved poets takes on one of the most compelling divas of our time. In sixty-one audacious poems, Jeanette Lynes re-imagines and reanimates the peripatetic art, life, and times of Dusty Springfield. Alternating between playful irreverence and profound compassion, It's Hard Being Queen paints a compulsively readable portrait of an extraordinary life. Each page is infused with wit, drama, and, of course, music. Jeanette Lynes not only steps into the icon's shoes-she lives in her skin.

Atiku utei, « le coeur du caribou », c'est la force d'un peuple et sa grande humilité. Les Innus ont marché à travers les tempêtes de la vie. Ils ont traversé des montagnes pour se nourrir de l'esprit du caribou. Ils puisaient en lui leur force, leur courage, leur savoir. Au son du tambour, l'appel de la forêt aiguise l'instinct. La poète au cœur du caribou entend la voix de Madiba, Nelson Mandela. Elle entend les tambours jaillir et leur son ressemble à ceux de son peuple. Lui, son cœur, c'est la paix et cette poussière qui soulève le ciel à l'infini.