National Network for Equitable Library Service

Spanning forty years and ten previously published collections, Wherever We Mean to Be is the first substantial selection of Robyn Sarah's poems in twenty-five years. This new volume showcases the versatility of a poet who moves easily between free verse, traditional forms, and prose poems. Familiar favourites are here, along with lesser-known poems that collectively illuminate and round out a retrospective of the thematic and formal concerns that have characterized Robyn Sarah's poetry from the start.

Hail, The Invisible Watchman is haunted poetry--Oliver's formal schemes are as tidy as a picket-fence and as suggestive; behind the charm of rhyme is a vibrant, dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. The poems in Hail, the Invisible Watchman are as tidy as a picket-fence--and as suggestive. Behind the charms of iambs lurks a dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. Metered rhyme sets the tone like a chilling piano score as insidiousness creeps into the neighbourhood.

"...a trans-mystical work of love and change..."--Ali Blythe, author of Hymnswitch. The mystics who coined the phrase 'the way of affirmation' understood the apocalyptic nature of the word yes, the way it can lead out of one life and into another.

In the stunning poems of "Settler Education", Graham explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake -- the death of nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. In ways possible only with such an honest act of imagination, and with language at once terse and capacious, she reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present. Poems from this book won the 2013 Thomas Morton Poetry Prize. 2016

Sarah Ens's second book of poetry traces connections between the Russian Mennonite diaspora and disrupted migratory patterns of grassland birds, returning to Manitoba's endangered tallgrass prairie in a meditation on the intergenerational impact of human and ecological trauma. Drawing from the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, eco-poetics, and familial history, Flyway migrates along geographical, psychological, and affective routes to explore the complexities of home.

In this poetic memoir, Katherine Lawrence rides the electric charge of childhood innocence to its moment of impact with adult manipulation and betrayal. Black Umbrella offers a bold portrait of family breakdown through the lens of a child, a teenager, and later as an adult who approaches love with wariness and longing. These poems speak of long-held secrets, strained loyalties, love, loss, and the courage required to embrace happiness through the thickening underbrush of adulthood.

Cooley conducts a chorus of "clucks & barks & muffled cries" to unconstrained cacophony. Bursting with a remarkable and encompassing cast of spiders and fish, crows and bears, rats, chickens, and cows, The Bestiary gives free rein to very human feelings and the way they grow, stunt, and stampede out on the prairie landscape. Amid hushed and howling moments, the natural bends uncanny while the extraordinary roots into the organic under Cooley's careful eye.

Welcome to the apocalypse! It was arrived . . . not with a bang, but with the white noise hum of tabloid news and the empty promise of the internet. Richard Scarsbrook`s Apocalypse One Hundred strips back the veneer of our screen-filled lives to expose every nip and tuck of our digital fantasies. Each hundred-word poem peeks over the event horizon to see the distraction that binds us to this world, hemming in thought and imagination. To learn more . . . just click here!

With vicious wit, K. I. Press pries open the intimacies of our lives in her collection of poetry, Exquisite Monsters. Fearless and weird, she splays open motherhood and mourning, laying them cheek by jowl next to biomechanical androids, and explosions of pop culture myths. And with every copy of Exquisite Monsters, enjoy your very own phantasmagorical, gender defying, reconfigurable, exquisite monster making machine. Perforated for her/his pleasure.

Endlings takes us across continents and through the long expanse of aeons to give voice to the dead. In poems that are lyrical, exact, and deeply melancholic, Joanna Lilley demands audience for the final moments of animal extinction. From the zebra-horse quagga and chiding dodo, to the giant woolly mammoth and delicate Xerces blue butterfly, the haunting, urgent words of these "endlings" cut to the bone to expose the brutality of Nature and the devastating repercussions of human ignorance and intent, while giving hope that our humanity will help save what remains.