National Network for Equitable Library Service

Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), has been heralded as a complicated and passion fuelled artist who dared to live in disregard of the burdensome expectations for women in the first half of the last century. 97 Positions of the Heart is a lyrical travelogue through the courageous life of this Canadian writer. Poet Jaik Josephson mines both her biography and literary catalogue to escort the reader into her remarkable world. Each poem charts Smart’s persistent quest to resist the forces that sought to claim and silence her.

Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems, Melanie Dennis Unrau’s debut collection is an elegantly spare, thoughtful, and fiercely tenacious meditation on the trials and tribulations of modern motherhood. Written in response to the platitude “Your children are your poetry now,” Happiness Threads explores the struggle of a young mother to balance the demands of raising young children with her desire to make art.

Intermission is an uncommon and refreshing excavation of popular culture, memory, and relationship. It offers startling interpretations of the fashionable sitcoms and young-adult novels which were prevalent during the late 1970s while exploring the nuances of belonging, faith, and loss. With a tensile gesture we are moved from the icons of the 1960s–Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the playful insertion of Jim Morrison’s documented acronym of his own name, Mr. Mojo Risin’–to the cityscapes inherited by Generation X.

St. Boniface Elegies includes short lyric poems on the themes of domestic life and loss; longer poems that explore the role of the poet within a changing cityscape; and a series of poems that engage with poetic tradition. Hunter plays with poetic forms, including a new invention: the cento sestina.

Gospel Drunk follows a speaker’s journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as “dragons in suits” collide with critiques of “the broken bicycle of recovery.” A child’s fingers interlace to form a gun during mass and Hulk attends an AA meeting.

first snow falling slow hangs in the air a curtain drifting there thickening sight —“Winter” In this new collection, Douglas Barbour experiments with what he calls “rhythmically intense open form.” Listen. If presents technically innovative poetry that invites the reader to join in some serious play. Barbour’s vivid, ekphrastic poems engage an ongoing conversation among artworks—not only classic paintings but also popular music—while his lyric poems astutely, accessibly evoke places, moments, and feelings.

Rain Shadow is a collection of poetry that explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and humans yearning to connect with something greater than themselves. The poems range through destabilized lives and landscapes, fathoming presence and absence, transformation and oblivion. They outline the major questions of our time as the poet crisscrosses western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Witty, playful, serious, and heartsore, Rain Shadow seeks to understand the space in which people and nature are inextricably entwined.

In her newest poetry collection, Salimah Valiani traces the meaning of love in 29 different ways. Two themes thread the poetic work: the exploration of love via loss, movement, stillness and surrender; and the attempt to understand historically the socio-ecological dismantling we are living throughout the world today. This book is about love in a large sense, of a sort/sorts needed to heal ourselves and our world ravaged today with division, fascism, ecocide, inequality, and violence.

This poetry collection travels through a daughter's childhood memories in Montreal, her mother's homeland of Lebanon, and the dark realities of grief across borders. Min Hayati uncovers the well of sorrow and the depth of love discovered only through loss. In this collection, poetry pays homage to the author's maternal lineage, her mixed ethnicity, and the ways in which "mother" transcends all aspects of life. This collection advocates for a radical change in our approach to grief and the (still) taboo subjects of death, dying, and grief.

Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora. In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled.