National Network for Equitable Library Service

Falling Backwards Into Mirrorsis a book that merges poetry and memoir. At the same time, it is a collection grounded in the body, naked and spare, wounded and wonderful. Through vivid, sensual images that evoke feeling, the speaker embraces the naked architecture of her own flesh and bones. In moments of give and take, this healing journey echoes the kind of deep explorations once undertaken by Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. After a fall from a boat, water, distortions of light, and the blur of close reflection inspire the speaker to question the consistency her own surface.

Afraid to be alone / we met by lamplight, trading stories: // Sin of Man was one, // Age of Science, another. More // prayers than answers. Daniel Cowper's debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, speaks for an unrooted age, for unrooted people. In these poems, city-dwellers long to ally themselves with some sympathetic culture or the evolutionary logic of nature, but those alliances remain conditional, ambiguous, or dangerous. A tsunami smashes a harbour city into "tide-rows of burning debris"; children chase snakes in summer meadows.

Text surrounds us. Text is everywhere, all the time, and the contemporary world is a codex to be deciphered and disassembled. In Dendrite Balconies, Sean Braune harvests the language that surrounds us-pieces and shards from other writers, conversations, and popular media-reassembling textual fragments into poetic sculptures. Blending together conceptual writing and lyric poetry, Braune locates beauty in the chaotic landscape of the urban environment and the digital era.

Tracks and ley-lines pull us, carry us / past Lindisfarne - or an imagined glimpse / drifting holy in the distance, / another reality running through it. A rail is a track, a support, and a barrier. In this collection, spanning the personal and the political, Kentish pathways lead to London, to Yorkshire, to Faroe, then circle back to the west coast of Canada. An appeal, a railing against, these poems reach for beauty and compassion amidst uneasy global upheaval.

Radiant is a poetic exploration of one hopeful person's healing journey through cancer-from missed appointment, to mammogram, to diagnosis, to surgery, chemo, and radiation, through hysterectomy, genetic testing through to wholeness. Kate Marshall Flaherty's luminous poetry is raw, honest yet radiant and life-affirming. The poems are chronological, yet timeless; they are courageous and graphic, yet tenaciously realistic and positive.

The Colour of Clouds features poems that focus on the Greater Toronto area which includes a variety of towns, hamlets, cities and landscapes with a rich history and culture. In a poetic and introspective style, this book explores the loss of our links to the past and how the pace of development threatens the beauty of our heritage, both built and natural. Featured in the poems are writers from Stephen Leacock to Lucy Maude Montgomery to Mazo de la Roche, and artists such as Milne, Gladstone, Varley and Macdonald who were inspired by the landscapes of these regions.

Peter Midgley’s let us not think of them as barbarians is a bold narrative of love, migration, and war hewn from the stones of Namibia. Sensual and intimate, these evocative poems fold into each other to renew and undermine multiple poetic traditions. Gradually, the poems assemble an ombindi—an ancestral cairn—from a history of violent disruption. Underlying the intense language is an exploration of African philosophy and its potential for changing our view of the world.

"With a sre voice, Groulx, an Anishnaabe writer, artistically weaves together the experiences of Indigenous peoples in settler Canada with those of the people of Palestine, revealing a shared understanding of colonial pasts and presents.

This collection brings together, for the first time in one volume, a generous selection of Leonard Cohen's song lyrics and poetry, revealing the range and depth of Cohen's work.

Published to immediate acclaim in 1956 when he was twenty-two years old, this is Leonard Cohen's first book and contains poems written between the ages of fifteen and twenty.