National Network for Equitable Library Service

The poems in this book brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt, and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, these verses give voice to our deepest intuitions.

This richly illustrated Inuktitut book makes the story of Uumasuusivissuaq accessible to Inuit everywhere. This important story from Inuit cosmology tells how a powerful woman has filled the world with marine life, and continues to ensure the natural world is cared for. This book also talks about the importance of the ancient taboos that must be kept to ensure this woman is respected and not angered.

“I build this story like my lair. One willow, / a rib at a time” — “The Crooked Good” Since 1990, Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe’s work has stood out as essential testimony to Indigenous experiences within the ongoing history of colonialism and the resilience of Indigenous storytellers. Sôhkêyihta includes searing poems, written across the expanse of Halfe’s career, aimed at helping readers move forward from the darkness into a place of healing. Halfe’s own afterword is an evocative meditation on the Cree word sôhkêyihta: Have courage. Be brave. Be strong.

Deportment is a selection of poems – surreal, cerebral, and defiant – by Alice Burdick. Burdick examines the dangers of dogma, women’s rights, and environmental degradation in biting satires, moving elegies, and anti-sentimental lyrics filled with mischievous wordplay. The selection includes some of Burdick’s most iconic poems as well as rare work from the beginning of her career in 1990s Toronto and previously unpublished material. Burdick’s later poetry, more expansive in form and subject matter, addresses motherhood, the rural landscape, and sex and desire at middle age.

Sense and sensuality. Body and embodiment. Fail Safe links human senses to the fecund world, examining plant and human bodies on the inside and the outside. Linguistically flourishing, sonically dense, this language is tactile. Dynamic and lush, these poems are inviting in their linguistic play. Using an impressive range of styles and poetic approaches, Nikki Sheppy presents strong, energetic, intelligent work. Each poem stands alone, yet speaks to the poems around it. Each poem is felt and tasted with acute attention to language and the body.

The poetic speaker, a First Nations Donna Giovanni, relates stories of her search for The One, or even better, that One-Night-Stand, in heated lines that fearlessly shed light on the intimacy and honesty that may arise even from the most fleeting encounter, leading to reflection on the complexities of sex, race, culture, and intention within relationships.

Speaking a language we understand, Rona Shaffran's poems tell the story of remarkable things that can happen in a broken relationship. These poems inhabit the sharp edges and rich depths of a union too long untended. Ignite begins in wintry suburbia with a man and woman who have lost emotional and physical connection. A magic-realist plunge into the atavistic tropics of desire breaks this barren matrix. The exotic landscape sparks resurgent passion, which leads to a dramatic and healing turn-around for the couple. The poems of disappointment don't waste a word.

The Way We Hold On is Abena Beloved Green's debut book of poetry. Her poems address cultural, social, and environmental issues, relationships, and reflect on everyday life as a small-town raised, semi-nomadic, first-generation Canadian. Here are poems about holding on and letting go-of ideas, opinions, beliefs, people, places, and things.

This collection brings together Allan Cooper's best poems over the last forty years. He weaves visions of nature with insight into the workings of the human heart. Read them individually or read them as a single long, flowing and eloquent narrative. The meditative and compassionate observations will transport the reader from the chaos of everyday life into a healing realm of possibility. In Toward the Country of Light, the author offers open sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, small poems inspired by the Chinese and Japanese, and poems influenced by Robert Bly and Francis Ponge.

Salt Fires is a volume of poems that embrace and reflect our human consciousness: our awareness, our blindness, our Shadow, our mythologies. They invite us to look at ourselves in ways that often are disconcerting, sometimes startling. Love of land infuses Salt Fires. Intimately inhabited and passionately shared, Nova Scotia's farms, woods, and shores reveal themselves to be our Earth in microcosm. A suite of Sable Island poems closes the book and affirms this notion-Sable Island, a strip of sand in a vast ocean, impossible, yet somehow here, like our planet, rich in life and beauty.