National Network for Equitable Library Service

Poetry of ambivalence, humour, and doubt that belies a kind of optimism. Dumpster fires outside discount stores and rotting whale carcasses; optical illusions and memento mori--all 'coming to you direct, / by way of this Rube Goldberg machine. Failure to Thrive zigzags through excess, taking in the big picture through the lens of a pinhole camera.

A poetic journal looks at life in a war-torn country. After two years spent in the Kurdish North of Iraq, Patrick Woodcock has returned with his eighth collection of poetry, Echo Gods and Silent Mountains. Resisting both summary gestures and grief tourism, these poems form a sustained poetic journal of both Woodcock's own experiences and those of the Iraqis who befriended him, as it paints a picture of the birth of a new Kurdish state.

Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something — Paul Vermeersch’s fifth collection of poetry — is, as its title suggests, a lyrical meditation on written language and the end of civilization. It combines centos, glosas, erasures, text collage, and other forms to imagine a post-apocalyptic literature built, or rebuilt, from the rubble of the texts that came before.

New poems from one of Canada’s best-known poets

A moving, lyrical, and original collection from an award-winning poet

Designated Mourner is a collection of elegies for an unconventional spouse and artistic collaborator, lost to addiction at a young age. These poems keen on the page, tracing tenderness and sorrow while raging against his night.

Well crafted and intimate, Designated Mourner engages with a range of forms. It is timely as grief is a misunderstood and often shunned emotion in North American society, as is drug addiction. The poems allow emotion while never losing their aural power.

A debut collection with a fresh approach

Poems that challenge the depths of perception

Dazzle camouflage, at the beginning of the 20th century, was an attempt to answer the question, How do we hide those things that are too big to hide? Ships, often containing thousands of soldiers, were done up in a confusing array of lines to perplex and distort the viewer’s perspective (in this case, German submarines). “Razzle dazzle” was art attempting to hide life.

Up-and-coming poet Jamie Sharpe presents a finely tuned second collection

Cut-up Apologetic, Sharpe’s second collection, explores aging in a world where youth is terrible and something we desperately want back. These are poems about failing to leave our mark while marks are left on us — about the collective insatiability of emptying surroundings in an attempt to fill ourselves.

“As accomplished as Jonathan Bennett is at using language, he’s never fussy or precious about it. With his exacting, contemporary voice, part colourful reporter, part reluctant witness, his lines gain their effect by serving experience in the most necessary way possible, via clear-eyed attention and vivid diction. The result is an immediacy often lacking in other poetry. Civil and Civic’s nimble narratives will crackle in your ear.”— David O’Meara, author of Noble Gas, Penny Black

From his first book, The Visible Man (“as fine a first volume of poetry as one is ever likely to read” — the Dalhousie Review), to his most recent, Resurrection In the Cartoon (“passionate, humourous, worldly-wise, kick-ass poetry” — The Vancouver Sun), Robert Priest’s poetry has been the delight of critics and readers alike. Blue Pyramids: New and Selected Poems brings together the best of Robert Priest’s six books of lyric poems, spells, psalms, aphorisms, koans, diatribes, and prose poems along with an exciting new group of poems and aphorisms.