National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Cure Is a Forest probes the various processes of growth and transformation among all living things in deep ecology. An element of animism permeates throughout the poems which are set in and against the backdrop of Canada’s ecotones, greenwoods, and lakes. The Cure Is a Forest is an odyssey or escape from the city and industry into both the past and the possible.

My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish' is a powerful collection. Karen Shenfeld's poems are filled with passionate sensuality, triggered by dazzling memories of people and places. There are short lyric poems that focus on a specific symbol to take on larger meanings, and narrative works in which the poet contemplates the Holocaust using the specifics of everyday, named objects. From Shenfeld's controlled intelligence comes an honest recollection of the past, imbued with an expansive hopefulness.

Michael Mirolla's poetic world is one where a mirror, or any simple reflective item is tilted ever so slightly, providing an opening to places we never imagined existed. (One of them is his own birth, from the inside, looking reluctantly out.) The poet is a metaphysical detective, finding the cracks and gashes that open into other worlds. Uncomfortable in the here and now, he would rather spend time in the past/future, or on the edge of that mirror.

In Footsteps on the Ceiling, Baila Ellenbogen explores the overlapping planes of existence her experience and intellectual curiosity have led her to inhabit, reliving childhood memories while questions of faith and domestic responsibilities collide. With a combination of personal, lyrical, and mystical images, the poet examines our ability to love and be loved, our longing to be heard, and the integrity of one voice rising among the many.

The thirty-three authors whose poems appear in this collection are: Jonathan Bennett, Rosemary Blake, Allan Briesmaster, Robin Blackburn, Clara Blackwood, James Clarke, Ron Charach, Margaret Christakos, Antonio D'Alfonso, Christopher Doda, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Keith Garebian, Ellen S. Jaffe, Steven Laird, John B. Lee, Malca Litovitz, Laura Lush, Joseph Maviglia, Steve McOrmond, Merle Nudelman, John O'Neill, John Oughton, Ruth Panofsky, Gianna Patriarca, B.W.

Bodies float in rapture, and in death, transported by waves of pleasure, or lapped by failure, fallen, having flown too close to the sun. The poems in this collection are at once macabre and ecstatic, probing the body by means of metaphysics and transcendence through pure sensuality. They describe the disintegration of story that occurs in the face of false love or faith, revealing the ironies, the non sequiturs, the sacrifice.

Exhale, Exhale explores the many facets of love, including nostalgia, separation, and newly-found happiness. These terse poems describe various passages of a love story unravelling between two continents, from the lonesome nights of a distant relationship to the abstract imperative of finding happiness within oneself. With a voice that is both wry and tender, the author guides the reader through a journey to the depths of the human soul, in search of what comes after love.

Lane is a pluralist in outlook and technique whose work, over the years, has explored civic space, domestic space, wilderness space, and interiorized psychic spaces. I've long enjoyed Lane's openness to idiosyncrasy - her willingness to let the odd, the quirky, the eccentric, sing... I admire the risks Lane takes in her poetry, her penchant for taking us to 'the place where the map gives out.'

Born in Amqui, Quebec, in 1938, Madeleine Gagnon has published over forty books of poetry and prose in Quebec and France. Although Gagnon's work is firmly rooted in North American mythology, history, and culture, she has published significant works dealing with the situation of women in war-torn countries and the impact of prolonged suffering on people's minds and spirits. In Stone Dream Gagnon takes us on the ultimate trip a poet can offer: the vast journey through our collective unconscious to produce the living poem, the dream of stone that so tantalized and provoked Baudelaire.

This selection of poems offers the reader a good introduction to a poet of oxymorons, the poet who brings light out of the darkness. Born and living in Montreal, José Acquelin is known to be a poet open wide to the world. He is the author of fifteen poetry collections and, for over twenty-five years, has been an active reader-performer-organizer of events mixing poetry, music and the visual arts, across the country as well as in Europe and Latin America.