National Network for Equitable Library Service

Weaving homage and history, this collection of poetry was inspired by the life of Charlotte Saloman, the Berlin-born artist who perished at Auschwitz. Saloman was the author of Life? or Theatre? an evocative fictionalized autobiography in paint that Saloman described as a means of conquering death. Bringing together biography and imagination, the conceptual lyrics in this collection evoke a terrible moment in history and celebrate a life that triumphed despite adversity.

Weaving together complex layers of personal and political history, this collection of poems traces a Jewish family's path from 1930s Europe to 21st-century Canada. Recalling the delicate, enduring family bonds that have held fast through war and peacetime, these poems find lyric expression for the past century's traumas, large and small.

Haunting and memorable, the poems in this collection exhibit a sensuous command of language. They are written in the new formalism, a refreshing change from the spate of free verse that has lately dominated the poetry scene. In each poem, Whipple plays with assonance, rhythm, and intermittent rhyme to intensify his meaning.

These poems test the capacity of individuals, families, communities, and the earth itself to stand the pressures of modern life. They walk the tightrope over the chasm between male and female, love and hate, child and adult, war and peace, and now and forever, attempting to find balance and reconcile the one with the many.

The poems in this selection were written and published between 1954 and 1977, except for two poems which have never appeared in book form before. Fred Cogswell writes crystalline poems. A Cogswell poem is the result of concentration; this intentional focusing on a particular person or thing, or language itself for that matter, enables him to cross over the pitfall of dull colloquialism. His sole obsession is to capture, to quote Stanislavsky, the life of a human spirit.

Daniel Sloate (1931-2009) was a prolific poet, playwright and translator.

The poetic vision of "A Taste of Earth, A Taste of Flame" is timeless. It is also a work rooted in the thought of our own era. Though man does not escape his predicament, our own era has perhaps made him more aware than ever before of his destiny. But here the poet's anguish cannot make him blind to the pro-digious beauty of a world in which the gods of salvation and redemption are absent. This collection is a superb expression of the intensity of this awareness. And the ultimate happiness that lies in knowing, in awareness is what Daniel Sloate illuminates for us in his poetry.

Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards) If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming. Finding the language of violence and the violence in language, Jonathan Ball becomes the Stephen King of verse.

The lease is meaningless: a square paced first by seismic workers, and then your father, and then by every other man you know. Distilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilfields, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease plumbs the prairie depths to find human technology and physical labour realigning our landscape. With acute discipline, Henderson illuminates the stubborn and often unflattering realities of industrial culture and its cast of hard-living men. Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award

Jay used to have an ego, but had it surgically removed. Get bur'd by Alex Cayce; Perfectly Ordinary Dreams by James Llar; Short Ghosts by John Elliott; heartrants by H. Azel; and Book of Leaves by Conwenna Stokes: five books written in five radically different styles.