National Network for Equitable Library Service

The highly anticipated debut poetry collection of Mi'kmaq poems by Prince Edward Island's Poet Laureate, Julie Pellisier-Lush. This collection will enthral poetry lovers. Skilled at taking words from hearts and minds to paper, Julie's poems will connect with the reader deeply. Some poems were created with teachings from our Elders and some were created to learn more about the art of words. At times heart wrenching and other times a call to action for Mother Earth, each poignant poem is paired with vivid artwork crafted by the poet herself.

From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman's journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home.In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen's relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past.

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It's a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities.

That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Audibility is a primary theme of this collection-what can be heard, what is obstacled, and what remains unheard.

In this debut poetry collection, E. McGregor combines the lore of family history with personal memory, vividly parsing patterns of inheritance, particularly through the maternal line. What Fills Your House Like Smoke begins and ends at the deathbed of the writer's Metis grandmother. In between, McGregor composes an incomplete and wildly imaginative biography of her grandmother, interrogated by family photographs, stories, and the scant paper trail she left behind.

Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace's confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships.

A moving collection of poetry about navigating mid-life, full of humour and wit, from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor. This debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor is both an intimate deep dive and a humorous glance at the tumultuous decade of her forties. Through crisp and vivid language, Doctor explores mid-life breakups and dating, female genital cutting, imprints of racism and misogyny, and the oddness of sex and love, and urges us to take a second look at the ways in which human relationships are never what we expect them to be.

In his commanding poetry debut, Wolf Sonnets, R. P. LaRose undoes the sonnet's classical constraints, retooling the form for current political circumstances. Packed with family lore, these poems reflect on how deeply we can trust the terms we use to construct our identity. A proud citizen of the Métis Nation, LaRose even questions his right to identify as such: "I was made in someone else's home," he writes. Wolf Sonnets is verse obsessed with names, infinity, numbers, categories, and interconnectedness.

Anita Lahey writes the kind of rigorously observed, emotionally charged poetry few can match. In While Supplies Last, her first collection in eleven years, Lahey throws herself on the mercy of a changing climate, takes refuge in art and revels in everyday wonders. In the final section, about a forest fire that devastated the Cape Breton village of Main-à-dieu in 1976, she becomes a custodian of local histories.