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An elegiac and incisive debut that blends poems of social justice with poems of ordinary life. In her first collection, Thin Air of the Knowable, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa’s life—West Coast, Caribbean, prairies—ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations.

The poems in Bearings are arranged in the stressful rhythm of alternation between the intense states of being in love and/or with someone or being alone. Loss refines the vision. For Rhonda Batchelor's poetry that means a gain which shows, for example, in occasional tender lyrics about experiences not governed by love and in the tang of the west coast in her poems, though setting is never the central thing. The centre is love, particularized with an art that revitalizes the ancient subject.

Winner, Lesbian Poetry at the 2008 GCLS Literary Awards (Golden Crown Literary Awards) and nominated for LGBT Poetry at the Lambda Literary Awards Shortlisted for the 2007 Anne Szumigalsi Award for Poetry and the 2007 Saskatoon Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards In this stunning new collection, Elizabeth Philips takes us down into the swirling core of planetary energies, the central mystery of life itself.

A sequence of fifty dated poems, four quatrains each; lyrical arguments; quick thinking amid the rational absurdity of everyday machinery; intuitive explorations of unknown energies; a diary of the unconscious.

Dead Man's Float details that sad emblem of Western alienation, the tourist couple in their rented tropical Eden. Here life is temporary and not at all cheap. The wildlife is spectacular, the culture incomprehensible, and the locals politely try to hide their hilarity at Canadian pidgin Spanish. Heat, beaches, ruins -- why did we think they could distract us from domestic squabbling or the 3 a.m. dreads? Derk Wynand wrings wry existential meditations from firsthand experience of the Exotic -- the First World and the Third in their ritual winter dance.

In her third collection of poems, Sue Wheeler writes of the ephemeral with an eye trained on the eternal questions. "Who are you?" she asks at the outset of her search for fresh and more telling names for the human in the lush natural landscape of her West Coast island home. The answers she gives us are always surprising. Wheeler names for us this place she knows intimately, where, despite its natural wealth, human sorrows grow as abundantly as the rich flora of the forest understory.

Winner of the 1995 Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Prize Variations on Herb is the latest in a lengthening series of books that emanate from the south-western Ontario farm of John B. Lee's childhood. The focus of Variations is Herb Lee, John B's grandfather (and an absolutely unforgettable curmudgeon) but the background of rural Ontario is also made palpable entirely without indulgent explanation. This grain, this rich vein that appears in book after book, may well be inexhaustible; the cumulative effect certainly has few parallels in Canadian writing.

Tuning a fine ear to Lawrence’s letters from 1906 until his death in 1930, Barry Dempster’s poems uncover the man within the myth and give voice to Lawrence’s passionate mortality. Dempster’s act is one of imagination and homage, a kind of lyrical readership which traces the life-and-death line in a great writer’s life, with its constant illness and energy, a line “green as the vein of a young man’s desire.” In this book, Barry Dempster, acclaimed as a writer of short fiction and novels as well as poetry, extends his range and the genre of poetry itself.

In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.

A man who might be Erik Satie floats, a la Magritte, above Paris rooftops, thinking of a newly-extinct species of songbirds, "contemplating grief in the absence of song." By turns tender, wry, playful and fierce, the poems in Dean Steadman’s second collection, Apres Satie -- For Two and Four Hands, use surreal imagery, recurring characters and cyclical themes to evoke the repetitive nature of much of Satie’s music, as well as the artistic and intellectual temperament of Paris during Satie's most creative years.