National Network for Equitable Library Service

Think Kierkegaard in a spacesuit, Kubrik in a Left Bank café. Like the neutrino observatory of its title, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande seeks "glimpses of the obscure" to carve out meaning, alternately a resistance to rationalism and its champion. It aims to tear through abstraction with the concrete, either catastrophic -- road accidents, nuclear explosions, floods, extinction, eviction, suicide -- or quotidian, finding threads of love, empathy, and belief within the fray.

Think Kierkegaard in a spacesuit, Kubrik in a Left Bank café.Like the neutrino observatory of its title, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande seeks "glimpses of the obscure" to carve out meaning, alternately a resistance to rationalism and its champion. It aims to tear through abstraction with the concrete, either catastrophic -- road accidents, nuclear explosions, floods, extinction, eviction, suicide -- or quotidian, finding threads of love, empathy, and belief within the fray.

Modernist poet-painters Mina Loy and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven had many friends in common (including Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp), yet there is no record that the two ever met. Their non-relationship presents a curious "absent presence" in modernist history. Zelazo weaves lines of poetry by both women into an imaginary conversation, exploring the way their work has been suppressed, stitched, spliced, and edited by male editors and arbiters of taste.

In Obits. a speaker tries and fails to write obituaries for those whose memorials are missing, those who are represented only as statistics. She considers victims of mass deaths, fictional characters, and her own aunt, asking what does it mean to be an 'I' mourning a 'you' when both have been othered? Centring vulnerability, the various answers to this question pass through trauma, depression, and the experience of being a mixed-race queer woman.

Nights on Prose Mountain gathers all of beloved writer bpNichol's published fiction. Originally appearing between 1968 and 1983, and representing almost the entire arc of Nichol's writing career, Nights on Prose Mountain is by turns heartbreaking, playful, and evocative. While Nichol's poetry is widely studied, researched and taught, his novels have remained out of print and are overdue for a new edition. Nichol's curiosity and craft, his exploration and exuberance, his lyricism and adventurousness are all on exhibit here.

Inviting, human, capacious poems that grapple with ideas while also lightly grieving our capacity for ruin.

Anxious, twitchy, urgent poems-a collection that's at once sardonic and "chronically wishful."

By turns funny, frank, mysterious, and heartbreaking, Standing in the Flock of Connections, Heather Cadsby's fifth collection of poetry, is one hundred proof associative thought. These poems testify to the human mind's capacity to "do"-taking into account all of the performative, causal, athletic, and sexual connotations of that verb. Many of them come in on an overheard conversation or monologue-mid-fight, mid-stride-and the absent details and specifics often function to open up a space for things to become other things, for the flock of connections to swarm.

What does it mean to be a man now? These poems' answers are bold and deeply moving.

Poems about commitment and catastrophe, from a voice of intense lyrical skepticism and wonderful tonal mobility.