National Network for Equitable Library Service

The poems in Black Suede Cave meditate on the space inside us, where darkness and imagination animate the unknowable. They illuminate the shadows of memory that slip into our darker corners, reveal by lamplight the nightscape of Toronto, and marvel at how loss creates vivid places of reflection around what we have loved.

These poems take the reader on a mind-blowing journey across the known micro- and macrocosms to the extreme outer edges of space and time. The counter-intuitive insights of modern science here become reality as we are led to question the representations of our senses. Quantum physics and cosmic relativity, captured in the intimacy of the prevailing sonnet form, create a dynamic challenging the reader to reaffirm the human world in the face of the unknowable.

Mothers of the 1950s were wasp-waisted, dutiful, serene, and tied to the kitchen with apron strings. Or so we thought. This collection of searing and startling poetry and prose unties the stereotype and reveals women who were strong, wild, talented, wise, mad, creative, desperate, angry, courageous, bitter, tenacious, reckless and beautiful, sometimes all at once. The contributors include multi-award-winning poets, novelists, and essayists, as well as compelling new literary voices.

COCKEYED: askew, crooked, intoxicated, absurd; marked by bends or angles; incongruous, not straight. In other words, Jim Christy, Canada's most iconoclastic and irreverent poet, views this cockeyed world the way it is; not only with 20/20 but x-ray vision and often through laughter and tears.

A sense of place has always dominated Louise McKinney's writing life. This poetry collection represents the best of her poetry written from the early 1980s to now. More than depicting mere geographical adventuring, this work expresses the poet's personal vision and emphasizes the importance of living out one's potential. This emotional journey may include the necessity of leaving something, of passing through wild and dark places in the shadow self. It may also mean becoming a different person, or persons. Sometimes inner and outer landscape merge.

The Daring of Paradise reconfigures stories and images from both multiple religions and from fairy tales, cracking them open to release new light. Poems probe the intense devotion in the letters of Paul and the sensuality shimmering within the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They cast lines across religious divides, gather elements of incarnate spirituality, and consider how, in our present moment, religion might speak to the body of the Earth.

Francis Catalano's poetry speaks of space, place and people. In the extracts from Index and qu'une lueur des lieux geographical, geological, geometrical and ancestral textures, shapes and colours kaleidoscope to create powerful North American landscapes. Wide open skies, craggy mountains, blinding snow, endless straight black top roads and fast food outlets reflect, refract and radiate in multi-facetted verse. In Romamor, framed within a city's walls, another dimension is added contrasting light and darkness, space and proximity.

From the vast expanse of the boreal forest, Vivian Demuth shows both an exquisite eye for detail and a profound concern for the larger environmental picture. Her lively poems show that, to an engaged observer with an accomplished literary imagination, the mountain forest is a complex, animated bio-community.

Three Canadian soldiers awaiting deployment to Afghanistan beat a homeless man to death on the steps of their armoury after a night of heavy drinking. The poet, whose downtown Toronto home overlooks the armoury and surrounding park, describes the crime, its perpetrators, the victim, and a cast of homeless witnesses that includes the woman, a prostitute, who first alerts police. The subsequent trial evokes reflection on the immigrant experience the poet shares with one of the accused, and on the agony of that young soldier's mother.

Moon on Wild Grasses, with illustrations by the author, shows the unsuspected scope of a very concise, precise poetic form. Keith Garebian's haiku encompass a wide range of themes in a vividly elegant style that combines the pictorial with the passionate, erotic or reflective. Nature, empirical experience, the self, love, death, and grief are captured with a perceptive, sensitive eye.