National Network for Equitable Library Service

Habibi, the love poems of the Moroccan poet Alim Maghrebi, is the latest in a series of David Solway's poetic "translations,"dating from Andreas Karavis' Saracen Island and including Nesmine Rifat's Pallikari, Rhys Savarin's Reaching for Clear, Bartholomew the Englishman's The Properties of Things, and Dov Ben-Zamir's New Wine, Old Bottles, the latter still in manuscript. These are what Solway calls his "ostensibles," poetic voices and artifacts which he regards as constituting an extended trope or metaphor of the desire for transformation.

To read Danielle Fournier is to plunge into the centre of a woman’s heart and body – a heart that continues to beat, to search and to hope spurred on by a sensual, desirable – and desiring – body. Not only physical and emotional, Fournier’s pursuits are also geographical and linguistic as she travels across continents and languages encountering bleak landscapes brightened by desire and feminine kinship. Despite the journey’s internal ruptures and emotional turmoil, we reach joy and the conclusion that We come from the same light.

Translated by award-winning author Antonio D’Alfonso, this collection presents four books by prolific Quebec writer Roger Des Roches. Considered by many scholars and critics to be one of the founders of modernity in Quebec, Des Roches’ writings span more than four decades and have acted as a source of inspiration for an entire generation of Quebec writers.

Jill Battson’s highly anticipated new collection of poems, The Ecstatic Torture of Gratitude, pushes deep into the heart of the human condition. In lush and visceral language Jill explores loss, beauty, nature, Francis Bacon’s ordered hoarding and the meaning of Martha Stewart. Jill’s poems whisper like muted Miles Davis tunes melancholy in the ear, or shout their colours from the top of desert mesas.

Filtered through insomnia and distress signals, Amphetamine Heart pumps out an atonal pulse over flashes of lowered inhibitions. Channelling punk and heavy metal influences, this poetry collection’s soundtrack is set to a backdrop of boozecans and broken glass. Written over a three-year period, these poems are linked by discomfort and decay, frequently capturing the urgency of paranoia and self-harm. Amphetamine Heart is about excess and the imbalance that it brings. It’s about people who don’t remember how they got home at the end of the night.

The poems in Bending the Continuum are slave to no genre. Science-fiction, alternative realities, and time are fluid. Form, voice and space in this collection borrow from multiple canons. Dane’s first book is equal parts Can-lit, Harlem Renaissance, the Caribbean oral tradition known as Griotism, Roddenberry, hip-hop and dark-humour.

To be Hitchcockian about it, the story deals with the relationship between [Umberto] Umber, a professor of comparative literature, and a Dr. Jamshid Kloster, an experimental physicist whom Umber meets on a Laguna Beach bench as Diane Keaton, a long-time Laguna Beach resident, strolls by. Umber’s other obsession or, perhaps, his deepest regret is that ...

In her first collection of poems, Suzanne Robertson meditates on the nature of intimacy; the connective tissue that binds stranger to stranger, human to animal, soul to landscape, heart to mind. Inspired by the Buddhist paramitas– actions that spark a spiritual sojourn, the poems attempt to both transcend and stay grounded in a conventional universe.

The Cure Is a Forest probes the various processes of growth and transformation among all living things in deep ecology. An element of animism permeates throughout the poems which are set in and against the backdrop of Canada’s ecotones, greenwoods, and lakes. The Cure Is a Forest is an odyssey or escape from the city and industry into both the past and the possible.

Scharpf's poems can be defined as expanded haiku. In spite of their brevity, however, they are suited to record physical and emotional journeys. Scharpf's verse has a distinctive colloquial diction: a sort of noisy stream of consciousness established by unorthodox syntax, sparse punctuation and frequent resort to verbalisms. Scharpf engages the reader with vivid snapshots of recognizable situations and feelings and thus the poems resonate with the poet's experience.