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Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards) If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming. Finding the language of violence and the violence in language, Jonathan Ball becomes the Stephen King of verse.

Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices of the past and present into a stitched song lifted and sounded toward the next century. Haunted by 'time's frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvas,' O'Meara's new book explores aspects of culture, art, war, rebellion and technology, offering defiance amid decay. 'O'Meara is a poet of the personal. Of the person. In and amongst the social documentary and human observation at which he excels, here is a writer prepared to put feelings on the line and to argue his case with the reader.

The Refrigerator Memory is an exuberant, strangely funny celebration of sadness. With fable-like miniature stories and short lyric poems, Shannon Bramer creates a world littered with stolen pears and prosthetic arms and inhabited by Kindness scientists and hot-air-balloon operators. The poems invoke a world of childhood delights and demons in the context of grown-up fears and appetites: heartbreak, loss, jealousy and old-fashioned sibling rivalry.

The lease is meaningless: a square paced first by seismic workers, and then your father, and then by every other man you know. Distilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilfields, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease plumbs the prairie depths to find human technology and physical labour realigning our landscape. With acute discipline, Henderson illuminates the stubborn and often unflattering realities of industrial culture and its cast of hard-living men. Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award

Winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry A finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Lambda Literary Award In her ambitious follow-up to Hagiography, acclaimed poet Jen Currin continues her unique exploration of the surrealist lyric, constructing a strong case that, in these frightening times, it may be the best poetic mode for capturing the complexities of lived experience.

Jay used to have an ego, but had it surgically removed. Get bur'd by Alex Cayce; Perfectly Ordinary Dreams by James Llar; Short Ghosts by John Elliott; heartrants by H. Azel; and Book of Leaves by Conwenna Stokes: five books written in five radically different styles.

Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years. The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic – how the mind contains both – and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person?

Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare the tricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange trees with bark and leaves.

First published in 1985, when Daniel Jones was just 26, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the poet/critic/novelist's lone collection of poems, was a cult hit, turning 'poetry' on its head before its author (then known simply as 'Jones') swore off verse entirely. Written in a direct, plainspoken, autobiographical and at times confessional style in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Al Purdy, these confrontational poems about sex and boredom, drugs and suicide, document Jones' depressive, alcoholic years as an enfant terrible.

Originally twelve years in the making! Featuring a cast of thousands. It still stars the letter H, and introduces Probable Systems, Negatives, and the Actual Life of Language! Your heart will pound as you see H's turn into I's before your very own eyes. You'll thrill as words fall apart only to create other words. You'll gasp as bp Nichol collaborates with the dead. You'll shake your head in disbelief as he walks the line between fact and fiction one step beyond into the twilight zone of pataphysics.