National Network for Equitable Library Service

This anthology cuts into the Canadian poetry scene on a fresh, oblique angle. Included are Robert Bringhurst, Margaret Avison, A.F. Moritz, Guy Birchard, Terry Humby, Alexander Hutchison and Brent MacKay.

Michael Kenyon's Rack of Lamb is a compelling study in voice. Organized loosely around various foods, the book brings together the voices of several women and a young girl, all from the same community but representing various social and cultural groups, subtly but powerfully joined by major social and political events.

Winner of the 2011 Concordia University First Book Prize, Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards Poems exploring the idea of home and the difficulties of a deeply ambiguous relationship to that word. At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft's The Truth of Houses is an elegant debut collection. While very intimate -- even startlingly intimate at times -- the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective.

A love affair chronicled--from obsession to heartbreak, foolhardiness to faith. In Love Outlandish, Barry Dempster undoes all the clichés that have barnacled our love lives and, with the zest and courage typical of his work, explores their torrents and eddies afresh. As in his previous books, Dempster responds to D.H. Lawrence's plea that we should discover and articulate what the heart really wants rather than some idealized version of it.

In Memoirs of an Almost Expedition, Barbara Schott peels back the skin of language to reveal its musculature, its bone. She also peels back the skin of relations, the intimate rub of self against self, to find both great longing and great loss. Schott marks how the heart bends to words, bends itself with words, in her poetic "novel" "Archipelago" her marvelous sequence "hymens" and in each discrete poem in this lovely book.

A sure-tongued linguistic menagerie.

Winner of the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, a Globe 100 Book for 2012, shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award and CAA Award for Poetry 2013. Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us what is sufficient, what will suffice? … a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grapple with this unanswerable conundrum—sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window.

A sequence of elegiac poems by the least recognized major poet in Canada, celebrating place all the way to glory.

Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness. With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination-those supposedly incompatible room-mates-into electrical connection.

Glenn's new collection confronts the deaths of dear friends and family members, returns to her prairie childhood and youth, and engages hard, hard questions of mortality, and of existence in a world fraught with suffering and violence (both global and domestic). Central is the poetic sequence “A Song for Simone”—a conversation between the poet and French mystical philosopher Simone Weil. Here is poetry reaching out to embrace a manner of being in the world that at once moves beyond the world and engages it fully.