National Network for Equitable Library Service

Shortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award, the 2008 Lampman Scott Award and the 2008 ReLit Awards Imagining the lives of nineteenth-century women asylum patients, Nadine McInnis charts her descent into, and recovery from, depression. In the afterword to Two Hemispheres, McInnis describes her first encounter with the remarkable photographs that illustrate this moving volume. Patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, these women's names and stories are lost to history.

D.A. Lockhart's stunning and subversive fourth collection gives us the words, thoughts, and experiences of an Anishinaabe guy from Central Ontario and the manner in which he interacts with central aspects and icons of settler Canadian culture.

Heaven's Thieves is a collection engaged with the big questions? What are bodies for? What does it mean to be alive? What is beauty and why does it have such power over us? What is the point of art? - and the urgent ones: how to live in a shattered ecology, what to do about grief, illness, betrayal. Sinclair turns her attention to these questions with fearless curiosity, economy, and an originality born of her willingness to pursue her own line of inquiry to its limit. These poems get close and cut deep, mixing subject and object, surface and soul.

In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.

A meditative and piercing collection that explores traumas both ordinary and out of the ordinary. Museum of Kindness, Montreal poet Susan Elmslie's searching second collection of poetry, is a book that bravely examines ""genres"" familiar and hard to fathom: the school shooting, PTSD, raising a child who has a disability.

A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award-winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada's greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery's walls falling away to travel in time.

Hooked is a stunning new collection of seven poems about seven famous or infamous women: Myra Hindley, Unity Mitford, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Carrington, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, and Elizabeth Smart. Each of these women was hooked on, and her life contorted by, an addiction or obsession. Here we have seven variations on the insoluble conundrum of sexuality - each in a remarkably distinct, authentic voice.

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?

Foreign Homes, Joan Crate's second book of poems, explores domesticity and dislocation, where what was thought to be home becomes alien, and where the alien is, piece by piece, made into home -- often in such simple, physical acts as laying a table, or driving a highway, or reassembling a tom photograph. In Crate's careful hands, the knife that cuts the vegetables for dinner can transform the blade-edge of a distant war.

How to Avoid Huge Ships, Julie Bruck's fourth collection of poetry, is a book of arguments and spells against the ambushes of time. Parents grow down, children up, and it's from the uncomfortable in-between that these poems peer into what Philip Larkin describes as "the long slide." But what if we haven't reached the end of the infinite adolescence we thought we'd been promised? We're still here in this world of flying ottomans, alongside a middle-schooler named Dow Jones, and the prehistoric miracle of a blue heron's foot.