National Network for Equitable Library Service

A sequence of poetic reveries that collide and collude suburban routine with subconscious fantasy.

Jesse Patrick Ferguson brings music and poetry into conversation with each other in this compelling debut collection. Modelled on the fundamental tones and overtones of the harmonic series, poems in Ferguson's arrangement riff on one another, and words, phrases and images resonate sympathetically, with all the energy and buzz of a firmly plucked mandolin string.

In their fourth collection of poetry, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha continues her excavation of working-class queer brown femme survivorhood and desire. Tonguebreaker is about surviving the unsurvivable: living through hate crimes, the suicides of queer kin, and the rise of fascism while falling in love and walking through your beloved's neighbourhood in Queens.

The book creatively reveals the beautiful and bitter essences of the world from a distinctive Indigenous female voice. Inspired by her recent global travels, experiences, relationships and Haudenosaunee perspective, the poet unapologetically sings words of midlife wisdom and cultural confidence. By using this creative foundation to unite distinctive communities, the author expresses raw emotion throughout her journey toward inner peace from a uniquely Indigenous point of view.

"Waniskatota ka pe wapahk", a Cree translation of "Rising with a Distant Dawn", is a powerful poetry collection that stretches across boundaries to give a voice to the lives and experiences of ordinary Indigenous people. The poems embrace anguish, pride, and hope. They come from the woodlands and the plains; they speak of love, of war, and of the known and the mysterious; they strike with wisdom, joy, and sadness, bringing us closer than ever before to the heart of urban Indigenous life.

In Narrow Cradle, Wade Kearley explores the midlife encounter with mortality and the ways we strive to resist, deny, cheat, and even bargain with it. Grounded in both traditional and modern poetic forms, these poems find in the transience of life a new kind of freedom, a rebirth independent of personal circumstance. In crisp, direct, and vivid language—swerving between sonnet, villanelle, and sestina—Kearley offers a compelling collection by turns vicious, lost, ragged, and regal.

In poems that risk the comingling of anger and elegy, poetry and documentation, humour and the dark spectre of poverty, Michelle Porter’s Inquiries oscillates at its edges, and amplifies the presence of human strength as it keeps company with our enigmatic and ever-present nemeses. This is a startling debut where the line between reality and reality television blurs, where a simple trip to the grocery store unifies mother and daughter in struggle, and where an economics of iniquity proves the existence of love as equality.

A celebration of the Innu land in the tradition of Joséphine Bacon. This telluric power is reminiscent of Paul Chamberland's Terre Québec. Natasha Kanapés challenge is to name her land, but also to reconcile opposites. In this collection of poetry, the author engages with the environment, colonialism, anxiety, anger, healing, solitude, and love. "Assi" in Innu means Land. ASSI MANIFESTO is primarily a land of women. If the manifesto is a public space, Assi is a forum of life, a song for those who open their spirit to its mystery.

In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.

In their debut poetry collection, Kama La Mackerel mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius. Composed of expansive lyric poems, ZOM-FAM (meaning “man-woman” or “transgender” in Mauritian Kreol) is a voyage into the coming of age of a gender-creative child growing up in the 80s and 90s on the plantation island, as they seek vocabularies for loving and honouring their queer/trans self amidst the legacy of colonial silences.