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Ilona Martonfi’s third poetry collection, The Snow Kimono, can best described as an obsession with truth. The Snow Kimono invites the reader into a magical world where reality shimmers with the fragile beauty of the moment and the dark, haunting awareness of a painful past that lingers just out of sight. Compassionate and disturbing, witness poems elaborate on history, exile, the war refugee, the dispossessed, and the disappeared. Other, more personal poems concern themselves with love, identity, place, and with loss — especially in the series keening for a mentally ill daughter.

With grace and courage Ann Elizabeth Carson looks to the past from the perspective of a contemporary feminist. A lively evocation of her aunts and their home in Cheltenham, Ontario, reveals the rich and powerful ground for the poet's own emerging sense of herself. As Toronto in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s comes to life in a rare blend of poetry and prose, the poet is caught unawares as the stories collectively uncover events that shaped her social-political outlook and reveal how our untold stories are inevitably woven into the fabric of our public lives.

Rebel Women begins by moving in and out of women’s kitchens, parlours, meetings, and wagon-rides on the eve and throughout Toronto’s 1837 Rebellion. The poems let the reader eavesdrop on the loves, fears, hatreds, and courage of these feisty pioneers as they are engulfed by an uprising some did or did not support.

Simultaneous Windows is a metaphoric and narrative journey, both personal and political, in which rebellion, love and loss open windows to change. Each window is a frame that through which we see the limits and possibilities of one small life. The voice is strong and the journey vivid. Poems are located in Toronto, Borneo, The Middle East, Rwanda and elsewhere.

The rich and varied poems in Ukrainian Daughter’s Dance speak to the heart as they document a woman’s life journey, as a Ukrainian-Canadian, and as a prairie woman, and her voyage of self-discovery. Her story can be anyone’s story. Poems explore issues of immigrant identity and voice in the prairies, and celebrate a cultural heritage expressed through song, dance, art, work and life.

Titled after the Latin term for “unknown land”—a cartographical expression referring to regions that have not yet been mapped or documented—Terra Incognita is a collection of poems that creatively explores various racial discourses and interracial crossings both buried in the grand narratives of history and the everyday experiences of being mixed-race. The poet asks how the discourse of multiculturalism speaks to the particular history of interracial figures—a history that has remained largely silenced, and a people who have continued to experience inequity on various fronts.

The Woman Who Went to The Moon captures in poems, six days spent in the tiny community of Igloolik in the Arctic winter of January 2006. Ice-locked to the Melville Peninsula, Igloolik lies west of Baffin Island. This is the year of the Circumpolar Moon, where the full moon sweeps the heavens at the lowest point of its curve in its 18.6-year cycle. The poems are suffused with its light and the slow ebb of its celestial brightness in the days that follow, as the sun for first time in four months creeps over the horizon, heralding the approach of spring.

The poems in A Samurai’s Pink House are threaded with the transformation of the seasons from Matsuo Basho’s travels to a love affair between a kabuki cross-dresser and a lonely geisha and the struggles of women in ancient and modern-day Japan. The collection takes the reader on a journey through the fascinating culture of Japan with graceful and accessible language. A sensuous, powerful and beautiful collection that moves across rice fields, tea houses, cherry orchards and narrow alleys where characters, in different stages of life, strive to find identity, peace and love.

Here green-leafed memories invade the mind; Here our young profuse acts luxuriate; And then leaf-fallen times can be defined; And then the old, snow-fallen thoughts await. These poems explore our ages by the season: Child's adventure in untidy garden With its ancient, stooped gardener; young poet Begging in Seattle; celebrations Of birth, birthdays and of deaths; old Ibsens, Restless in their solace; backyard elegy; And more beside, all etched in shifting verse.

Why Reporting from Night? The title of this first collection refers to the surreal night flowering of memory and imagination. In these imagistic, playful poems, the sleep-deprived thought patterns of a mother of small children, the inventiveness of a child’s-eye view and the restless brain at 4:00 a.m. all converge. With subtle wit, teasing sensuality and lyrical brightness, these distilled poems explore the provocative nature of memory and the often surprising coexistence of the urban and the wild, by day and night.