National Network for Equitable Library Service

In Electric Affinities, Michael Pacey's second collection, everyday household items become points of departure into wonder -- a handsaw becomes a “bird hooded, strung with jesses, strops with its beak.” A cup becomes “a tool for gripping liquids.” Mirrors are “windows turned inside out, always concentrating, trying to memorize each detail” and scissors are “Perpetually plural, twin sisters fastened together.” While it is Pacey’s particular magic to discover the amazing alchemical properties of everyday objects, in Electric Affinities he also illuminates the poetic “current” that connec

Navigating through tragedy with sincere inquiry, Learning to Love a River explores unlikely existences in and of Thunder Bay, a small northern Ontario city which is rife with stereotype and misconception. With its insider’s perspective, this collection offers a sympathetic but frank accounting for these misconceptions, challenging facile assumptions about race and class. Deep down, the poems are asking important epistemological and ontological questions. But, they are also reminding us to try and move forward with a light heart, while looking for the best in others.

This is a book of the inner sea. Language, concept, and form alternate holding the depths. That broken diamond of sun on rough waters: she speaks egalitarian. That cool glass of viridian water just within reach of the surface: water daemons flit through meaning. Obeying the dictates of water, Put Your Hand in Mine guides us through a deep love of the world and all beings in it. It matters not, the pain, nor the broken flippers, nor the sting in old wounds. Reading this is a cleansing, a claim of survival against iron pleats of loneliness.

If Body Work begins by writing desire through a belief in the stability of the physical body, this is undone in exploring symptoms of disease, new self-knowledge and rewriting one’s personal story. Because Body Work explicitly undertakes to write of a protracted and often painful period of chronic illness, these poems complicate notions of ability and disability. Connecting all six long poems are prose footnotes chronicling a natural history of human skin.

Out of dried tears and burnt matter comes fertile ground; new nourishment. These are poems that transform the vocabulary of science, its language and concepts, into poems that encounter the natural world with quietly impassioned and new eyes.

The title of Jennifer Houle’s second collection, Virga, refers to a cloud formation often seen on the horizon, when rain begins to fall but evaporates before reaching the ground, only to fall again when the time is right.

Jennifer Houle's debut collection, The Back Channels, reflects the effort to build a meaningful life in a rapidly changing culture, in a region afflicted, as many are, with outmigration and an economy of anxiety and hard choices.

1970. The FLQ has kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history—a time when army tanks rolled through the streets and bombings and other random acts of violence became l’ordre du jour. Shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Poetry Award, October is a collection of poetry set in the quiet Montreal suburb of Saint Lambert, where the clash between the "two solitudes" came to a head in 1970 with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ.

George Amabile's eleventh book and newest collection of poetry explores the relationships between civilization, technology, empire and human violence, theatres of war, the collateral damage of military occupation, the machinations of power politics, oil spills, destruction of the environment, PTSD, and other characteristics of what we call "world events." These are tough poems for tough times -- our times -- when the human cost of military conflict, environmental disaster and gun violence have become the daily staple of news headlines.

Recueil de poèmes d’une jeune Franco-Ténoise, des expériences qu’elle a vécu et du regard qu’elle porte sur celles-ci, en particulier le fait de grandir en région, l’insécurité linguistique, la découverte de la grande ville et de sa violence, premiers émois amoureux et expériences sexuelles, découverte des autres cultures (Amérique latine).