National Network for Equitable Library Service

Governor General's Award-winning poet Arleen Paré combines the story of two first best friends with questions of the mystery of cosmic first cause. The poems in First, Arleen Paré's seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings.

A gender-fluid trickster character leaps from Cree stories to inhabit this racous and rebellious new work by award-winning poet Louise Bernice Halfe.There are no pronouns in Cree for gender; awâsis (which means illuminated child) reveals herself through shape-shifting, adopting different genders, exploring the English language with merriment, and sharing his journey of mishaps with humor, mystery, and spirituality.

TransilienceTrans is waiting for your name to get called,

'Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment...' Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness.

Nicole Brossard’s Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire — that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each “crazy” silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality.

In her debut collection, Congratulations, Rhododendrons, award-winning poet Mary Germaine offers love poems to an insistently unlovely world.Through poems that speak to plastic bags and drones as much as they admire roses and the moon, Germaine surfs the confluence of artificial and natural environments, technology, and our small but consequential feelings about them.

This collection of new and previously published poems by Steven Heighton, author of the Governor General's Literary Award winner The Waking Comes Late, showcases a defining lyric poet of his generation. Selected Poems 1983-2020 is Steven Heighton's seventh volume of poetry and the first since his Governor General's Literary Award-winning collection, The Waking Comes Late.

In Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life.Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee's much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl.

in the poem / of the world / there once / was a map / of the map / composed in / the likeness / of a poemIn this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind.

I've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawkInspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Visionpresents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide.The Tantramar Re-Visioncharts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thriv