National Network for Equitable Library Service

Margaret is unlike other women: her hands bark, she speaks Hawaiian Punch, and she can often be seen prodding at stars with sticks. And sometimes she is the happiest woman in the world: a pillow with a pillowcase. Her brother, Alex, feels pleasant enough, except that his parts are made of wood, and that a bunch of his hair is electrified. And then there are the gun-shot wounds to his head and chest. With this final ailment, Margaret may have had a hand. In the winter of 1926, Margaret McPhail went on trial for the murder of Alex, and throughout, maintained her innocence.

There is beauty in the teacup like dresses requiring crinoline or beaded purses too small to carry anything but anger -- from "Inheritance" Marita Dachsel's third poetry collection explores parenthood, love, and the grief of losing those both close and distant. In the tradition of Karen Solie and Suzanne Buffam, and with a touch of Canadian Gothic, Dachsel's poetic skills unfold in a variety of brief and expansive forms. Authentic and controlled, full of complexity and disorder, her poems offer release despite their painful twists and topics.

Is the self inside the body / or is it the body / or can it leave? "How can you ask a question that you live inside?" Madelaine Caritas Longman's debut is an affecting, intelligent engagement with the often-paradoxical pursuit of self-coherence and self-presence. These prose poems, haiku, and experiments with language and form not only examine the individual search for identity but call into question the concept itself.

Social Poesis introduces readers to the work of one of Canada's most exciting and challenging poets. Through selections from across Rachel Zolf's poetic oeuvre, this book foregrounds the philosophical, ethical, and political questions that inform Zolf's poetry. Selections range from early poems in which Zolf explores transhistorical trauma and queer subjectivity to more recent writings that examine militarism, settler colonialism, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence.

Adele Wiseman, lifelong writing friend of Margaret Laurence, is best know for her novels, The Sacrifice, winner of the Governor-General's Award in 1956, and Crackpot, Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Award in 1974. She also wrote essays, plays, and children's books.

War, Pestilence, Famine, Death. Was I deaf / to the headline roar of my unwieldy load? Engaging with the inevitability of change and flux, Thomas O'Grady's poems grapple with themes of death and rebirth, of loss and resiliency, of ebb and flow within nature and within individual lives and romantic and domestic relationships. Bookended by the springtime of "Controlled Burn" and its mirror, the wistfully autumnal "Magritte," the collection follows multiple arcs within and across poems and longer sequences.

Post-glacial is a collection of poems by Robert Kroetsch selected by his former student David Eso. The book features Kroetsch's iconic collection, Completed Field Notes, alongside rare work gathered from different stages of Kroetsch's career. The book contains an afterword by Aritha van Herk. Kroetsch's poetry evolved from short lyric poetry in the 1960s to postmodern long poems in the 1970s and 80s. Kroetsch's work in the 1990s and 2000s was marked by the production of experimental chapbooks.

The poems in this collection are sculpted like carnallite crystals and come together as elegiac meditations, drawing on history, and on mythology. Beauty and pathos are wound in a tangle of exile, and find a home. Offering free verse, prose poems, haibun and haiku. Ilona Martonfi uses her poetry to build on her activism as a tool for achieving goals, taking a stand. The book's five sections are composed of poetry of witness, ekphrastic poems, resistance poems, erasure poems, dream poems, persona poems, elegies.

The poems in Any Waking Morning probe deeply into love, loss, and life's darker dilemmas. They seek pathways and meaning, interrogate endings and life changes, and tap the creative energy engendered through art's ekphrastic cycles. While foregrounding the influence of contemporary ideas on the author's poetic explorations, the collection returns inevitably to images, insights and experiences from the Caribbean and the author's early life.

We Are Malala is an imagined dialogue between Nobel Peace winner Malala Yousafzai and the poet about historical, cultural and spiritual themes. Malala's autobiography, I Am Malala, inspired this collection. Judaism, Islam and Christianity are in increasingly and dangerously hot conflict. This volume of poetry, also inspired by Karen Armstrong and Sally Armstrong, two unrelated conciliators/activists, attempts to bridge the gap between those religions through dialogue and respect for other belief systems. This collection also includes artwork by the poet.