National Network for Equitable Library Service

Covering Indigenous adventures from Wahpole Island to Northern Saskatchewan to the West Coast, #IndianLovePoems is a poetry collection that humorously delves into the truths of love and lust within the Indigenous communities, leading to reflection on the complexities of sex, race, culture, and intention within relationships.

An exquisite series of meditations on memory, evanescence and the land. Randy Lundy draws deeply from his Cree heritage and equally from European and Asian traditions. Readers will be reminded by turns of Simon Ortiz, Per Lagerkvist, and Jane Hirshfield. This is the mind of prayer, a seeing and re-seeing of the immense cyclic beauty of the earth.

Louis Riel prophesied that a polyglot Metis nation would rise on the prairies five hundred years after his death, and that it would be called by the "joyous name" of the House of Charlemagne. This new polity would be built on the principles of Riel's Massinahican, a radical philosophical system which now survives only in fragments. Its hallmarks would be justice, ontological accord, and the blurring of all separations dividing women and men, the earth and human beings.

Spaces are not exterior to bodies. They influence and affect the way bodies exist in the world. A quarry is an unnatural place within a natural territory. At any moment, it can be abandoned. A body is not separate from the spaces it inhabits. They exist together, in a mutual state of interrelation and instability. Quarry relays a year in the life of a body in transition as it changes with other bodies; human, animal, and mineral. It examines queer social spaces and contested natural spaces, asking how they affect each other.

Visible Cities prompts readers to reconsider their relationship to the landscapes of cities. Poems explore streets in cities all over the world, while the photographs find beauty in back lanes, observe people taking their coffee breaks, capture people playing with a work of public art or pulling a ladder onto the roof of a downtown building. The language of the poems creates a poetic style that expresses the challenges and joys of living in cities. The photographs come from all over the world--Regina, Saskatoon, Chicago, New York, Paris, and Venice.

A poetry that is at once harrowing, angry, and achingly beautiful

In Asian folklore cranes symbolize longevity, immortality, and good fortune. In Winter Cranes, his third collection, award–winning poet Chris Banks conjures these birds when he sees herons near his home towards the end of a long and difficult winter.

Poetry that explores how accidental voyeurism can force reconsideration and reconciliation
 

White⋅out: n. a surface condition … in which no object casts a shadow, the horizon cannot be seen, and only dark objects are discernible …

Whiteout: when the heavy weather of daily life establishes the measure of the measureless; when the predatory nature of the accidental conjures cowboys and the comatose; when the sickly sweet pop of life underfoot contrasts the televised image, shrinking to a pinprick.

“In the age of increasing surveillance of borders, the border is where every thing significant occurs; map the border and you begin to understand the pulse of a nation,” Asher Ghaffar writes in the introduction to wasps in a golden dream hum a strange music, his debut collection of poetry. In 2003, he was stopped at the Wagah border post, where hundreds gather to watch the spectacle of the aggressive flag-lowering ceremony on both the Indian and Pakistani side.

From the moment we learn to speak we are always using other people’s words. the real made up improvises on this simple idea of imitation; mimicry becomes a kind of cadence for an interweaving of transcribed speech, ironic song, jarring randomization, post–colonial irony, and blatant theft. An incessant imitative dialogue shapes our neural and cultural networks; imitation is a source of power for any subculture, and the primary means of a colonizing process that should be seen as violent.