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A picture of the Riel Resistance from one of Canada’s preeminent Métis poets

Poetry kills the beautiful people. The Fat Kid, Paul Vermeersch’s second full-length collection of poetry, chronicles a childhood troubled by obesity, poor body image, and low self-esteem. The media’s perfect faces, societal expectations, family concerns, and primitive socialization rituals collide with the already horrendous physical and emotional tribulations of adolescence to drive Calvin Little over the edge. He’ll stop at nothing to become beautiful and weightless, but he must conceal his battle with what the world has come to know as a girl’s disease.

The Ends of the Earth moves through technological disasters, environmental nightmares, and broken relationships to find love cast away at the end of days.

A spellbinding evocation of the power of memory and the spirit of place

Taking off from the Promethean myth of human creation, Gillian Sze’s second poetry collection explores the “anatomy of clay” and the individual as a sentient mystery. At times reflective, instructional, playful, or strange, the first section, Quotidianus, offers observational poems, which recount intimate and ordinary moments often missed, overlooked, or forgotten. Sze tugs at the fabric of habit and amidst the urban mundane finds her subjects in a woman waiting for the bus, a neighbour who talks to his plants, a girl smoking after a storm.

The eagerly anticipated debut from one of Canada’s most exciting new poets

In her debut collection, Ashley-Elizabeth Best explores the cultivation of resilience during uncertain and often trying times. It’s a book built around day-to-day conflicts — poems about love, family, grief, power, and longing. Navigating the fault lines of popular culture and traditional poetry to assert that we are all history makers, Slow States of Collapse enters the landscape of personal narrative in an attempt to reconcile life’s little universal griefs.

Seven Into Even reworks Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in counterpoint to the seven deadly sins, and brings these vast references through a mesh of contemporary settings and issues in a series of poetic installations. The number seven works as an organizing principle: the book struggles with narrative and its constraints, questioning the development of characters as a poetic device, and reflecting on itself as it builds.

Reverse engineering the word, meme splicing, morpheme replacement therapy, phonetic modifications: these are some of the techniques in play throughout Reading the Bible Backwards, the lyrical thought experiments that make up this eagerly anticipated new collection of poems by Robert Priest. By throwing the Bible and other cultural narratives on the turntable and spinning them backwards, Priest unleashes surprisingly new but strangely familiar music and meaning. Whether the movements are sideways, inverted, or omni-directional, his satire has never been sharper--or darker.

Daring new verse from one of Canada's most-established poets

Play Out the Match, Michael Knox's first published collection of poetry, is also an extended meditation on the idea of reconciliation. Vivid and lyrical, the poems make use of various voices, speakers, and landscapes to explore the surreptitious aspects of fear and indifference, tenderness and fragility. In Play Out the Match, dollar store cashiers, Scottish pub brawlers, lovers, and cowards create a broad and sympathetic world of otherness.