National Network for Equitable Library Service

“I was only born into the world,” begins one of Vincent Colistro’s poems, “didn’t invade it, didn’t ransom it for a nicer one.” Late Victorians, Colistro’s debut, is a beguilingly irreverent investigation of the life he was “born into.” Hyper-fluent, riding wave after wave of copious invention, Colistro builds his weirdness from scratch, turning simple ideas into sense-resisting parables full of deranged twists and dizzying embellishments.

Installations, David Solway’s 14th book of poetry, is haunted with transformation, Few poets possess as commanding a gift for metaphor or can use it to masterfully conjure the ever-changing landscape of the natural world. Like the jerry-rigged farmer’s contraption that stands in for “eclectic grandeur and jumbled eloquence,” this collection celebrates the way ordinary elements can be yoked to create wholly original insights.

Penny Dreadfuls were popular, cheaply produced 19th century magazines filled with brutal and sensationalist tales. In her uncompromising second collection of poetry, Vancouver poet Shannon Stewart revisits their grisly spirit through a series of meditations that examine the medias obsession for luridness, be it tabloids or respectable newspapers. At the centre of the book is the story of accused serial killer Robert Pickton.

In his second book of poems, Jason Guriel cuts a dazzling figurewhip-smart, charismatic, with a mischievousness always eager to play for more serious stakes. Guriels way of seeing the world is low-key and sly: he tries to show us the big picture by enumerating all the small oneswhat he calls the way tiny things / cant help being, next / to nothing, something.

An old idea of reality animates the poems in The Mechanical Bird: things are never what they seem. Opening with a quick-talking disquisition on lying (Keep it simple, tidy, / take a noncommittal stance) and ending with masterly mediation on the workshop and its drawing-board dreams, Asa Boxers debut constantly tests the claims of authenticity over artifice. Objects, settings and everyday details are swept up in an imagination that can never quite shake the sense of the visible worldeven nature itselfas an artful mixture of fact and invention.

The Empire's Missing Links explores a world familiar to readers of Walid Bitars previous three books: a world where language is never simple, where the most ordinary words are weapons used against us in the play for private and public power. Resembling a series of unflinchingly ambivalent, and often jarringly enigmatic, history lessons, Bitars new poems are rich in original observations about our contemporary unease.

Like the laundry that greets readers at the start of Anita Laheys astonishing debuthanging on clothelines and bodied out in breezesthe poems in Out to Dry in Cape Breton exist in a state of thrumming levitation. Laheys scampish play with idioms, her accelerated sense of traditional forms, and her omnivorous eye for fresh imagery lead to a poetry constantly streaming with surprises.

Sympathy for the Couriers is a collection of messages from the border region of our lives—that vast allegorized territory of cheap self-deceptions and illusions. By turns comical and grim, these new poems feature Peter Richardson at his most ventriloquistic. The “couriers” in question are the banged-up, long-suffering, Dantesque voices who, speaking through the poet, deliver their news: heartfelt, often heartbreaking admissions that, nonetheless, are always buoyant with aphoristic brio and panache.

La lenteur du monde est un livre de l’aube. Une autre journée se lève sur le monde et voilà que le regard, toujours au début de chaque chose, se fait attentif à tout ce qui commence. Ce recueil est une plongée dans l’enfance, les souvenirs et les amours. Autant de préludes à l’essentielle rencontre de soi où le poète avance tranquille vers le but ultime, «Devenir», titre du dernier poème. Michel Pleau poursuit ici sa quête de lumière. Un peu en retrait, il se met à l’écoute et cherche à dire la beauté du monde.

Entre le doute et l’espoir, entre l’effroi et le désir, entre la densité et l’intensité, il y a tout le confort de l’incertitude. L’argile et le marbre y cisaillent l’éther. Le tu et le je y sculptent un nous en quête de socle. Chaque prochain pas est un précipice. Ne restent que des empreintes dans l’encre vitreuse des lucarnes, plaies dans les alcôves asymétriques de la rencontre de l’autre. Nous n’aurons plus à nous nommer; nous serons seuls. Nous n’aurons plus à nous aimer; nous serons sans doute.