National Network for Equitable Library Service

Comme autant de mémoires surgissant de chaque instant, les mots se fragmentent et forment le kaléidoscope de la Vie. Un regard, une émotion, un souvenir ravivent l'impression forte nichée au fond de l'âme attendant l'heure d'imbiber le papier.Derrière moi, les souffrances et les joies, s'entassant dans un coffre sans fond, bouillonnant d'effluves à raconter. Devant moi, la Vie. Nécessité de dire. Urgence d'écrire. Besoin viscéral de redonner vie à tout ce qui m'habite. Regard incessant, capteur de sentiments. Je n'y peux rien. Accepter, une fois pour toutes.

From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, We are no longer the smart kids in class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. A fantasia of academic disillusionment and deflating youth, this collection contemplates moustaches, mountains, and oceans from Halifax to Victoria, always wondering how poetry matters to the heaving, melting, masturbating world it dramatizes.

Joe Fiorito spent 18 hours in total, over the course of three days, on the corner of Victoria and Queen in downtown Toronto watching the city go by and recording what he saw. The rhythms of the city ebb and flow according to the time of day. The declarative sentence is the best brush to paint an objective portrait of the city we live in. It is an example of what happens when you stay put and observe a single place or thing for a very long time.

Although poetry is one of the oldest art forms and cinema one of the youngest, a symbiosis exists between the two -- an interchange of metaphor, rhythm, point-of-view. No surprise, then, that so many contemporary poets write about film and the magnitude of its effect on modern life.

These meticulous, skillful, and endlessly revealing poems are astounding in their restraint and delicate comprehension of the natural world. Minimal language and brief verses contribute to the precise imagery illustrated in these gorgeously spare narrative lyrics. From East Coker to Northern Ontario, the fine line between poetry and deceit lurks, inevitably, in the corners of each of our lives. Dan Jalowica illuminates precisely these in language honed, spare, pure, gorgeous.

On Order and Things is the story of an impossible love between a man and a woman. Confused characters living in a senseless world where love and creativity are irrelevant. This poetic narrative is for all of us.

The poems in Courage Underground burrow beneath the skin to examine the relationship between consciousness and body. They penetrate hidden emotions contained by vital organs; they enter the sensibilities of lower order creatures and characters of the mythic underworld. The journey elicits new perspectives on loss and alienation that are both hilarious and startling. "Beating boldly at the centre of Courage Underground, Julie Roorda's provocative new volume of poetry, is the very root of courage: heart.

The poems in Black Suede Cave meditate on the space inside us, where darkness and imagination animate the unknowable. They illuminate the shadows of memory that slip into our darker corners, reveal by lamplight the nightscape of Toronto, and marvel at how loss creates vivid places of reflection around what we have loved.

COCKEYED: askew, crooked, intoxicated, absurd; marked by bends or angles; incongruous, not straight. In other words, Jim Christy, Canada's most iconoclastic and irreverent poet, views this cockeyed world the way it is; not only with 20/20 but x-ray vision and often through laughter and tears.

Three Canadian soldiers awaiting deployment to Afghanistan beat a homeless man to death on the steps of their armoury after a night of heavy drinking. The poet, whose downtown Toronto home overlooks the armoury and surrounding park, describes the crime, its perpetrators, the victim, and a cast of homeless witnesses that includes the woman, a prostitute, who first alerts police. The subsequent trial evokes reflection on the immigrant experience the poet shares with one of the accused, and on the agony of that young soldier's mother.