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Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years. The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic – how the mind contains both – and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person?

Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare the tricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange trees with bark and leaves.

Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is 'Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness.

Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) If it were necessary to tell someone where I am, I’d say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles. I’d say I have loved. These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. 'Time's not the market, it's the bustle; / not the price but worth,' he muses, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr.

Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication.

A spun radio dial passing clean through poetry. A stuttering loop of Endgame recorded by Stockhausen, remixed by Kraftwerk. The chatter of minotaurs and metadata. Transmissions from far-off futures or new pasts, recordings from a recoded present topped off with a cherry. Evel Knievel, above it all, mysterious, forever taciturn. Mission Creep comes on with the inferno of apocalyptic prophecy and melts on your tongue like the last snowflake of a nuclear winter. Praise for Joshua Trotter: 'Joshua Trotter’s long-awaited debut is here, and it’s every bit as good as we’d hoped.

New Theatre stages a lively foray into spaces geographical and utopian that calls into question the process and nature of meaning. Steudel’s coolly cerebral ‘Birch’ sequence about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s later life muses on power and identity, but is balanced by an intimate autobiographical long poem that gives quieter, equally surprising shorter pieces room to spike and bloom in this assured debut.

Shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Translation. The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning.

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Poetry David McGimpsey's fifth collection of poems takes to new levels the melding of the deeply personal and the culturally popular that drove his acclaimed book Sitcom (nominated for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) – this is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committed liar.

Better break out your sledgehammer - it's time for a little concrete! Concrete poetry, that is. Concrete what? Well, it's poetry that's a lot like art - its meaning comes from what it looks like instead of the order of the words, so it's full of great visual puns and word puzzles. And one of its foremost practitioners is bpNichol, one of Canada's best experimental writers. Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer is Nichol's very first book.