National Network for Equitable Library Service

Dulge, rageous, couth, chalant-we think of prefixes as a few letters that change a word, but what if a word is lost without one' Each prose poem in Whelmed features a word that has been unhinged from its prefix, allowing new meanings-radically unfamiliar, yet uncannily intimate-to emerge from these prefixless word deposits. Part prose-poem sequence and part encyclopedia of unpredictably irregular terms, Whelmed is at times deranging, almost disturbing, sometimes detached, and ultimately joyfully disrupting. Nicole Markotic is a poet, novelist, and critic.

The word "magyarAzni" (pronounced MAUDE-yar-az-knee) means "to explain" in Hungarian, but translates literally as "make it Hungarian." This faux-Hungarian language primer, written in direct address, invites readers to experience what it's like to be "made Hungarian" by growing up with a parent who immigrated to North America as a refugee. In forty-five folk-art visual poems each paired with a written poem, Hajnoczky reveals the beauty and tension of first-generation cultural identity. Helen Hajnoczky's first book of poetry was Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising (Snare, 2010).

In her second book, Alexandra Oliver takes us on a journey of escape from the suburbs of Canada to Glasgow, Scotland. Training her eye on the locals-on the streets, by rivers, in museums, on playgrounds, in their own homes, in the ill-starred town of Lockerbie-Oliver reflects on issues of exile, memory and identity, while traveling back into her own past.

T.S. Eliot and Tennessee Ernie Ford, Buddha and Jesus, Jung and Heidegger. Love, solitude, obliteration, the ocean, and a sad neighbor who feeds pigeons. Metanoia is an aphoristically narrative poem that engages all of these, a book-length meditation on transformation, enlightenment, and on opening one's eyes. McCartney's work evinces that journey, the junket into the self. Sharon McCartney is the author of numerous poetry books. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and an LLB from the University of Victoria.

From the monk who sets himself on fire in a crowded intersection of Saigon ("the familiar corded tendons of his hands, become / a bracken of ashes, a carbon twine of burnt"), to the salmon run in British Columbia ("The salmon word / for home is glacierdust and once-tall trees unlimbed, / a taste, no matter where, they know"), Johnson writes of topics varied and eclectic, unified by a focus on moments both declining and revenant. Startling and haunting, the poems delve into the ways in which these moments are transformative, beautiful and unexpected.

In this debut poetry collection by award-winning author Kim Fu, incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence illuminate small scenes of domestic life and the banal tragedies of modern love and modern death.

Consciousness and nostalgia in the Swipe Right age This collection attempts to find poetry, or what Gwendolyn MacEwen once called "a single symmetry," amid the chaos of 21st-century life.

The highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly popular Glimpse Quick is George Murray's second collection of aphorisms-a form that straddles the lines between poetry, philosophy, humour, and prose. He describes these pieces as "poetic essences"-sometimes even as "poems, without all the poetry getting in the way." Some are deep, some clever, some funny, some all three. The best, he says, should read like common-sense statements that have never actually been expressed.

A masterwork from one of Canada's most important poets Referencing the post-war neorealist film by Vittorio De Sica, Mary di Michele's Bicycle Thieves commemorates her Italian past and her life in Canada through elegy and acts of translation of text and of self. The collection opens with a kind of hymn to life on the planet, sung from the peak of that urban island, Montreal-an attempt to see beyond death.

Poems that challenge the depths of perception Dazzle camouflage, at the beginning of the 20th century, was an attempt to answer the question, How do we hide those things that are too big to hide' Ships, often containing thousands of soldiers, were done up in a confusing array of lines to perplex and distort the viewer's perspective (in this case, German submarines). "Razzle dazzle" was art attempting to hide life. Jamie Sharpe's Dazzle Ships is also concerned with art's relationship to life. It questions how we build poems from the material of mass culture.