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Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness. With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination-those supposedly incompatible room-mates-into electrical connection.

Glenn's new collection confronts the deaths of dear friends and family members, returns to her prairie childhood and youth, and engages hard, hard questions of mortality, and of existence in a world fraught with suffering and violence (both global and domestic). Central is the poetic sequence “A Song for Simone”—a conversation between the poet and French mystical philosopher Simone Weil. Here is poetry reaching out to embrace a manner of being in the world that at once moves beyond the world and engages it fully.

The Way to Come Home is Carolyn Smart's fourth book of poems. It is a collection that ranges from celebrating the rural landscape north of Kingston, Ontario to re-creating the painful last phase of her friend Bronwen Wallace's life in a moving sequence titled "The Sound of the Birds." The volume's opening sequence, "Cape of Storms," views the hatred thriving amid the astonishing physical beauty of South Africa while "The woman is bathing" details a journey to Costa Rica that is a journey into the self.

Near the centre of Marrying the Animals, Cornelia Hoogland's new book of poetry, is the sequence "In the Meantime: Elizabeth Smart Poems" Hoogland's exploration of Smart's obsession with the poet George Barker is an apt heart for this volume, for its abiding spirit is passion. With feather touch and "kelp green longing," Hoogland pauses over the minutiae of the daily, of the loved. Her lyric intensity embraces family, friends, lovers and literature.

Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question “what if?” What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun? Cayley draws on her experience as a playwright to create vividly engaging voices and characters ranging from the famous to the infamous to the all-but-anonymous.

Deluxe redesign of an aching solo situated at the mid-point of a long, melodious career. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the third of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Riffs features a new introduction by the poet Paul Vermeersch, a reprint of an extended interview with Dennis Lee about the book, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

Winner of the 2004 Archibald Lampman Award (National Capital Region -- Ottawa) and shortlisted for the 2004 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the 2004 ReLit Awards In The Vicinity David O'Meara gives us a new kind of cityscape, one that brings its unseen, and usually unsung, materials to the foreground. Brick, concrete (that "not-so-silver screen / our walk-on parts are posed upon"), glass, steel, wire: they step boldly from anonymity into fresh focus, backdrops goaded into stardom.

Ink Monkey is Diana Hartog's first book of poetry in more than thirteen years and her patience is the reader's reward. In these spare and elegant poems -- not a word out of place, not an unnecessary syllable -- Hartog turns a perceptive eye toward the stories of seemingly ordinary things, of overlooked moments and long-closed rooms. Whether she is writing about jellyfish, the desert, awkward silences that end a relationship, struggles of creativity, or Japanese prints, her poems are astute and beautiful.

Shortlisted for the 2006 Gerald Lampert Award Inter Alia is the long-awaited first collection by one of Canada’s most talented young poets. His work has been widely published in journals and was selected by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane for Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He is heir to the English metaphysical poets in many of his preoccupations, with a good dash of Robert Bly, but his technique is very much influenced by his interests in Oriental forms – haiku, waka, haibun, etc. Seymour is smart, yes; but this is above all poetry of deep feeling.

Atmospherically light and stylistically expansive – poems that regard our givens as a gift. Don McKay's description of The Pearl King and Other Poems, Catherine Greenwood's wonderful first book, also apply to The Lost Letters: 'With discerning wit and a large range of styles and voices, she holds up each subject for contemplation as though it were a pearl. . . .' At the centre of The Lost Letters is a sequence of radically diverse poems based on the story of Heloise and Abelard, truly lovers in a dangerous time, the twelfth century.