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In these passionate poems, this long poem, there is a story (there are stories) which a reader mines out of a landscape of language moulded under great pressure and eloquent of the stresses that formed it. This is non-representational work of great concentration and beauty.

Reading Julie Berry's poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. "like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this," Berry writes in "Touching Ground." "Like this" is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues.

In his fifth book of poetry, Douglas Burnet Smith tunes his eye and ear closely to the world, conscious of those points where the everyday blossoms into fierce magic. The title sequence is a deftly-rendered homage to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Introduction to the Introduction to the Introduction by Andre Alexis For me, reading the Introduction was like being caught in a spring shower while waiting for the 41, and running into a library to get out of the rain and, because the rain lasts, wandering the aisles on the fifth floor, taking books from the shelves (Waley's translations from the Chinese, a work by Roland Barthes, an oversized book about eastern birds…), draping my winter coat on a chair and sitting down to read.

From Microphones there will be no returning to the standard detective story. This long poem/videotext ticks right along on its narrative marginalia alone, but its substance is an interplay of voices and its essence is high-density song.

Ed Dyck finds that you cannot say "piss" on the radio in Saskatoon. There wasn't very much radio promotion of his book. That's a shame. Everybody should know about the cat Jack and the world Dyck compacts around him in 15 "sonnets."

Jane Munro's poems are explorations of the mysteries of inner experience. What are the truths of emotion? What can the body know? In Grief Notes & Animal Dreams, Munro's third collection, we enter the condition Gaston Bachelard has called reverie, strange and miraculous beauty glowing in the suspended underwater light of the heart.

Notable Book in the 2005 Kiriyama Prize and longlisted for the 2005 ReLit Awards Catherine Greenwood draws on the stories and legends which surround the development of cultured pearls by Mikimoto, the fabulous Pearl King, to engage a rich array of themes, including the clash between an aesthetics of refinement and nuance, and mass manufacture. With discerning wit and a large range of styles and voices, she holds up each subject for contemplation as though it were a pearl, and explores the sometimes bizarre consequences of an overwhelming rage for beauty.

Shortlisted for the 2001 ReLit Awards John Reibetanz is good on grief: "You, mother,/ dying, left what was hard first:/ bones weeping into/ / your veins like flutes, teeth/ vanished on some hospital/ lunch tray" This conjunction of a profound sense of loss with the clearest-eyed observation and acceptance of the entropy of the mundane is characteristic. His poetry has a cultural breadth seldom seen in Canadian writing.

Winner of the 1999 CAA Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 1999 Pat Lowther Award Fantasies and meditations on friendship and on love: erotic, romantic, tormented, spurned, married, illicit, patriarchal, filial, professional, and shot-gun. On the love of men and women, and of women for women: as friends, as mothers, as daughters, as uncertain selves; intimate communion with women living, with their imagined pasts, and with the dead.