National Network for Equitable Library Service

The poetry in Marimba Forever is concerned with love and longing, which the author displays in all their multifarious guises.

'Laura Boss proves she is an audacious poet. She succeeds in writing risk-taking poems that are full of ironic and wry humour. The poems speak with the self-deprecating, down to earth voice of a sensual woman. This is a poet whose increasingly sure hand guides her to handle her explosive material with the deftness of a high wire artist. I love this book. I love these poems. I know that anyone who starts to read Flashlight will not be able to put it down. What energy, what effervescence, what a tour de force!

In Slender Human Weight, Sue Chenette explores a world both familiar and mysterious. She finds, in her mother's attic, in the French countryside, and in her own home, the richness of physical objects as they embody what is felt, dreamed, longed for, and remembered.

In Exploding into Night, Sandy Pool delves into the heart of a grisly murder that took place in the Parkdale area of Toronto. With its dazzling turns and deafening silence, this narrative poem is a stark reappraisal of urban existence and its heartache. Pool's metaphysical landscape speaks in multiple voices and prods the very nature of our collective conscience. A selection of poems from this collection was awarded First Place in the 2009 Elora Writers' Festival Poetry Contest. The collection has been short-listed for the 2010 Governor General's award for English poetry.

Antonella Anedda (Anedda-Angioy) was born in Rome to a Sardinian family and studied Art History both in Rome and Venice. She has taught at the University of Siena-Arezzo, worked for the journal Il Manifesto, and collaborated on the Berchidda jazz festival. Her collections of poetry include: Winter Residence (1992), Nights of Western Peace (1999), The Catalogue of Joy (2003), and From the Body's Balcony (2007). She has also published two books of essays and three collections of translations. Currently, she lives in Rome.

In What We Pass On: Collected Poems: 1980-2009, Maria Mazziotti Gillan weaves a tapestry of one woman's life - wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, grand-daughter, Italian American. Reading these poems in one volume makes us acutely aware of how memory is layered, each new poem adding another detail, another color, another perspective so that we watch as the poet and the people around her change. With increasing clarity and honesty, Gillan peels away all the self-protective layers and invites us in so we can see in her story a reflection of our own.

Courageous and astute, this collection of poems, written in varied styles, explores the emotional upheavals caused by the estrangement of a son. Weaving together complex layers of personal history, these poems capture the poet's personal journey in trying to understand how these things happen in families and the process towards reconciliation. 

Drawn from the author's 60-year journey through the Middle East, Japan, and North America, this collection of poems offers a variety of engaging styles, ranging from sonnets to haiku to free-form experimentation, while considering the implications of technology, science, and nature in the context of the 21st century. Including previously published works as well as unpublished new works, each piece is delightfully engaging, possessing a wry sense of humor while celebrating the pleasures and paradox of modern life.

Orioles in the Oranges is a collection of poems that tells the story of love and loss as they find common ground in a Metis legend and in modern times. The poems weave the contemporary voice of a young woman who finds herself on Pelee Island letting go of a lover with the telling of the Pelee Island story of a Metis woman who plunges to her death in Lake Erie after being abandoned by her English husband. The narratives dovetail, and grapple with the pull of physical and psychic places that we all find in the experience of finding and losing love.

Written with a probingly sensitive eye, this collection of poems illuminates the subtle and poignant moments in life-moments that cause people to grow and, occasionally, to digress as individuals. Greatly emphasizing musicality, this compilation re-examines the common aspects of everyday life from a female perspective. The urban world and its intricacies are explored and, as a result, a profound zeal for nature emerges. Insightful and unique, these free verses delve deeply into human emotion.