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Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. A play of resonance between pronouns and persons, freely percussive between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions, White Piano offers readers a 'language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie.

From the ruins of poetry, fiction and philosophy comes Touch To Affliction, a meditation on the notion of homeland, on patrie and the inhumanity that arises from it. This is a text obsessed with ruins: the ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body.

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.

The fairground screamed. The mountains and valley were gone. The fire was gone too. The hanging ‘because’ was gone too. The men were away and my heart already dead and the fairground monkey dead in my mouth. A spectre haunts a derelict nsa surveillance station on a hill in Berlin. Our posthumous selves cry to us from the Cloud. We’ve internalized the panopticon, but it still feels good to buy. On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, undirected prayer and meta-chatter into a quartet of delirious song, a diorama of our new, totalized and ubiquitous armour.

His body, like yours, would lie mute as a plumuntil a vigilant limb came to a decision. As you might have guessed I've come to one myself. Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know 'you' is you? What good is it to decorate a headstone? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-­old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers.

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.

Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey’s Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy. Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself in demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O – offering, along the way, a sincere contemplation of mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore.

Warning: this book may encourage a series of ungrammatical thoughts! Welcome to the poetic landscape of Mark Truscott, where less is more than you bargained for. Said Like Reeds or Things is a book of micropoetic and linguistic koans. With a quirky, off-centre sense of humour, these poems uncover a language that has malfunctioned only to find itself in the form of a gesture.Minimalist in form, these small gatherings of words, a.k.a.

Deliciously wicked satires about local and international celebrities, the poems in Portable Altamont evince an irrepressible grasp of the zeitgeist, its machinations and manipulations, its possibilities and puerility. Who other than artist and raconteur Brian Joseph Davis could have imagined Margaret Atwood as a human beatbox, Jessica Simpson applying for arts grants or the Swedish Chef reciting T. S. Eliot? Davis uses every literary form available to revel in and rearrange pop culture.

At times a call to action and at others an intimate conversation between friends, Currin’s sensual and surreal poems speak to the political upheavals and environmental catastrophes of our time. School is an instruction manual for igniting transformation through a collective effort of love and community.