National Network for Equitable Library Service

Whether misreading sixth grade pedagogical materials or offering visual schematics for reading Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Jon Paul Fiorentino's sixth poetry collection asks us to reconsider our engagement with received information — but does so with a wink during detention, a dodgeball to the gut during recess.

Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication.

Poet Margaret Christakos, throughout her eight previous poetry collections, has created ruptures and splices inside of and against the limits of the confessional lyric, often using recombinatory procedures, cyclical and serial structure, and enmeshing intimate vernacular with highly aestheticized language in writing that explores maternality, sexuality and intimate address.

MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.

Where were you when you first read Ariel? Who were you? What has changed in your life? In the lives of women? In My Ariel, Sina Queyras barges into one of the iconic texts of the twentieth century, with her own family baggage in tow, exploring and exploding the cultural norms, forms, and procedures that frame and contain the lives of women.

Nominated for a Griffin Poetry Prize. In Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake, they rage against despair, they speak against death and wrestle with the fateful spirits of Armageddon to loosen their choke-hold on humanity.

A spun radio dial passing clean through poetry. A stuttering loop of Endgame recorded by Stockhausen, remixed by Kraftwerk. The chatter of minotaurs and metadata. Transmissions from far-off futures or new pasts, recordings from a recoded present topped off with a cherry. Evel Knievel, above it all, mysterious, forever taciturn. Mission Creep comes on with the inferno of apocalyptic prophecy and melts on your tongue like the last snowflake of a nuclear winter. Praise for Joshua Trotter: 'Joshua Trotter’s long-awaited debut is here, and it’s every bit as good as we’d hoped.

New Theatre stages a lively foray into spaces geographical and utopian that calls into question the process and nature of meaning. Steudel’s coolly cerebral ‘Birch’ sequence about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s later life muses on power and identity, but is balanced by an intimate autobiographical long poem that gives quieter, equally surprising shorter pieces room to spike and bloom in this assured debut.

Shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Translation. The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning.

Need Machine clamours through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumour. Honest, irreverent and sharply indifferent, this book will hogtie you with awe.