National Network for Equitable Library Service

Through the rapidly altered perspectives of romantic relationship and the demands of economic recession, Little Empires pursues what it means to own your changing landscape. In a deft and pithy, elegantly nuanced and urbane style, Robert Colman charts awareness within our fragmenting society, where Tweets drown the present tense, and “purpose” loses its hold on sense. Out of it all comes an enriched appreciation of human connection.

Rough Wilderness chronicles one of the most famous tales of love, betrayal and redemption. Heloise and Abelard were medieval scholars whose taboo-breaking affair shocked clerics and fellow scholars and assured the star-crossed pair a place in history. These poems are contemporary in subject and tone, but also explore some of the more complex modes that have come down to us, including sonnets, pantoums, villanelles and others.

Something Small to Carry Home is an homage to the dead and the living, a family history, a celebration of life’s special occasions and a meditation on poetry itself, its solace and significance through the poets who’ve nurtured and inspired the author.

The poetry of Fermata, like the pause or hold in music which the word signifies, conjures the audible spaces between notes and the suspended moment. As the author puts it, this is “terse but lateral but lyrical writing.” Her words “are always on the threshold of becoming solid entities. In Fermata, the pitched sound, held indefinitely or paused indefinitely, is the mind feeling the restless body, the migrations of geese or memory.”

Karen Connelly’s first collection of poetry since The Border Surrounds Us, the poet offers up a searing, complex portrayal of her troubled family. Refracted, augmented, drawn through various cities, streets and fields, over mountain ranges and foreign landscapes, this portrayal grows into an authentic homage to people who are often invisibilized or silenced. Simultaneously, it becomes an indictment of her own country, Canada, its long history of racism and unconscionable violence against women, children, addicts and poor people.

In The Hundred Lives Russell Thornton illuminates the intricate imaginative orders of love at work within an individual life.

Syrinx and Systole is a book of prose poems and lyrical poems which meditate, with a Buddhist orientation, on philosophical and religious themes such as the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world, and between spirituality and anatomy, and the nature of “voice” in birds and in ourselves, and on the power and limits of language.

Nevermore: A Book of Hours is a modern bestiary and a book of remembrance, a distillation of 30 years of research and meditation by author and poet David Day, an acknowledged authority on the extinction of species. In its conception and approach, Nevermore is unlike any other natural history. It is laden with a combined sense of wonder and savagery in its vivid descriptions of first encounters with, and last glimpses of, long forgotten species. It is beautifully illustrated by four distinguished wildlife artists, and unfolds as a requiem to vanished species.

Pin Pricks is a collection of deceptively simple poems and aphorisms, each of which expresses an understanding of what it means to be human in this high-tech, global age. The poems leap from urban first world concerns to third world struggles, from the solidly grounded to the surreal, from sombre to witty to frighteningly harsh. They constantly remind us that we are all intimately connected, struggling and fortunate to be alive. Like the pricks of a pin, they are short, sharp and memorable.

These elegantly crafted works of social and psychological realism, counterpointed with expressionistic and surrealist textures, employ a language teeming with images, ideas and rhythms. This versatile book of travel poems, portraits, a long dramatic monologue, epistolary and catalogue pieces will leave the reader emotionally and intellectually gratified.