Pop culture and the balladry of bedlam collide in this wry debut that volunteers a transfusion of the unpredictable to readers yearning for more than a muralized Olive Garden world.

In [Sharps], a visit to the last Dollar Store becomes a meditation on the global supply chain. Unicorns and sarcophagi turn up in the most unlikely of places. Pushers shark outside of a short-staffed methadone clinic. A fan of Bill Callahan almost falls into New York's underbelly. Canmore moviegoers scoff at Alec Baldwin, and the Queen resembles Rip Torn.

How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in.
Each line a strip of skin torn from me.

In A thin fire runs through me, Kim Trainor interrogates what it means to exist, to navigate the quotidian amidst the constant drip-feed of political and ecological disasters.

Written over an intense nine-month period in 2016 and 2017 amidst the stresses of heartbreak, depression, and the progression of a new love, Trainorâ s exquisite sequence of short poems offers meditations on different hexagrams in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Incorporating fragments from reportage on current events, Jewish liturgy, and lyric poetics, she latches her readers to the present while acknowledging the inescapable presence of the past.

A thin fire runs through me grapples with Trainorâ s own personal circumstance while contemporaneously documenting the tenor of our times, suggesting that â We peer into other lives; we absorb words, headlines, violent events. We see and we donâ t see. These scraps are unintegrated, unintegratable, yet we carry them.â

Winner, 2017 ReLit Award

Katherine Leyton's fresh and vibrant debut collection takes on the sexual politics of the twenty-first century, boldly holding up a mirror to the male gaze and interrogating the nature of images and illusions.

Confronting the forces of mass communication â whether television, movies, or the Internet â Leyton explores the subtle effects of the media on our perceptions and interactions, including the pain of alienation and the threat of violence simmering just below the surface.

And yet, for all its unflinching and raw lyricism, the poetry of All the Gold Hurts My Mouth is warm and searching, full of humour and hope. Engaging her readers with lush vocabulary and spare, tightly controlled forms, Leyton's poems become a rich quest for identity, authenticity, and nature uncorrupted. Reaching gloriously from isolation and pain to connection with love, Leyton channels the wit of past feminists to create a manifesto for our time, an affirmation of what might be possible.

"So what if I left language by the pier. Metaphorâ s a raft," declares Andrew DuBois as he leads readers through a fractured past and present â from "slummy memories of streets" to a "a charnelhouse (?) of possible clowns" â defamiliarizing, critiquing, and satirizing a wide range of conversational forms in the style of Wallace Stevens and Michael Palmer.

Yet, as "lives at time degenerate into victory competitions," and the poet alternates between searching for an escape from the mundane and accepting that "merely being there together is a dull catastrophe," we recognize that a formally wry, almost flippant, voice has become caught in languageâ s web. The surfaces of the poems begin to feel like thin ice, a brittle coating over which we skate for as long as it lasts. Danger lurks here: the poet must play the puppet, not the puppeteer and we must surrender, body and soul, into language as element.

Winner, New Brunswick Book Award (Poetry)
Third Prize Winner, Alcuin Society Book Design Awards (Poetry)
Finalist, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry

Sue Sinclair has been praised for her "crisp, lyrical poems imbued with subtle, subtextual philosophic musings" (Globe and Mail). She has been described as a poet who "writes her way to a new understanding of the world and carries her readers with her" (Journal of Canadian Poetry). Sinclairâ s debut collection, Secrets of Weather and Hope, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, while subsequent collections have earned a place on the Globe Top 100 list (Mortal Arguments), won the IPPY Poetry Award (The Drunken Lovely Bird), and the Pat Lowther Award (Heavenâ s Thieves).

This collection includes an introductory essay by editor and poet Ross Leckie, over one hundred selected poems from Sinclairâ s twenty-year career, and new poems that consider the poetâ s evolving relationships with the idea of beauty and with the more-than-human world in a time of manufactured upheaval. The new poems, many never-before published, exemplify Sinclairâ s masterful powers of observation and her precise, arresting language.

Love is a boxcar going off the rails. For anyone who has experienced the highs and lows of love and wants to know they are not alone.

Patricia Young's new collection confirms her status as one of Canada's great and most versatile contemporary poets. In Amateurs at Love, she explores the dynamic, liminal space between lovers, taking precise aim at the silent climacteric moments of the heart: the interrogating, persuading, confiding, reflecting moments that help us feel and understand that distance.

Her response is unexpected, unsettling and emotionally pungent. To the question of what is love, her interlocutor answers,

I think it means a boxcar going off the rails, grain spilling down a gully, fermenting over summer, a bear gorging on that grain, passing out in a field, a bear that could wake any moment, hung-over and thirsty and ready to kill for a drop of water

In forms ranging wildly from pangramic love songs to prose poems, Young guides her readers through the many layers of human relationship with unappeasable joy. Her poetic voice, her bold and unconventional metaphors, her rich incantatory rhythms and linguistic dexterity, lure us into a pulsing universe that leaves no aspect of human nature unblemished.

An angular unconformity is a border between two rock sequences, one lying at a distinct angle to the other, which represents a significant gap â often millions of years â in the geologic record. (Imagine a biography that has several decades simply unaccounted for.) It might also be described as a fissure through which deep time leaks into history and upsets its authority.

Angular Unconformity shows us a life's work in cross-section, a restless and humane intelligence, ever searching, ever shifting, finding significance in our blink-of-an-eye existence against a backdrop of geological time unimaginable in its scale.

A shrewd observer of teh sounds and the poetics of nature, Don McKay attunes his senses to bird song and music, to human presence and geological formations, to vernacular speech and inanimate silence. In his eloquent, yet exuberant encountes with the wilderness, he walks the fault line between the known and the unknown, testing the uncertain mechanism of language and its imperfect gestures toward meaning.

This first comprehensive collection of Don McKay's poetry displays this pre-eminent Canadian poet's gift for thinking through metaphor, for channelling a profound philosophical discourse through poetic imagery. In poem after poem, his disciplined attention and contemplative mind break through the commonplace, illuminating an ecological understanding of the world as it is.

Reflecting on a dual upbringing in two villages, Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone), Jessica Hiemstraâ s new collection of poems delves into her relationship with home. In Blood Root, she interrogates questions of legacy, land, belonging, and the breathtaking intimacy of death.

At one moment, a pure abstraction; at the next, an incontrovertible presence of hooves, antlers, and fur. The beating heart of this assured debut by Richard Kelly Kemick is the Porcupine caribou herd of the western Arctic.

In Caribou Run, Richard Kelly Kemick orchestrates a suite of poems both encyclopedic and lyrical, in which the caribou is both metaphor and phenomenon â text and exegesis. He explores what we share with this creature of blood and bone and what is hidden, alien, and ineffable.

Following the caribou through their annual cycle of migration, Kemick experiments with formal and thematic variations that run from lyric studies of the creature and its environment, to found poems that play with the peculiar poetry of scientific discourse, to highly personal poems that find resonance in the caribou as a metaphor and a guiding spirit. Running the gamut from long-lined free verse and ghazal form to tightly controlled tankas and interwoven rhyme schemes, Caribou Run serves notice that a formidable new talent has been let loose on the terrain of Canadian poetry.