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59.
Series:
Happiness Threads
The Unborn Poems
Paperback
Melanie Dennis Unrau
9781897289952
$15.95
POETRY
Sep 20, 2013
Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems, Melanie Dennis UnrauÕs debut collection, is an elegantly spare, thoughtful, and fiercely tenacious meditation on the trials and tribulations of modern motherhood. Written in response to the platitude ÒYour children are your poetry now,Ó Happiness Threads explores the struggle of a young mother to balance the demands of raising young children with her desire to make art. Unrau wastes neither words nor sentiment; often brief and wonderfully compact, these poems shy away from nothingÑdelving into every challeng...
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60.
Series:
North End Love Songs
Paperback
Katherena Vermette
9781897289761
$15.95
POETRY
Mar 01, 2012
For Katherena Vermette, Winnipeg's North End is a neighbourhood of colourful birds, stately elms, and always wily rivers. It is where a brother's disappearance is trivialized by local media and police because he is young and aboriginal. It is also where young girls share secrets, movies, cigarettes, Big Gulps and stories of love&emdash;where a young mother full of both maternal trepidation and joy watches her small daughters as they play in the park."In North End Love Songs, Katherena Vermette uses spare language and brief, telling sketches to ...
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61.
Series:
Intermission
Paperback
Heather Simeney MacLeod
9781897289754
$14.95
POETRY
Mar 20, 2012
Intermission is an uncommon and refreshing excavation of popular culture, memory, and relationship. It offers startling interpretations of the fashionable sitcoms and young-adult novels which were prevalent during the late 1970s while exploring the nuances of belonging, faith, and loss. With a tensile gesture we are moved from the icons of the 1960sÑJanis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the playful insertion of Jim MorrisonÕs documented acronym of his own name, Mr. Mojo RisinÕÑto the cityscapes inherited by Generation X:& they became icons worn to wa...
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62.
Series:
Both Boys Climb Trees They Can't Climb Down
1st edition
Paperback
Stephanie Yorke
9781897109946
$14.95
POETRY
Apr 16, 2012
Both Boys Climb Trees They Can’t Climb Down is Stephanie Yorke’s homage to lost homes. The poems in the collection commemorate a home that is at turns too ugly to look at, and too profound to ignore. The remembered home is both a depleted space where “women climb flimsy ladders/ to rag and harangue mildew from awnings/ over the doors,” and a potent space where a “volcano spits like a roast pig/ initial ash on your window.” Yorke approaches her subject obliquely, giving a monolithic topic the sidelong glance it demands: home looms on the periph...
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63.
Series:
Ignite
1st edition
Paperback
Rona Shaffran
9781927426029
$14.95
POETRY
Mar 15, 2013
Ignite’s unflinchingly honest poems tell the story of a broken emotional and physical relationship between a man and a woman, healed by a very physical process of self-discovery, which is sparked by the woman’s recovery of desire in a renewed connection between body, soul and earth. The language, sparse and evocative, almost disappears to get beneath the intellect, to create an intimacy with the reader, a collective energy, a human experience that we all share.
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64.
Series:
Once Houses Could Fly
1st edition
Paperback
Rosemary Clewes
9781897109939
$14.95
POETRY
Apr 16, 2012
In Once Houses Could Fly, ten kayakers snail along the rugged fjords of Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic. Here under the roofless world, the ancient killing fields of the Thule people become campsites for tents, pitched among the bleached bones of sea mammals and the rough docks of shore-ice. These poems speak of the bite and beauty of weather and the limits it sets on us. Be it “Jeremiah on a rampage” or the “which-way of ice,” the polar desert has a habit of dismantling expectations. There is nowhere to hide, no turning back. Beginner’s ...
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65.
Series:
Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being
1st edition
Paperback
Susan Andrews Grace
9781927426043
$14.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2013
Imagining how the philosopher imagines is one way to read and learn a philosophy and is especially suited to the practice of poetry. Sometimes poetry has the ability to be the reality when philosophy can only describe it. Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being marches through the seasons as Jia-li, a mountain woman, and a girl philosopher inhabit their cosmos, sluicing philosophy of antiquity through twenty-first century existence. They imagine the world as the sages may or may not have.
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66.
Series:
Shape of a Throat, The
1st edition
Paperback
Sheila Stewart
9781897109953
$14.95
POETRY
Apr 16, 2012
In this, her second collection of poetry, Sheila Stewart is deeply attuned to the process of unearthing childhood memory and mapping the landscape of midlife. She meanders along High Park trails and carefully observes scenes in Toronto subways and cafés, as she wrestles with the complexity of having grown up in the United Church manse in small-town Ontario and living a writing life with a partner and teenaged children. She charts a path through a disquiet childhood, letting dreams and the unconscious shape her knowing. Her lyrical command creat...
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67.
Series:
small flames
1st edition
Paperback
Dina E. Cox
9781897109922
$14.95
POETRY
Apr 16, 2012
small flames is, like its title poem, an arrangement of lambent coals which brighten their hot cores under the breath of the reader’s gaze. Quiet, contained poems flare up with the intensity of peak experience – in moments of childhood, womanhood, birth, death and the infinite in a cormorant’s flight or Chaucer’s tomb. Dina E. Cox has the extraordinary gift of having begun to write seriously only after her children had grown, and yet writing as though she were in her twenties – youthful energy, enthusiasm and passion seasoned already with matur...
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68.
Series:
The House on 14th Avenue
1st edition
Paperback
Michael Mirolla
9781927426036
$14.95
POETRY
Mar 15, 2013
The House on 14th Avenue is about paired and shared lives, featuring two people whose connection sometimes seemed forced and uneven. That of master and slave. That of trembling and acceptance. Some of the poems detail each individually, a scraping together of momentary identities; others bring them together as they embark on journeys both physical and psychic. Journeys into the past through an underworld of ancestral ghosts and paths so well-trodden there is no possibility of creating new ones. Journeys in the present through detailed lists of ...
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69.
Series:
Unseen World, The
1st edition
Paperback
David Elkins
9781927426050
$14.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2013
The poems in The Unseen World wander just below the surface under water and under the moon, beneath fields and cities, love and family. They bump into dead Spanish poets in bus station gift shops, take coffee with Soren Kierkegaard at IKEA and spot Henry Miller emerging from 14th Street subway. Cameo appearances include two bullfighters, a bear out shopping a pair of pants, a dental assistant’s ovaries and a voting pig named Victoria. All the while the action is being filmed by Robert Frank from his perch in Cape Breton to a sound track of the ...
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70.
Series:
Message Sticks
Tshissinuatshitakana
Paperback
Joséphine Bacon
9781927494097
$21.95
POETRY
Apr 30, 2013
Translated from the French into English by Phyllis Aronoff. This bilingual work (English and Innu-aimun) is an invitation to dialogue. Message sticks are the signs that allow the nomadic Innu to orient themselves inland and find their way. The poetry brings the language of the nutshimit (the back country) to life again, recalling the sound of the drum. Simple and beautiful, Joséphine Bacon?s poetry is an homage to the land, the ancestors, and the Innu-aimun language. Charting unwritten history, it provides a vision into the intensity of the e...
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71.
Series:
Voices From Kibuli Country
Paperback
Dannabang Kuwabong
9781927494288
$19.95
POETRY
Nov 01, 2013
This collection results from the author?s experiences in Hamilton, Ontario, where he has a home, and his travels to several Caribbean islands and the United States as a person of multiple locations and origins: Canadian, African, and Ghanaian. The Hamilton poems also look at the experiences of immigrants, their disrupted lives and loves, their broken dreams. The history of Africa Village in Hamilton Mountain, now known as Concession Street Housing finds its way into these poems. The Caribbean poems, based on visits to St. Croix, St. Martin/S...
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72.
Series:
Wanting in Arabic
Second Edition
Paperback
Trish Salah
9781927494301
$19.95
POETRY
Nov 15, 2013
Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences, convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l?ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father?s language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood. Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism,Wanting in Arabic attempts to tra...
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73.
Series:
The Space That Connects Us
Paperback
Mansa Trotman
9781894770958
$17.95
POETRY
Nov 15, 2012
In The Space that Connects Us, Mansa Trotman treats her readers to an exquisite slice of heart renderings carefully crafted to create immediate empathy and spark a glow of feelings. The emotions run deep, the humour surfaces loud and clear, and soon one is over the hump of the rough road on which she drags your senses. At first, it may only be one hand clapping, but eventually, the joy at the capacity to speak life in the raw is contagious.
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74.
Series:
Subversive Sonnets
Paperback
Pamela Mordecai
9781894770941
$17.95
POETRY
Sep 01, 2012
These "subversive sonnets" overhaul the traditional sonnet form to address a range of subjects, from the tenderness of love to the terror of rape, punishment, torture, and murder. The poet's quest is to corral iambics into the demotic of Jamaican creoles as well as forms of English past and present. Mordecai has an unfailing ear for voices, for the music that sings and laughs and laments the stories of family, clan, and tribe, thus celebrating life in all its aspects. This is Pamela Mordecai's fifth collection of poetry.
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75.
Series:
The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit
Paperback
Irene Marques
9781894770965
$18.95
POETRY
Sep 15, 2012
The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit is about memory of being, being in body, spirit and speculation. It unravels the remembrances and cognitions forged in the mind as it recalls life through images that are intensely reflective, transtemporal, sensual, daunting and mournful, sometimes feeling like never-ending, lazy arias. As we move from poem to poem, we dwell in magnificent displays of sensations, ideas, and moods, happy and sorrowful, pleading and celebratory, allowing ourselves to reconstruct life through the physicality of the body or th...
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76.
Series:
Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter
Paperback
Sonia Saikaley
9781894770972
$17.95
POETRY
Sep 15, 2012
Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter takes the reader from Lebanon's olive groves to Montreal's frigid winters and underground malls. These closely connected poems present a narrative threaded with the rich traditions of the Middle East, from its dazzling varied food to its bustling Arabian marketplaces and passionate politics. A lover longs to be reunited with his beloved. A woman mourns the loss of her father and must find her place in a male-dominated culture, while another must relinquish her unborn child. Honest, accessible, and humane, Turk...
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77.
Series:
A Nervous City
Paperback
Chris Pannell
9781894987745
$17.00
POETRY
Apr 08, 2013
Winner of the Kerry Schooley Award ? Hamilton Literary Awards Whether it is the roads that weave through his native Hamilton, or the crowded streets of Cairo where tourists, it seems, are forbidden to walk, Pannell captures the hum and energy that animates these urban spaces in his latest collection. With an eye for the unexpected and genuine understanding of the common man, Pannell crosses and recrosses the city with his deft lines. In the end, The Nervous City walks the reader down streets they thought they knew but now see in a completely di...
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78.
Series:
Archive of the Undressed
Paperback
Jeanette Lynes
9781894987660
$17.00
POETRY
Sep 01, 2012
From twirling tassels to dead playmates Archive of the Undressed is a sharp, darkly comic look at the image of women in a society between changing sexual mores. Jeanette Lynes brings her iconic style to these poems, fearlessly critiquing attitudes towards women, poking at Canadian identity and finding something sexy in the settlement of "The Queen's Bush," Northern Ontario. A wickedly pointed and funny collection, Archive of the Undressed will overturn any reader's belief that poetry is boring.
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79.
Series:
Arguments with the Lake
Paperback
Tanis Rideout
9781894987714
$17.00
POETRY
Apr 08, 2013
In 1954, at the age of sixteen, Marilyn Bell became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario. It brought her fame and adulation; her life seemed charmed. Enter Shirley Campbell, another young swimmer whose accomplishments were poised to rival Bell's, but in falling short in her own attempts to cross the Great Lake, she found herself spiraling out of control into a life of addiction, petty crime, and personal tragedies. Tanis Rideout weaves the tales of these two remarkable women together in a series of stunning, lyrical poems. It is a story...
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80.
Series:
Einstein's Cat
Paperback
Zoë Landale
9781894987677
$17.00
POETRY
Oct 05, 2012
Whether considering the Skeena River or the foibles of an onscreen diva, Zoë Landale creates vivid and unforgettable poetry. Shot through with bright colour and sharp natural imagery, this is not a calm, contemplative collection. Indeed, Landale punctuates her own poetic musings with a director's cut, a counterpoint of sly, often acerbic observations on her own lines. A fascinating and intricate work, Einstein's Cat is a collection that is sure to reward repeat readings.
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81.
Series:
Enjoy It While It Hurts
Paperback
JonArno Lawson
9781894987776
$17.00
POETRY
Sep 08, 2013
Winner of the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry Enjoy It While It Hurts is an edifying miscellany of quarrelsome quips, holiday oddities, benevolent advice, curious thoughts and comically apocalyptic melancholia. This delightful collection of light verse and nonsense poetry written and illustrated by the award-winning, multitalented JonArno Lawson keeps alive the traditions of Edward Gorey, Shel Silverstein and Hilaire Belloc. Erudite, witty and wholly original, Lawson's wordplay is serious business.
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82.
Series:
Floating Life
Paperback
Moez Surani
9781894987639
$17.00
POETRY
Mar 01, 2011
Floating Life, Moez Surani's second collection of poetry, takes the reader on a dizzying tour of the world, stopping in Cairo, Muju, Madrid and Cape Breton. Interwoven through these evocative glimpses of places and the people that live in them are poems exploring relationships, reflecting on identity and considering the passing of time.
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83.
Series:
Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects
Paperback
Catherine Graham
9781894987769
$17.00
POETRY
Sep 08, 2013
Shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award ? League of Canadian Poets Shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry In her fifth collection of poetry, Catherine Graham breaks into rich, new territory. Long recognized for the easy grace and strange beauty of her poems about grief and remembrance, in Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects, she turns her thoughts toward poems of tribute and exaltation. Paying homage to the work of two inspiring poets?P. K. Page, whose long life and celebrated career have made her a legend ...
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84.
Series:
Naked Trees
Paperback
John Terpstra
9781894987653
$17.00
POETRY
Apr 01, 2011
Naked Trees is a meditation on urban trees. It explores the life and death of these trees and the people who live with them. We see the trees through the eyes of a child, who finds her tree friendly and inviting, or view the tree's life through the thoughts of a leaf, promised flight, but denied it by the capricious wind. Terpstra finishes the collection with a section on varieties, composed of poems on individual tree types such as prunus serotina and utility pole.
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85.
Series:
Civic-mindedness of Trees, The
Paperback
Ken Howe
9781894987721
$17.00
POETRY
Apr 08, 2013
Winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers' Federation Winner of the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry In The Civic-mindedness of Trees, award-winning poet Ken Howe updates the vocation of the "nature poet" for the 21st Century. These poems are witty and philosophical meditations on the haunting presence of the natural world, and on the familiar presence of humanity within it. In this book, odes to oak trees and ground squirrels renew the mysteries of plant and animal life; it is not an idealized Eden untouche...
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86.
Series:
We, Beasts
Paperback
Oana Avasilichioaei
9781894987622
$19.00
POETRY
Mar 01, 2011
Winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers' Federation With undeniable verve, Oana Avasilichioaei upends expectations of literature and poetry in this fascinating collection. We, Beasts is a fairy tale; a book within a book; a collection of verse; a mediation on language, real and imagined and a sly social commentary all in one.
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87.
Series:
Bone Sense
Paperback
Laurie Lynn Muirhead
9781927068076
$9.95
POETRY
Oct 15, 2012
These are narrative poems that resonate with the simplicity of rural life but evolve from the great traditions of Emerson, Thoreau, and have the emotional connections of the poetic works of Patrick Friesen and Glen Sorestad. The poems reflect how the lands, the climate, cattle, coyotes and weather unfold with circadian rhythm. Her language is straightforward and yet she creates fresh and useful metaphors to embody those mystical connections that are entrenched between her and the rural world she inhabits.
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88.
Series:
Riot Lung
Paperback
Leah Horlick
9781927068083
$9.95
POETRY
Oct 15, 2012
Riot Lung is a well-balanced introduction to a new voice. Horlick's poems vibrate with spontaneity and yet retain an intimacy that is emotionally intoxicating. Whether reflecting on her coming of age moments within her family, or measuring the impact of both the rural and urban prairie landscapes on her life, Horlick never strays far from how her identity as a queer writer has been shaped.
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89.
Series:
Sound Off
a book of jazz
Paperback
Stephen Bett
9781927068410
$18.95
POETRY
Mar 15, 2013
Stephen Bett’s 12th book, Sound Off: a book of jazz, is loosely, a "serial" poem, a book of 76 linked poems, each responding (himself as a jazz fan) to the work of 76 very current jazz musicians. These "jazzers", as he calls them, are not the old tried & true names we all know --- they fall, very roughly, into three general camps: the "sons of Miles" (Jarrett, Hancock, Corea, McLaughlin, Scofield, Shorter, etc.); the ECM artists (largely Norwegian, the very contemporary sound coming from jazz’s second centre these days) & very young (20-somethi...
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90.
Series:
She Draws the Rain
Paperback
Carole Chambers
9781927068427
$15.95
POETRY
Mar 15, 2013
As an environmental activist and avid gardener Chambers has finely tuned her sensitivities to the magic and drama of nature. Her poetry uses this energy to describe the relationships that people have to the environment, to themselves and to each other. She Draws the Rain contains poems of both dream and vision in its exploration of the human condition. It also offers poems that are built on the science of knowing nature, knowing its rhythms, its seasons, its storms and the healing power it possesses. Chambers’ poems name the unnameable and scat...
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91.
Series:
Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis
Paperback
Robin Richardson
9781770411623
$18.95
POETRY
Sep 01, 2013
Sexy, irreverent, and inventiveLovesick Stormtroopers, dowsing Girl Guides, movie stars, pool hustlers, and the mad queen Ranavalona … With Knife Throwing Through Self–Hypnosis, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine–grained and crude. Yearning, unapologetic women who delight in the monsters they’ve created make these poems “a shield made of braids, / bassinet of broadswords,” and “a ghost-like choir where a love affair / becomes a pulp-book, plotted perfectly to end.”
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92.
Series:
Previously Feared Darkness
Paperback
Robert Priest
9781770411647
$18.95
POETRY
Sep 01, 2013
Picking up and pulling at the vibrant threads of Robert Priest’s last book of poems, Reading the Bible Backward, this collection explores new themes while spanning multiple strands of thought. One strand leads, with unabashed candor and elegance, through the author’s love life; another, through fields of praise; a third experiments with automated metaphors and delivers a challenging new selection of mash-ups that Priest calls meme splices. A fourth thread rekindles the author’s love of the prose poem to produce a suite of strange tales, bizarre...
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93.
Series:
Impact
The Titanic Poems
Paperback
Billeh Nickerson
9781551524429
$14.95
POETRY
Apr 01, 2012
Billeh Nickerson is a Vancouver-based poet well-known across Canada for his playful, witty observations on sex and culture. In Impact, his third poetry collection from Arsenal, Billeh turns his attention to a more serious subject that has fascinated him ever since he was a child: the sinking of the Titanic. Published on the 100th anniversary of the disaster (which occurred on the night of April 15, 1912), Impact is an intimate and evocative poetry collection that depicts the tragedy in a series of poetic snapshots. Based on historical research...
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94.
Series:
No Ordinary Place
Paperback
Pamela Porter
9781553801511
$15.95
POETRY
Feb 15, 2012
Pamela Porter's poems celebrate a world awaiting discovery. She opens this new collection with a poem entitled "An Offering" in which she brings to the ceremony "poems / for every season - of dreams born, / burning, broken" and, in particular, one that "begins like a perilous grace" to develop as "naked and tender and wanting." Throughout, one hears and sees images that connect both the poet and reader to other dimensions. Always for Porter, there is the moment tentatively coming into being where the mundane is transformed into something totall...
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95.
Series:
Flicker Tree, The
Okanagan Poems
Paperback
Nancy Holmes
9781553801832
$15.95
POETRY
Sep 15, 2012
How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes' new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes comes to terms with personal grief, she tries to find consolation in the place she shares with other beings. Holmes' poetry looks for relationships with the prickly pear cacti, bluebunch wheatgrass, the bl...
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96.
Series:
In The Vision of Birds
<p>Long before the current rise of eco-poetry, Steve Luxton was writing powerful and exquisitely cra
Paperback
Steve Luxton
9781897190838
$16.95
POETRY
Jul 10, 2012
An avid fisherman, canoeist, and hiker, Luxton explores and records in memorable detail the region around his home in Quebec. This collection brings together for the first time 35 years of his best nature poems, including new and previously unpublished work. Influenced by fellow Eastern Townshippers, F. R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, and D.G. Jones, Luxton has developed a mature and authoritative voice uniquely his own. Rich in language and metaphor, these poems dazzle at times with their depth and dissolve the barrier between Man and ...
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97.
Series:
In The Vision of Birds
Hardcover
Steve Luxton
9781897190845
$31.95
POETRY
Jul 10, 2012
An avid fisherman, canoeist, and hiker, Luxton explores and records in memorable detail the region around his home in Quebec. This collection brings together for the first time 35 years of his best nature poems, including new and previously unpublished work. Influenced by fellow Eastern Townshippers, F. R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, and D.G. Jones, Luxton has developed a mature and authoritative voice uniquely his own. Rich in language and metaphor, these poems dazzle at times with their depth and dissolve the barrier between Man and ...
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-
98.
Series:
The Lower Provinces
<p>Daniel O'Leary's fascinating new collection of dramatic poems combines scholarly recovery of earl
Paperback
Daniel O'Leary
9781897190814
$16.95
POETRY
Jul 10, 2012
Daniel O?Leary?s new collection of dramatic poems combines scholarly recovery of early Canadian visionary experience and new translations of early French-Canadian poems and documents, to create a series of dramatic settings presenting a revived Canadian poetic ethos. In The Lower Provinces, O?Leary rejects the notion that Canada lacks a deep and visionary culture, or that the country?s commercial colonization by American financial interests is too far advanced to be resisted. Instead he presents an imaginative, frequently humourous cast of earl...
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99.
Series:
The Saddest Place on Earth
<p>When Donald Rumsfeld briefed his press secretary on how to deal with the media, he said: 'Begin w
Paperback
Kathryn Mockler
9781897190326
$17.95
POETRY
Dec 01, 2012
When Donald Rumsfeld briefed his press secretary on how to deal with the media, he said: 'Begin with an illogical premise and proceed perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion…They [the media] do it all the time.' Kathryn Mockler's new collection of poems applies Rumsfeld's advice to powerful poetic ends. Deeply interested in American politics and the absurdity of our mediated relation to the political sphere, the beautiful and entertaining narrative poems in The Saddest Place on Earth follow absurd premises to their most logical conclusi...
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100.
Series:
The Lower Provinces
Hardcover
Daniel O'Leary
9781897190821
$31.95
POETRY
Jul 10, 2012
Daniel O?Leary?s new collection of dramatic poems combines scholarly recovery of early Canadian visionary experience and new translations of early French-Canadian poems and documents, to create a series of dramatic settings presenting a revived Canadian poetic ethos. In The Lower Provinces, O?Leary rejects the notion that Canada lacks a deep and visionary culture, or that the country?s commercial colonization by American financial interests is too far advanced to be resisted. Instead he presents an imaginative, frequently humourous cast of earl...
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101.
Series:
The Saddest Place on Earth
Hardcover
Kathryn Mockler
9781897190890
$31.95
POETRY
Jun 27, 2013
When Donald Rumsfeld briefed his press secretary on how to deal with the media, he said: 'Begin with an illogical premise and proceed perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion?They [the media do it all the time.' Kathryn Mockler's new collection of poems applies Rumsfeld's advice to powerful poetic ends. Deeply interested in American politics and the absurdity of our mediated relation to the political sphere, the beautiful and entertaining narrative poems in The Saddest Place on Earth follow absurd premises to their most logical conclusio...
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102.
Series:
Divide and Rule
Electronic book text, EPUB
Walid Bitar
9781770563056
$9.99
POETRY
Mar 15, 2012
In Divide and Rule, Walid Bitar delivers a sequence of dramatic monologues, variations on the theme of power, each in rhymed quatrains. Though the pieces grow out of Bitar’s personal experiences over the last decade, both in North America and the Middle East, he is not primarily a confessional writer. His work might be called cubist, the perspectives constantly shifting, point followed by counterpoint, subtle phrase by savage outburst. Bitar’s enigmatic speakers are partially rational creatures, have some need to explain, and may succeed in par...
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103.
Series:
Cutting Room
Electronic book text, EPUB
Sarah Pinder
9781770563247
$9.99
POETRY
Sep 06, 2012
Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and 'natural' spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focus to worn detail, asking us to seek pattern and possibility in a hyper-paced present tense. Theseare little ominous films, documenting the minutiae around us that can be our undoing.
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104.
Series:
The Politics of Knives
Electronic book text, EPUB
Jonathan Ball
9781770563209
$14.95
POETRY
Sep 06, 2012
Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards) If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming. Finding the language of violence and the violence in language, Jonathan Ball becomes the Stephen King of verse.
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105.
Series:
New Theatre
Electronic book text, EPUB
Susan Steudel
9781770563070
$14.95
POETRY
Mar 21, 2012
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.
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106.
Series:
Davie Street Translations
Paperback
Daniel Zomparelli
9780889226838
$16.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2012
To the street that is a village, Daniel Zomparelli conveys a liveliness and wit that rhetorically towel-flicks its way from the sardonic bathhouse banter of ancient Rome to the cinematic musical machismo of the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, with each poem ?translating? another chapter in his documentary of gay male culture in Vancouver.To the tune of mononymous deities Beyoncé, Madonna, Barbra and Gaga, this home-brewed Catullus flirts with the very concept of ?translation,? not only representing the movement and conversion of event, ...
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107.
Series:
The Properties
Paperback
Colin Browne
9780889226852
$19.95
POETRY
Mar 15, 2012
Poetry begins when the properties of things — and the correspondences among them — reveal themselves through language. Language is the veil that can pierce itself. The poems in The Properties record encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They’re alert to correspondences, attentive to the lines of force to which the poet’s family quietly assented in the contested place that is the Northwest Coast of North America.
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108.
Series:
Specks
Paperback
Michael McClure
9780889226883
$16.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2012
Widely noted for the popularity of his dynamic performances, Michael McClure has been celebrated since his first poetry event. At twenty-two years old, in San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery, McClure, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg gave their first poetry reading—Ginsberg read ?Howl? that night. McClure’s writing followed his deepening environmental awareness and biological studies, and he became an outspoken advocate, through his essays, music, theatre and novels, for the protection of all living beings.When McClure’s Specks was first publis...
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109.
Series:
This Poem
Paperback
Adeena Karasick
9780889226999
$19.95
POETRY
Aug 15, 2012
This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic-saturated world we are enmeshed in. Composed in the style of Facebook updates and extended tweets, each section infuses itself with continuously shifting tones, styles, and commentary which in turn are provocative, emotive, and deeply satiric. Mashing up lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Whitman, the recent financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Derrida, and Flickr streams, This Poem is a self-reflexive romp through shards and fragments of post-...
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110.
Series:
Theogony / Works and Days
Paperback
C.S. Morrissey
9780889227002
$17.95
POETRY
Aug 15, 2012
C.S. Morrissey’s brilliant translations bring a modern, lyrical sensibility to Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod’s two great poems that paved the way for subsequent achievements in Greek philosophy. Theogony tells of the first generations of the gods and recollects how Zeus established his cosmic reign of justice. Works and Days examines the two-fold role of competition in life, what Hesiod calls “the bad strife” and “the good strife” and how they affect our struggle to maintain order in the wake of chaos and the primeval void.
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111.
Series:
To the Barricades
Paperback
Stephen Collis
9780889227477
$19.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2012
To the Barricades moves back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. Avant-garde technique is donated to lyric ends, forming anti-archive of the revolutionary record where words are hurried bricks thrown up as linguistic “barricades."
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112.
Series:
In the Dog House
Paperback
Wanda John-Kehewin
9780889227491
$16.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2012
In her first idiom-shattering book of poetry, Wanda John-Kehewin endeavours to “speak her truth,” combining elements of First Nations oral tradition with a style of dramatic narrative that originates from the earliest traditions of cultural storytelling and also keeps pace with the rhythmical undulations of Canadian poets such as James Reaney and E.J. Pratt. However, in a contemporary setting, the magniloquent narrative of nation-building has given way to fragmentary and reflexive self- examination that is inextricably bound to a history of col...
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113.
Series:
The Monument Cycles
Paperback
Mariner Janes
9780889227514
$16.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2012
The Monument Cycles investigates our relation to monuments and works of public art, ranging from memorials to cenotaphs, expressing our desire to capture the fleeting and intangible. Speaking specifically to the city of Vancouver, these poems focus explicitly on the impoverished Downtown Eastside, exploring the narrator’s experiences working in the poorest postal code in Canada.
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114.
Series:
Liquidities
Paperback
Daphne Marlatt
9780889227613
$16.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2012
In her "re-vision" of Vancouver Poems, originally published in 1972, Daphne Marlatt's additional lyrics trace countless transformations of a West Coast port city. In Vancouver's fast-moving, realty-driven reality, global business is conducted over "liquid lunches" and in the midst of mounting social crises, including poverty, addiction, and homelessness.
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115.
Series:
Coping with Emotions and Otters
Paperback
Dina Del Bucchia
9780889227644
$16.95
POETRY
Apr 15, 2012
Combining serial poetic technique with pop psychology how-to books, Dina Del Bucchia fashions punchy emotional guides in an age when illusory autonomy is achieved by “going viral” and through obsessive identification with celebrities, tracking two otters holding hands at the Vancouver Aquarium and watched by millions, prompting us to meditate upon the media frustum through which we construct emotional realities.
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116.
Series:
The Hottest Summer in Recorded History
Paperback
Elizabeth Bachinsky
9780889712768
$18.95
POETRY
Mar 15, 2013
With her signature eye for irony and sensuality, Elizabeth Bachinsky's latest book of poetry, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, balances a youthful playfulness with observational maturity. Bachinsky strings together seemingly non-sequitur images, capturing in these poems the commonality of raw intimacy, dark humour and a sense of immediacy. Her vision is unapologetically bold, finding the erotic in everyday moments and keenly capturing the complicated truths of life in a powerfully candid style.