First Poets

From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, We Are No Longer The Smart Kids In Class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. This collection contemplates moustaches, mountains, and oceans from Halifax to Victoria, always wondering how poetry matters to the heaving, melting, masturbating world it dramatizes.

The poems in Black Suede Cave meditate on the space inside us, where darkness and imagination animate the unknowable. They illuminate the shadows of memory that slip into our darker corners, reveal by lamplight the furtive nightscape of Toronto, and ponder how loss creates its own places of reflection about what we have loved.

Exaltation in Cadmium Red splatters and brushes in poems, both as a toxic, poisonous, metallic mix, and a rich, vibrant, powerful oil colour. Shades of cadmium red have persisted throughout history as the most exuberant in the oil-paint palette; the hues meant to be mixed with other oils in subtle, specific, and precise doses for greatest effect. This body of poems revels in this fanatical, fantastic colour to express the heights and depths of passion - engaging in meditations on prayer, spirituality, feminism, and the breadth of existence in a post-colonial, trans-national and transsexual age.

In her first collection of poems, Suzanne Robertson meditates on the nature of intimacy; the connective tissue that binds stranger to stranger, human to animal, soul to landscape, heart to mind. Inspired by the Buddhist paramitas ? actions that spark a spiritual sojourn, the poems attempt to both transcend and stay grounded in a conventional universe. Follow the humourous, pedestrian plight of a secretary/writer grappling with her noonday demon, her love affair with Little Black, and the metamorphosis of her marriage as she harnesses the practical power of poetry, marrying words "to the wind horse," "to the lies and the gossip and the truth of the river / as it pours out the mouth of right-now." Paramita, Little Black explores acts of transformation; documenting a journey to live and love authentically amidst the transient anatomy of our twenty-first century lives.

The poems in Bending the Continuum are slave to no genre. Science-fiction, alternative realities, and time are fluid. Form, voice and space in this collection borrow from multiple canons. Dane's first book is equal parts Can-lit, Harlem Renaissance, the Caribbean oral tradition known as Griotism, Roddenberry, hip-hop and dark-humour. This is his first collection of poetry.

Filtered through insomnia and distress signals, Amphetamine Heart pumps out an atonal pulse over flashes of lowered inhibitions. Channelling punk and heavy metal influences, this poetry collection's soundtrack is set to a backdrop of boozecans and broken glass. Written over a three-year period, these poems are linked by discomfort and decay, frequently capturing the urgency of paranoia and self-harm. Amphetamine Heart is about excess and the imbalance that it brings. It's about people who don't remember how they got home at the end of the night. It's about broken illusions and the dark undercurrents that often permeate party culture.

In Footsteps on the Ceiling, Baila Ellenbogen explores the overlapping planes of existence her experience and intellectual curiosity have led her to inhabit, reliving childhood memories while questions of faith and domestic responsibilities collide. With a combination of personal, lyrical, and mystical images, the poet examines our ability to love and be loved, our longing to be heard, and the integrity of one voice rising among the many. Baila Ellenbogen holds a Master's Degree in Child and School Clinical Psychology from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Footsteps on the Ceiling is her first book. {Guernica Editions}

Written with a probingly sensitive eye, this collection of poems illuminates the subtle and poignant moments in life-moments that cause people to grow and, occasionally, to digress as individuals. Greatly emphasizing musicality, this compilation re-examines the common aspects of everyday life from a female perspective. The urban world and its intricacies are explored and, as a result, a profound zeal for nature emerges. Insightful and unique, these free verses delve deeply into human emotion.

Set off the southern shores of Ontario, on Pelee Island surrounded by the waters of Lake Erie, the poems in this collection tell parallel stories of women who find common ground in ancient Native American Métis folktales and modern times. Intertwined throughout are two distinct female voices-a young woman struggles to let go of her lover, an elderly woman distraught and abandoned by her husband. Weaving together these coinciding lives, together they dovetail, grappling with the pull of physical and psychic places found in the experience of finding and losing love.

A stunning collection of poems, these works explore moments of empathy in suffering, epiphany in ruin, and grace in surrender. In chronicling a journey from childhood grief through the dark rapture of love and longing, these translucent poems unveil vulnerability, uncertainty, and movement into the half-light of a new beginning.