Laurier Poetry

Space Between Her Lips presents the first selected works of one of Canada's most important poets of the last few decades. Margaret Christakos writes vibrant, exciting, and intellectually challenging poetry. She plays language games that bring a probing and disturbing humour to serious themes that range from childhood and children to women in contemporary techno-capitalist society to feminist literary theory, and so much more. Gregory Betts' introduction to the collection highlights her formal diversity and her unique combination of feminist and avant-garde affinities. He connects the geographies of her life - including Northern Ontario where she was raised, downtown Toronto where she studied with cutting-edge authors and artists like bpNichol and Michael Snow, and Montreal where she integrated with the country's leading feminist authors and thinkers - with her polyphonic experimentation. While traversing the problem of bifurcated identities, Christakos is funny at a deeply semiotic level, wickedly wry, exposing something about the way we think by examining the way we speak of it. In her afterword, Christakos maps out a philosophy of writing that highlights her self-consciousness of the foibles of language but also deep concern for the themes she writes about, including her career-length exploration of self-discovery, hetero-, queer and bi-sexual sexualities, motherhood, self-care, and linguistic alienation. Indeed, Margaret Christakos is a whole-body poet, writing with the materiality of language about the movement of interior thought to embodied experience in the world.

"I build this story like my lair. One willow, / a rib at a time" - "The Crooked Good" Since 1990, Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe's work has stood out as essential testimony to Indigenous experiences within the ongoing history of colonialism and the resilience of Indigenous storytellers. Sôhkêyihta includes searing poems, written across the expanse of Halfe's career, aimed at helping readers move forward from the darkness into a place of healing. Halfe's own afterword is an evocative meditation on the Cree word sôhkêyihta: Have courage. Be brave. Be strong. She writes of coming into her practice as a poet and the stories, people, and experiences that gave her courage and allowed her to construct her "lair." She also reflects on her relationship with nêhiyawêwin, the Cree language, and the ways in which it informs her relationships and poetics. The introduction by David Gaertner situates Halfe's writing within the history of whiteness and colonialism that works to silence and repress Indigenous voices. Gaertner pays particular attention to the ways in which Halfe addresses, incorporates, and pushes back against silence, and suggests that her work is an act of bearing witness – what Kwagiulth scholar Sarah Hunt identifies as making Indigenous lives visible.

Deportment is a selection of poems – surreal, cerebral, and defiant – by Alice Burdick. Burdick examines the dangers of dogma, women's rights, and environmental degradation in biting satires, moving elegies, and anti-sentimental lyrics filled with mischievous wordplay. The selection includes some of Burdick's most iconic poems as well as rare work from the beginning of her career in 1990s Toronto and previously unpublished material. Burdick's later poetry, more expansive in form and subject matter, addresses motherhood, the rural landscape, and sex and desire at middle age. Deportment makes the case for Alice Burdick as one of Canada's best poets, alongside figures such as Lisa Robertson, Karen Solie, and Sina Queyras. Alessandro Porco's introduction situates Burdick's early work within the Toronto small press scene, focusing on her fugitive chapbooks, broadsides, and literary ephemera while highlighting her formative relationships with Victor Coleman and Stuart Ross. He traces her move from Toronto to Nova Scotia in the early 2000s and the impact of publishing from the social and spatial margins of Canadian literature. In her afterword, Burdick reflects on everyday life – as a poet and citizen, daughter and mother –in both the zombieland of downtown Toronto and the alien geography of Eastern Canada. She explores how the comparative speed, sound, and density of urban and rural spaces have shaped her literary imagination.

(Re)Generation contains selected poetry by Anishinaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm exploring a range of issues: from violence against Indigenous women and lands to Indigenous erotica and the joyous intimate encounters between bodies. From her earliest work in my heart is a stray bullet and Bloodriver Woman, through her spoken word works standing ground and A Constellation of Bones, Akiwenzie-Damm's poetry demonstrates how to represent Indigenous peoples in their full complexity, especially as it pertains to bodily pleasure, love, and loss. Akiwenzie-Damm's afterword speaks to the relations and obligations Indigenous peoples have to one another and their other-than-human kin, as she reflects on the resilient work that Indigenous creative work has done and continues to do in spite of colonial violence. She stakes a claim for the necessity of poetry in the face of ongoing colonialism, not only in the present but in the future and for the generations to come. The introduction by Dallas Hunt locates Akiwenzie-Damm within the field of Indigenous literature and meditates on her influence on the field of Indigenous erotica.

Lillian Allen is one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada. Her work has been foundational to the dub poetry movement, which swept across the Black diaspora in the 1980s, taking roots/routes in Kingston, Toronto, and London and offering exciting sounds of protest and a careful, detailed documenting of everyday life as political praxis. Make the World New brings together some of the highlights of Lillian Allen's work in a single volume. It revisits her well-known verse from the celebrated collections Rhythm an' Hardtimes, Women Do This Everyday, and Psychic Unrest, while also assembling new and uncollected poems. Allen's poetry is incisive in its narration of Black life and its call to create new and different futures. Her work highlights the need for radical intersectional change as a process of social transformation. Allen's afterword, "Tuning the Heart with Poetry," includes the writer's reflections on her process and the social and cultural impact of the work. The introduction, by Ronald Cummings, engages with the duality of Lillian Allen's poetry in its written and spoken forms, and the give and take in committing poems to the page that "are not meant to lay still." He also reflects on the dynamism of Allen's dub poetry, where, for example, her portrayal of breaths and breathings take on new resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19.

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home, critiquing petro culture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with Western poetics. The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two published collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and the volume includes previously unpublished new poems. Peter Midgley's introduction contextualizes Otiono's work within the frame of diaspora and newer critical frames like Afropolitanism, attending to form as well as his political engagement. The volume concludes with an afterword written by the poet with Chris Dunton.

Social Poesis introduces readers to the work of one of Canada's most exciting and challenging poets. Through selections from across Rachel Zolf's poetic oeuvre, this book foregrounds the philosophical, ethical, and political questions that inform Zolf's poetry. Selections range from early poems in which Zolf explores transhistorical trauma and queer subjectivity to more recent writings that examine militarism, settler colonialism, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. Zolf's poetry enacts what she calls a "social poesis"; she is attuned to questions of ethical responsibility and the role, and limitations, of poetry as a tool for ethical thinking, political engagement, accountability, and bearing witness. Heather Milne's introduction examines Zolf's compositional strategies, tracing the evolution of Zolf's writing from an autobiographical poetics, in which Zolf as subject/speaker is locatable, toward a poetics that moves beyond the self to address political and ethical relations among subjects of geopolitics and settler colonialism. In her afterword, Zolf focuses on her most recent work, in which poems are composed almost entirely from archival sources and enact a kind of collective assemblage of enunciation.

Sonosyntactics introduces the reader to over forty-five years of Paul Dutton's diverse and inventive poetry, ranging from lyrics, prose poems, and visual work to performance texts and scores. Perhaps best known for his acclaimed solo sound performances and his contributions to the iconic sound poetry group The Four Horsemen, Dutton is a surprising, witty, sensitive, and innovative explorer of language and of the human. This volume gathers a representative selection of his most significant and characteristic poetry together with a generous selection of uncollected new work. Sonosyntactics demonstrates Dutton's willingness to (re)invent and stretch language and to listen for new possibilities while at the same time engaging with his perennial concerns-love, sex, music, time, thought, humour, the materiality of language, and poetry itself. Gary Barwin's introduction outlines the major subjects and techniques of Dutton's poetry: an intricate weaving of thought and language, sound and emotion, sound and sense, and the unfolding of a text through the logic of language play such as puns, paradoxes, ambiguity, and sound relations. In an afterword by Dutton himself, the poet insightfully lays out the terms of his engagement with the materiality-both visual and aural-of language, often beyond the purely recountable, representational, or depictive.

Tom Wayman's poetry has been published around the world to great acclaim. Wayman is one of Canada's most prolific and public poets, and his writing since the 1960s has been by turns angry, engaged, hopeful, tender, and hilarious. His voice and persona are his alone but simultaneously ours too. His recurring themes-work, mortality, love, lust, friendship, the natural world-make his work a poetry of human inevitabilities, a poetry that exults in the inevitability of seeing poetry in the everyday. Wayman's craft is poïesis (from the Ancient Greek "to make")-making a change, making a difference, making a ruckus, making the most of our time. His working life has always been inextricable from his writing one; his poems offer an honest and candid consideration of the ideological underpinnings, practical realities, and subtle beauties of a life lived on job sites and picket lines, in union halls, classrooms, and book-stuffed offices, and on the page itself. The Order in Which We Do Things is a collection of more than thirty of Wayman's best poems, selected and introduced by Owen Percy. Percy's introduction explores the genesis of Wayman's print persona and contextualizes his politically engaged, conversational voice within the pantheon of its various publics. In his afterword, "Work and Silence," Wayman reflects on his more than forty years in print as a work poet, and underlines poetry's sustained power to engage readers, invite solidarity, and stoke the fires of critical resistance to the order in which we do things.

This collection brings together representative work from Sina Queyras's poetic oeuvre. Queyras is at the forefront of contemporary discussions of genre, gender, and criticism of poetry. Her influential blog-turned-literary-magazine, Lemon Hound, published up-and-coming writers as well as work by established literary figures in Canada and abroad. The title, Barking & Biting, makes reference to the tagline of Lemon Hound: "more bark than bite." Erin Wunker's introduction situates Queyras's poetry within ongoing debates around genre and gender. It suggests that Queyras's writing, be it literary critical, poetic, or prose, is precise and probing but avoids toothless critical positioning. It pays particular attention to Queyras's poetic innovations and intertextual references to other women writers, and suggests that read together Queyras's oeuvre embodies an engaged feminist attention-what Joan Retallack has called a "poethics," where poetry and ethics are bound together as a mode of inquiry and aesthetics. Queyras's poems trace a consistent concern with both poetic genealogies and the status of women. Thus far, twenty-first century poetics have been preoccupied with two ongoing conversations: the perceived divide between lyric and conceptual writing, and the underrepresentation of women and other non-dominant subjects. While these two topics may seem epistemologically and ethically separate, they are in fact irrevocably intertwined. Questions of form are, at their root, questions of visibility and recognizability. Will the reader know a poem when she sees it? And will that seeing alter her perception of the world? And how is the form of the poem altered, productively or un-, by the identity politics of its author? These are the questions that undergird Queyras's poetry and guide the editorial selections. Queyras's poetics pay dogged attention to questions of both representation and genre. In each of her poetry collections she inhabits tenets of the traditional lyric but leverages the genre open to let conceptualism in. This is demonstrated in her afterword, "Lyric Conceptualism, a Manifesto in Progress," which was first published on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet the Blog. In it Queyras puts forward a set of maxims about the possibilities of a new hybrid, the conceptual lyric poem.

The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. Plans Deranged by Time is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of place-often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants, doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs. In the introduction, A.F. Moritz places Fetherling in the modern picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind of flâneur, impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of "communion-in-isolation." He contrasts Fetherling's contemplative intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this outsider's fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political. Fetherling's afterword is an anecdote-anchored exploration of what the poet sees as his two central approaches-"the desire to create new codes of hearing" and "writing-to-heal"-and how they are reflected in the collection.

Post-glacial is a collection of poems by Robert Kroetsch selected by his former student David Eso. The book features Kroetsch's iconic collection, Completed Field Notes, alongside rare work gathered from different stages of Kroetsch's career. The book contains an afterword by Aritha van Herk. Kroetsch's poetry evolved from short lyric poetry in the 1960s to postmodern long poems in the 1970s and 80s. Kroetsch's work in the 1990s and 2000s was marked by the production of experimental chapbooks. Yet it is in the 2000s that Kroetsch's celebrated The Hornbooks of Rita K and his final collection, Too Bad, were published. Post-glacial presents the material in a thematic arc that follows daily, seasonal, and biographical topics. The collection moves from moods of morning, spring, and youth to shades of darkness, winter, and mourning. In the introduction, Eso charts Kroetsch's early attempts at poetry in his teenage and undergraduate years. Eso takes the title Post-glacial from the poem "Lonesome Writer Diptych" and proposes the term as an alternative to "postmodernism," a term often used by critics to describe Kroetsch's work. Post-glacial emphasizes the poet's interest in landscape, ecology, history, the presence of absence, and the endurance of a living past.

Lorna Crozier's radical imagination, and the finely tuned emotional intelligence that is revealed in the clarity of her poetry, have made her one of Canada's most popular poets. Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected and introduced by Catherine Hunter, and includes an afterword by Crozier herself. Representing her work from 1985 to 2002, the collection reveals the wide range of Lorna Crozier's voice in its most lyrical, contemplative, ironic, and witty moments. Hunter's introduction discusses the poet's major themes, with particular attention to her feminist approach to biblical myth and her fascination with absence and silence as sites for imaginative revision. Crozier's afterword, "See How Many Ends This Stick Has: A Reflection on Poetry," is a lyrical meditation that provides an inspirational glimpse into the philosophy of a writer who prizes the intensity of awareness that poetry demands, and is tantalized by what predates speaking and all that cant be named. An engaging volume that will appeal to undergraduate students as well as general readers of poetry. Lorna Crozier's work has won many awards, including the Governor Generals Award in 1992 (for Inventing the Hawk), the first prize for poetry in the CBC Literary Competition, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1992, a National Magazine Award in 1995, and two Pat Lowther Memorial Awards (1993 and 1996) for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. She has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently, Whetstone. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, she now lives in British Columbia, where she is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Victoria.

Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatt's poetry stands out as an essential engagement with what matters to anyone writing with a social-environmental conscience. Rivering includes poems inspired by the village of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. Also gathered into Rivering: lesbian love poetry from Touch to my Tongue; a transformance of Nicole Brossard's Mauve; passages from The Given, winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional "Kuri" song from the Noh drama, The Gull; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera "Shadow Catch." Difficult, beautiful, heart-breaking realities of the twenty-first century are urgently immediate in selections from Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now. All of the poems speak to Marlatt's poetics of place and of language as passage between distant or disparate human beings, and between human beings and the more-than-human world. The selections are framed by Susan Knutson's deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatt's "immediacies of writing," a new lyrical essay investigating the act of writing. Closing with a walking meditation situated by her Buddhist practice, Rivering is both a "pocket Marlatt" and an introduction to one of the best poets of our time.

The selected poems in Desire Never Leaves span Tim Lilburn's career, demonstrating the evolution of a unique and careful thinker as he takes his place among the nation's premier writers. This edition of his poetry untangles many of the strands running through his works, providing insight into a poetic world that is both spectacular and humbling. The introduction by Alison Calder situates Lilburn's writing in an alternate tradition of prairie poetry that relies less on the vernacular and more on philosophy and meditation. Examining Lilburn's antecedents in Christian mysticism and the ascetic tradition, Calder stresses the paradoxical nature of Lilburn's writing-the expression of loss through plenitude. The divine in the natural world is glimpsed in brief flashes; nevertheless, the poet, driven by love, continues his quest for what glitters in things. Tim Lilburn's afterword is an evocative meditation grounded in personal history. He speaks of how poetry, a craning quiet, allows one to hear what is alive in the world. He also describes how poetry is resolutely attached to both a historical moment and an individual subjectivity that is inevitably anchored in time. Lilburn's poetry is both a religious undertaking and a political gesture that speaks to the urgency of situating ourselves where we live.

A four-time Governor General's-award nominee for both poetry and non-fiction, Christopher Dewdney is celebrated internationally as a writer and a visionary and is best known for his particular imagining of place and memory. Beginning with Paleozoic fossil formations in southwestern Ontario and moving through eons of natural history to cityscapes and the digital present, Dewdney's poetics encapsulate often surreal experiences from radical and epiphenomenal perspectives. His writing vibrates in a standing wave between science and art, reason and myth-embedding geology, neurophysiology, linguistics, and post-digital technology within a play of transitory viewpoints. Children of the Outer Dark provides a geological survey of Dewdney's poetic strata. The poems selected, along with their order of presentation, serve a critical function to mine diverse layers of development in Dewdney's career. This collection will reward all those who seek inspiration and will provide teachers, students, and other writers with a short natural history of one of Canadas essential poetic minds.

Since the beginning of his poetic career in the 1990s, derek beaulieu has created works that have challenged readers to understand in new ways the possibilities of poetry. With nine books currently to his credit, and many works appearing in chapbooks, broadsides, and magazines, beaulieu continues to push experimental poetry, both in Canada and internationally, in new directions. Please, No More Poetry is the first selected works of derek beaulieu. As the publisher of first housepress and, more recently, No Press, beaulieu has continually highlighted the possibilities for experimental work in a variety of writing communities. His own work can be classified as visual poetry, as concrete poetry, as conceptual work, and beyond. His work is not to be read in any traditional sense, as it challenges the very idea of reading; rather, it may be understood as a practice that forces readers to reconsider what they think they know. As beaulieu continues to push himself in new directions, readers will appreciate the work that he has created to date, much of which has become unavailable in Canada. With an introduction by Kit Dobson and an interview with derek beaulieu by Lori Emerson as an afterword, Please, No More Poetry offers readers an opportunity to gain access to a complex experimental poetic practice through thirty-five selected representative works.

With The Cape Breton Book of the Dead, Don Domanski emerged as a remarkable new voice in Canadian poetry, combining formal conciseness with broad cosmic allusions, constant surprise with brooding atmospherics, and innovative syntax with delicate phrasings. In subsequent collections, Domanski's poetry has deepened and expanded, with longer lines and more complex structures that journey into the far reaches of metaphor. Now, with Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski, the long-awaited first selection from his books, readers have a chance to experience the full range of his work in one volume. Editor Brian Bartlett, in his introduction, "The Trees are Full of Rings,", discusses Domanski's engagement with nature and the transformative power of his metaphors; his poetic bestiary amd mythical underpinnings; and his kinship to poets like Stevens, Whitman, and Rumi. Like these poets, Domanski is drawn to borderlands between the physical and the spiritual, the unconscious and the conscious. His poetry finds a home for demons and angels, spiders and wolves-and for kitchens and back alleys, forests and stars. In language both fluent and hypnotic, Domanski maintains an awareness of both the magnitudes and the minutiae that live beyond language. In "Flying Over Language," an essay written specifically for this volume, the poet explains that for him metaphor is one way to suggest the wealth of being that poetry can only point toward.

Dumont's poetry explores how the structural legacies of Canada's racist and colonial history continue to be lived realities for First Nations and Métis communities. Extremely relevant today with continual stories of MMIWG and residential school burial sites. Dumont is a descendent of Gabriel Dumont, prominent historical leader of the Métis people. This heritage drives her artistic practice The positions that the book takes with respect to Métis history, identity and resurgence are vital, and may be considered controversial for a reader new to considering the Métis a people with their own cultures and histories. The poem "Letter to John A MacDonald" is a much-needed reparative to a violent history of removal and erasure. A Really Good Brown Girl won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets. It has been reprinted multiple times and is a staple of course teachings in Indigenous poetry. Other volumes published were also award winners. This book is the first selected volume of Dumont's poetry. Introduction by Armand Garnet Ruffo, award-winning writer, poet, scholar. Afterword by Dumont. Marilyn Dumont is a Metis writer who was born and raised on Metis Road Allowance in small town Alberta. She is the author of A Really Good Brown Girl (Winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award- League of Canadian Poets), green girl dreams Mountains (Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry - Writers Guild of Alberta), that tongued belonging (Winner McNally Robinson Poetry Book of the Year and McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year), The Pemmican Eaters (Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry - Writers Guild of Alberta, and forthcoming collection coming in 2024. Marilyn's work has been widely anthologized, represented in artwork and poetry installations. She has received the Alberta Lieutenant Governor General's Distinguished Artist's Award and the League of Canadian Poets Lifetime Membership Award. Marilyn was guest anthologist for The Best Canadian Poetry 2020. Armand Garnet Ruffo was born in Chapleau, northern Ontario, and draws on his Ojibwe heritage for his writing. He is the recipient of the 2020 Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize. His publications include Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird (2014) and Treaty # (2019), both finalists for Governor General's Literary Awards. He teaches at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. To describe the writing of Marilyn Dumont is to call her a poet of reclamation and resurgence. Some thirty-five years ago she set about documenting her life as a young Métis woman and telling the story of her people, the Red River Métis, and, in the process, she has become a principal literary voice for the "Renaissance" of the Métis nation. To understand Marilyn Dumont's work is to understand Métis culture and history, that of a people who originated in the 17thth century upon the meeting of the First Nations and the newcomers, the European voyageurs and cartographers who travelled along the great waterways of Turtle Island/ North America. How does a Métis poet write about a country where its politicians and bureaucrats are honoured as national figures when they made family fortunes from confiscated Métis and First Nations lands? For Dumont, the answer to this question resides in telling the truth, about the present and the past. Through carefully crafted poems, Dumont takes the reader through a range of personal and historically connected experiences grounded in emotional truth. For Dumont, perception, like memory, is as much about the body as it is the mind, surfacing as visionary insight, which has become the hallmark of her poetry. Reclamation and Resurgence contains poems selected from A Really Good Brown Girl, green girl dreams Mountains, from that tongued belonging, and The Pemmican Eaters, as well as previously uncollected poems, and includes an introduction by Armand Garnet Ruffo and an afterword, "Contradict

Arcing across thirty years and seven volumes, Jan Zwicky's poetry has always been acutely musical (and sensitive to the silence out of which music comes). In the compositions in Chamber Music, the first anthology of Zwicky's poems, one may perceive the attunement of her vocations: poet, philosopher, violinist. Her poetry both praises and relinquishes the earth, bearing witness to the fierce skies of the prairies and the freezing rain of the West Coast. Enacting the virtue of clarity prized and defended by her explicitly philosophical work, this poetry is both resonant and integrated. It is also formally diverse, ranging from the singular focus of the lyric ode to suites of variations and fugal structures, from polyphonic textures to the sprawling reach of narrative gestures. Throughout, one feels the deft hand of an adept using powerful metaphors to explore themes of colonial violence, environmental devastation, spiritual catastrophe, and transformation. Resisting Western philosophy's exclusion of imagination from civic life, Zwicky's poetry is noteworthy for the tension it achieves between the abstract and the personal, the general and the particular. Meditating repeatedly on themes of love and grief, this poetry is at once passionately committed to the lucidity of its utterances and the fidelity of its images.

Nelson Ball has had a significant impact on contemporary Canadian poetry not only as a poet but as an editor, with his Weed/Flower Press in the 1960s and 70s. Certain Details provides a major overview of the breadth and many paths of Ball's poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains selections from all of Ball's major collections as well as works that have previously appeared only in chapbook or ephemeral form. In a generous and thoughtful afterword, and for the first time in print, Ball discusses his processes, influences, and aesthetics. The book is introduced by editor and poet Stuart Ross, who offers a personal entry point into Nelson Ball's extraordinary oeuvre.

With compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date. Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. She is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love. Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight. Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers. Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy, and is an enthusiastic retrospective of Bloom's work. In Ronna Bloom's Afterword, she traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration. A Possible Trust is a selection of Ronna Bloom's poetry by poet and editor Phil Hall. The book includes an introduction by Hall, and an afterword by Bloom that traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. • representations of illness and aging • Ronna Bloom is a psychotherapist, so there may be an expanded audience in the field of health care and wellness, spirituality, meditation • She was poet in residence at Sinai Health from 2012-2019 (Toronto) • poetry engaged with spontaneity, spirituality, work, health care via the raw honesty of one plain-speaking woman. • Bloom's poem "The City" was painted by PLANT Architects 30 metres wide on King Street in Toronto for the summer of 2018. It was part of the King Street pilot project (transit corridor)

mahikan ka onot collects the finest work of accomplished Indigenous poet Duncan Mercredi, from his first book in 1991 to recent unpublished poems. These are poems of life on the land as well as life in the city, vibrant with the rhythms of traditional Cree and Métis storytelling but also with the clamour and the music of the streets. This book brings the work of Duncan Mercredi (Cree/Métis) back into the public eye, providing a new generation of readers with the opportunity to experience his unique artistry. Mercredi brings to these poems the sensibility of a Cree speaker and a renowned oral storyteller, revealing a deep attachment to the land and a nuanced understanding of the complexities of contemporary Indigenous life. In startlingly direct, plainspoken language, the poet explores themes of cultural resurgence and steadfast connections among the generations, even amid the unfolding tragedies wrought by colonialism. Some of these poems are memories of traditional life on the land, especially in the time before Manitoba Hydro radically altered Mercredi's home community of Grand Rapids, Manitoba. Others focus on the urban Indigenous experience, based upon Mercredi's longstanding and intimate knowledge of Winnipeg. Like mahikan, the wolf, Mercredi's characters are often outsiders in certain contexts, but the poems reveal other perspectives that allow us to understand their loyalty and their love of community. The volume includes an afterword by Duncan Mercredi and an introduction by Métis scholar Warren Cariou, both of which provide resources for deeper study of the poems. mahikan ka onot collects the finest work of accomplished Indigenous poet Duncan Mercredi, from his first book in 1991 to recent unpublished poems. These are poems of life on the land as well as life in the city, vibrant with the rhythms of traditional Cree and Métis storytelling but also with the clamour and the music of the streets. • Mercredi has been named Winnipeg's poet Laureate for 20-21 • the poems can be read on two levels. The first is accessible, but there are nuances and depths that could be explored should a reader (or student) want to go deper • Mercredi expresses an authentic Cree/Métis voice in his poems that tells stories in an unvarnished way, giving the reader the truth of Indigenous experience today • Mercredi has held a number of manual labor jobs and his poetry reflects this • deals with resource extraction (hydro development), the gender politics of colonial labor practices in Indigenous communities, loss of Indigenous languages, and the experience of urban Indigenous people, often less explored than the rural • Mercredi is a renowned storyteller and performer of his work. This is reflected in the style and form of his poems.

The career of Eli Mandel (1922–1992) was one of the most prolific and distinguished in all of Canadian literature, yet in recent years his work has gone unsung compared with that of such peers as Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page. Though he was a critic, anthologist, and editor of national prominence, Mandel's legacy resides most securely in his poetry, which earned many accolades. From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel presents thirty-five of Mandel's best poems written over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The selection covers the most prominent themes in Mandel's work, including his Russian-Jewish heritage, his Saskatchewan upbringing, his interest in classical and biblical archetypes, and his concern for the political and social issues of his time. The book also highlights the way in which Mandel's work bridged the formal attributes of modernist poetry with contemporary, sometimes experimental, poetics. Complete with a scholarly introduction by Peter Webb and a literary afterword by Andrew Stubbs, From Room to Room makes a worthy addition to the Laurier Poetry Series, which presents affordable editions of contemporary Canadian poetry for use in the classroom and the enjoyment of anyone wishing to read some of the finest poetry Canada has to offer.

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott's poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott's artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for "The Canadian Authors Meet," "W.L.M.K," and "Laurentian Shield," but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure. The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott's work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively.

Increasingly known as the "poet's poet," Governor General's Award–winner Phil Hall has long been a constructor of intricate sequences, collecting and arranging lines and phrases, artifacts, and small revelations. He writes on influences, literary and local; he writes of rural Ontario, attempting to comprehend a deeply personal family violence; he stitches together lines and tall tales and fables from his life and the stories that float around the ethos of his variety of Ontario wilds. Hall's isn't a poetry carved into perfect diamond form but a poetry whittled from scores of found materials pulled apart and rearranged. This volume is not so much a "selected poems" as it is a reshuffle, a sampler from the span of Hall's published work. Guthrie Clothing is a collage-selection by Hall. Lines, stanzas, and poem-fragments are reworked and patterned into a new sequence, a fresh structure. The afterword consists of an important new essay-poem by Hall as well. It argues against irony from a rural perspective and amounts to Hall's ars poetica. In an encompassing introduction, rob mclennan explores Hall's four-plus decades of bricolage.