Robert Kroetsch

As if there could be no other memory a tree invisible remembering itself In as if, E.D. Blodgett takes readers on journeys of contemplation in which he re-imagines the lyric form. Each line leaves the reader breathless as it runs into the next to form a continuous cycle, a continued breath. The delicate syntax of each piece pushes one forward, ever forward. The poems are Dantesque, leading the traveler through a deeper, darker world. As a collection, as if constitutes an ars poetica of Blodgett's Apostrophes series. The poems explore the elements that make up the series-strict metrical patterns, the possibilities of breath, the endlessness and seamlessness of the spoken word, the incantation.

This is a book about women and ageism. There are twenty-nine contributing writers, ranging in age from their forties to their nineties. Through essays, short stories, and poetry, they share their distinct opinions, impressions, and speculations on aging and ageism, and their own growth as, people. In these thoughtful, fierce, and funny works, the writers show their belief in women and the aging process.

In seven and a half interlinked stories, Aaron Kreuter's Rubble Children tackles Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, love requited and unrequited, and cannabis culture, all drenched in suburban wonder and dread. Sometimes realist, sometimes not, the book revolves around Kol B'Seder, a fictional Reform synagogue in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill. In these stories, the locked basement room in the home of the synagogue's de facto patriarch opens onto a life-altering windfall; visions of an omnipotent third temple terrify; rhythms of the Jewish and scholastic year collide in bong rips and hash hits; alternate versions of Israel/Palestine play out against domestic drama. In the title story, a group of Jewish girls obsessed with the Holocaust discover that they are far from the only people who live in the rubble of history. Engaging, funny, dark, surprising, Rubble Children is a scream of Jewish rage, a smoky exhalation of Jewish joy, a vivid dream of better worlds. In seven-and-a-half interlinked stories, Aaron Kreuter's Rubble Children tackles Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, love requited and unrequited, and cannabis culture, all drenched in suburban wonder and dread. In seven-and-a-half interlinked stories, Aaron Kreuter's Rubble Children tackles Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, love requited and unrequited, and cannabis culture, all drenched in suburban wonder and dread. "This book, in its indispensable way, may make some readers uncomfortable as it amplifies voices and conflicting generational narratives around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within its own community.... Kreuter challenges readers to examine their current biases and narratives, succeeding in presenting a complex issue in an accessible and honest way. By doing so, he allows readers to deeply empathize with the characters.... The authentic dialogue of contemporary voices layered with complex emotions draw the reader in and welcome her to join the conversation, regardless of her affiliations or beliefs. Ultimately, Rubble Children invites readers into a nuanced and vital discourse, making it a compelling and thought-provoking read." Britta Stromeyer [Full review at https://brittastromeyer.com/2024/06/24/book-review-rubble-children-by-aaron-kreuter/] "What if the worldview you were raised in turns out to be monstrous? In the stories that form Rubble Children, Aaron Kreuter examines a Jewish community in flux, caught between its historical fealty to Israel and a growing awakening and resistance to it. Rubble Children is a book of great range: at once political, communitarian, empathetic, funny, revolutionary, touching, and hopeful. This is a work that is essential for our moment." Saeed Teebi, author of Her First Palestinian "The stories simultaneously ground themselves in the immediate, lived experience of the Jewish community in Toronto and leap beyond it into possible futures, following flights of imagination that curl back on the present, revealing its hidden dimensions. Rubble Children breaks what is essentially new ground for the Canadian short story. Urgent, topical, and contemporary, it makes for genuinely exhilarating reading." Aaron Schneider, author of The Supply Chain "A solid and provocative collection that needles all the contradictions in one Jewish community north of Toronto. The story 'Rubble Children' is jam-packed with scrappiness, turmoil, and revelation." Tamara Faith Berger, author of Yara "Although Rubble Children is an important book given the current climate, it's Kreuter's characterization and storytelling abilities that make it a must-read. These are stories of growing, healing and understanding, powerfully told and skillfully wrought. History, culture, religion and politics play a part in each of these stories, but at the end of the day, it's the humanity of the characters, and the vagaries of their na

That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Audibility is a primary theme of this collection-what can be heard, what is obstacled, and what remains unheard. Many of the poems included in the collection try to hold spaces open for the slipperiness of the heard and unheard and the not-yet heard and their associated problems: error, insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects such as fear and avoidance. "A Branch of Happen," the opening section of award-winning poet Margaret Christakos' collection, explores interior listening to both the self as sensation machine and the collaged external soundscape we both hear and fail to hear within the assailing violences and inequities of the news. A second suite, "Heart is a Guest Whippet Resting on a Firm Trunk," is troubled by memories of deceased loved-ones amid the North Saskatchewan River valley and the many-layered history of amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). The fragmentary "Listening Line Notebook" multiplies the treatment of listening as a situated perceptual, sensory, and ethical process. A final long poem called "The Incubation" navigates ideas of being asleep and awake, altered and attuned, as well as spiritually dis/located in time and space. Poised within and beyond both established and emergent traditions of ecocriticism, contemporary feminisms, and experimental lyric, this intriguing and probing work of sound-illuminated poems welcomes readers into its overlapping worlds with grace. That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we both hear and fail to hear insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects. • [Draft] • 1. A Branch of Happen • Capacity • Rise Unclutter Path • Contest Enter People • Collision Altercation Allegedly • Branch • Paper Crowns • Feed The Birds • Aluminum Machiavellian Allegations • Hours • Such Love Alert • Chairs Bending at the Hips • Upload • Station • Gloss • 2. Heart is a Guest Whippet Resting on a Firm Trunk • 3. Listening Line Notebook • 4. The Incubation That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we both hear and fail to hear insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects. "For maximum benefit, read That Audible Slippage out loud. It's a listening party: you will hear the whirr of birds, the click of Facebook posts, and a radical mind awake to its own listenings and jostlings within the rivers of the body and the body of the world. However you read this book, take it in, you will feel yourself hearing anew. Rest awhile in this consciousness." Ronna Bloom, poet "Within That Audible Slippage each measure of the text invites a deeper hearing in an entrancing dance of sounds vividly musical and politically astute. Twinned ironic anchors of popular culture and natural silence yield by turns whispers, yells, and experience." Sheila Murphy, author of Permission to Relax

In Sublunary, Lisa Richter explores what it's like to live "under the moon" in a world that is simultaneously a heartbreak and a total wonder. Sweetmeats and ocelots rain from the sky. Pets are shadow puppets. A kitten impersonates a teacup. A grieving daughter travels back in time to be at her father's side in the final hours of his life. Newlyweds soar over the rooftops of west-end Toronto, passing a violin-playing goat along the way. From Atlantis to Mount Olympus to Christie Pits, these poems interweave moments of absurdity and awe, creating a nuanced portrait of what "a reckless intimacy with the world" might look like-for better or worse. Sublunary is a book of elegy, play, and rupture that advocates for an ethics of care, solidarity, and compassion for our perfectly imperfect selves and each other: a mode of survival that is full-throated and, at times, even joyous. Sublunary navigates the otherworldly geographies of complicated grief, renewal, climate emergency, love, and survival, interweaving dreamlike surrealism, humour, and compassion. Sublunary navigates the otherworldly geographies of complicated grief, renewal, climate emergency, love, and survival, interweaving dreamlike surrealism, humour, and compassion. "These poems are moving sublunary folk tales, a contemporary oral tradition of grief and wonder, surprise and bemused celebration. They speak of memory, the steadfast alchemy of self-awareness, of naming, of weaving a cloth of relations with the world and those one loves. They have the steady and certain strength of craft and curiosity. Life as we experience it is beautiful and strange, a painful and tender paradox. These are poems that see. We are seen." Gary Barwin, author of The Comedian's Book of the Dead "In Sublunary, themes in Richter's previous work, like memory, grief, and absence, re-emerge-this time woven in with references to mythology and Jewish folklore. Always present: the struggles of holding life's strangeness alongside its joyful and bewildering elements." Jonathan Rothman, Canadian Jewish News, December 2025 "In Sublunary, a collection as elegant as it is insightful, Richter answers the question, 'What rhymes with crow's feet, / girl's grit, owl's flight, crone's teeth?' A hard-won wisdom resounds through these bespoke lyric poems that glitter like crystal trees, nourished by roots of blood. While holding space to elegize what has been taken and lost, Richter never succumbs to easy bitterness, but remains open to wonder-'passionately attached to the world' and all 'its peculiar mouthfeel.''' Kayla Czaga, author of Midway • Staying Power • I. • False Awakening • Frog Rain • Crashing the Floodgates • Tabula Rasa • Flotsam and Jetsam • The Thrill of the Find • Blood Concordance • Equinox in the Crystal Forest • A Portrait Made of Seaweed • I'm Not Being Hard on Myself, You're Being Hard on Yourself • Onism for Beginners • If You're Anything Like Me • At the Oracle of Delphi • Be Someone Who Would Have Been Burned at the Stake 500 Years Ago • Aesthetics • II. • Marc Chagall • Missed Flight • Lower Soul • Days of Awe • Reading Zagajewski • Three Years, Two Months and Twelve Days After My Father Dies Overseas • Mountain Concordance • Communiqué from the Fortunate Islands • Epithalamium • Loss Isn't so Important • Moon Phasery • Ghazal with Malbec, No Cigarettes • The Pomegranate Year • Spring Poem Ending with a Line from Roo Borson • Ulcerative Colitis Remission Conditional • Winter Solstice • Unboxing Day • Self-Portrait as Demolished Supermarket • Hauntological • Artifact Inventory • Disassembly Line • III. • Whatever It Takes • The Fish Trees • Communiqué from Atlantis • Bloordale Elegy/li> • Yes, and • Against "The Road Not Taken"

Rain Shadow is a collection of poetry that explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and humans yearning to connect with something greater than themselves. The poems range through destabilized lives and landscapes, fathoming presence and absence, transformation and oblivion. They outline the major questions of our time as the poet crisscrosses western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Witty, playful, serious, and heartsore, Rain Shadow seeks to understand the space in which people and nature are inextricably entwined. I walk like a bear- I have a bear's gait- but the gate to the bear's mind is closed. -from "The Bear and the Wind" Poetry that explores our fraught relationship with nature: playful, serious, heartsore. "[Rain Shadow] fits easily into my shelf of place-aware, place-engaged, self-examining literature from the North American West.... Bradley has a real knack for the potent ending. His final lines simultaneously turn his poems and sprout from them, meaning that each piece in this collection tugs you to stop a minute before you move to the next page.... He slips between registers with ease, blending humour with story with reflection..." [Full review at http://boughtbooks.blogspot.com/2018/08/nicholas-bradley-rain-shadow.html] "Told in four parts, the collection centers thematically around the way humans move through, connect to, and are ultimately alien from our surrounding landscapes.... The poet's haunting voice floats through existential thoughts, alternating between the abstract and the visceral.... In a time when the effects of climate change ravage our natural landscapes and the disconnect between citizen and cosmos seems ever widening, the poems are prescient.... Bradley sketches scenes ever on the edge of disaster, where all life is precious and profound, and rests in the shadow where little rain falls and true growth is a struggle, not to be taken for granted." [Full review at https://www.splitrockreview.org/rain-shadow-review] "Bradley describes and appeals to massive elemental forces and beings, like earthquakes and avalanches, bears and killer whales.... Figurative language and wordplay, often subtle, appear throughout the collection....Some of these poems celebrate wildlife and wildness; some highlight the uneasy and destructive relationships we maintain with our fellow earthlings". [Full review at https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1509&context=thegoose] "[In his] stunning first collection....Bradley's impulse isn't to rub our faces in mortal mud, it's to see survival-even glimpses of transcendence-through that mortality..." I - The Same Mountain Twice The Same Mountain Twice Gray Wolf Pass Glacial Suite Appleton Pass: Watershed Nocturne Song of the Notch Song of the Wind-Loaded Ledges Larches on the Continental Divide Whiteout in May Some Goats Fat Salmon in the Clearwater River Sea to Sky Port Angeles Quadrilateral Fall Classic 2 - Thisness Thisness Ecosystem Square Schist First, Failure Failure Revisited Eclipse A Premise in Kamloops Spell for the Museum of the Canadian Rockies To Gordon Burles Sunplay on Mountains In the Spirit World, on a Rock High Meadows, September Salmon Reconsidered: Goldstream River In Winter's Nick Seasonal For the Millionth Time Maundy Thursday Invocation 3 - Instructions for Travel Instructions for Travel Teachers and Pupils A Lesson on Mount Rexford Late August, Nesakwatch Spires Snow Dome On Reading Conquistadors of the Useless, by Lionel Terray Mountain Failure Mount Rundle: Second Attempt: 18 September Avalanche Bulletin At Bozeman International, in Hugo Country Contra Naturam In Midair Transcontinental Cancer magister Cycling The Earthquake On Corporeal Existence 4 - Metamorphoses Metamorphoses The Beas

"I returned to the same respiratory therapist for my annual checkup. I told her that her words to me, 'You look good for your age,' had inspired a book. 'Wow!' she said. 'You wrote a whole book about that?' 'Twenty-nine kick-ass writers wrote it,' I said. She gave me a thumbs up." From the Preface This is a book about women and ageism. There are twenty-nine contributing writers, ranging in age from their forties to their nineties. Through essays, short stories, and poetry, they share their distinct opinions, impressions, and speculations on aging and ageism and their own growth as people. In these thoughtful, fierce, and funny works, the writers show their belief in women and the aging process. Contributors: Rona Altrows, Debbie Bateman, Moni Brar, Maureen Bush, Sharon Butala, Jane Cawthorne, Joan Crate, Dora Dueck, Cecelia Frey, Ariel Gordon, Elizabeth Greene, Vivian Hansen, Joyce Harries, Elizabeth Haynes, Paula E. Kirman, Joy Kogawa, Laurie MacFayden, JoAnn McCaig, Wendy McGrath, E.D. Morin, Lisa Murphy Lamb, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Olyn Ozbick, Roberta Rees, Julie Sedivy, Madelaine Shaw-Wong, Anne Sorbie, Aritha van Herk, Laura Wershler With wit and wisdom, women writers challenge ageism through essays, short stories, and poetry. "Vulnerability and honesty are found in these pages, and raw power too. Readers will cheer these brave writers on as they refuse to allow stereotypes to smother their voice and experience." "Just as aging women can be invisible in our society, they're often invisible to our cultural curators. This collection brilliantly addresses that blind spot, with wisdom, humour, and fine writing." # 9 on Alberta Bestsellers list, May 30, 2021 # 1 on Calgary Herald Bestsellers list, June 5, 2021 # 8 on Alberta Bestsellers list, June 6, 2021 # 2 on Calgary Herald Bestsellers list, June 12, 2021 # 9 on Calgary Herald Bestsellers list, June 20, 2021 #10 on the Alberta Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, June 27, 2021 #7 on the Edmonton Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, June 27, 2021 #5 on Calgary Herald Fiction Bestsellers list, July 3, 2021 #10 on Edmonton Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, July 11, 2021 #9 on Edmonton Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, August 15, 2021 "Altrows stated that her wish for young readers is that through this anthology, they will get a sense of what it is like to be in the mind and body of an older woman.... By sharing pieces from women who have had first hand experience with aging, readers are able to better understand the effects of the ageist ideals our society upholds." Megan Gervais, The Gateway, November 23, 2021 [Article at https://thegatewayonline.ca/2021/11/you-look-good-for-your-age-challenging-ageism-through-writing-the-gateway] "Altrows reached out to 29 writers identifying as women in their middle to advanced age, a call that resulted in this engaging collection of fiction, non-fiction and poetry… There is much to be savoured here. Buy the book." Jannie Edwards, Alberta Views Magazine, November 1, 2021 [Full review at https://albertaviews.ca/look-good-age-anthology/] "This is a brilliant collection of women's writing about aging, some of which shows reluctant acceptance, some of which shows reinvention of oneself." "This is a brilliant collection of women's writing about aging, some of which shows reluctant acceptance, some of which shows reinvention of oneself." Annie Wesko, Freefall Magazine, Spring 2020 Although unified in subject, the style, tone, and mood of each piece varies widely, combining to create a poignant patchwork of protest and peace-making, of lamentable losses and celebratory gains.... In addition to these writers' grief, rage, and resignation, there is also joy, peace, and anticipation regarding the years to come." Melanie Power, Canadian Literature, June 2022 [Full review at https://canlit.ca/article/agents-against-their-erasure] #6 on Calgary Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, January 25, 2024 #6 on Calgary Herald Non-Fiction Bestsellers l

In a series of poems inspired by Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, E.D. Blodgett searches for meaning amidst grief. In the contemplative gentleness of his words, he finds the special light children possess in their state of unknowing as they encounter the world. These sparse poems move through acceptance and resignation to the solace that exists in the word. Blodgett's poetry will speak to readers who have experienced loss, are exploring grief, or want to find a way to connect with stillness. as bells that ring through the winter air the clear laughter of children sings in the trees almost like brooks bursting in spring the air stands up its joy unbound the breath of it the bright birth of stars Timeless and powerful poems contemplating eternity, grief and love in a reflective and quiet way. "These seemingly slight lyrical moments of exquisite attention to grief and loss are so clear, so without even a trace of literary ambition, they hover in the mind like scraps of music we can't forget, like the apparitions of innocent spirits, erased, but re-surfacing with irrepressible exuberance, whenever we open ourselves to the world that has gone on without them." "Blodgett's profound poetic meditation explores primordial innocence, the brutalities and betrayals of the current world of experience, and the possibility of an integrated, timeless state of innocence. These poems will break your heart, take your breath away, and give it back again in 'verdant hallelujahs.'"

Through mesmerizing forays into characterization, voicing, and narrative technique, and with a clean economy of style rare even in short fiction, Astrid Blodgett conjures the moral and existential freight of her fully fledged characters in the throes of realistic moments. From the fascinatingly unhinged hero of "Getting the Cat," to the dreamy survey of prairie landscape and childhood experience of "New Summer Dresses," to the fatal irony of "Ice Break," readers will be hooked from first sentences and carried along on crisp prose. You Haven't Changed a Bit shimmers with the energy of a first book while affording readers the subtlety, complexity, and range of an accomplished master of the genre. Full-fledged characters positively crackle in the deliciously realistic situations of these thirteen short stories. Back Cover: Astrid Blodgett's stories are acutely rendered picture-poems of the way the world is. The beauty, the shock, the frissons of love and dread-it's all there. A compelling new voice. - Caroline Adderson "Uncle Rick's there, Dad, look," Janie said. "Where? For Christ's sake, where?" Dad said. He drove forward slowly. I looked too. We'd passed ten or twelve men, some of them in pairs, hunched over holes. They were dark shapes in the white-grey globe. I couldn't see Uncle Rick either. "Keep going, Dad, he's out there, I can see him," Janie said. "Past that guy with the dog." Dad drove on. And then I heard a loud crack, like a gun going off, and the front of the truck tipped forward. It was like those dreams where everything is in slow motion and sounds are muffled and all the people have gone and only you are left. The truck tipped forward, and then the front wheels were in the water. -from "Ice Break" Front Flap: Through mesmerizing forays into characterization, voicing, and narrative technique, and with a clean economy of style rare even in short fiction, Astrid Blodgett conjures the moral and existential freight of her fully fledged characters in the throes of realistic moments. From the fascinatingly unhinged hero of "Getting the Cat," to the dreamy survey of prairie landscape and childhood experience of "New Summer Dresses," to the fatal irony of "Ice Break," readers will be hooked from first sentences and carried along on crisp prose. You Haven't Changed a Bit shimmers with the energy of a first book while affording readers the subtlety, complexity, and range of an accomplished master of the genre. In You Haven't Changed a Bit, Astrid Blodgett lights a fuse. She takes us deep into the country where alfalfa brushes against the skin, where ice and sky merge, where people we've known since childhood live. Powerful fiction has a way of detonating after a book has been set down-these stories snap and burn. - Anne Simpson Back Flap: Astrid Blodgett has an MA in English from the University of Alberta and has received a number of literary awards, including a City of Edmonton Seven Arts Club Scholarship and James Patrick Folinsbee writing prizes from the University of Alberta. Her stories have been read on CBC Radio's Alberta Anthology and published in Meltwater: Fiction and Poetry from The Banff Centre for the Arts, The Journey Prize Stories 24, Alberta Views, The Antigonish Review, and Prairie Fire. Astrid lives in Edmonton with her family. Astrid Blodgett was announced as one of the 12 contributors to The Journey Prize Stories 24. Congratulations! http://www.facebook.com/TheJourneyPrize/posts/10151067884019227 "You Haven't Changed a Bit, a compilation of 13 stories, took 10 years to complete. For the Literary Cocktails reading, Blodgett has picked Ice Break, a story about a family that goes ice fishing on Lake Wabamun. They never start fishing because as they drive on the ice, it cracks and breaks." St. Albert Gazette, April 20, 2013 "These thirteen stories are a breath of fresh air. Blodgett's writing is clean and spare. The stories are intelligently written, and great care has clearly gone into crafting them. Detai

Arborophobia, the latest collection by award-winning poet Nancy Holmes, is a poetic spiritual reckoning. Its elegies, litanies, and indictments concern wonder, guilt, and grief about the journey of human life and the state of the natural world. When a child attempts suicide and western North America burns and the creep of mortality closes in, is spiritual and emotional solace possible or even desirable? Answers abound in measured, texturally intimate, and often surprising ways. The title sequence, named for a word that means "hatred of trees," sassily blurs the boundaries between human beings and Ponderosa pines, reminding us how fragile our conceptual frameworks really are. Another sequence responds to Julian of Norwich's writing and call "to practise the art / of letting things happen." Saints' lives interlace with our quotidian experience, smudging connections between the spiritual and the earthly. Taking a hard look at what we have done to this beautiful planet and to those we love, Arborophobia is a companion for all who grapple with the problem of hope in times of crisis. Arborophobia explores wonder, guilt, and grief of human life and the state of the natural world. "Nancy Holmes' fluent poetic language, her clear intelligence, her deep seriousness, her playfulness, her fierceness, her elegance-all are here. Arborophobia cannot be viewed as anything less than a necessary work, and like all superb books of poetry, it's a trove of imaginative insight, a collection to keep close at hand." Russell Thornton, author of Answer to Blue "From aching poems on dementia to the stunning, layered, multi-voiced 'A Cloth in the Wind, or Being with Julian of Norwich,' Nancy Holmes carefully picks up sorrows and turns them, delicate, entrancing, in her hand. The voice crackles; everywhere in these poems is a mystical or metaphysical sensuality. Arborophobia is remarkable." Tim Lilburn, poet and essayist "Arborophobia, the latest collection by award-winning poet Nancy Holmes, is a poetic spiritual reckoning. Its elegies, litanies, and indictments concern wonder, guilt, and grief about the journey of human life and the state of the natural world." 49th Shelf, February 28, 2022 #8 on the Calgary Herald Non-fiction bestsellers list, May 2, 2022 "Arborophobia is made up of a series of narrative, meditative lyric on trees and dementia, loss and falling, mothers and motherhood, grief and erosion. Holmes writes of breakings, and of breaking apart, from climate to forests to the human ability to endure.... Through long, narrative stretches, she offers poems as companion pieces to climate anxiety, personal loss and the uncertainty of where we sit as a species, thanks in large part due to an array of choices both historic and ongoing." rob mclennan, April 27, 2022 [https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2022/04/nancy-holmes-arborophobia.html] "'The slow unzipping/ Of the body from time:/ I didn't notice.' Nancy Holmes brings us beautifully observed instances of the natural world, a huge breadth of imagery, and documentation of an intense engagement with the living world. There is wit, and colour, swagger, and texture all played out along these lines, which move and live, brimming with invention." Jury comments, SCWES Book Awards for BC Authors "... Nancy Holmes' brilliant newest collection, Arborophobia, ... [explores] in some deeply philosophical ways the relationship between the natural and spiritual selves and the manifold ways in which one may negotiate the complexities of living a life bound up in both." Neil Querengesser, Canadian Literature, September 1, 2023 [Full review at https://canlit.ca/article/poetry-for-our-time/] • I Orb • 2 The Tribes of Grass • 3 The Milk Chute, an Ode • 6 Spring Shave • 7 Lunolio • 10 Anemone in Cyprus • 12 Saint Lucy • 13 Newborn • II Arborophobia • 16 Ponderosa Pine • 16 I. Gotcha • 24 II. Qualms

The late sun falls slowly into the afternoon of your eyes, and there it pauses as one might pause to take a breath -from "Lost" Nothing Is But You and I, the breathtaking final volume in the Apostrophes series, reveals poet E.D. Blodgett at his most accomplished. Lyrical grace meets exquisite technique as Blodgett fathoms intimacy, knowledge, and being. The poems allow us to listen to one side of an intimate conversation; yet despite this inward focus, the speaker looks up and out at a larger world, inviting us into contemplations of loss, time, memory, and the ineffable other. Majestic poems look up and out at a larger world; inviting, contemplating, deliberating, reflecting. "Blodgett was perhaps the greatest living master of prosody in Canadian poetry, and this lifetime of craft is evident in every poem. Apostrophes VIII is exceptional-the culmination of one of the most distinguished poetry careers in Canada in the past fifty years." "These are accomplished, weighty poems that demand full immersion on the part of the reader. They are dense and metaphysical with their own signature rhythm which often feels like waves crashing onto a shore, or a pebble thrown into water, and the rings from its weight moving outward into wider circles." # 6 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 04, 2019 # 2 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 10, 2019 "E.D. Blodgett's final book Nothing Is But You and I completes his life long poem Apostrophes with a rumination on life, fragility, and time....[T]he poems formally reflect on time and duration, death and whatever comes next as our human matter unravels." [Full review at https://canlit.ca/article/something-attentive/] Contents 1 Water 2 Trieste 4 Glass 5 Shells 6 Questions 7 A Woman Sitting 8 Winter's Night 9 Palestine 10 Skating 11 Aubade 12 Arriving 13 Hand 14 Lost 15 Creed 16 Church 17 Thresholds 18 Prayers 19 Departure 20 Beaches 21 Openings 22 Singer 23 Sarabande 24 Dreamt 25 Stream 26 Disappearing 27 Temple 28 Tapestry 29 Winter Dreams 30 Eternities 31 Barely 32 Rooms 33 Herons 34 Vodník 35 Frieze 36 Pool 37 Fountain 38 Last Apostrophe 39 Sentinels 40 Opened 41 Moonlight 42 Surrendered 43 Weeping 44 Heaven 45 Beginning 46 Predestined 47 Soror 48 Ghosts 49 Grasped 50 Boys 51 Swan Song 52 Encompassed 53 Bowl 54 Abiding 55 Flowering 56 Unfolding 57 Echoed 58 Star 59 Apple Trees 60 Waiting Again 61 Sky 62 Dissolution 63 Echoing 64 Seeking 65 Polaris 66 Childhood 67 Undecided 68 Epilogue

"It's a losing battle: my words have no chance against time. Sometimes, unable to catch up with imagination, I leave the battle, candle in hand, in complete darkness." - from "Trying Again to Stop Time" Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one's birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance that happens in the face of censorship and oppression. In defiance of Saddam Hussein's call for sycophantic political verse, he turns to the natural world to reference a mournful state of loss, longing, alienation, and melancholy. Barzanji's poetry is infused with the richness of the Middle East, but underlying it all is a close affinity to Western Modernists. In those moments where language and culture collide and co-operate, Barzanji carves out a strong voice of opposition to political oppression. Readers will return to his work again and again, just as viewers return to a favourite painting. "Like contemporary poets Taslima Nasrin, Adonis, Yehuda Amichai, and Shuntaro Tanikawa, Barzanji's is a voice in which the native willingly mutates into the global." - Sabah A. Salih, Translator Dream-like cadences of international landscapes, human desire, and visions of a loving and wounded poet. Foreword "...it will be easy for readers to connect with Barzanji's writing, because his words seep with humanity's universal emotions and occurrences." On the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Fiction) for the week of May 8, 2015 Today's book of poetry believes that poetry connects us, makes us more human.... Barzanji has been part of an oppressed minority in his own country, an exile, a refugee and an immigrant…. By illuminating his world of exile Barzanji shines a light on the whole world. His poems are witness and journey…. Barzanji has a surprisingly light touch considering the depths he is mining, it surprises the reader again and again.... Jalal Barzanji's story is a familiar one but it is not often shared, rendered into art. These poems shine." "The poetry itself is political, personal and interrogating. It asks questions of governments, of individuals in power and of ourselves as citizens, readers, and artists. While the poems cross boundaries and decades, Barzanji's work is intensely immediate, while always acknowledging the swift passage of time... Barzanji's voice is warm, accessible, and occasionally humorous. He does not shy from the seriousness of politics and war, but reminds us that within those larger spheres beats an individual heart, alone or-one would hope-next to another." [Full review at http://arcpoetry.ca/?p=8993] Nice, intimate, vertical format that works beautifully for the poems, with a simple typographical palette... Benjamin Shaykin, Juror, Association of American University Presses: Book, Jacket, and Journal Show 2016 "The Kurdish question stands tall in our age as yet another emblematic paradigm of the violence enacted on a people in the name of the nation-state. Barzanji's poetry is lovely, with frequent piercing tender moments and visions of the daily and the ordinary. The translation reads smoothly and naturally, highlighting the spoken quality of the poems, the loving and wounded quality of their speaker." Fady Joudah, translator of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, winner of the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize ix Foreword Sabah A. Salih xiii Preface Trying Again to Stop Time (2009) 2 Trying Again to Stop Time 4 A Soulful Sunshine 6 Beauty's Fault 8 Smart Poems I 11 Winter Is the Season of Grief 15 Home in a Suitcase 18 The Pocket 20 I Didn't Want to Leave Alone 22 Returning to Autumn I Want To Be Named Home (2007) 24 To Go Back and Back 34 Beyond the Sky Is a Blue Window 36 A Woman Befriends Darkness 37 To Be Free and Lonely 39 Even Autumn Had No Room In Memory

Gisèle Villeneuve's short stories test the elastic pull between passion and terror. For inspiration, Villeneuve turned to her personal history to examine what lures urban dwellers outdoors, to test themselves against peaks and valleys. Using the overarching metaphor of mountain climbing, she plays with form, language, and narrative to reveal our fears, our loves, our passions. Rising Abruptly is a perfect companion for anyone who likes to travel, loves a climber, or simply glories in the allure of the mountains.

"Freedom is something my father has never known. How do I explain freedom to the ones born bent?" -from "Not Scared." Ella Zeltserman's poetry cuts both ways. The story of her flight from the USSR in 1979-of the young family she brought to Edmonton and the older one she left behind-does "explain freedom to the ones born bent," but it also explains oppression to the ones born free. Deftly modulating language, imagery, and events of past and present, comfort and tyranny, atrocity and family, home and war, Leningrad and Edmonton, she touches readers emotionally, drawing them into the journey. This authentic account of Russian-Jewish immigration to Canada during the Cold War will speak to all who have left their country or who moved far away from home.

Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. The new lyric voice sustained (within) these labyrinthine verses does so by virtue of its authors' pitch-perfect collaborative process. For ten years they have kept their song alive via email, pulsing jazz-like variations and haunting repetitions back and forth from Arizona to Alberta, all the while adhering to that taut stanza of six lines. Readers who admire Barbour and Murphy's past innovations, or any poetry that gracefully exceeds its reach, will enjoy Continuations 2.

By turns quirky, startling, earthy, and hope-filled, Micheline Maylor's poems slip effortlessly through topics ranging from what we give up as we age to regrets for love that has passed, the interplay between the animal world and human thought, and the myths we append to ourselves and others. An expansive, conversational voice underscores the poet's technical mastery as her subjects turn from love to hope to fearlessness. Maylor asks readers to perceive how we inhabit our selves, how words construct us. Little Wildheart is rich with challenge and surprise. I check the box on the government forms: Caucasian. No box for colonized, for the 1/16th bred. Just the double helix of my DNA, my ability to sun-brown, and my own green-eyed children of the voyageur, river visions still caught in their irises. We're born out of a long ago season. Everyone is sure of place and race. Blood and semen mixed in dirt and cervix, convex and enchanted by muskrat's eerie smile, dark truth furred and matted, stroked by a river paddle. Let that long tooth bite now in the land of the race riots, negro, and redskin, the underground railroad, and the Indian village. Let the name Pontiac take new form and hit the road, the righteous mile where judgment and boundary blurs, especially on matters of composition blood, bone, and relations. -from "Detroit Zoo bathroom 1977"

100 days... 100 days that should not have been... 100 days the world could have stopped. But did not. For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem-each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family's experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan Acholi oral tradition of her father-the poet Okot p'Bitek; Anglican hymns; the rhythms and sounds of the African American Spiritual tradition; and the beat of spoken word and hip-hop. 100 Days is a collection of poetry that will stop you in your tracks.

Through mesmerizing forays into characterization, voicing, and narrative technique, and with a clean economy of style rare even in short fiction, Astrid Blodgett conjures the moral and existential freight of her fully fledged characters in the throes of realistic moments. From the fascinatingly unhinged hero of "Getting the Cat," to the dreamy survey of prairie landscape and childhood experience of "New Summer Dresses," to the fatal irony of "Ice Break," readers will be hooked from first sentences and carried along on crisp prose. You Haven't Changed a Bit shimmers with the energy of a first book while affording readers the subtlety, complexity, and range of an accomplished master of the genre.

The pages of this anthology are filled with personal essays and poems of thoughtful musings, raw memories, and humorous self-examinations by authors and poets who have been labelled by the world-teachers, parents, and peers-as shy. Here, they proudly own up to their shyness, and their message is clear: they don't need to be "cured"! Why should they, when nearly half of North Americans consider themselves shy? Editors Naomi K. Lewis and Rona Altrows have enlisted writers from across the continent and have created a moving anthology that will appeal to all, either because we are shy or because we know someone who is. Contributors: Rona Altrows, Debbie Bateman, Wade Bell, Alex Boyd, Janis Butler Holm, Brian Campbell, Weyman Chan, Lorna Crozier, Mike Duggan, Ben Gelinas, Elizabeth Greene, Vivian Hansen, Elizabeth Haynes, Steven Heighton, Jennifer Houle, I.B. Iskov, Eve S. Krakow, Shawna Lemay, Naomi K. Lewis, Shirley Limbert, Carol L. MacKay, Micheline Maylor, Don McKay, Stuart Ian McKay, Bruce Meyer, Jeff Miller, Dhana Musil, Lori D. Roadhouse, Kerry Ryan, Sydney Sharpe, Natalie Simpson, Sylvia Stopforth, David Van Buren, Aritha van Herk, Russell Wangersky, Cassy Welburn, Madelaine Wong, Elaine Woo, and Elizabeth Zotova.

There is beauty in the teacup like dresses requiring crinoline or beaded purses too small to carry anything but anger. -from "Inheritance" Marita Dachsel's third poetry collection explores parenthood, love, and the grief of losing those both close and distant. In the tradition of Karen Solie and Suzanne Buffam, and with a touch of Canadian Gothic, Dachsel's poetic skills unfold in a variety of brief and expansive forms. Authentic and controlled, full of complexity and disorder, her poems offer release despite their painful twists and topics. Readers across generations will find kinship in Dachsel's grief-fuelled and vulnerable words.

Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one's birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance that happens in the face of censorship and oppression. In defiance of Saddam Hussein's call for sycophantic political verse, he turns to the natural world to reference a mournful state of loss, longing, alienation, and melancholy. Barzanji's poetry is infused with the richness of the Middle East, but underlying it all is a close affinity to Western Modernists. In those moments where language and culture collide and co-operate, Barzanji carves out a strong voice of opposition to political oppression. Readers will return to his work again and again, just as viewers return to a favourite painting.

Python Love weaves together experiences of childhood abuse, birth trauma, and recovery from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother. In her debut collection, Shannon Arntfield delves into the many ways in which the body recalls what has been done to it. Long, breathtaking sequences set within medical facilities during labour and delivery are juxtaposed with spare, lyrical reflections on ideas of memory, natural spaces, implicit love, and the relationships between parents and children. Full of precise observations, careful renderings, and visceral originality, Python Love is focused on how the body and mind are inextricably linked, how the past can overwhelm and inform the present, and how recovery is tied to love and connection. Python Love is a collection of free verse poetry weaving together experiences of childhood abuse and birth trauma from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother. Python Love is a collection of free verse poetry weaving together experiences of childhood abuse and birth trauma from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother. "'I remember…becoming one of the machines,' Shannon Arntfield writes in her steely debut collection, an exploration of the brutal sides of medicine and motherhood, where trauma conspires to short-circuit the present. Python Love is a compassionate lament for living in a body that says no." Monica Kidd, author of Chance Encounters with Wild Animals "Python Love holds its lines in isolation-granules of memory spent at the intersections of birth and death, childhood abuse, and moments of healing. Vulnerable and investigative, this book quietly seeks to find meaning in the difficult moments while unflinchingly refusing to look away." Christine McNair, author of Toxemia • Arguing with No One • 1. • Bedrest Lament • Python Love • The Books Said • Tidal Pools with My Mother • Permeable Membrane • On the Pacific Coast with My Father • Hand in Hand, We Brought Back the Ground • Maze Masquerading as a Mangrove Forest • The Woman Beneath the Sheet • Blue and Pink Bottles Representing Children • 2. • The Same Yellow Tiled Walls • 3. • Windless Sea • Child's Play • Clues • Car Wash • Reckoning • Get Away • Swamp Wading • Tickle Attack • When My Daughter Turned Eight • God • 4. • Fallen Horseman • 5. • Apollo • Fatu Hiva • Between Us • The Bridge Between the Mountains • I Have Passed Through • Lichen Sclerosis • The Stone the Builders Rejected • Animal, Misunderstood • Wild Iris • Quiet, rarely • 6. • Alive. Intact. Unharmed. • Acknowledgements

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It's a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities. Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. "In Northerny, Dawn Macdonald tempers a poetic soulfulness with a comic's sense for absurdity and punch. These poems speak with smart humor and wit, linguistic delight, and honest observations spiked with confession, always with an ear, too, for what their poet can't say. Macdonald's take on born-and-raised life in the north avoids romantic quagmires with a well-cured settler colonial self-consciousness. Macdonald resists worn expectations in this fresh expansion of northern literature rich with voice, earned insight, and meaning." Jeremy Pataky, author of Overwinter "Dawn Macdonald's poetry is alive with curiosity and truth. She speaks in conversation at times soft and at times bitter, creating images from a reality that can be obscure yet familiar. Macdonald's singular work reveals the unromantic beauty of a storied northern world full of lichen, kingfishers, and dog hair. Her poems open new paths in poetry from the high latitudes. This work is a bright addition to any library." Ernestine Hayes, Alaska State Writer Laureate 2017-2018 "Northerny echolocates around the rural, urban, and more-than-human worlds with unflinching curiousity. Macdonald's poetry bewilders language, making it romp, flit, and twist. Her images are in turn luminous and jarring cut with knife-sharp wit, unafraid to trespass against our expectations." Clea Roberts, author of Auguries "...the poems here refuse the easy depictions and descriptions, and even work to correct outside narratives on and around a place she knows intimately, but I would suggest she offers these elements not as foreground but as an underlay, beneath her depictions and observations, writing her own line across such intimate backdrop." rob mclennan's blog, May 25, 2024 [full article https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2024/05/dawn-macdonald-northerny.html] # 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestseller list, May 5, 2024 # 5 on Edmonton Poetry Bestseller list, May 12, 2024 "...Macdonald describes a North which is anything but stereotypical, or stereotypically romantic.... Conversational, tangential, at times funny, at times baffling, these poems can also dazzle with their imagery.... There's all kinds of clever wordplay here..." Kelly Shepherd, Alberta Views Magazine, December 1, 2024 "Dawn Macdonald's Northerny is a blast of crisp Yukon air. Funny and fresh, unexpected and daring, it understands 'the personal is heretical,' and glories in that fact. It's a rush, a relief, and remakes with impishness the notion of what a poem can be." Judges' Citation: 2025 Canadian First Book Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize • 1. • • Roadside Wildflowers of the Northwest • • 11 Conversations • • 5 Ways of Shutting Up • • Littlest • • The 2nd Shortest Day • • The Failure of Winter's Five-Year Plan • • Quickness

Waiting, that most human of experiences, saturates all of our lives. We spend part of each day waiting-for birth, death, appointments, acceptance, forgiveness, redemption. This collection of thirty-two personal essays is as much about hope as it is about waiting. Featuring literary voices from the renowned to the emerging, this anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction will resonate with anyone who has ever had to wait. Contributors: Samantha Albert, Rona Altrows, Sharon Butala, Jane Cawthorne, Weyman Chan, Rebecca Danos, Patti Edgar, John Graham-Pole, Leslie Greentree, Edythe Anstey Hanen, Vivian Hansen, Jane Harris, Richard Harrison, Elizabeth Haynes, Lee Kvern, Anne Lévesque, Margaret Macpherson, Alice Major, Wendy McGrath, Stuart Ian McKay, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Susan Olding, Roberta Rees, Julie Sedivy, Kathy Seifert, Cora Siré, Steven Ross Smith, Anne Sorbie, Glen Sorestad, Kelly S. Thompson, Robin van Eck, Aritha van Herk "The verb esperar means to wait. It also means to hope." -Cora Siré, The Past Was a Small Notebook, Much Scribbled-Upon This diverse anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction explores the universal agony and hope of waiting. "I would buy this book based on the contributor list alone. The essays are well balanced-short mixed in with long, very well-established writers mixed in with new ones, a variety of approaches and styles, and surprising interpretations of the waiting theme mixed in with more expected explorations. Waiting is as strong a collection as I have read." "A great deal of our lives is spent waiting. As humans we wait for public transit and for food at restaurants and food courts... And we wait for longer, more existential things: the birth of a baby, the progression of an illness, the arrival or departure of a friend or family member, acceptance or rejection of a job opportunity, love. In this edited anthology, a broad array of writers...examine various aspects of why and how we wait." # 2 on Calgary Herald's Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, October 6, 2018 # 9 on Calgary Herald's Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, October 13, 2018 # 2 on Edmonton Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, October 19, 2018 "Each of these thirty-two essays is powerful, distinctive, authentic.... I closed this book feeling that I'd been on thirty-two life journeys.... Waiting is not just filling blank time. It is also about courage and love." [Full review at https://www.ottawareviewofbooks.com/single-post/2019/02/02/Waiting-An-Anthology-of-Essays-edited-by-Rona-Altrows-and-Julie-Sedivy] "There's plenty to debate here... These are just a few of the kinds of waiting essayed here, and they are all very much worth reading." Saskatoon StarPhoenix, January 26, 2019 [Full review at https://thestarphoenix.com/entertainment/books/book-reviews-the-literary-history-of-saskatchewan-vol-3-waiting] "Waiting is a universal phenomenon, and in this impressive collection editors Rona Altrows and Julie Sedivy curate a variety of nuanced and distilled personal essays from 32 writers exploring the liminal experiences of people waiting for results, news, change, release or understanding" <ul style="list-style-type:none;" • Preface • Acknowledgments • Burgeoning • 1 Bill of Fare // Susan Olding • 2 Saturday // Anne Lévesque • 3 Waiting for Now: Four Stories // Steven Ross Smith • 4 The Escape // Edythe Anstey Hanen • 5 Waiting for Alexandra // Glen Sorestad • Scope • 6 The Art Hospital, the Floating Hospital, • and the Burning House // Elizabeth Haynes • 7 The Past Was a Small Notebook, • Much Scribbled-Upon // Cora Siré • 8 Beyond the Horizon // Julie Sedivy • 9 Two Women Waiting // Rebecca Danos • 10 Esperando // Patti Edgar • 11 Currents // Alice Major • Moment • 12 Letter of Intent // Rona Altrows • 13 The Next Minute // Jane Cawthorone • 14 Frozen // Lorri Neilsen Glenn • 15 Harder, But Still Not Painful // Robin Van Eck

as if there could be no other memory a tree invisible remembering itself In as if, E.D. Blodgett takes readers on journeys of contemplation in which he re-imagines the lyric form. Each line leaves the reader breathless as it runs into the next to form a continuous cycle, a continued breath. The delicate syntax of each piece pushes one forward, ever forward. The poems are Dantesque, leading the traveller through a deeper, darker world. As a collection, as if constitutes an ars poetica of Blodgett's Apostrophes series. The poems explore the elements that make up the series-strict metrical patterns, the possibilities of breath, the endlessness and seamlessness of the spoken word, the incantation. E.D. Blodgett's visceral musings explore the intertwining connection between the human and the natural worlds. "How succinctly Blodgett captures the fragility and incompleteness of human perception, and our powerful yearning to exceed these limitations.... With poetry, it's one thing to read the words; that happens quickly. Comprehending them is a slower process. Blodgett's poetry is unique, however--it forces you to read much more slowly the first time through. No doubt it's the even-paced phrasing, the deliberate and sparse language.... Poems to think about and think about again. To read, put down and consider, then read again." "Blodgett's latest book in his Apostrophes series is two books in one. Both are contemplations of wisdom and identity. The first is a book of poetry-words laid down in measure, printed on paper. Its words are made of artful language.... The second book is an energy field, conjured by a reader reading that first book. Its words are not human language but the ghosts of the earth, conjured by human speech.... Blodgett's consciousness is fluid here. His world moves between book, reader, memory, and earth with the surety of dream.... It is a bold undertaking, this business of bridging a half-century of Canadian poetry. Blodgett does it by making each physical word leave the book of words and enter the mind through the book of energies." [Full review at http://arcpoetry.ca/?p=8188#sthash.NwEPOoUQ.dpuf]

100 days... 100 days that should not have been... 100 days the world could have stopped. But did not. For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem-each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family's experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan Acholi oral tradition of her father-the poet Okot p'Bitek; Anglican hymns; the rhythms and sounds of the African American Spiritual tradition; and the beat of spoken word and hip-hop. 100 Days is a collection of poetry that will stop you in your tracks. Foreword by Cecily Nicholson. It was the earth that betrayed us first it was the earth that held onto its beauty compelling us to return it was the breezes that were there & then not there it was the sun that rose & fell rose & fell as if there was nothing different as if nothing changed Poems that recall the senseless loss of life and of innocence in Rwanda. Foreword, author's note "Bitek's ability to connect with the beauty and pain of human suffering seems supernatural, this ability to give voice to those who seem to have no voices. Bitek wrote this book with her blood and it shows.... Bitek is a gifted seer, she sees tomorrow with a sweet but earthy, guttural voice, voice of the masquerade.... [Bitek] takes the reader to places in the heart that the writer never intended or imagined. That is powerful, how she makes 100 Days a deeply personal journey to each reader." Ikhide R. Ikheloa, Reading and Writing... Loudly, February 29, 2016 [Full post at http://xokigbo.com/2016/02/28/juliane-okot-bitek-100-days-of-hells-anomie/] "Bitek's poems are fierce, directly straightforward and unrelenting, composing her poems in an unadorned manner that increase in tension through the accumulation.... Part of what makes the collection so engaging is in the way she focuses on intimate spaces and details, refusing to utilize the form for a simple re-telling of history (which, frustratingly, so many poets tend to do) but engaging the smaller moments. The witness here is personal and deeply felt, even when she writes on large abstracts, proclaiming in broad gestures, exploring through the lyric a human tragedy so brutal and extensive that it becomes unfathomable." rob mclennan, March 21, 2016 [Full post at http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2016/03/juliane-okot-bitek-100-days.html] "The 'Hundred Days' from April to July 1994 witnessed one of the great genocides of the twentieth century and all while the world looked on and did nothing..... The poetry of Juliane Okot Bitek takes you through its villages and churches and lost innocence, relationships where time was measured out in machete strokes and words that made light of indifference and nothing to tie it to but days and the chattering of birds and bayonet sticks and the awful brutality of it all. There are no epiphanies here, no wise men to make sense of it, no Christian sacrifice or saviours, only the memories and a poet who wrote them out for one hundred days lest we forget." The Tara Poetry Blog, June 22, 2016 [Full post at http://thetarapoetryblog.blogspot.ca/2016/06/100-days-juliane-okot-bitek.html] "[H]ow could an event so terrible birth a myriad of powerful words so beautiful in their execution... 100 Days is a deserving tribute to a time when humanity forgot what it meant to be human. Reading the poetry collection is a humbling experience." Sydney Mugerwa, Writivism, August 22, 2016 [Full review at http://bit.ly/2bjmR6r] "The poems...engage traumatised personal memory, suspect the objectivity of official discourse and explore the complications involved in forging a new future. This collection, therefore, does not only add to the ever-growing library of contemporary African poetry, but it does so in ways that will further the postcolonial conversations aroun

"Freedom is something my father has never known. How do I explain freedom to the ones born bent?" -from "Not Scared" Ella Zeltserman's poetry cuts both ways. The story of her flight from the USSR in 1979-of the young family she brought to Edmonton and the older one she left behind-does "explain freedom to the ones born bent," but it also explains oppression to the ones born free. Deftly modulating language, imagery, and events of past and present, comfort and tyranny, atrocity and family, home and war, Leningrad and Edmonton, she touches readers emotionally, drawing them into the journey. This authentic account of Russian-Jewish immigration to Canada during the Cold War will speak to all who have left their country or who moved far away from home. Lyric-narrative poetry of a Russian-Jewish refugee's flight to Canada during the Cold War. "That is what I would write if I were a poet." "Her first collection of poems...is powerfully sad and hopeful, full of Russian history and personal histories, her family, herself." [Full interview at http://bit.ly/1wtv7ql] "Ella Zeltserman waited decades to pen her experiences of oppression and liberation.... In these 38 poems, small things left behind weaves a big story. It traces the poet's bold quest for a better life after she sees a Soviet documentary of a Russian-Jewish immigration... Zeltserman's story of the human cost of leaving one country, one life, for another, has made her an important voice." Fall/Winter 2014 "Ella's is an important story for all readers and she tells it with razor-sharp prose and exquisite imagery. The poems tell a story of politics and family, of leaving and arriving, of displacement and longing... [A] book that belongs in schools and classrooms, on the shelves of libraries and in homes as a treasured part of a family collection."

That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Audibility is a primary theme of this collection-what can be heard, what is obstacled, and what remains unheard. Many of the poems included in the collection try to hold spaces open for the slipperiness of the heard and unheard and the not-yet heard and their associated problems: error, insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects such as fear and avoidance. "A Branch of Happen," the opening section of award-winning poet Margaret Christakos' collection, explores interior listening to both the self as sensation machine and the collaged external soundscape we both hear and fail to hear within the assailing violences and inequities of the news. A second suite, "Heart is a Guest Whippet Resting on a Firm Trunk," is troubled by memories of deceased loved-ones amid the North Saskatchewan River valley and the many-layered history of amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). The fragmentary "Listening Line Notebook" multiplies the treatment of listening as a situated perceptual, sensory, and ethical process. A final long poem called "The Incubation" navigates ideas of being asleep and awake, altered and attuned, as well as spiritually dis/located in time and space. Poised within and beyond both established and emergent traditions of ecocriticism, contemporary feminisms, and experimental lyric, this intriguing and probing work of sound-illuminated poems welcomes readers into its overlapping worlds with grace. That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we both hear and fail to hear insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects. That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we both hear and fail to hear insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects. "For maximum benefit, read That Audible Slippage out loud. It's a listening party: you will hear the whirr of birds, the click of Facebook posts, and a radical mind awake to its own listenings and jostlings within the rivers of the body and the body of the world. However you read this book, take it in, you will feel yourself hearing anew. Rest awhile in this consciousness." Ronna Bloom, poet "Within That Audible Slippage each measure of the text invites a deeper hearing in an entrancing dance of sounds vividly musical and politically astute. Twinned ironic anchors of popular culture and natural silence yield by turns whispers, yells, and experience." Sheila Murphy, author of Permission to Relax "...Christakos' poems across That Audible Slippage attend to deep listening: the sights and sounds of light, politics, birds, students, trees, contemporaries, radios and silence itself. The effect is delicate, pointed and polyvocal..." rob mclennan's blog, May 17, 2024 [Full post at https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2024/05/margaret-christakos-that-audible.html] "Christakos uses sound, the slip of the tongue into and out of liminal states in order to bear witness to snowy walks, environmental degradation, corporate impunity..." melanie brannagan frederiksen, Winnipeg Free Press, July 27, 2024 [Full review: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/2024/07/27/assonance-accentuates-reflections-on-nature] "Rather than resting in stillness, the doubling of presumed silence on the page questions itself as it is amplified in the air: Can air, thirsty for action, ever be fully silent? Here the velocity of bird wings careening by answer rhetorically. Silence resonates with the meditative concentration of listening that engages with even the most subliminal trilling of sound. It is in this resonant space that That Audible Slippage excels." Klara du Plessis, Arc, April

"As soon as she was gone from this earth, I felt an overwhelming need for more of her. I had to find her again. But how do you find someone after they're gone for good?" After her mother succumbed to a rare form of dementia, Myrl Coulter turned the eulogy she had written for the funeral into a series of meditations on absence. The result is fifteen personal narrative essays that move through the vacations, holidays, special occasions, and ordinary days each year brings. Coulter reaches for the mother who is gone, yet ever-present, no matter where she is or what she is doing. In every captivating detail of Coulter's world, A Year of Days offers readers an intimate odyssey of experience and catharsis. Canadian author re-examines her life following the harrowing loss of her mother to dementia. "As soon as she was gone from this earth, I felt an overwhelming need for more of her. I had to find her again. But how do you find someone after they're gone for good?" After her mother succumbed to a rare form of dementia, Myrl Coulter turned the eulogy she had written for the funeral into a series of meditations on absence. The result is fifteen personal narrative essays that move through the vacations, holidays, special occasions, and ordinary days each year brings. Coulter reaches for the mother who is gone, yet ever-present, no matter where she is or what she is doing. In every captivating detail of Coulter's world, A Year of Days offers readers an intimate odyssey of experience and catharsis. "The book spans a single calendar year, but Coulter says what it's really about is the process of living through the same dates and events, time and time again, even as our experiences of them change dramatically as we age." [Full article at http://bit.ly/1E0p6TF] On the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Nonfiction) for the week of May 8, 2015 #3 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Nonfiction) for the week of May 22, 2015 "A Year of Days is light without ever treading Hallmark grounds, funny while still acknowledging the gravitas of death and full of the remembered warmth or loss of not only the 'special' days, but also the days that lie around them by the hundreds: days at the lake, Mexican holidays and days in which we simply move and live. 'Keep moving,' Coulter writes. 'Movement is life.'" Gut Feelings Twenty-Eight Magnificent Mexican Sunsets Those Pesky Natal Days Death by Dementia Perforated Hearts Giant Bunnies Don't Deliver Chocolate Eggs Gym Interrupted, Again The Parent Days May Long is Tee Time Lakes I Have Known Cornucopia Soup Survival Gear Wearing Black Music on the Hill Current Crossings Epilogue Author's Note Acknowledgements

Kasia Van Schaik's debut story collection follows the journey of Charlotte Ferrier, a child of divorce raised by a single mother in a small town in British Columbia after moving from South Africa. Mother and daughter wait out the end of a bad year in a Mexican hotel; a friendship is tested as forest fires demolish Charlotte's town; a childhood friend disappears while travelling through Europe; and a girl on the beach examines the memories of dying jellyfish. The stories traverse the most intimate and transforming moments of female experience in a world threatened by ecological crisis. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2023. "She rests her hand on my arm, her eyes clear and serious. We could be the same person, encountering each other in a fragment of time lived twice." Balancing an ambivalent relationship to the past, and fear and hope for the future, Kasia Van Schaik's portraits of female interiority, immigrant identity, dislocation, and desire trace the transitions from girlhood to adulthood, grappling with the struggle to understand what it means to live on earth. Balancing an ambivalent relationship to the past, and fear and hope for the future, Kasia Van Schaik's portraits of female interiority, immigrant identity, dislocation, and desire trace the transitions from girlhood to adulthood. "Full of diffuse longing and hallucinatory memory, these stories shimmer and compel like half-remembered dreams. Van Schaik's poetic linked collection brings the reader on an evocative journey across decades and continents." Saleema Nawaz, author of Songs for the End of the World "We Have Never Lived On Earth contains a bright humour, a sharpness. There's an authentic, human thrumming behind these stories. With their focus on mothers, fathers, and daughters, these linked stories explore how initial models of care feed into our romantic loves. Kasia Van Schaik captures the souring phase of relationships, where the glue has become brittle and two individuals begin to lean away from each other. Yet the characters forge their way through these moments of dislocation with grace, humour, and the perfect amount of self-awareness, which makes the reader laugh out loud, or nod knowingly. At least it did for me." Eliza Robertson, author of Demi-Gods "Few writers can work with memory as vividly as Kasia Van Schaik-fusing fiction and remembrance with confidence, sensitivity and the shivering logic of dream. These are stories that glitter and then duck away from view, like a swimmer half-discerned. A beautiful book you can't forget." Sean Michaels, Giller Prize-winning author of Us Conductors and The Wagers "A riff on loneliness. Exquisitely written. Profoundly moving. A must read." Rosemary Sullivan, OC, award-winning author "In Kasia Van Schaik's visionary stories a generation will recognize its rootlessness and frail sense of futurity, as well as its desire for grace. We Have Never Lived On Earth is a beautiful collection that explores all realms of experience-what we see and what we dream. I couldn't get enough of this work's exquisite precision and depth." Seyward Goodhand, author of Even That Wildest Hope "We Have Never Lived On Earth speaks to many readers' own experiences of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, which involve the difficult work of figuring out how to move through loss and grief and, ultimately, how to be most alive in all of our imperfections. I have read many novels and collections that capture the feeling of threat the world can impose upon female bodies, but the quality of Van Schaik's prose made these experiences alive, honest, and corporeally real throughout each story in a way I had not encountered before." Heather Jessup, author of The Lightning Field and This Is Not a Hoax: Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture "Traversing themes such as transience, loss, painful attachment, and belonging, Kasia Van Schaik's stories recall literary icons Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, though wit

Secrets aren't good for families. - from "Big Luck Island" In The Left-Handed Dinner Party and Other Stories-a collection of new, delightful, distinctive short stories-everyone is missing something or someone; every family is riven by secrets and absences. From "The Remedy," a tale of revenge and justice, to "The Smart Sisters," a story of tricky family dynamics, Coulter's narratives portray relationships, loss, and what we learn in the aftermath of death. Ghosts, echoes, memories, regrets...Coulter's characters are haunted in many ways. With style and sweep that hints at Lynn Coady and Alice Munro, Myrl Coulter is a strong, fresh voice in contemporary Canadian fiction. Contemporary Canadian short fiction about perplexing family secrets and the haunting consequences of loss. [T]he vividness of Coulter's hard-luck characters and their situations commands attention. For the second half, Coulter changes tracks with two longer stories that experiment with tone, structure, and perspective. "The Smart Sisters" is a rollicking depiction of three struggling sisters.... "Limbo," narrated by a "reluctant haunter"...is divided into six captivating tales that recount the decades after his death for those close to him. Gentle, comic, and uplifting, the story's craft perfectly complements its humanity and skillfully closes this promising collection." [Full review at https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-77212-328-9] # 1 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, September 24, 2017 "… this collection reads a bit like a mystery novel with subtle connections between characters and stories…told intriguingly and effectively…" The way Coulter uses the short story medium to loosely tie the collection together adds an enthralling quality... Coulter wanted to showcase that the things which tear us apart - depression, anger, death, suicide - are seldom talked about, or even written about... The Left-Handed Dinner Party ends on a note of fleeting happiness that alludes to a place of resolution." [Full article at https://www.thegatewayonline.ca/2018/03/left-handed-dinner-party/] "What interests Coulter is families, and the endlessly paradoxical combinations of love and resentment, security and entrapment, which families offer. Some of the stories are connected by their characters, and the novella, "Limbo," consists of a series of stories about the same family. Alcoholism, adultery, abuse, parental abandonment, trips into an uncertain future, suicide, secrecy, car crashes, sibling alienation-these are the stock-in-trade of Coulter's families." [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/space-and-time/] 1 Grad School 2 The Remedy 3 The Left-Handed Dinner Party 4 The Scream 5 Uncanny 6 Estate Planning 7 The Ballad of Jake and Janet 8 Big Luck Island 9 The Smart Sisters 10 Limbo -Jean's Slice -Orphan Sister -The Viewfinder -Willpower -The Dead List -The Beer Tent Acknowledgments

"Most long poems contain lyric occasions. Here is an amazingly sustained lyric that contains traces of other commodities." -Robert Kroetsch Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. The new lyric voice sustained (within) these labyrinthine verses does so by virtue of its authors' pitch-perfect collaborative process. For ten years they have kept their song alive via email, pulsing jazz-like variations and haunting repetitions back and forth from Arizona to Alberta, all the while adhering to that taut stanza of six lines. Readers who admire Barbour and Murphy's past innovations, or any poetry that gracefully exceeds its reach, will enjoy Continuations 2. Two seasoned poets pulse jazz-like variations back and forth via email, from Alberta to Arizona. Front Flap: Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. Their pitch-perfect collaborative process sustains a new lyric voice (within) these labyrinthine verses. For ten years they have kept their song alive via email, pulsing jazz-like variations and haunting repetitions back and forth from Arizona to Alberta, all the while adhering to that taut stanza of six lines. Readers who admire Barbour and Murphy's past innovations, or any poetry that gracefully exceeds its reach, will enjoy Continuations 2. Back Cover: "Most long poems contain lyric occasions. Here is an amazingly sustained lyric that contains traces of other commodities." -Robert Kroetsch half moon/lighting the nonce naked thought trans lated littered across dimensions that hidden buds of this formerly remembrance lying drowned and growing under ground spondee's ground break weighs what buds that cross dimensioned thought would weigh remembering a highlit moon pressed into service -an excerpt from "xlviii" "Douglas Barbour and Sheila E. Murphy extend their ... refined and joyful collaboration, which begun in November 2000 via email, in Continuations 2. Very evident in this flowing is the sense of delight that each writer must have had in the interchange, which results in a third, distinctive, voice.... Word play is extended over stanzas in a relentless rhythm that captivates and invites a circling back..." Shawna Lemay, Edmonton Journal, April 7, 2012 [Full article at http://bit.ly/HzQUjb] "The lyric voice throughout these tight, six-line stanzas is sustained by a 10-year collaborative process in which the poets have kept their song alive via email, back and forth from Arizona to Alberta." Prairie Books NOW "[Barbour and Murphy] extend their sequence of ongoing collaborations, producing a rare second volume of a contemporary collaboration between two poets.... Part of what makes this ongoing collaboration interesting is in the experience behind both writers, as Douglas Barbour has been publishing trade poetry collections since the early 1970s, and Sheila E. Murphy has been publishing nearly as long as well, and their collaborative efforts would be difficult to compare to much of their already-published individual works, truly creating something that is different in tone, style and voice.. This second volume continues the play of call and response, where Barbour and Murphy meet in the middle." rob mclennan, July 7, 2012 [Full post at bit.ly/N3IHIW]

first snow falling slow hangs in the air a curtain drifting there thickening sight -"Winter" In this new collection, Douglas Barbour experiments with what he calls "rhythmically intense open form." Listen. If presents technically innovative poetry that invites the reader to join in some serious play. Barbour's vivid, ekphrastic poems engage an ongoing conversation among artworks-not only classic paintings but also popular music-while his lyric poems astutely, accessibly evoke places, moments, and feelings. This is poetry that takes up language both as the already-said and as a playground for brilliant technique. Leaping from love to landscapes, politics to jazz, Keats to Milne to Monk, these poems yearn to be spoken aloud for the pure joy of sound. Love to landscapes, politics to jazz; poems to read aloud for the joy of sound. "In Barbour's latest, there are some elements familiar through much of his work, from meditations to memorials, his ongoing engagements with world politics, and lines and narrative-threads composed with breaks of breath in and among.... There is a precision that Barbour writes out in each short breath-take, clipped and clear, even as the accumulation of those words and phrases come together to form a narrative both distinct and nebulous." [Full post at http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2017/04/douglas-barbour-listen-if.html] # 8 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017 "Listen. If is Douglas Barbour's first book of poetry in over a decade and includes work that was produced over a twenty year period. That extended period of production has some interesting effects on the text.... The past becomes an ironic counterpoint to the present, a space where the concerns of the present are revealed not necessarily to be a repetition of the past so much as a series of re-iterations altered by task of memory. Listen. If is a book about memory and remembering. It is reflective and reflexive, a collection marked by meditation. The objects of meditation which include the seasons, love, art, jazz recordings, and memory shift throughout the book, but serve to ground the reader's experiences in instances and talismans of remembering.... [W]orth reading." Ryan J. Cox, Prairie Fire, May 30, 2018 [Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/listen-if-by-douglas-barbour] 1 Acts of Memory 13 Seasonals 31 The Age Demanding 45 It's over is it over 57 Trans - 79 Look. If 97 floating head songs 109 Recording Dates 127 A Flame on the Spanish Stairs

Gisèle Villeneuve's short stories test the elastic pull between passion and terror. For inspiration, Villeneuve turned to her personal history to examine what lures urban dwellers outdoors, to test themselves against peaks and valleys. Using the overarching metaphor of mountain climbing, she plays with form, language, and narrative to reveal our fears, our loves, our passions. Rising Abruptly is a perfect companion for anyone who likes to travel, loves a climber, or simply glories in the allure of the mountains. "Even the unassuming day trips deliver their moments. The whiteouts. The going off route. Scrambling back down on rock coated with verglas. Neither of us liking it one bit, but resolutely descending. Focusing on the moment that could change everything with one misstep. The four-hour scramble that begins on a sunny summer morning, stretching into the night to a seventeen-hour epic. There are such days, and they can happen an hour's drive from Calgary on a relatively small mountain. Back to comfort, talking up a storm. Doing the post-mortem. Watching the tempest, still so real in our minds, relief and excitement printed on our windburned faces. Together, building story, across time and across silences. Back to comfort then acquires a whole new meaning when you bear the land deep in the bone." From "Assiniboine Crossroads" Seven enigmatic and compelling stories about the myth and mystery of mountains. Lore has it that the jagged little peak reveals itself only when you stand on it. -From "Jagged Little Peak" Gisèle Villeneuve's collection of mountain-based stories tests the elastic pull between passion and terror. Featuring daring, risk-taking girls and women, these smartly observed stories explore the myth and the mystery of mountains across the world, and the soaring human emotions connected to them/evoked by them. A widely published Franco-Albertan writer, Villeneuve turned to her personal history to examine what lures urban dwellers to peaks and valleys. Through stories that play with form, language, and narrative, we discover mountains and women in different moods: enchanting, enigmatic, indifferent, yet utterly compelling. Rising Abruptly is perfect for anyone who climbs, loves a climber, enjoys sports literature, or simply glories in the allure of the mountains. "The seven quirky stories in Gisèle Villeneuve's new collection, Rising Abruptly, all have mountains at their heart.... The characters' relationship with mountains evolves throughout the stories, creating an arc that models a romantic relationship: infatuation, the conflict between independence and commitment, and the acceptance of love coupled with death. Rising Abruptly is a literary ode to climbers and the mountains that captivate them, and presents a fascinating portrait of passion for the high peaks." "Sept nouvelles impressionnantes, écrites dans une langue irréprochable, qui donnent - ou ne donnent pas - envie d'affronter les toits du monde." # 5 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017 "Mountain climbing is a metaphor in the stories found in her new collection, "Rising Abruptly", which use form, language, and narrative to deal with raw emotions like fear, love, and passion... Villeneuve's stories convey to readers a sense of the dual nature of the mountains, which are at once hard, difficult, and intimidating, but also fragile. In fact, it is precisely the juxtaposition of two opposites that often fuels Villeneuve's writing." Prairie Books Now, Fall/Winter 2016 These are not your typical alpinist accounts. The climbers are mothers, sisters and sexagenarians-the stories often focused on loved ones or filtered through the lenses of emotion and heightened perception. Desire, dread and madness run like an undertow, often threatening to overtake the characters… These stories can be emotionally wrought, as off-kilter as their mountains, yet Villeneuve invites us into this thorny, expos

By turns quirky, startling, earthy, and hope-filled, Micheline Maylor's poems slip effortlessly through topics ranging from what we give up as we age to regrets for love that has passed, the interplay between the animal world and human thought, and the myths we append to ourselves and others. An expansive, conversational voice underscores the poet's technical mastery as her subjects turn from love to hope to fearlessness. Maylor asks readers to perceive how we inhabit our selves, how words construct us. Little Wildheart is rich with challenge and surprise. I check the box on the government forms: Caucasian. No box for colonized, for the 1/16th bred. Just the double helix of my DNA, my ability to sun-brown, and my own green-eyed children of the voyageur, river visions still caught in their irises. We're born out of a long ago season. Everyone is sure of place and race. Blood and semen mixed in dirt and cervix, convex and enchanted by muskrat's eerie smile, dark truth furred and matted, stroked by a river paddle. Let that long tooth bite now in the land of the race riots, negro, and redskin, the underground railroad, and the Indian village. Let the name Pontiac take new form and hit the road, the righteous mile where judgement and boundary blurs, especially on matters of composition blood, bone, and relations. -from "Detroit Zoo bathroom 1977" Quirky, startling, earthy poems reflect the moods of existence. The sequence of making love and not giving a damn, the consequence of falling for and breaking off, these are Maylor's interests, and she canvasses them in indelible and fragile images, and in erudite and earthy language. Micheline Maylor is as endearing as William Carlos Williams and as dangerous as Sylvia Plath. The way the world loves us bubbles up as our desire for each other at first, but in the end that love is our desire's opposite. This is the puzzle: we are born facing away from what we might have; our entire life is learning how to turn around. That turning is the work of this book. And it is beautiful. See with all clarity, and from way up, what the predator knows. Death already hunts. - from "We Are Entirely Flammable" Micheline Maylor's poems slip effortlessly through topics ranging from what we give up as we age to regrets for love that has passed, the interplay between the animal world and human thought, and the myths we append to ourselves and others. An expansive, conversational voice underscores the poet's technical mastery as her subjects turn from love to hope to fearlessness. Maylor asks readers to perceive how we inhabit our selves, how words construct us. By turns quirky, startling, earthy, and hope-filled, these poems reflect the moods of existence. Little Wildheart is rich with challenge and surprise. # 3 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017 "In Little Wildheart, Micheline Maylor writes poems that chart the vagaries of love, its cycles of loss and renewal, followed by a realization about the joy and freedom in reinhabiting the self without outside commitment.... Maylor draws images from an elementary and animal world to reflect the psyche and its spiritual progress. Allusive and elusive, educated and down-to-earth, witty and conversational, these oftentimes rollicking poems are fine-tuned with technical skill and strict formalist measures." (Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/little-wildheart-micheline-maylor/?cn=bWVudGlvbg%3D%3D) "... this and other poems are most memorable for how Maylor varies phrases to lure and surprise her reader. If Maylor is playing with the conventions of the lyric sentence, she's playing with the conventions of poetry itself in the book's formal pieces... Little Wildheart is a complicated book of deceptively simple parts." "... fuses the personal and visceral to the mythological and metaphysical. In turns surprising and affective, Maylor's collection presents a bodily, sensory intervention at the intersection between hu

Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird's When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood's sleepless nights, domestic violence, and isolation. Offering a courageous account of queer intimate partner violence, including the impacts of femme erasure in queer communities, this book is also grounded in the tastes and textures of a new parent's everyday and is keenly interested in our capacities during personal and global catastrophe. Haunted by hawks, coyotes, frogs, and forests, the collection also speaks to the power of the beyond-human sphere in the translation and transformation of pain and sorrow. Reaching through stories of survivorship to touch on personal and collective pain with tension, nuance and care, Baird's poems remind us that grief is inextricably intertwined with love and joy. Baird's poems traverse through joy, loss, parenting, domestic violence, and isolation. Steely, tender, and sensual, this collection creates a reverent container for a broken world. Baird's poems traverse through joy, loss, parenting, domestic violence, and isolation. Steely, tender, and sensual, this collection creates a reverent container for a broken world. "What gorgeous magic Baird excavates from human circumstance. Rich with celebration, grief, and a touch of science, When Whales Went Back to the Water navigates a labyrinth of survivals. 'You will / grow to be a wild thing,' Baird promises. And isn't that the gift we each most desire?" Jeanann Verlee, author of PREY and others "When Whales Went Back to the Water sings and pushes language with its uncanny imagery, unexpected word choices and combinations, and play with spacing and breath. With its linguistic lifts, Baird's collection shows the power of free verse to convey lyric beauty." Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees "When Whales Went Back to the Water deftly moves between microscopic, geological, and intimate perspectives to show how we are 'animal[s] made of other animals'-and the grief and belonging that entails. Amidst housefires, environmental decline, domestic abuse, the word 'trauma' graffitied on a garbage bin, Baird conjures hard-earned awe." -Adèle Barclay, author of Renaissance Normcore "In When Whales Went Back to the Water, Lisa Baird asks us to see the sacred in each moment. Again and again, this book calls us to the present with a clear voice and a sharp eye. Personal loss and collective emergency meet poignant truths of the natural world. 'A relocated coyote will do whatever it takes to get back home,' Baird tells us. She bares her own path home to herself: past nettle patches and open fields, through echoing violence and recovery, to the messy kitchen floor of new parenthood. We are in this together, these poems remind us. Even solitude is a collective condition." Alessandra Naccarrato, author of Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene I • When Whales Went Back to the Water • Poem That Wanted to Be an Apple • It Is Relevant That I'm Ovulating • Explanation • The Biggest Disappointment of My 16th Year • She Says, I don't think I'm going to fall for you • An Alternate Universe in Which My Trauma Response Is Made of Birds • Time Machine • The Day Dad Starts Hitting My Younger Brother • The First Time I Go Skinny-Dipping • In Defence of Purple • Poem That Wanted to Be an Icicle • She Says It's Dangerous to Open Umbrellas Indoors • Why I Thought Dating Women Would Be Safer • On Seeing the Word Trauma Graffitied Onto a Garbage Bin • The Mouth Is Your Hardest and Softest Place • Blue Angel • Ode to the Mississauga Women's Clinic • • II • All His Ex-Girlfriends Are Monstrous • Affirming Femme • You Don't Understand

Kasia Van Schaik's debut story collection follows the journey of Charlotte Ferrier, a child of divorce raised by a single mother in a small town in British Columbia after moving from South Africa. Mother and daughter wait out the end of a bad year in a Mexican hotel; a friendship is tested as forest fires demolish Charlotte's town; a childhood friend disappears while travelling through Europe; and a girl on the beach examines the memories of dying jellyfish. The stories traverse the most intimate and transforming moments of female experience in a world threatened by ecological crisis.

This poignant debut by Gavin Bradley explores the emotional toll of different kinds of separation: from a partner, a previously held sense of self, or a home and the people left behind. The main narrative describes the deterioration of a long-term relationship, interweaving poems dealing with the loneliness of immigration and the anxiety of separation from Northern Ireland, the poet's homeland. These personal poems enter their stories through a variety of characters and places, from dock builders to dogs, from shorelines to volcanoes, to "mouths soft and humming like beehives." Other sections of the collection examine a post-Troubles' experience in Northern Ireland (evoking the lived-experience of growing up with bombs and domineering Catholicism), tell grandfather stories, and show a lasting love for the people, the language, and the land. Separation Anxiety ultimately conveys a message of hope, reminding us that "we'll be remembered for / ourselves, and not the spaces we / leave behind."

Deriving is a feminist exploration of the creation of life, of family, and of words themselves. Delisle asks: How does past infertility colour the experience of new motherhood? How do historical voices echo in the present? How does language impact our ways of being in the world? These poems embrace the rich material of mothering with unapologetic honesty, confronting the experiences that some would keep hidden. Fear, anger, envy mix with joy and ultimately hope, as Delisle considers the challenges of conceiving and raising children in both familial and global contexts. Deriving is a poignant, lyrical meditation on longing, place, and embodiment. I watched it freeze up, rafts of white snagging beneath the bridge, frazil ice, pans linked along the shoreline. Inside me my son was building white fat on bone. -from "North Saskatchewan"

You Might Be Sorry You Read This is a stunning debut, revealing how breaking silences and reconciling identity can refine anger into something both useful and beautiful. A poetic memoir that looks unflinchingly at childhood trauma (both incestuous rape and surviving exposure in extreme cold), it also tells the story of coming to terms with a hidden Indigenous identity when the poet discovered her Métis heritage at age 38. This collection is a journey of pain, belonging, hope, and resilience. The confessional poems are polished yet unpretentious, often edgy but humorous; they explore trauma yet prioritize the poet's story. Honouring the complexities of Indigenous identity and the raw experiences of womanhood, mental illness, and queer selfhood, these narratives carry weight. They tell us "You need / only be the simple / expression of the divine / intent / that is your life." There is a lifetime in these poems.

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It's a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities. Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. • 1. • • Roadside Wildflowers of the Northwest • • 11 Conversations • • 5 Ways of Shutting Up • • Littlest • • The 2nd Shortest Day • • The Failure of Winter's Five-Year Plan • • Quickness • • Increase • • Aperture • • A Strange Request • • Changelings • • The Fungus Speaks • • 2. • • About the Author • • Fire Water Asbestos Mold • • Bird's Ten • • Binaries (1) • • Binaries (2) • • The Kingfisher • • Walking the Long Loop • • ONLY GENIUS CAN SOLVE THIS PUZZLE • • Transcribed on Leaves and Thrown into the Wind • • A Boring Poem • • 3. • • Lately we've been talking • • Our 80s was Iron Maiden • • We are tasked to speak truth • • Please Leave On • • The Forts • • Gun Etiquette • • Charts • • Apologies to a Mouse • • Naturalist's Notebook. Backyard, July • • In a Scrub Pine • • At Hidden Lakes • • The town filled up • • There's a lot I can't talk about • • 4. • • Look at how we didn't know • • Occupational classification schema • • Every Yukoner owns the 1979 • • LongGone Outhouse Blues in 14 Lines • • The One Tree • • Wasp Summer • • This Isn't the House • • Chit Chat • • There's only two stories • • Acknowledgements" • Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. "In Northerny, Dawn Macdonald tempers a poetic soulfulness with a comic's sense for absurdity and punch. These poems speak with smart humor and wit, linguistic delight, and honest observations spiked with confession, always with an ear, too, for what their poet can't say. Macdonald's take on born-and-raised life in the north avoids romantic quagmires with a well-cured settler colonial self-consciousness. Macdonald resists worn expectations in this fresh expansion of northern literature rich with voice, earned insight, and meaning." Jeremy Pataky, author of Overwinter "Dawn Macdonald's poetry is alive with curiosity and truth. She speaks in conversation at times soft and at times bitter, creating images from a reality that can be obscure yet familiar. Macdonald's singular work reveals the unromantic beauty of a storied northern world full of lichen, kingfishers, and dog hair. Her poems open new paths in poetry from the high latitudes. This work is a bright addition to any library." Ernestine Hayes, Alaska State Writer Laureate 2017-2018 "Northerny echolocates around the rural, urban, and more-than-human worlds with unflinching curiousity

Like the ever-widening universe, Standard candles expands on Alice Major's earlier themes of family, mythology, and cosmology, teasing out subtle wonders in form and subject. Her voice resonates through experiments with old and new poetic forms as she imbues observed and imagined phenomena-from the centres of galaxies to the mysteries of her own backyard-with the most grounded and grounding moments of human experience. In Standard candles, readers will find an emotional dimension that seamlessly intersects with the dimensions of space and time. Fans of Alice Major will enjoy seeing her work through familiar themes, while readers new to her poetry will discover unexplored universes. Alice Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a weekly newspaper reporter. She served as Edmonton's first poet laureate and has been inducted into the city's cultural hall of fame. A widely-published author, she has won many distinctions. Her most recent book is Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, which received the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction as well as a National Magazine Award gold medal. Her website is www.alicemajor.com. Let us compare cosmologies There is a beginning and a middle. There is an arc of narrative. There is a word, a large engraved initial. There is imperative- a cause, a god. Or not. There is an end. A purpose. Or maybe none. There is a plot with reasons, reason. There is a circus, a theatre stage of space and time. There are equations at the bottom or the top. There is a pantheon of matter, motion, scattered photons. And the questions every universe expects: what came before? What happens next? Canadian poet links cosmology, mythology, and the human heart in a range of poetic forms. "I always look forward to reading a new book by Alice. Her genius is very well represented by your press, in my opinion" Neil Querengesser, Concordia Univesity Notes "Alice Major's 10th poetry collection, Standard candles, covers a huge distance in its slim text, racing through a dozen different poetic forms and countless cosmologies. It references everything from Greek mythology to quantum uncertainty to Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the inventor of the standard candle itself. The book is like an ultra-dense kernel containing all things-history, theology, astronomy, geometry, an infinite list. It's the universe right before the Big Bang, titanic forces contained within a few thousand tightly packed words, almost ready to explode and race endlessly out." [Full review at http://bit.ly/1W6w7s5] #6 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Nonfiction) for the week of November 06 2015. #10 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list for the week of November 13, 2015. "In her latest poetry collection, Standard candles, Alice Major continues to draw from science as a source of metaphor to ground the big ideas floating around the universe. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who bring scientific concepts to a public consciousness in their documentary television shows, Major takes up the poet's essential challenge to make grand concepts accessible and relatable to the reader. The result is a collection of thoughtfully crafted suites that feel mythological or biblical in scale, yet as familiar and common as our offices or kitchens.... In reading Standard candles, there is the potential for a most palpable experience of having one's mind blown. Readers will certainly find themselves putting the book down to stare out the window at the night sky and feel a sense of loneliness wrapped in communion." Prairie Books Now, Fall/Winter 2015 #9 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list for the week of January 16, 2016. "In her poetry she uses her knowledge of specialised – even arcane – fields in the same way that British playwrights Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn have done: to provide startling and vivid analogies with the human dynamics of a complex e

"I wanted this to be a narrative. So finally Jean-Luc went all the way: every line in the script a quotation from somewhere else. Every blessed line. Love doesn't die. It's people who die. Love just goes away." -from "NOUVELLE VAGUE / New Wave (1990)" Stephen Scobie celebrates "the greatest film director of his age" with poetry exploring 44 of Godard's films. Subtle yet profound unities play from poem to poem. Characters, locations, images, and the generous use of quotation jump-cut and recur to send the imagination reeling through the larger works of both artists. Readers will be seduced to linger within the writing and encouraged to seek beyond, to Godard's own oeuvre. The book is sharply envisioned and carefully cadenced so as to delight readers who may not be familiar with Godard's films. Those already acquainted with Godard's work will find At the limit of breath a most rewarding experience. Stephen Scobie reflects on the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard with poems for 44 Godard films. Front Flap: Stephen Scobie celebrates "the greatest film director of his age" with poetry exploring 44 of Godard's films. Subtle yet profound unities play from poem to poem. Characters, locations, images, and inter-textual quotation jump-cut and recur to send the imagination reeling through the larger works of both artists. Readers will be seduced to linger within the writing and encouraged to seek beyond, to Godard's own oeuvre. The book is sharply envisioned and carefully cadenced to delight readers who may not be familiar with Godard's films. Those already acquainted with Godard's work will find At the limit of breath a most rewarding experience. Back Cover: Here is light and here are soldiers here are bosses here are children here is light and here is joy . here is the universal wound here is night here is the virgin here is grace and here is light and here is light and here is fog and here is adventure and here is fiction and here is reality and here is documentary and here is movement and here is cinema and here is the image and here is sound and here is cinema -- JLG, Scénario du film Passion, 1982 Back Flap: Stephen Scobie was born in Scotland and has lived in Canada since 1965, teaching at the Universities of Alberta and Victoria. A widely published poet, he won the Governor General's Award in 1980 for McAlmon's Chinese Opera. He has also published extensively in the criticism of Canadian literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Stephen Scobie lives in Victoria. "Stephen Scobie's newest collection is a chronological, poetic study of the films of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. And like the work of the man about whom Scobie writes, the book is pleasingly esoteric and sharply focused.... this book studies and examines Godard in a sharp and thrilling way, and Scobie invites his reader to further explore the world of the great filmmaker. Scobie's knowledge of Godard is vast, to be sure, but his poetics-and his love for the films-are what truly shine here." Kimmy Beach, ARC Poetry Magazine, February 2014 [full review at http://arcpoetry.ca/?p=7755] "In the poem on one of Godard's masterpieces, Weekend, Scobie writes: 'What a rotten film / All we meet are crazy people / eating each other.' A funny barb, with a hallucinatory development in the image, that works against expectation by insulting Godard's film, the stanza stands on its own. At the same time, the 'insult' contains a quotation from the film, thus replicating Godard's own method of incessant quotation-deepening the poem for those who know the film…. Scobie's poems intelligently engage Godard's films." "The collection is held together by a dense net of recurring motifs.... At the Limit of Breath is a textual space where Godard's characters, places, images, and actors take on a Pirandellian existence, crossing borders of both poems and movies."

These twelve new short stories from Astrid Blodgett explore the consequences of grief and denial and single moments that change perceptions, lives, and attachments forever. Crisp prose and unexpected plot twists move relatable characters through vivid outdoor settings and interior depths. A child negotiates adult behaviour when an injured dog is put down. An older sister bribes a younger one to go on her first date. A family canoe trip launches from Disaster Point. A woman wants to hurl her granddaughter's birthday cake out the window. This Is How You Start to Disappear shows all the heartbreaking ways we evolve when coping with change or trauma. "After a while, they'll stop talking about her, the way they don't talk about Bri. This is how you start to disappear, she thought." Tension-filled short stories that show all the heartbreaking ways we evolve when coping with change or trauma. Astrid Blodgett is a short story writer from Edmonton / amiskwaciwâskahikan. Her work has appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology, Meltwater: Fiction and Poetry from the Banff Centre for the Arts, and many Canadian literary magazines. She was short-listed for the Writers' Guild of Alberta Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Story, and her first collection, You Haven't Changed a Bit, was long-listed for a ReLit Award, a runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and a finalist for the High Plains Book Award for Short Stories. ""New Summer Dresses" … begins as a piece of straightforward naturalism about two girls on summer vacation, only to take a sharp detour into much darker and creepier territory in its climactic stages. Blodgett effectively seeds the ground in the course of the story, while still ensuring that the final pages retain a significant punch. Like the best stories in the collection - "Zero Recall," "Tattletale" - "New Summer Dresses" features a strong narrative line and an undercurrent of astringent irony that results in a propulsive reading experience." from The National Post "Rarely does one encounter such an even collection of beautifully rendered short stories, but such is the case with Astrid Blodgett's fine group of thirteen [You Haven't Changed a Bit]. Although her debut book, the writing is clearly that of a master/mistress of the short story craft. Each is a jewel in its own right." Resource Links magazine "You Haven't Changed a Bit has the complexity and texture you'd expect from a well-established short fiction writer. The fact that this is a debut collection is a remarkable achievement…" The Winnipeg Review "Highly recommended." Dave Jenkinson, editor, CM magazine "Astrid Blodgett's first book of fiction short stories is a bravado performance coming at the beginning of the writer's career, rather than at the end. It speaks of more great things to come." St. Albert Gazette "…each of the stories in You Haven't Changed A Bit is a pitch-perfect gem, characterized by truly graceful and insightful writing…" Brett Lockwood, O' Canada blog Tension-filled short stories that show all the heartbreaking ways we evolve when coping with change or trauma. "This Is How You Start to Disappear is for readers who revel in stories told with both skill and passion, stories with twists, stories without ready resolutions." Rona Altrows, author of At This Juncture "In these precisely paced and deceptively dark stories, Astrid Blodgett sweeps out the dust bunnies of contempt and devastation from the junk drawers of her characters' family homes. These stories do what short stories do best: every word flexes its muscles, every detail teeters on an iceberg of deeper meaning. This Is How You Start To Disappear is a complex and satisfying compilation of unsteady bridge crossings between our childhood and adult selves." Susan Sanford Blades, author of Fake It So Real "This collection is an intimate embrace of the moments and memories that define us. With pitch pe

Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace's confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships. Later poems in the collection recall vivid moments of psychological trauma and stalking and explore the bias of the justice system toward gay men. Collecting memories, dreams, and fears about sexual identity, Deviant makes important contributions to queer coming-of-age and intimate partner violence narratives. Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. "Deviant deftly and with heartbreaking tenderness explores the beauty, yearning, grief, and boundless cycles of discovery involved in queer realization. With a narrative poise that invites the reader in as an intimate witness, Patrick Grace lays down a mosaic of moments that capture the wonders and cruelties of queer being, from heat-warped summer days to coiling truck exhaust and late urban nights. Grace's poetry is a gift-at once confessional and intimate, yet allowing the queer reader to find themselves time and again within the verse. Deviant is an earnest testament to the way a life unfolds in the face of societal rigidities, told with a voice that carries a mesmerizing composure, yet which surges with the undercurrents of a fierce and luminous poetic grace." Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin, author of Fire Cider Rain "Imagine a poem as a traffic light, blinking "stop, go, and wait." In the hands of Patrick Grace, a phrasemaker of immense skill, these states are combined and recombined to form a highway to the living, breathing world. Deviant is the best kind of poetic debut-written to stand out, and in doing so subverting all expectation." Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors "The glinting and sensually rich poems in Grace's Deviant are in possession of such a harrowing nostalgia. Tread carefully, but tread nonetheless." John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Junebat "In Deviant, Patrick Grace calls out from the charged and sometimes lonely terrain of queer male intimacy. In brilliant and emotionally devastating work, Grace reminds us how the hunger for connection and the desire for lasting redemption unites us in our longing. Deviant is a collection to savour, introducing a brave new voice in Canadian poetry." Trevor Corkum, author of The World After Us "Deviant deftly embodies that complex space of queer selfhood and interaction and longing. What a journey, what a joy to move through its beautiful, bruising language, its resonance, and all the ways it makes hope and hurt alike sing." Dominik Parisien, author of Side Effects May Include Strangers "Far from being a subject for a case study or criminology class, Grace's deviant searches for customary destinations: love, freedom, satiation, contentedness.... Savvy about his mistakes and perpetually committed to self-renewal, he does what he can. Along with the rest of us." Brett Josef Grubisic, The British Columbia Review, March 14, 2024 [Full review at https://thebcreview.ca/2024/03/14/2101-grace-grubisic/] "You cannot help but to linger in the poignantly shattering moments that Grace unfolds within the poems of Deviant. Intimate and nostalgic, this stellar debut distills the comp

Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disappearing life with that of the persona of the woman's granddaughter through a choreographed confusion of identities: of she's and I's. Few poets could execute this with convincing solemnity, while simultaneously recovering the dignity of the sufferer and her loved ones. Butler does. Poetry lovers, critics and scholars, and readers who crave a deft style charged with honest emotion should read Wells. Through poetry, Jenna Butler pieces together the life of a cherished grandmother lost to Alzheimer's. Front Flap: Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disappearing life with that of the persona of the woman's granddaughter through a choreographed confusion of identities: of she's and I's. Few poets could execute this with convincing solemnity, while simultaneously recovering the dignity of the sufferer and her loved ones. Butler does. Poetry lovers, critics and scholars, and readers who crave a deft style charged with honest emotion should read Wells. Back Cover: At the edge of the hayfield, a flag of corn poppies, sunset lifting their skirts like a Guy Fawkes fire. The hands of your husband and those of your children. You were touched by so many things. -excerpted from "Flesh" Back Flap: Jenna Butler was born in Norwich, England in 1980. She has edited more than thirty books of poetry in Canada and England, and is the author of six short collections, in addition to an award-winning trade book from NeWest Press, Aphelion. She is currently finishing a trio of new short collections: Spindle, Love Letters, and Songs for a Broken Season. Butler is the founding editor of Rubicon Press and teaches Creative Writing and Literature at MacEwan University during the school year. In the summer, she and her husband live with three resident moose and a den of coyotes on a small organic farm in Alberta's north country. "[Wells] explores the structure of the prose-poem, and the prairie narrative stretched out as long as a line can follow. Arranged in poem-sections, the poem-fragments hold up as a series of family photographs either blurry or apocryphal, and write the prairie sentence/long line with exquisite grace." rob mclennan's blog, March 19, 2012 [Full posting athttp://bit.ly/FSaEgs] "The poems use a rich, sensual vocabulary of flora & fauna, delineating each separate item of once loved & now lost local life, now retrieved by the poet to make manifest the world the remembered grandmother can no longer say into being.... Wells is a beautifully sad acknowledgement of the losses all must face, made deeply personal & universal through its sharply observed images of a life now gone. It's a fine example of how to take lyric & shake it into something beyond the merely personal." Eclectic Ruckus, March 23, 2012 [Full post at http://bit.ly/IgulkV] "In a fragmented, sensory assemblage, Butler witnesses her grandmother's disappearance into dementia. The loss of language is not tidy. Post-it notes are found in 'arcane places.'... Wells is a beautiful homage to a beloved grandparent, but also a poignant and gently persistent inquiry into peripheral loss. Butler gets at the difficulty of 'seeing our own lives erased' from another's memory, and how that leaves us 'left doubting, in a deep place, the truth of our own existence.'" Shawna Lemay, Edmonton Journal, April 7, 2012 [Full article at http://bit.ly/HzQUjb]

Gospel Drunk follows a speaker's journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as "dragons in suits" collide with critiques of "the broken bicycle of recovery." A child's fingers interlace to form a gun during mass and Hulk attends an AA meeting. Boldly honest, Gospel Drunk is for all who seek humanity in a world where the personal and the political are equally complicated. He drops a match on his wound to set fire to his blood. At a certain temperature even the Devil cools. -from "Drowning Man Sonnets" A poet's struggle for identity and salvation in the face of religious dogma and alcoholism. "The poems in Gospel Drunk transfigure hockey bros, hazing rituals, and the warmest parking lot in Canada into a bioluminescence of interconnections. By drawing upon the personal, Chafe is able to write with pointed authority to the central struggle of our age: the structural abuses of faith. Redefining the dowry of religion's aftermath, Chafe crafts work out of reason and imagination, showing how metaphor can help carry us across the turbulence of our times." "At the heart of Aidan Chafe's impressive sophomore collection is a bare-knuckle interrogation of organized, patriarchal religion. Languishing in the space between faith and doubt, the speaker of Gospel Drunk gives himself over to awe and observation, exploring violence, masculinity, addiction, and structural injustice in lyrics that are sonorous, deliberate, and searching." # 10 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, October 10, 2021 I 2 Disciple 3 Galileo 4 Trust 5 Helmets and Gloves 6 Social Development 7 Ode to the Hockey Bro 8 Churches, Trucks and Shallow Pools 10 Driving Through Kitsilano 11 Suburban Lament 12 Two Lips 13 Fall of the Empire 14 Meditation on Enclosed Space 16 This Might Be the Warmest Parking Lot in Canada 17 Another Seasonal Poem 19 We Are Bioluminescent 20 Passage II 22 Struggling Protagonist 23 Indelible 24 Sizing Up 25 The Light Salesmen 26 Prayer in the Age of Unreason 27 Mary Too 29 Sacrificial Sons 31 Eternal Optimist 33 Land in the Name of Taking 34 Suffering as Spectacle 35 Holes 36 Hard Rain 37 Sonnet in Defence of Lust 38 Nothing Written Is Sacred III 40 Gun Journal 47 Safety Rules 48 The Strongman 49 The Activist 50 Eyes of the Assailant 51 Good Men 52 Colonial Chokehold 53 Fallen 54 Superhero AA 55 Epistle of the Inebriate 56 Empty 57 Ode to Ruin 58 Drowning Man Sonnets 73 Notes 75 Acknowledgements

By turns joyous and adventurous, melancholy and nostalgic, Michelle Smith's debut collection of poems showcases a wide-ranging fascination with places, people, and story. Smith's limpid and humane handling of an array of themes, emotions, and styles-her Norwegian ancestry, her Canadian Prairie heritage, the significance of family, the fragility of memory, world travel, ekphrasis, myth, and more-exemplifies the lyric self on a poetic grand tour, or pilgrimage, to meet the world. Framed by imaginative travelogues addressed to Greek gods, dear Hermes... offers readers an escape and an entrance-out of time and into the poet's luminous experience. Readers who appreciate clear lyric and fleet voicing will relish Smith's poetry. This Canadian Prairie poet's debut collection is framed by imaginative travelogues addressed to Greek gods. Front Flap: By turns joyous and adventurous, melancholy and nostalgic, Michelle Smith's debut collection of poems showcases a wide-ranging fascination with places, people, and story. Smith's limpid and humane handling of an array of themes, emotions, and styles-her Norwegian ancestry, her Canadian Prairie heritage, the significance of family, the fragility of memory, world travel, ekphrasis, myth, and more-exemplifies the lyric self on a poetic grand tour, or pilgrimage, to meet the world. Framed by imaginative travelogues addressed to Greek gods, dear Hermes... offers readers an escape and an entrance-out of time and into the poet's luminous experience. Readers who appreciate clear lyric and fleet voicing will relish Smith's poetry. Back Cover: dear Persephone, it wasn't the pomegranate, was it? c'mon, confess, 'cause the jig is up. it was words, words, words as delicious as those tart-sweet seeds, wasn't it? -from The traveller writes after a drink or two with Demeter Back Flap: Michelle Smith is a poet and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She has been writing and publishing poetry for over a decade. "I enjoyed this collection and its combination of classicism, nature imagery and response to myth and to art. I also really liked the choice of form.... This was a collection in which I found poems to soothe my need for imagery and for twists of the language. I was interested in the stories it told and the echoes set going in my mind as I was reading, and I would recommend it to other poetry readers I know." The Indextrious Reader, April 10, 2012 [Full post at http://indextrious.blogspot.ca/2012/04/dear-hermes.html] "This debut collection of poems addresses Smith's Norwegian ancestry, her prairie heritage, themes of family, memory, travel, myth, and more in ways that are joyous and adventurous, melancholy and nostalgic." Prairie Books NOW "The Greek myths that inform dear Hermes... function both as a device for crafting lyric apostrophes and as a model of travel that embraces the newness of otherwhere alongside the promise of imagination. Three pages of explanatory notes attest to the breath of cultural forms Smith engages in this slim volume.... dear Hermes... proves aptly attuned to the inner and outer workings of story." Travis V. Mason, Canadian Literature 218, Autumn 2013