Hope Matters, written by multiple award-winner Lee Maracle, in collaboration with her daughters Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter, focuses on the journey of Indigenous people from colonial beginnings to reconciliation.

Maracle states that the book, "is also about the journey of myself and my two daughters." During their youth, Bobb and Carter wrote poetry with their mother, and eventually they all decided that one day they would write a book together. This book is the result of that dream.

Written collaboratively by all three women, the poems in Hope Matters blend their voices together into a shared song of hope and reconciliation.

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Fracking – tar-sand runoff – dirty oil extraction. This is the language of our oil-addicted 21st century society: incredibly invasive, blatant in its purpose, and richly embedded in mythological and archetypal symbolism. The ultimate goal of the industry: To core the underworld.

Endangered Hydrocarbons, Lesley Battler's first full-length collection of poetry, shows that the language of hydrocarbon extraction, with its blend of sexual imagery, archetype, science, pseudoscience and the purely speculative, can be as addictive as the resource it pursues.

Using pastiche and wordplay, Battler shines a floodlight on the absurdity and pervasiveness of production language in all areas of human life in the oil fields, including art, culture and politics. Incorporating texts generated by a multinational oil company, and spliced with a variety of found material (video games, home decor magazines, works by Henry James and Carl Jung), Battler deliberately tampers with her found material, treating it as crude oil—excavating, mixing, and drilling these texts to emulate extraction processes used by the industry.With traces of Dennis Lee's Testament, Larissa Lai's Automaton Biographies, and Adam Dickinson's The Polymers, this lively and refreshing take on a polarizing topic will resonate with readers of contemporary poetry who connect with environmental issues and capitalist critique.

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PRAISE FOR LESLEY BATTLER

Electric and unexpected... Lesley Battler's "Idylls of Inuvik" [is] a zinger of a poem that uses the internal, molecular energy of words to enact a merciless takedown of the still-colonial attitudes at play in the economics of Canada's North.

—Anita Lahey, Arc Poetry Magazine

Lesley Battler's cut-up work will continue to remind me that it will always be easier to remove overburden than it will be to clear-cut a small forest. Her work brings us the spectacle of the wars of rhetoric—with their victors & victims of ideology, hijacking knowledge and power with 'approved terms of vocabulary.

— Paul Zits, filling Station

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When Andy Warhol's a, A Novel was first published in 1968, The New York Times Book Review declared it "pornographic." Yet over four decades later, a continues to be an essential documentation of Warhol's seminal Factory scene. And though the book offers a pop art snapshot of 1960s Manhattan that only Warhol could capture, it remains a challenging read. Comprised entirely of unedited transcripts of recorded conversations taped in and around the Warhol Factory, the original book's tone varies from frenetic to fascinating, unintelligible to poetic.

No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol by Liz Worth attempts to change that, by appropriating the original text and turning each page into a unique poem. In remixing a into poetry using only words and phrases from each piece's specified page, Worth sets the scene for the reader, not unlike eavesdropping in an all-night diner, with poetry full of voices competing to be heard, hoping for just a sliver of attention at the end of a long, desperate night.

True to Worth's style, the poems in this collection hiss and pop with confessional whispers while maintaining the raw, distorted qualities originally captured on tape and documented in a, A Novel. Warhol fans, archivists, and academics, as well as readers of confessional and conceptual poetry and fiction, will jump at the chance to be a part of the Factory in-crowd in No Work Finished Here.

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Praise for No Work Finished Here:

"Liz Worth’s collection of poems is a testament to both her artistry and daily discipline. In an age of diminished attention, her perseverance in daily poem-making by mining the same source over and over reminds us that artists can be a model of life without distraction—how to go deeper and deeper until you find yourself looking back at you." —Heath Allen, composer Andy, A popera

Praise for Liz Worth:

"If one were to rip the cupcake niceties and corporate regimens from society and present a poetic and existential depiction of the anarchical remains, then that would be PostApoc. Liz Worth's tour de force of vivid prose and stunning visceral imagery will haunt you long after you've read the final chapter. Thought-provoking, powerful and inspiring, this book calls for multiple reads." –Lisa de Nikolits, author of The Hungry Mirror, West of Wawa and A Glittering Chaos

"Whether it be poetry, performance art, or prose, Liz Worth has the uncanny ability to turn the grotesque and profane into something sublime and sensual. With PostApoc, she has taken this to a higher level by solidifying her unique voice and bringing rock 'n' roll to its logical dystopian conclusion." —Brandon Pitts, author, playwright, and poet

"The end of the world is not a new idea. Liz Worth writes as if it were. You come away gasping. Begging for hope. Begging for happiness. Begging for the sanctuary of the unreal. PostApoc makes Cormac's The Road seem paved with yellow brick. You'll need more air after reading this." —Bob Bryden, singer-songwriter, founding member of Christmas, Reign Ghost, Benzene Jag, and Age of Mirrors

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Winner, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Longlisted, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial Award

Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader's attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of British Columbia's coastal rainforest, these poems are full of life and decay; they carry the odours of salmon rivers and forests of fir; salal growing in the fog-bound mountain slopes.

This astonishing debut, at once spare and lush, displays an exquisite lyricism built on musical lines and mature restraint. Nilsen turns over each idea carefully, letting nothing escape her attention and saying no more than must be said. Combining a scientist's precision and a poet's sensitivity, Otolith examines the ache of nostalgia in the relentless passage of time.

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"Otolith is a house built by gravity and movement, at once weighty and ephemeral. These poems are fogged in and present, placed and displaced. Nilsen is a poet of the interstitial, of longing, of the sensitive shift itself."

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"Spend enough time at a remote research station, suggests Emily Nilsen, and you, too, will identify fifty different species of fog. In Otolith, Nilsen’s poems measure all that environmental science cannot: the alignment of a tree planter’s sensibility to charred forest, the geolocation of grief. Wake before dawn and follow Nilsen’s ‘solitary, rugged route’ into our fragile ecology."

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"Otolith challenges the idea that madness is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. With metaphors and imagery as wild as the ecologies she encounters, Emily Nilsen shows that repeating the same question can yield multiple answers: Otolith’s world is not static, won’t hold still for its photograph, doesn’t sit pretty. And this is its virtue."

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Welcome to Kate Hargreaves' Leak, where the relationship between language and the body lives in the bumps and bruises that in turn become new ways of understanding the borders and leaks of our everyday existence. In Leak, bodies lose pieces and fall apart, while words slip out of place and letters drop away. Emergency room signage becomes incomprehensible, the census requests bodily measurements, a cyclist confuses oil with her own blood. This visceral deconstruction of the body and its multiple representations tests the boundaries of body politics — pathologically, emotionally, and lyrically.

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Praise for Leak:

Inside Kate Hargreaves's stunning new book, words bite and yawn and breathe the page, chipping away at the dictionary, diagnosing the alphabet. A tour de aperture, these poems will leak from your tongue into your brain, gushing pleasure: pleasure: pleasure: pleasure.

– Nicole Markotic

With deliberate caprice, Kate Hargreaves executes, deranges, disentangles, fractures, accidenting language into dazzling constellations.

– Rosemary Nixon

Leak is an exciting poetic debut which performs a relentless and passionate anatomy through syntax that spills, kicks, craves, bloats, sheds, and spits. Hargreaves reminds us that, for worse and for better, parts of speech and speaker tend to gurgle beyond their notional grammars. Read it and gush.

– Susan Holbrook

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Poems that unfold like liturgy, confronting old violence with a trembling, dignified restraint. Reunion is a parable, an origin story, a cautionary tale. It is also a time machine in which poems commune with ghosts in an attempt both to reckon with and subvert their legacy. It is a tale of the impossible quest for the original, unhurt self. A girlhood is re-inhabited and oddly transformed as the adult becomes ally of her younger self. Young’s writerly range extends through language both candid and stylized, and to forms from ballads to prayer to Biblical sermons. The voice is often interior, but at times it gains a public character—often through the use of religious language and song forms—and we sense that the child’s suffering is in many ways a community failure. The emotional and psychological landscape of these poems seems at once near and far, familiar and strange, uncanny in Freud’s sense. Young has created a distinctive pastoral-gothic hybrid; her daring spirit shapes a collection both deeply generous to and demanding of the reader. As I lay there on the couch / I bargained feebly, / weighing each thing I thought I loved / against the ache. (from “Lamb”)

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“Each of Deanna Young’s spare, pitch-perfect poems seems to contain a novel. Young weaves in and out of time, playing with perspective, to illuminate experience.... This is a poetry that makes memory sharper, consciousness larger, life longer in all directions.”

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Poems that skitter between life and death, “sleep and hurry,” at their heart a kind of tender panic. By turns funny, frank, mysterious, and heartbreaking, Standing in the Flock of Connections, Heather Cadsby’s fifth collection of poetry, is one hundred proof associative thought. These poems testify to the human mind’s capacity to “do”—taking into account all of the performative, causal, athletic, and sexual connotations of that verb. Many of them come in on an overheard conversation or monologue—mid-fight, mid-stride—and the absent details and specifics often function to open up a space for things to become other things, for the flock of connections to swarm. / I love a pentagram. You can draw that thing / all day freehand, sloppy. Five-star / hotels, movies, generals. Throw it around / like it was a love number, which it is. / Cut an apple horizontally, there it is. / Draw one inside its centre pentagon and so on / nesting smaller forever. Till you call it quits / and start singing Holy etc. / (from “Sunday geometer”)

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“…verse that demonstrates wit and levity as well as a seriousness at its heart … capable of blasphemy … an honest inquiry into life and the inherent duality of the moment.”

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In THOU, Aisha Sasha John knows the day – biblically. What if time itself was an object of desire? And the book was a theatre for that? Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time. Which is why she discipled in it. For three years. Also for three months. Also for three months at 33. Ya. Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time and discipled in time, moving it across her body, watching it, um, course the day. She slowed it down and thought along it, she cut it up. She slowed it down and thunk along it and sped it up. She cut it up and spaced it out and rhythmed it down and laid it flat and looked at it hard. Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time. She did it. She did time. It was gross and funny and it was hard and it was good. The result is/was – THOU.

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Aisha Sasha John’s THOU re-plays that archaic pronoun as a constantly present movement and rhythm of attention: the suddenness of the interpolative “moment.” These lines of poetry “shake...a little” as the “I” narrates and choreographs a monologue of the self in motion; each page is the dance floor and John’s words break through the “I-as-you” with both the foreignicity of anticipation and the reflection of grace.

– Fred Wah

THOU is physical, fearless in its vulnerabilities, a sensing amid thought’s most succulent folds. THOU is a choreography of irresolute bodies, the insistent shifting of their positions. Aisha Sasha John is a poet of centrifugal energy, of reverberant intimacy.

– Michael Nardone

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In this post-lyrical era, poems can be stories, or they can just as easily be exuberant laughter set to words, an experiment in language, or an incidental collation of plays on a Scrabble board.

the pet radish, shrunken, the third full collection of poetry from the inimitable Pearl Pirie, deals in the poetics of sound, language, and play. In true Pirie style, this fresh, quirky, and clear-seeing collection speaks in a range of styles and voices: From a military convoy of turtles, to a Kafkaesque conversation with a houseful, to the dissection of a fruit machine, Pirie offers oulipo found speech as it integrates and disintegrates, plays with and tumbles through language.

Earning comparisons to Jenny Sampirisi's Croak and Leigh Kostilidis's Hypotheticals for their shared sense of linguistic playfulness and curiosity, the pet radish, shrunken will appeal to exploring minds who are ready to question language, society, and self while not minding a taint of grief and comedy that necessarily creeps in around the edges.

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Praise for the pet radish, shrunken

Quirky and fresh, playful yet serious, Pirie’s collection, the pet radish, shrunken, demands and activates new pathways of reason. These line-by-line lyrical segments both tantalize and take the reader down the rabbit hole (pulling rabbits out of hats along the way) with their semantic surprises and jumpy music. Pirie sees the world askew and brings the reader along for the ride. An invigorating collection. – CATHERINE GRAHAM

The poems collected in the pet radish, shrunken invite us equally into routine and catastrophic events. Pirie submits "we are always settling into a new now" and leads us through a life revised by the external and internal encounters of a day. With humour, play, and brass, Pirie revels in the daily ruckus of domesticity, verbatim conversations, and the language that must somehow hold a whole existence. – JENNY SAMPIRISI

In Pearl Pirie's poems, language ferments, foments a "vinegar vigour." Flipping the labels off contemporary mores, cooking with sound, she offers quick food for thought. Keep up with her if you can. – DAPHNE MARLATT

Precise riots of vowels and consonants rattle these poems. Pearl Pirie's lines burn with sonic-rich images: "kalimba of algae" and "tight loops of oops." Her verbal verve is rooted in an ecstatic attentiveness to language, both found and formal. Charged with innovative and lyrical energies, the pet radish, shrunken is a gorgeous rebellion. – EDUARDO CORRAL

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Winner, New Brunswick Book Award for Poetry

A Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year

Like the novella in fiction, the long poem is an oft-neglected form. Too long for publication in most literary journals and anthologies, too short to merit book-length publication, the long poem occupies a lonely space in literature. M. Travis Lane is a master of the form, in which her considerable poetic skills reach their apex. There are few that match her brilliance. This volume collects all of her long works — most of them now out of print — from a five-decade commitment to the art.

M. Travis Lane has long flown under the radar of Can Lit, crafting luminous poems and sharp literary criticism — much of it published in the Fiddlehead, one of Canada's premier literary journals — but in recent years her work has been drawing the attention it deserves. Evidence of this recognition is her 2015 Governor General's Award nomination for Crossover, a collection the still-vital poet published at the age of 81. Her poetry is modernist, dense, and highly allusive, drawing adeptly on classical and biblical sources, imbued with a feminist and ecocritical perspective. Her musical lines, vivid metaphors, and phenomenological acumen launch her into the company of such poetic luminaries as Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn. In the long poetic form, these qualities reach their highest expression. This volume, an exquisite collection that brings together her long poems for the first time, constitutes an important addition to the canon of Canadian literature and to the canon of feminist literature in North America.

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"M. Travis Lane keeps the Aristotelian tradition in poetry: to move from lyric poetry to longer verse forms. Thus she has always done — with meet cadence, with right diction, with sweet wisdom. But the Collected Long Poems gather at long last her consistent achievement, her persistent excellence, her insistent, epic impulse. Lane accepts our collective debt to classical poets, the undead — deathless — bards of antiquity. The wording is precise, the imagery compelling, the verses supple. If you have not read Lane before, prepare to travel: like T.S. Eliot, she wants you to have a transporting experience in your imagination. If you i>have read Lane before, prepare for fresh astonishment. She is Homeric breadth and Sapphic brevity in this suite of superb poems."

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"With a multiplicity of voices, these poems offer a generously imagined theatre of the human. M. Travis Lane's The Witch of the Inner Wood is more than a rich, wide-ranging collection. Here is one of Canada's finest poets at work, revealing the power of her lyrical voice. A treasure of a book."

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"Canadian poetry has always had secret masters; poets who, without fanfare, deepened their style and vision — and extended the presiding genius of our tradition. M. Travis Lane is one of these figures. She has become, for our attitudinizing era, an especially powerful example of how emotional complexity and psychological depth aren't a matter of 'spontaneous overflow' but are built from lucid stanzas, uncompromising compression, and effective metaphors. These qualities can be seen in the astonishing long poems selected for The Witch of the Inner Wood, a book that will cement Lane's status as one of our most significant poets."

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"'You either go or you get sent.' If you've never thought of poetry as page-turner, wait till you delve into M. Travis Lane's masterful long poems, collected together here for the first time. Hypnotist, conductor, and hobgoblin, she liberates life from its usual haze, so we may consider it in the changing light — so we must. Almost any single line by Lane seals the case for the necessity of the lyric. This welcome volume reshapes the narrative around the Canadian long poem, placing one of our finest poets at the centre of the rise of this widely beloved form, now an essential component of our literature."

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