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Poetry

  • Where seas and fables meet
    Auteur:
    Powe, B.W.
    Sommaire:

    This powerful, beautiful book blends parables, aphorisms, dreams, fantasies, anecdotes, witticisms, puns, vignettes, and prose poems in a meditative and often passionate way. It takes the risk of being free in its style and form, to affirm the possibilities of thought, spirit, heart, humour, and imagination. Here B.W. Powe gives us his boldest, most soul-revealing work to date.
  • When you thought I wasn't looking : a book of thanks for mom
    Auteur:
    Korzan, Mary Rita Schilke
    Sommaire:

    "When I wrote a tribute for my mother years ago, I never anticipated it would take a worldwide journey. Nonetheless, that is exactly what happened. The story I am about to share with you may read like fiction. I can assure you, there is nothing in the world that has ever been more true." —Mary Rita Korzan Mary Rita Schilke Korzan wrote a poem to her mother 24 years ago, thanking her for all she had done as a mother, friend and role model. She gave the poem to her mother and, a few months later, offered it as a tribute when Mary and her husband were married. So many wedding guests asked for a copy that Mary included one in her thank-you notes. Thus began the strange and heartwarming journey of Mary's poem to her mom. Friends passed it on to those they knew. A minister in her hometown couldn't recall who gave it to him, but he included the by-then "anonymously written" poem in his book about loving others. Another author picked it up from there for her compilation of heartfelt works, and Mary finally noticed her poem, now listed as "Author Unknown," in A Fourth Course of Chicken Soup for the Soul, which her husband and children gave her as a Mother's Day gift. With When You Thought I Wasn't Looking, readers have the chance to experience Mary's poem in its entirety and from its creator. This is the special kind of book that reminds us that sometimes the little things we do "just because" mean more to someone than we can imagine. Those little things teach love, compassion and understanding. In other words, they're priceless. This sweet gift book brings that lesson home to the heart.
  • When we were very young & Now we are six
    Auteur:
    Milne, A. A.
    Sommaire:

    From the unabridged collection "A.A. Milne's Pooh Classics," here are all of the poems and verses from When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.
  • When This World Comes to an End
    Auteur:
    Cayley, Kate
    Sommaire:

    Poems that journey through a tapestry of myths, archetypes and fables; of histories invented and revisited.

    Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question “what if?” What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun?

    Cayley draws on her experience as a playwright to create vividly engaging voices and characters ranging from the famous to the infamous to the all-but-anonymous. With exquisite pacing and striking imagery she draws us into the gaps in history, invites us to survey its wonders, both real and imaginary.

    Be the horse. Be patient and simple, blind
    to anything beyond this moment, step out
    on trembling legs toward the lake, knowing that
    there is something behind this, something
    that sustains, propels, repeats.

    (from “The White Horse Divers, Lake Ontario, 1908”)

    “Skillfully deploying a diction both lithe and lapidary, Kate Cayley’s first collection regales the reader with conjurations of psyches diverse as those of Judas Iscariot and Simone Weil, Daguerreotype cameos and cautionary tales, apocalyptic stories and feminist fables – all brimming with revelations and wonder.”  —Ruth Roach Pierson
  • When the rapture comes
    Auteur:
    Layton, Max
    Sommaire:

    In his first collection of poetry, Max Layton takes the post apocalypse to new heights. Satirical in places, full of longing and remorse in others, the poems (each beginning with "When the rapture comes ...") bring together memories of family, trips to fantasylands, and outrageous humour. Life, in other words, in all its varied colours and shapes -- despite the shadow of when the rapture comes.
  • When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
    Auteur:
    Martz, Sandra
    Sommaire:

    This enchanting collection of writings and photographs evokes the beauty, humor and courage of women living in their later years and tells of the endearing moments of joy--and passion--to be found in the rich and varied world of midlife and beyond. An award-winning anthology that takes a refreshing look at issues of aging in a society that glorifies youth. This groundbreaking collection was one of the first non-clinical and positive books on women and aging, and was written by older women themselves. It challenged stereotypes and confronted the invisibility of older women in America.
  • When Earth Leaps Up
    Auteur:
    Szumigalski, Anne
    Sommaire:

    Edited by Mark Abley; Preface by Hilary Clark; Afterword by Mark Abley

    ” … one of Canada’s major poets. The audacity – the courage – of her imagination teaches us, gives us our better selves.” — Tim Lilburn

    This posthumous collection will be a delightful surprise for readers who thought they had heard the last of Anne Szumigalski’s nimble, sideslipping, otherworldly voice. Szumigalski’s poetic universe is as beguiling and unpredictable as dreams and myth, and like them, her universe can be enchanting, visually lush, and suddenly dangerous.

    Untitled (“glory to the queen …”)

    glory to the queen whoever she is
    wherever she finds herself as she moves
    up and down round and round
    all the spaces that are hers

    once she was a young thing and jumped
    easily over any fence any line
    now she’s an old woman thick and earthy

    by tomorrow she hopes to leap
    out of this skin and into a new one
    a skin like petals like leaves

    The poems deal with ultimate questions. What is time? What is memory? Is it invented or real? Is death a kind of dream? Is life? Is God a man, a woman, or a Sacred Reptile? The imaginative leaps in When Earth Leaps Up are as easy as looking up at the prairie sky, as simple as turning your head to the side to catch a glimpse of an idea as it skips past you in the form of an interesting stranger, a passing cloud, the face of a loved one, long dead.

    Mark Abley is the editor or author of 10 books, including the internationally acclaimed Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Abley is the literary executor for Anne Szumigalski.
  • What we pass on : collected poems : 1980-2009
    Auteur:
    Gillan, Maria Mazziotti
    Sommaire:

    In What We Pass On: Collected Poems: 1980-2009, Maria Mazziotti Gillan weaves a tapestry of one woman's life - wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, grand-daughter, Italian American. Reading these poems in one volume makes us acutely aware of how memory is layered, each new poem adding another detail, another color, another perspective so that we watch as the poet and the people around her change. With increasing clarity and honesty, Gillan peels away all the self-protective layers and invites us in so we can see in her story a reflection of our own. Her work in all its texture and exuberance, its passion and power, forces us to care about what matters and teaches us to be human. This is a poet who, in these courageous poems, teaches us why poetry matters and why it can change us.
  • What we are when we are : Kaj smo, ko sm
    Auteur:
    Priestly, Tom, Lipuš, Cvetka
    Sommaire:

    Working within a postmodern style, this rhythmic and melodious collection of poems originally written in Slovenian by Cvetka Lipuš and translated here by Tom Priestly, blends the real with the surreal, dull urban lives with dreams. Lipuš, known for the lexical beauty of her work, dwells on topics of time and space which she handles in an almost revolving, irreverent manner. Priestly captures the maze-like characteristic of her verse and carefully reconstructs the sonoric beauty of the work in its original language.
  • What noise against the cane
    Auteur:
    Bailey, Desiree C.
    Sommaire:

    The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips observes that Bailey's "poems argue for hope and faith equally ... These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance."
  • What my arms can carry
    Auteur:
    Patriarca, Gianna
    Sommaire:

    What My Arms Can Carry is Gianna Patriarca's fourth book of poetry. She returns to the themes she explored first in the award winning Italian Women and Other Tragedies (Guernica Editions 1994) - the dislocation wrought on the lives of immigrants and the children of immigrants, the dream of returning "that dream for another lifetime," the deep pearl of memory.
  • What kind of man are you
    Auteur:
    Davis, Degan
    Sommaire:

    What does it mean to be a man now? These poems' answers are bold and deeply moving.
  • What it feels like for a girl
    Auteur:
    Harper, Jennica
    Sommaire:

    What It Feels Like for a Girl is a series of poems following the intense friendship between two teenagers as they explore pop icons, pornography, and the big, strange world of sex. They soon learn just how complicated sexuality is--and how confusing desire can be. What It Feels Like for a Girl is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its “lessons” for the young woman who has never experienced sex in an unfiltered way. What sex and love have to do with each other--if anything. How so many things in this world are two things at once (thirteen is both young and old, Madonna is both the virgin and the whore, pornography is both arousing and terrifying). How teenage girls (like pornography, literature, art) hold a mirror up to the world and show it its true, beautiful, and ugly face.

    Praise for What It Feels Like for a Girl: “Smart, brave, hard-edged, and a little frightening…Jennica Harper offers a compassionate glimpse into the turbulent lives of teenaged girls. May this book find its way to school libraries. May it find itself in the hands of every young person who ever wondered What It Feels Like for a Girl.” (Elizabeth Bachinsky, Governor General's Award Nominee for Home of Sudden Service) "This is something refreshing: a portrait of female sexuality not undone by squeamish delivery or euphemistic evasions. Sex is fun, funny, silly, horrifying and irresistible in these poems. The poetic format allows the subject to emerge organically (orgasmic-ly?), true to girlhood, and true to nature..." (Gillian Wigmore, Northern Poetry Review) “... Rather than theoretical ideals, this fictive narrative folds in individual, idiosyncratic felt-experience, and in the telling and her negotiation of complexities, in her marvellous use of language and rhyme, Harper is sure, wondrous, wise, musical and winning.”(Herizons) Poetry in Transit selection (poem from the book displayed on Vancouver city buses) Adapted for theatre by Vancouver's innovative Electric Company
  • Wet dream
    Auteur:
    Robinsong, Erin
    Sommaire:

    "Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart."
  • We, the women
    Auteur:
    Nudelman, Merle
    Sommaire:

    Merle Nudelman plumbs the nuances and vagaries which define our relationships and the shifting moments of lover, abuser, victim, and healer. The imagery in We, the Women is at once startling and evocative. Poems of layered scenes of domesticity and of the natural world border on the elegiac. In this richly textured collection, Nudelman celebrates the transformative power of love and spiritual awakening. "In her second book, Merle Nudelman writes with the accomplishment and confidence of an established poet. Her poems possess that rare combination of emotional astuteness and a penetrating depth of vision. In this volume, We, the Women, Nudelman establishes herself as a voice who speaks from the courage of an astute, caring and defiantly humane heart" - Bruce Meyer.
  • We have crossed many rivers : new poetry from Africa
    Auteur:
    Sommaire:

    We Have Crossed Many Rivers: New Poetry from Africa is a fascinating anthology of some of the finest contemporary poetic voices from twenty-nine African countries. Inspired by the examples of first generation African poets like Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Dennis Brutus, and Mazisi Kunene, the poets in this anthology display rootedness in, and preoccupation with, the discourses of identity and political freedom. At the same time, they engage the more contemporary themes of human and economic rights, governance, the natural environment, love, family and generational relations representative of the African continent. Poems from Tanure Ojaide, Yewande Omotoso, Reesom Haile and Frank Chipasula are inlcluded and in all there are contributions from 68 poets.
  • We come from the same light
    Auteur:
    Fournier, Danielle, Tipper, Christine
    Sommaire:

    To read Danielle Fournier is to plunge into the centre of a woman’s heart and body – a heart that continues to beat, to search and to hope spurred on by a sensual, desirable – and desiring – body. Not only physical and emotional, Fournier’s pursuits are also geographical and linguistic as she travels across continents and languages encountering bleak landscapes brightened by desire and feminine kinship. Despite the journey’s internal ruptures and emotional turmoil, we reach joy and the conclusion that We come from the same light.
  • We are no longer the smart kids in class
    Auteur:
    Huebert, David
    Sommaire:

    From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, We are no longer the smart kids in class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. A fantasia of academic disillusionment and deflating youth, this collection contemplates moustaches, mountains, and oceans from Halifax to Victoria, always wondering how poetry matters to the heaving, melting, masturbating world it dramatizes.
  • Vulnerable AF : poems
    Auteur:
    Ball, Tarriona "Tank,"
    Sommaire:

    The debut poetry collection from Grammy-nominated recording artist and slam poet Tarriona "Tank" Ball about infatuation, love, and heartbreak. The real-life story of a relationship in the author's past told in verse and short prose pieces. Relatable and honest, with Tank's signature mix of whimsy and realness, Vulnerable AF is about the difference between love and infatuation, the danger and confusion of losing yourself in the idea of someone else, and coming out on the other side of heartbreak with your sense of self-worth--and your sense of humor--stronger for it. Scored by pianist Robert Glasper.
  • Vox Humana
    Auteur:
    Pierce, E. Alex
    Sommaire:

    Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on.

    E. Alex Pierce’s voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth.  It’s not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.

    Pump organ, stops labelled
    vox, vox, vox – tremolo, bellows filling air.

    Take this creature into your throat pipe. Gristle,
    heft, and hide. Rasp, slide the whistle – the alder
    cuts its throat to speak its sound.

    – from “Vox animalia”

    “‘Poetry’, someone once wrote, ‘is the music of consciousness’, and Vox Humana is indeed a rich diapason rooted in the landscape of Nova Scotia’s Sable River. But the wonderful thing about the collection is its lightness and optimism – though its subject matter is often love and loss, it can be retrospective without being nostalgic, and elegiac without overbearing solemnity. Good poetry is always redemptive, and one leaves this collection refreshed, exhilarated and renewed.

    “Its scope is wide: beautifully crafted family reminiscences; Bach and Beethoven; Raphael and Goltzius; Shakespeare; the Greek Myths and the fate of the Romanovs.  But whatever the subject, the real strength of Pierce’s work lies in the richness of its landscape which is forever opening out before us, transfigured by an inner music and wonder and light.” – John Glenday

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