The poems in Violet Energy Ingots contain a sense of dis-ease, rupture, things frayed, and grief—as love shimmers the edges. Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyen’s writing as “a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the words find their pathways.” As grounded in the earth as in the stars, her poems are reminders of the possibilities of contemplation in every space and moment.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Fille d’eau et de sable, sur les rives de ce long fleuve, libre d’espaces, tu imaginais tes contes de fée. Le bonheur ! Tu as couru dans les prés parmi les fleurs, les ronces, les blés. Vient un temps où on désapprend le rêve et se glisse dans le savoir des autres. Oui, j’appris à tourner le dos au froid, à me présenter face au bonheur. Tu es venu tête frisée, m’as prise par la main et ensemble avons marché, marché tant d’années, éraflures aux pieds et joie dans le coeur. Nous avons parcouru notre chemin accrochés au temps, aux blessures. Mon piano, nos soirées à peindre. Nous nous sommes levés ce matin de grandes noces et avons bâti maison au pays de l’amour infini. Le soleil a séché nos doutes et rempli de joyaux l’espace entre nos deux corps. Cette maladie sournoise, mon sang, tes larmes. Je te soignerai de mes baisers, de mon amour, de mes craintes. N’aie pas peur. Nous ne céderons pas notre bonheur aux désirs de la mort. Que veux-tu que nous fassions d’une seule vie ?... Ce livre est un seul poème dédié à la mémoire de la conjointe de l’auteur qui retrace, dans un seul souffle, le fil de leur vie commune alors que son épouse l’a quittée au terme d’une maladie.

A collection of verse from the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia.

Mothers of the 1950s were wasp-waisted, dutiful, serene, and tied to the kitchen with apron strings. Or so we thought. This collection of searing and startling poetry and prose unties the stereotype and reveals women who were strong, wild, talented, wise, mad, creative, desperate, angry, courageous, bitter, tenacious, reckless and beautiful, sometimes all at once. The contributors include multi-award-winning poets, novelists, and essayists, as well as compelling new literary voices.

Shortlisted for the 2005 Atlantic Poetry Prize, the 2005 Dartmouth Book Award and the 2005 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry

Undone is a cornucopia of passionate poems arranged into three sections. “Forgotten” has mostly to do with the aftermath of a heart-rending breakup; “Kindred” features poems on fellow artists in poetry, music and painting (ranging from Georgia O’Keeffe to Snoopy, beagle-novelist); in “Apprentice,” leaving is transformed into celebration, poem after poem about fierce loving of a world that we will have to leave. In these hard-hitting, highly personal poems, lamentation is a key note. Crushing loneliness weighs heavily on the spirit. But Sue Goyette has ways of sharing pain with a compensating lift: wonderful flights of metaphor, language charged with verbal energy. “Isn’t that our job,” she asks, “to coax out the light in the story?” It’s a job she takes to heart and performs brilliantly.

The poems in Undone have the amplitude proper to “watching wide” – a discipline good for seeing shooting stars and, as this book illustrates, all other kinds of light in a darkness palpable but never enveloping, not when probed so truly and sung so beautifully.

If I had to do it again, I’d place a stethoscope on the heart of us
Sooner. I’d prescribe Neruda, not the despair but the slow blossom of 20 kisses.

Goodbye, goodbye to the slippery duvet of this bed. The cold floor
of awake and how hope can have insomnia, spend the whole night wishing.

Heartbreak is a geological occurrence.

from “A Version of Courage”

Shortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Part roving eye, part devotion, you wander hotel corridors, entering rooms not quite yours, trying on clothes, blankets, skins. Arguing with the body's limits and its trickery, you are always in disguise. Sometimes you're Leda; sometimes the swan. The rooms are haunted with gendered injuries of the past . . . but messengers arrive to guide you. In this stunning debut collection by Ali Blythe, every poem is unerringly built with hatches and escapes. Every line shimmers with life and shivers with fleeting materials. Someone or something is always leaving. The early poems, almost claustrophobic in their double vision, gradually give way to poems of aching beauty, erotically charged by the myth of completeness. Ultimately, whether you emerge or disappear, you are transformed.

Winner of the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award (East Coast Literary Awards)

Chekhov’s work and life fuse with a daughter’s caring for her dying mother in this powerful debut.

Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths is a book-length series of poems written from the perspective of a daughter who reads Chekhov obsessively while spending a spring and summer caring for her mother, who is dying from pulmonary fibrosis. Through the prism of the relationships in Chekhov’s work and life an honest, intimate, and even occasionally humorous portrayal of the energy we put into each other’s lives through deterioration and suffering. A prismatic, memorable debut

…In the early

editions of Chekhov’s letters, his editors removed
anything that might stain his image or the image
of Russia. An ellipsis stands in for vulgar language,
deleterious remarks, and the references to masturbation
he used, like little brooks across the page, but as far as I know,
no one made confetti of his personal life.

If it were up to me, I’d prefer to talk today. To ask
my mother questions, finish half-told stories.

—from “Yellow”

The hunt over; the kill complete / limping towards perfection, padding / about the room, thorns in her thumbs / Hermes crawling on all fours - / That was the last I saw of Hilda. What is it to remember a life, to relive it, to mythologize it? Things that were said or not said haunt us for a lifetime. In Translating Air Kath MacLean imagines conversations between the modernist poet H.D. and Sigmund Freud during the poet's sessions with him in 1933 to 1934 and the dialogues that continued long afterwards in H.D.'s own mind. Shadowed by uncertainty and memory lapses or blinded by flashes of profound truth, readers are transported to a world of myth, continuity, and human connection. H.D.'s palimpsest account of herself as girl and woman, writer and Imagist, and psychic and spiritualist is engaging and elastic as it pulls readers into a space where time is both endless and sure. Questioning her sanity and a world gone mad with war, H.D.'s personal accounts help us understand what it means to love deeply, to feel passionately, and to think beyond the limits of our individual consciousness. MacLean demystifies and humanizes one of the most misunderstood modernist writers in this stunning collection. Translating Air takes us on a remarkable journey into the known and unknown and allows readers to experience one remarkable woman's struggle to get it right, to live life with dignity, hope, wisdom, and the courage to have no regrets.

Le doute apparaît ici comme un antidote à la folie meurtrière de ceux qui imposent leurs certitudes. Un certain dieu semble avoir la vie dure et s’ingénier, à travers ses prétendus représentants, à rendre l’existence des hommes tout à fait impossible. Devant la montée des intégrismes, force est de constater que l’intolérance religieuse n’est pas plus morte que ses dieux.