John B. Lee

Burgundy is more than a place on the map of France. It is also a place which inspires and provokes the senses, both physical and spiritual...wine, food, light, history, memories, churches, people and much more. From its Gaulish past through the Roman period, from the period of the monastic orders through to the ascendancy of the Dukes of Burgundy a …

Everything lives and everything dies. As those we love pass on, we all come to be Dressed in Dead Uncles.

John B. Lee negotiates our interactions with life and death with poems that are both deeply emotional and reflectively humorous. Lee’s poetry covers a variety of topics through which he expresses his shifting notions of what is meant by birth, …

With the publication of Lee’s memoir of growing up on a farm insouthwestern Ontario, Black Moss launched itsSettlements series. This is a series of books in which Canadian artists reflect onthe land, the neighbourhood and the “place” in their lives; thereby telling thestory of this country.

Lee is:" a poet, not afarmer, though I was born a f …

The hired hand of these poems was a stupid man. Nowadays he would be known as one of the employable retarded. Tom was lucky enough to find work and a home with the family of John B. Lee, people who understood him. And John B. Lee was lucky to have his whole life coloured by the presence of an apparently limited man who turns out to have been a poem …

In the Terrible Weather of Guns is a book of poems and short prose pieces that tell the story of the life and times of Irish immigrant, Joseph Willcocks. Arriving in Upper Canada penniless in 1800, he was by turns a personal secretary, sheriff of the Home District, and publisher of the first political newspaper in Upper Canada. He was an elected re …

In Left HandHorses, acclaimed poetJohn B. Lee offers thereader “a clear viewinto the deep wells ofthe interior life of an individual writer.”

Lee, one of Canada’s most successful andimportant poets, has redefined the autobiographicalwriting genre. Beyond a mere personal account ofthe author’s life, Left Hand Horses, provides essentialinforma …

Poems for the Pornographer’s Daughter, explores all aspects of theerotic using both poetry and prose. His writing movesbetween a child’s innocence, the exploration and desire ofadolescence, and adult meditations on sexuality. Lee examines the experiences,desires, curiosity and society that shape an individual’ssexual character.

Rediscovered Sheep takes its origin generations ago when an ancestor of John B. Lee began to raise Lincoln sheep in Ontario. John B. may never take up his inheritance as Master of the Flock, but his understanding of sheep husbandry is woven into the woolly fabric of his work. The first poems in Rediscovered Sheep are about real modern-day shepherds …

The Place That We Keep After Leaving is a sequel to the award-winning book, How Beautiful We Are. In keeping with the theme of How Beautiful We Are, The Place That We Keep After Leaving continues a poet's exploration of life on the shores of Lake Erie.

A long poem dramatizing the clash in visions of the land which occurs when a white settler builds on a sacred Iroquois site.

Totally Unused Heart is the first book in the second half of internationallyacclaimed,award-winning Canadian poet John B. Lee’s writing life.It brings together poems written over a period of two years, dealning with the“ increasing complexity of concern arising from the fact that I’vebeen on the earth for 50 years.”

The Abbey of Gethsemani is one of the most famous monasteries in the world. In this new Black Moss anthology, poet John B. Lee has pulled together a remarkable collection of writing about the Abbey by authors who have stayed there and by monks who have lived there. Against the backdrop of this writing is the presence of the late poet and philosophe …

The War of 1812 as it occurred in the western districts of Upper Canada represents the most violent conflict ever fought on North American soil prior to the American civil war. Published on the 200th anniversary of the invasion of Canada, Black Moss Press anthology An Unfinished War edited by Canada’s foremost anthologist John B. Lee brings toget …

Variations on Herb is the latest in a lengthening series of books that emanate from the south-western Ontario farm of John B. Lee's childhood. The focus of Variations is Herb Lee, John B's grandfather (and an absolutely unforgettable curmudgeon) but the background of rural Ontario is also made palpable entirely without indulgent explanation. This g …

This new book from the winner of the 1992 Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award shows John B. Lee’s work at its finest. An accessible book, When Shaving Seems Like Suicide juxtaposes the human and animal worlds, setting images of naivete and wonder against images of violence and change.

In September 1975 at the age of twenty-three Canada’s most prolific poet John B. Lee joined a teachers’ pickup hockey team called The Skatin’ Scolors. By the time he was in his mid-forties Lee was playing hockey seven times a week, sometimes twice a day and sometimes all day outdoors with his two young sons. Although he no longer plays summer …