New Generation of Canadian Poets

Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie’s been shed bore, her first trade poetry collection, follows years of a small voice gaining in strength, and in volume, through so much subtle activity and quiet disconnect that by the time she was noticed, she was already everywhere, and already a confident voice. In a poetry built on the strength of play, Pirie’s writi …

Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize! Winner of the 2010 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry! Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall's bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays b …

Steve McOrmond’s unflinching take on contemporary life, with its saturnine candour and ironic focus, may remind readers of the anti-poetry of Europeans like Zbigniew Herbert: intense, humanistic and deeply sceptical of inflationary gestures or stagy rhetoric. Shedding illusions, but equally refusing the consolations of despair, McOrmond’s well- …

Campfire Radio Rhapsody is Windsor poet Robert Earl Stewart’s follow-up to his acclaimed, Lampert Award–nominated debut, Something Burned Along the Southern Border. The humour that many readers found in that first collection takes a turn for the darker here, but the poems are livelier than ever. Campfire Radio Rhapsody features shadowy trains, …

The Floating Life, Moez Surani's second collection of poetry, takes the reader on a dizzying tour of the world, stopping in Cairo, Muju, Madrid and Cape Breton. Interwoven through these evocative glimpses of places and the people that live in them are poems exploring relationships, reflecting on identity and considering the passing of time.

The Hard Return is a broken list of metaphors for the human heart. Or it’s a troubling elegy for a disposable world. Alternating between loving descriptions of 21st century excess and awkward social situations, Marcus McCann’s poems are sincere and ironic, sad and half-joking, often in the same instant.

Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry! Shifting focus from the limits of the telescope to the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of ch …

The Id Kid is a book about appetites. Linda Besner’s addiction to linguistic play leads to uncommonly beautiful poems: by turns sassy and sumptuous, sparkling with mischief, and marked by deep feeling. There seems little Besner won’t try. Crammed with tall tales, off-colour jokes and cockamamie theories, omnivorousness is her only rule as thoug …