New Generation of Canadian Poets

Shortlisted for the 2008 Relit Award for PoetryMarita Dachsel's debut collection is a visceral exploration of the moments of life that stand out in the pages of a family album and the intervals of memory.She playfully and poignantly documents first crushes, first times, weddings and trips across town, across water, and across continents. Dachsel pe …

Filtered through insomnia and distress signals, Amphetamine Heart pumps out an atonal pulse over flashes of lowered inhibitions. Channelling punk and heavy metal influences, this poetry collection's soundtrack is set to a backdrop of boozecans and broken glass. Written over a three-year period, these poems are linked by discomfort and decay, freque …

Equally crude and charming, locker-room macho and sensitive, these poems are always singularly marked by formal ingenuity and stylistic élan. A deeply felt and original collection, this work understands that (as its epigraph, in the words of Diderot, insists) “there is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest te …

Emily McGiffin

There are many journeys encompassed in the pages of this mature and well-crafted first collection; literal travels to different parts of the world, to Europe and Africa, are the outward manifestation of the inward quest, the asking of the old but still essential questions: What is real? What is true? What is honourable? What is right? …

Bloom is the electrifying debut collection from one of our best emerging poets. If a studio technician could "remix" poems by modern and contemporary poets so they retold the story of the Manhattan Project from the viewpoint of Louis Slotin, simultaneously putting Robert Lowell in whispered conversation with Ted Hughes, as vocalized by a Canadian p …

Without you, I have taken to drawing maps on the backs of photographs. On the coast in a raincoat your smile has been dented by a lake, the fluting arms of rivers have made your shoulders look like the bark of birches. from "Cartographer"

In Cartography and Walking, Adam Dickinson charts his own listening — an acute listening of eye and ear, a lis …

Shortlisted for the Manitoba Book Awards in the category of Most Promising Writer! Talented newcomer Jonathan Ball's Clockfire is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce – plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience, and the laws of physics are flagrantly v …

With sublime poetic insight, Wendy McGrath takes us on a tour of everyday objects and events that celebrates what many of us take for granted. A truck-stop diner is obliquely referenced to the subject of Vincent van Gogh's The Night Cafe. A refracted glimpse of a typical suburban couple is transmuted into a modern-day version of a wedding portrait …