Brick Books

Kate Cayley bio

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 orbitin …

Lyric poems of tense clarity.

Marlene Cookshaw is a Cheshire cat of a poet whose naturally realized details illuminate a shifting wholeness on the "singing edge" between dream and waking. Hers is a quilted language at once covering and revealing our fascinating ordinariness. The long poem "In The Swim" subtly captures the desperate and humourous beauty of a seemingly plain life …

Why I Haven't Written takes Phil Hall back to Ontario roots in family immediate and extended, and on again into the larger world. In his beautifully-controlled poems, he catches much of a life in nodes of consequence-often painful for the poet, but not for the reader. The life may have seemed ill-fitting to the one who blundered or was buffeted thr …

Complex, intricately textured and polyphonic, this sequence of five long poems enacts the fulfilment of poetry and philosophy in one another. "In Schiller's terms, it is the elegiac longing for unity of soul and world, here expressed in some of the most beautiful poetry of 1986." -- Ronald B. Hatch, University of Toronto Quarterly

In The Woman Downstairs, eloquence joins intimately with an attentive and hungry eye. Julie Bruck explores the accidents and acquaintances of life, its small coincidences and occurrences, its unexpected meetings. With a passionate distance, Bruck blends the outside observer's cool embrace with a desire to know intensely life's eccentric smallnesses …

Adopting woodshedding — a jazz term for arduous, solitary rehearsal — as her writing practice, Venart has honed both her craft and a seeing heart.

Whatever their subject?the unwinding of lovers, childhood as the foundation of being, the metaphorical life of everyday objects and events?S.E. Venart's poems show us a kind of courage that is quotid …

Reading Julie Berry's poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. "like marie d'oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this," Berry writes in "Touching Ground.""Like this" is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainso …