Brick Books

Physical and fiercely lyric, Helen Humphreys' Anthem is a litany of want. A song of poverty and of desire, of the reach forward and the relentless backward glance. With stark images and subtle, tensile strength, her poems touch that rare interval between presence and absence, echo and answer, between wall and window and sky-that gap in which we liv …

Verve, energy, wit, piquance and pure linguistic excitement: Mia Anderson's poetry is a whole cookbook of poetic experiences. Anderson is always ready to take big risks, and her work shows her love of life in its manyness and accident, as well as a delight in the intricate prism of language. Appetite includes the long poem sequence "The Saugeen Son …

Granddaughters, asters, Medea cakes, para pom tandle, Mrs. Roker raking, Caraquet, angelic recurrence, Neruda, zupzupzup, the high bush cranberries, the Somme, a waterfall in Iceland that cries by the thousandsful, the Strawberry Shaman and the Japonica Bushelful Bountiful Lady: you would never mistake a Colleen Thibaudeau wordscape for any other. …

No postmodern gimmickry, no tricks except all the old ones that every good poet must learn: these lucid, evocative poems put the reader so clearly in the picture that you taste the blackberries of your childhood, shiver at the chill of rainwater down your neck in a western forest, or rake the dust from your hair as you trudge home from the Trojan W …

Don Kerr's fifth poetry collection is a verbal joyride, an exuberant celebration of a book: a celebration of mountains and plains, of growing up and of being young, of being alive in the present moment and absorbing the feel of the road through the palms of your hands on the wheel. Autodidactic represents an erotics of the everyday, a tribute to pl …

Baby Grand, a slim volume big as it needs to be (and grows in the mind) appeared in 1979, when Brick Books was a chapbook press. Taut, elegant poems. Grab, hold on: you're blessed.

Being in love and/or with someone; being alone-the poems in Bearings are arranged in the stressful rhythm of alternation between these intense states. Loss refines the vision. For Rhonda Batchelor's poetry that means a gain which shows, for example, in occasional tender lyrics about experiences not governed by love and in the tang of the west coast …

By the author of Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour (a "critical collage") and Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature Of Treaty 9 (winner of the 1995 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Criticism of Canadian Literature) - nine passionate essays on the writing of seven important contemporary Canadian writers: George Bowering, Leonard Cohen, Chris …