New Star Books

The Adam's River sockeye run is one of the natural wonders of the world. Every October, the river turns red as hundreds of thousands of mature, scarlet—humped sockeye salmon return from the Pacific Ocean to spawn and die in the same gravel beds where they hatched four years earlier.

Adam's River tells the story of the salmon's epic journey far out …

Fascinated by the ligature –– a joining of two letters in a single word –– Donato Mancini chose, logically, to conjure one up in the title of his second book of concrete poetry, Æthel. "Although," as Mancini remarks parenthetically, "it might be the name of the crabby old blue–rinse who calls the police if you cross her lawn."

Æthel, the …

"Don't gaze into the abyss," George Stanley states in his new book. "Gaze out."

And this is what the reader receives from Stanley's eighth book, After Desire: the observations of a poet, and a consciousness, as they arrive together at old age. Not what the poet is thinking ––– although we get to watch him thinking too ––– but what he see …

Ken Collier draws upon the world'system theory developed by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein to shed light on the welfare state and its apparent demise. The welfare state, Collier argues, grew up in the heyday of the anti'state to meet the needs of both capital and labour. The role of the state is changing, and the nation'state itself is he …

The world's largest manufacturer of the two–stroke engine may seem like an unusual jumping–off point for poetry. But Peter Culley's second book about his hometown Nanaimo stems from his realization that there is not an hour of his waking existence when he cannot somewhere hear a leaf blower, a lawn mower or another piece of Briggs & Stratton– …

British Columbia — the last temperate part of the New World to be mapped — has long conjured up images of Utopia, a word that comes from the Greek "no place". Indeed, utopian experiments started springing up soon after the first European explorers passed through.

In All Possible Worlds, Justine Brown explores the attraction BC holds for utopian …