Margaret Atwood’s Paper Boat (October) is a career-spanning collection from one of the most revered poets and storytellers of our age. Chambersonic (September), by Oana Avasilichioaei, imagines the book as an acoustic chamber, its pages populated with an ensemble of players who breathe together, enacting translations between instruments and materials. And Manahil Bandukwala's second collection of poems, Heliotropia (September), is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval.

I Hate Parties (September), by Jes Battis, guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives, offering the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary, to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code. Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s Bad Weather Mammals (September) navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. And in Death of Persephone (September), award-winning poet Yvonne Blomer displaces the myth of young Persephone in Hades’ violent underworld, challenging modern concepts of gods and humanity.

Hard Electric (September) is Michael Blouin's third book of poetry, a road-tripping, bridge-burning collection of the author's hard-won and soft-edged reflections that seem to stutter-step towards resolution while tumbling down a decided slant towards disaster. Without Beginning or End (September) is Jacqueline Bourque’s final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis. And weaving together a modern retelling of Roman Empress Agrippina the Elder, a künstlerroman-inspired exploration of French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, and the contemporary portrait of an unhappily married mother, Norah Bowman’s My Eyes Are Fuses (September) is a bold exploration of tensions between freedom of art and the constraints of gender.

Alice Burdick's first collection of new poems since 2018, Ox Lost, Snow Deep (October) will alter your ways of thinking and reading. DADDY (October), by Jake Byrne, is a powerful look at patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and queer desire that seeks an unravelling of systems of control to reclaim vulnerability. And, written in the midst of wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle (October) extends award-winning poet Stephen Collis’s investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering.

A powerful and emotional poetry collection, The Liturgy of Savage No. 82 (September) explores the realities facing Indigenous women in Canada and the emotional impact of homelessness, intergenerational trauma and systemic racism, all through a feminist lens, as Maya Cousineau Mollen considers the implications of femininity and identity in relation to the unceded land of her people. The spirit of the interrobang, a punctuation mark merging the questioning and the exclamatory, informs Mary Dalton's compelling investigations of home and identity in Interrobang (October), extraordinary poems of aging; of despised plants once revered; of rites and sites of community abandoned. And award-winning Quebec writer Carole David’s The Double Feature of the Murdered Woman (September)—translated by Donald Winkler—could be the written record of her conversations with ghosts, and is a return to the crime scene, a renewal of vows, face to face with a haunting past: that of Italy, and the blood drenched story of women.

The poems in Rosanna Deerchild’s She Falls Again (October) are a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self. South Side of a Kinless River (September) is a nuanced, relational, and community-minded new book from Marilyn Dumont, one of Canada's preeminent poets. And Post-Mortem of the Event (September) is a cyclical archive that twists back to recorded readings of Klara du Plessis’s earlier Hell Light Flesh and leans forward to invoke a still unwritten manuscript.

A site-specific engagement with the ecosystem of Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island), Conversations with the Kagawong River (October), by sophie anne edwards, raises the possibility of collaboration with the more-than-human. cop city swagger (September) conducts a threat assessment of the police, spanning from 2019 to 2023 and grounded in Mercedes Eng’s deep connections to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods. And Permission to Settle (September), by Holly Flauto, fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler.

The Sky Above (September), by Marty Gervais, is an engaging book that follows a long and colourful career of an award-winning poet, journalist and photographer intent upon spinning stories, whether they be as momentous as meeting up with Mother Teresa in the basement of a Detroit church or as ordinary as driving through winter storms to watch his sons play hockey. The Flesh of Ice (September), by Garry Gottfriedson, is a searingly honest and deeply heartfelt collection, dedicated to those who attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School and residential schools in Canada. And “What was there to do but to play music?” Thus begins the first and title poem of Matthew Gwathmey's Family Band (September), and what follows describes becoming a family of seven and what happens up until the moment that the band decides to break apart, and everyone chooses to pursue their respective solo careers.

Boundary Territory (October), by Renée Harper, finds its locus in British Columbia’s sparsely populated interior valleys—on Greyhound buses, in motel rooms paid for by social services, and in the unsettled body of its speaker. In Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead (October), Erina Harris works with Victorianism, fairy tales, children’s literature, mythology and feminist literary history to ask important questions of gender, of queerness, of misogyny and of the role of art in social change. And with Attic Rain (September), her debut poetry collection, Calgary based poet and writer Samantha Jones puts obsessive-compulsive disorder centre stage.

from time to new (September), by Lydia Kwa, is a collection of poems that weaves themes of alienation and reconciliation between the past and the present. Grace Kwan is ruthless and nimble, guiding us through the recesses of body and roadside space in The Sacred Heart Motel (October). And situated at the moment when thought becomes image, lettuce lettuce please go bad (May), by Tiziana La Melia, expands on the author’s personal history of familial migration and agrarian labour—picking, pruning, grafting, tending, planting—entangled in issues of colonization, land manipulation, ownership, extraction, and food production.

Becoming the Harvest (October), by Pauline Le Bel, invites the reader to contemplate the fierce transformative initiations of aging and death. Molecular Cathedral (September) is the first ever selection of the extraordinary poems of John Lent, renowned Okanagan-based writing instructor and poet, edited by Jake Kennedy. And The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet (September), by Irene Marques, is a collection of poems that reveal an all-consuming yearning: the desire to find a language that can tell the most about our existence.

Victoria Mbabazi’s poems in The Siren in The Twelfth House (September) are siren songs, reclaiming love from pain, and rediscovering joy through the destruction and eventual rebuilding of astrological houses. In Toxemia (October), an alchemy of anger and love, history and memoir, Christine McNair delves into various forms of toxicity in the body—from the effects of two life-threatening preeclampsia diagnoses to chronic illness, sexism in medicine, and the toll of societal expectations. And Great Silent Ballad (September), beloved lyric poet A.F. Moritz’s twenty-second volume of poetry, forwards in visionary terms the assertion that poetry, a primordial reality, is in the current moment both the equal of, and the antidote to, the rest of present-day civilization and its suicidal nature.

For bpNichol’s 80th birthday comes some lines of poetry (September), edited by derek beaulieu and Gregory Betts, a selection of 80 pieces from his 1980s notebooks, an astounding trove of never-before-seen work. Lambda Literary Fellow jaz papadopoulos offers a poetically critical look at how sexual assault trials impact survivors in I Feel That Way Too (September). Written in the aftermath to her husband’s death, Molly Peacock’s The Widow’s Crayon Box (November) is a book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colours in loss and rejuvenation.

Craig Francis Power’s Total Party Kill (September) explores addiction, trauma, poverty, and the journey toward recovery and spirituality through the vernacular and iconography of the popular roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. A. Jamali Rad’s No Signal No Noise (October) is a playful poetic hybrid, sitting somewhere between philosophical treatise and experimental novel. And in Baby Cerberus (October), Natasha Ramoutar creates a speculative space where we think about the world we want to live in, with room for play, and where we think about kinship and how we care for one another.

Harold Rhenisch’s poems balance the settler and Indigenous experiences of land and water in the Pacific Northwest in The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle (September). The sky’s the limit in the funny and sad head-in-the-clouds poems in Stuart Ross’s The Sky is a Sky in the Sky (September). Part exposé, part memoir, all heart—critically-acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Ruth’s poetry debut This Report is Strictly Confidential (September) is an act of love and commemoration, inspired by real life events that have left a lasting imprint on generations of family.

In A Tension of Leaves and Binding (October), by Renée M. Sgroi, is an exploratory journey that examines our relationship to the natural world through the lens of a single garden. With echolalia echolalia (October), writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Jane Shi expresses a deep belief in one's chosen family, love and justice. Expansive and moving, Melanie Siebert’s Signal Infinities (August) courses with the intelligences of the body, its music and limits, in search of more enlivening, ethical relationships with each other and the earth.

In Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock (November), Jaspreet Singh deepens his exploration of climate, language, migration, decolonization, and the Anthropocene with an energy both acrobatic and intimate. Using experimental hybrid poetry, Invisible Lives (July), by Cristelle Smith, breaks generational silence in lyric resonance, reflecting on a childhood rife with upheaval and poverty, the invisibility of single motherhood, and the silence of domestic violence. And Inherent (October), by Kevin Stebner, is a collection of concrete poems that uses familiar poetic tools to reduce words and letters and characters to their structural components, celebrating the shapes we’re used to taking for granted.

Selected from Ricardo Sternberg's four collections, along with astonishing new poems, One River (September) is a major event. Escaping from the evils of the modern world into the vivid colours of a bird’s plumage, Michael Trussler’s 10:10 (October) plunges into the mystery and horror of living at the beginning of the Anthropocene. And in Island (October), Douglas Walbourne-Gough expands upon issues of identity and history that he introduced in Crow Gulch, offering a deeply personal and equally beautiful exploration of Mi'kmaw and Newfoundland identity.

Rich with vibrant language and intensity, poems sizzling in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham’s Water Quality (September) calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner. Inspired by Liz Worth’s professional tarot reading, the poems in Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea (October) explore the thin veil between them and suggest it barely exists at all. And Canadian poet David Zieroth’s creative journey, still unfolding after more than 50 years, comes into brilliant focus in the revelatory retrospective first here and then far (October).