Poetry is arguably more satisfying to write than novels. Building a poem, especially a good one, may take years (like a novel usually does) but the gratification in shaping that poem feels more immediate to me. During the many years when I was writing, This Report Is Strictly Confidential, I marinated in poems and inhaled too many outstanding collections to list here. Nothing is better for a writer of any form, in my opinion, than to spend time with other poets on the page. So, here’s a list of ten books that influenced my development and are also sure to engage readers. 

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The Family China, by Ann Shin

Internationally award-winning filmmaker and writer, Ann Shin knows how to tell a good story in any form. In this, her second book of poems, Shin looks at notions of belonging, self-definition and identity through a nostalgic lens she also seeks to disrupt. Here you’ll find family experiences of migration, loss and death explored through layers of time. A great example of how to honour family and culture while still challenging and re-imagining. 

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act normal, by nancy viva davis halifax

No other book on this list or perhaps in this country, comes closer to the subject inspiration of my debut collection, This Report Is Strictly Confidential. In act normal, the poet has on the page dismantled the hegemonic and oppressive notion of "normalcy" through work that looks at the institutionalization of children who are categorized as intellectually inferior. My aunt was one of those children and spent 30 years in a government run institution. act normal does what the best writing does: destabilizes or disrupts categories of meaning, so we might come to new ways of knowing and understanding each other. These are necessary and artfully crafted poems. I was happy to see act normal on the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Longlist.

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She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and Zong! by M. Nourbese Philip

I had the luck to study under this writer during my undergrad. I was introduced to the prize-winning poems in She Tries Her Tongue before I’d become a writer. (Find something to say, she advised when I confessed my desire to write. Live a little.) These unflinching poems address racism, colonialism and the relationship of language to power. They changed how I would read myself in the world, and how I would interpret and engage with words. Flash forward a few decades. Now we have Philip’s recent extended poem, Zong!—a book-length look at the murder of Africans on a slave ship, using words from an actual case report. Never forgetting Philip’s lessons to always look at the etymology of words, and to remember that language reflects the relations of ruling, I too used institutional reports as found poems/evidence to reframe notions of disability and difference. Rebellious, defiant, intense: M. Nourbese Philip, who also writes fiction and nonfiction, remains an inspiration. 

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Take the Compass, by Maureen Hynes

I’ve followed this award-winning poet since her first collection, which I discovered in 1996. Take the Compass is Hynes’ sixth book of poems and shows a writer in full command of her skill and talent. I love how these poems address the big and small of life with a clear-eyed intelligence. Hynes mines the quotidian and connects the everydayness of living to larger themes such as social and climate justice. She can be whimsical and surprising in delightful ways, making fresh imaginative leaps, but is always precise in her use of language. Maureen Hynes’ poetry is grounded in the material and political world it simultaneously resists. 

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Troubled, by RM Vaughan

This collection chronicles a sexual and romantic relationship that never should’ve happened, between a patient (the author) and his psychiatrist. When it was published, I happily provided an endorsement for this work. It remains a brave example of memoir-in-verse and of effectively shaping found poems. I had no idea how important this collection would become to me until I began writing, This Report Is Strictly Confidential. I can’t say it any better than I did on the book jacket: Troubled is a work of razor-sharp intelligence, with a nuanced understanding of power and desire. Vulnerable and dangerous, RM Vaughan shall hereafter be known as the King and Queen of having the last word. 

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This Wound is a World, by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Part memoir (part manifesto) from an utterly original queer Indigenous poet, Belcourt plays with form. With his much lauded first collection, this author, a Rhodes scholar named by the CBC as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, tears at the fabric of a broken world to expose openings and possibility. These poems are celebratory and radically rebellious. There is pain and pleasure, love and grief, but there is no space for erasure of self, culture or history in this decolonizing project. Reading Belcourt fundamentally alters both past and future.

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If I Write About My Father, by Sheila Stewart

This is the newest collection on this list, published in 2024, and the third from this poet. With each book Stewart moves into greater intimacy with herself and with her readers. Here, she examines father-daughter relationships (and the impact of her father’s Northern Irish Presbyterian background and his ministry within the United Church of Canada). Stewart asks important questions about daughters and fathers and faith. Because some of my poems take up the question of fatherhood—what it means in the context of ancestry and absence—I particularly enjoyed how Stewart unfathers herself within these poems, setting herself free.

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Nothing Will Save Your Life, by Nancy Jo Cullen

Cullen is a novelist, short story writer and poet with a wicked sense of humour and a wickedly pointed way with words. In this fourth collection, we are in the territory of motherhood, religion, pop culture, femininity and sex, all filtered through Cullen’s kaleidoscope of experience. She pulls no punches, but at the same time, can be tender. Cullen will simultaneously make you rage and weep as she tackles her subject matter, but somehow always manages to leave room for joy. In this work, there seems to me, an insistence on life amid despair or anger, that is vital for us all. 

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Personals, by Ian Williams

I’ve recommended this collection often. Williams’ inventiveness is profound. With the opening suite of poems, Rings, the author creates a new poetic form, one that carries on indefinitely. The novelist in me was initially drawn in by the multiple voices within Personals, but what holds me inside the work are the intimate experiences the poet illuminates, whether they be a struggle with infertility or the impact of institutionalized racism. As a poet-in-progress, there is so much to learn here about writing close-up experiences and connecting the personal to wider political contexts.

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Ghost Sick: a poetry of witness, by Emily Pohl-Weary

Written in response to a shooting in her Toronto neighbourhood, Pohl-Weary’s collection initially grabbed my attention because I too had been writing poems as a witness to tragedy, albeit a different sort of tragedy. Reading the collection, a picture emerges of a place and its people that no individual poem could provide. This author knows how to leave enough room inside an experience for readers to find their way around and emerge from reading with greater empathy. Pohl-Weary’s poems don’t shy away from nuance or complexity as she wrestles with her own implicated self in community. Best of all, Ghost Sick takes readers beyond the impact of the tragic moment that inspired it, into possibilities for social change and even, hope. 

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Learn more about This Report Is Strictly Confidential: 

Presented in four linked sections, this debut poetry collection from award winning writer Elizabeth Ruth offers readers rare glimpses into private worlds, revealing the life of the author’s aunt who lived for decades in a notorious government-run residential hospital, exploring the experience of critical illness, and addressing the biological father Elizabeth Ruth has never met. With fresh, inventive use of language, biting irony and an unflinching gaze upon the human condition, these intimate poems give voice to the things that can’t be said. This Report Is Strictly Confidential is an act of literary alchemy that carries all kinds of secrets out of the shadows and into the light, thereby transforming ugliness into beauty.