Amber Dawn's latest poetry collection, Buzzkill Clamshell (March), flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power. Python Love (February), by Shannon Arntfield, weaves together experiences of childhood abuse, birth trauma, and recovery from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother. And confessional, candid, and insightful, Chris Bailey’s Forecast: Pretty Bleak (March) looks at life in rural PEI with poems exploring climate change, work, family, love, and the idea that sometimes all you’ve got is hope for better weather and favourable winds tomorrow.

Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird’s When Whales Went Back to the Water (February) creates a reverent container for a broken world. Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two portraits in the debut collection No One Knows Us There (April), the first being that of the caregiving granddaughter navigating the painful realities of palliative care, and the second that of a woman a decade older, looking back on her younger self, honouring loss and turning it into healing. And sustained by icicles on the eaves, neglected violets, and the ethereal presence of departed loved ones, the poems in Nina Berkhout’s The Great Wake (April) help make sense of the sorrows and joys of ordinary life.

In their second poetry collection, Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells Part 1: Scraping Lungs Like Hide (April), Tawahum Bige explores belonging and voice of a Two-Spirit Dene youth. Writing in his signature poetics in The Xenotext: Book 2 (June), Christian Bök speculates that, buried within the biochemistry of Life itself, there really does exist an innate beauty, if not a hidden poetry—a literal message that we might read, if we deign to seek it. An exploration of Walter Borden's creative power, Africadian Mi'kmaq Songs in the Key of The Universal Anthem (January) lays bare the resiliency of the author's tender spirit. And between two poles, between sea, river, lake, emotion, light and shadow, the bodies of man and woman, the poems in Moonroads (February), by Connie T. Braun, comprise a map of longing and belonging, travelling ancestral roads and moonroads to the present moment, and toward the last compass point of the spiritual wayfarer.

The long-awaited collection by much-loved dub poet Klyde Broox, Echo-Mirror (February) is a tour of his poetry over the decades. In Michael Chang's latest Things a Bright Boy Can Do (May), all the world's a vaudeville stage, and this poet is its jester with a knife. Set in a vibrant yet ragged coastal city, Kingdom of the Clock (April), by Daniel Cowper, is a verse novel whose interwoven storylines begin with one day’s dawn and end at the first light of the next—within the cycles of that single day, the lives of the city’s inhabitants unfold. And more than descriptors, the words in The Seated Woman (March), by Clémence Dumas-Côté, translated by E. S. Taillon, behave as commands or moves in a game.

Meandering through physical and philosophical materials—cement, memory, water, narrative, history, sand, light, concrete, and others’ voices—Daniela Elza’s SCAR/CITY (April) is a poetic call to action. Kim Fahner's The Pollination Field (April) is a foray into the literal and metaphorical world of bees, Fahner continuing with her poetic observation and documentation of how the human world impacts the environment, but also incorporates myth and feminism in her consideration of how women evolve over time. And for millennia humanity has looked upward and traced stories in the night sky, projecting our human wants and desires outward, but in Supergiants (April), Kyle Flemmer turns his gaze in the other direction, considering what our reach for the stars say about us.

Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More (March) re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Borrowing its title from a finance term—"the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists"—Shadow Price (April), by Farah Ghafoor, is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens. And "Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state." So begins Lorna Goodison's astonishing new translation of The Inferno (March), by Dante, a poet she once described as "uncompromising as an old testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder."

Bridget Huh’s debut collection is Fugue Body (March), a book in which the body becomes a site of inquiry: a compositional space of melody, counterpoint, and theme. Adam Haiun’s unsettling debut, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid (May), is the bildungsroman for a digital consciousness. What does the computer want from you? Reflecting on a dual upbringing in two villages, Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone), Jessica Hiemstra’s new collection Blood Root (March) delves into her relationship with home, interrogating questions of legacy, land, belonging, and the breathtaking intimacy of death.

The highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Aisha Sasha John is Total (March). Channeling influences as wide as Shakespeare and Anne Carson, Virgil and Carl Phillips, Devotional Forensics (March), by Joseph Kidney, takes full advantage of the liberties of language, playing with its boundaries. And one of the inaugural volumes of the Lyrik Poetry Series, honouring Canada’s foremost Mennonite poets, New & Selected Poems of Sarah Klassen (June), offers a generous selection of some of the best work, past and present, of Manitoba’s Sarah Klassen, who has published eight books of poetry in a long and distinguished career. The other books in the series are New & Selected Poems of David Waltner-Toews (March) and New & Selected Poems of John Weier (March).

Country Music (April), by Zane Koss, is a book about the stories the author listened to late at night around kitchen tables or campfires growing up in rural British Columbia. Emerging from a mind with a propensity for the otherworldly and an unsuitability for the worldly, A Bouquet of Glass (March), by Carol Krause, gathers the fragments of different realities into a vivid, piercing collection. And in her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms (May), award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather.

The driving impulse of Amy LeBlanc's new collection of poetry, I used to live here (April), is an examination of chronic illness, disability, and autoimmunity. Full of vivid imagery and deep, thoughtful reflections, Thomas Leduc’s Palpitations (May) is a tribute to that which makes us human—moments that palpitate with life, longing and change. i cut my tongue on a broken country (March), by Kyo Lee, is a debut poetry collection about reconciling with oneself and learning to love through a youthful, queer diasporic Korean lens.

Anchored by elegies for NASA’s Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, Elegy for Opportunity (April), by Natalie Lim, explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift’s cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Commonwealth (April), by D.A. Lockhart, is a profound lyrical meditation on the pre- and post-colonial migrations of the Lenape population throughout the American Midwest, from the watershed of Weli Sipu (the Ohio River) in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to Indiana and beyond. And Green (April), by Zachari Logan, is an exciting collection of ekphrastic poems accompanied by a compilation of green sketches via the lens of a queer poet and visual artist.

Jessi MacEachern’s Cut Side Down (April) is a textual collage, or a book feasting on books, the title a metaphor for the sensuous paper cut received when diving face first into the bookcase, and it means to call up the pleasure and pain of contact with so many literary personalities. At a time when binaristic and hierarchical relations are being readily interrogated, MA|DE—a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third—takes up a critique of the human-animal divide in their full-length debut, ZZOO (February). And Myth (April), the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds ("real" and "imaginary") unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future.

In a Cage of Sunlight (March) features the selected works of poet, singer-songwriter and essayist Joseph Maviglia, covering a period of 30 years of Maviglia’s work in different genres. What Shade of Brown (April), by John Brady McDonald, is a collection passionate poetry and prose exploring the experience of an Indigenous person who feels like a stranger in a strange land, not quite accepted because of his light skin but also undermined by a settler-colonial society. And the interplay between photography, nature and poetic form is on full display in Wendy McGrath's and Danny Miles' collaborative new work The Beauty of Vultures (April).

Paul Moorehead’s Green (April) makes unique poetic use of scientific ideas, considering the consequences, both lived and artistic, of existing in a world of wonders. A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel (March), by Tolu Oloruntoba, is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world. And both a tender tribute to a beloved grandson and an elegy for coming of age in our modern, online society, Encrypted (May), by award-winner Arleen Paré, is an honest and illuminating narrative of a life arrested and a home haunted by grief.

The Sweet Spot (May), by Chiedza Pasipanodya, is a journey beyond survival and thrivance, a place of being, of calm, of assurance, trust, and balance. The Problem with Having a Body (April) unites Jessica Popeski's preoccupations with intersectional ecofeminist poetics and the genetic inheritance of fractured, grandmaternal generational lines. And rooted in Omar Ramadan’s experiences as a son of Lebanese immigrants, and set in Canada, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, the poems in This Sweet Rupture (March) bring together intergenerational exchanges and present-day realities, from sweetened tea preparations to conversations about conflict zones to investigations of Canadian blizzards.

The poems in Taslīm: We are the Prophets (April), by Carolyn Ramzy—a Coptic (Egyptian Christian Orthodox) daughter of immigrants—depict, explore, and question the burden of Taslim ("Commandments") on Coptic girls. A debut poetry collection, both lyrical and surprisingly playful, Walking Upstream (April), by Lloyd Ratzlaff, is about overcoming a harsh evangelical upbringing and seeking consolation from the beauty of the natural world. And Sprocket (January) is a series of breathless prose-poems capturing poet Al Rempel's childhood adventures spent roaming free in the idyllic setting of Arnold, BC, a small farming community tucked into the corner of Vedder Mountain, near the US border.

Speech Dries Here on the Tongue (April) is an anthology of poetry by Canadian authors exploring the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health, edited by Rasiqra Revulva, Amanda Shankland and Hollay Ghadery. Self-referentiality, mashups of the erudite and the profane, allusions to other arts and sciences, the insertion and bending of biographical and historical facts, problematic snippets of philosophy and literary theory, quotes, and bastardizations, deploying non- or a-poetical language to challenge notions of how a poem should work, sampling, and off-kilter humour work together to update Stan Rogal’s playlist for a present-day audience in More Songs the Radio Won’t Play (March). And antibody (March), by Rebecca Salazar, is a protest, a whisper network, a reclamation of agency, and a ritual for building a survivable world.

Woven together from fragments collected in notebooks and dream journals over two decades of introspection, Kelly Shepherd’s Dog and Moon  (March) inhabits a space of sleeplessness, enveloped in the darkness of night. a body more tolerable (March), by jaye simpson, is a collection of powerful and haunting poems full of mythos, fairy tales, allusion, and magic. In a genre-defying blend of poetry and story, Ojibway and Mohawk Elder Dawn Smoke shares all that lives within her heart, mind, and soul with Seeds Are For Sharing: Reclaiming Spirit (May), with illustrations from Jackie Traverse. And the poems in Wellwater (April), Karen Solie’s sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of “value,” addressing housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses.

A captivating search through one family's history, All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain (April), by Sarain Frank Soonias, is a stunning examination of intergenerational trauma and its effect on Indigenous voices. Vulnerable, eloquent, compassionate, and enduring, Born Sacred (April) is an in-time reflection honouring the shared histories of Indigenous Peoples of North America and of the people in Palestine, Smokii Sumac offering this collection as a small piece of life dedicated to Palestinians and resounds the collective call for solidarity in a shared liberation. And Trillium Book Award-winner Nick Thran explores the companionship of wistful music in his fourth collection, Existing Music (April).

The poems in Alice Turski's ravenous and playful Stolen Plums (March) explore the ways we consume and are consumed by those we love and the histories they embody. Bonememory (April) confronts the indelible marks left by immigration, the Holocaust, Canadian settler-colonialism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, amid these various upheavals, Anna Veprinska finding herself within her own body, facing chronic illness and navigating disability. And White Lily (April) is John Emil Vincent’s love note to Louise Glück and Laurie Anderson, two artists inspired and bedevilled by white lilies.

The poems in Goalie (April), by Ben von Jagow, follow our narrator’s journey as he progresses throughout his hockey career, from novice all the way to retirement. Taking its title from Ancient Greek, Tracy Wai de Boer’s Nostos (May) is a hero’s journey rooted in the quest for selfhood from elemental beginnings to an unknowable end. And Tom Wayman’s new collection, Out of the Ordinary (March), explores how such extraordinary developments can both arise from and affect the ordinary objects, environments and human relationships that surround us.

Drawing upon ecology, traditional knowledge, and sexuality, Re: Wild Her (April), by Shannon Webb-Campbell, is a personal and poetic awakening. The poems in James Yékú's second collection, A Phial of Passing Memories (May), offer shifting sceneries that record the everyday and chronicle vagrant seasons. And the slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran is “Woman, Life, Freedom,” encompassing hopes and ideals for all people everywhere, with the anthology Women Life Freedom (April), by Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom, echoing that cry.