New Generation of Canadian Poets

Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie's been shed bore, her first trade poetry collection, follows years of a small voice gaining in strength, and in volume, through so much subtle activity and quiet disconnect that by the time she was noticed, she was already everywhere, and already a confident voice. In a poetry built on the strength of play, Pirie's writing moves at the speed of sound, slipping up against silence.

Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize

Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare thetricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up h …

Poems that occupy the difficult territory of contemporary crisis with great candour and trenchant wit.

Steve McOrmond's unflinching take on contemporary life, with its saturnine candour and ironic focus, may remind readers of the anti-poetry of Europeans like Zbigniew Herbert: intense, humanistic and deeply sceptical of inflationary gestures or stagy rhetoric. Shedding illusions, but equally refusing the consolations of despair, McOrmond's well-tempered satire is carried home on its own crisp mus …

Campfire Radio Rhapsody is Windsor poet Robert Earl Stewart's follow-up to his acclaimed, Lampert AwardÐnominated debut, Something Burned Along the Southern Border. The humour that many readers found in that first collection takes a turn for the darker here, but the poems are livelier than ever. Campfire Radio Rhapsody features shadowy trains, a cab-driving opera singer, a multi-armed mollusk, and a mass exodus of clowns. From the epic 'The Country Reporter' (Stewart edits a small-town newspape …

Floating Life, Moez Surani's second collection of poetry, takes the reader on a dizzying tour of the world, stopping in Cairo, Muju, Madrid and Cape Breton. Interwoven through these evocative glimpses of places and the people that live in them are poems exploring relationships, reflecting on identity and considering the passing of time.

The Hard Return is a broken list of metaphors for the human heart. Or it’s a troubling elegy for a disposable world. Alternating between loving descriptions of 21st century excess and awkward social situations, Marcus McCann’s poems are sincere and ironic, sad and half-joking, often in the same instant.

Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.

The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic – how the mind contains both – and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to …

The Id Kid is a book about appetites. Linda Besner’s addiction to linguistic play leads to uncommonly beautiful poems: by turns sassy and sumptuous, sparkling with mischief, and marked by deep feeling. There seems little Besner won’t try. Crammed with tall tales, off-colour jokes and cockamamie theories, omnivorousness is her only rule as though she couldn’t bear to exclude anything or anyone. And the result—imaginatively abundant and formally audacious—is one of the most arresting poe …