ISBN-10: 1-55192-777-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-551927-77-0
Price: $29.95
Pub Date: March 2005

Now being distributed by Tightrope Books

With this groundbreaking anthology, poets and teachers Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve set out to explore Canadian form poetry. The result is a thrilling collection of 175 poems, over 140 poets from the 18th century to the present day, and 20 distinct poetic forms (sonnets and ghazals, triolets and ballads, epigrams, pallindromes, blues and more) that will appeal to every poetry-lover as well as teachers and students of poetry.

Poets include Bliss Carman, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Dennis Lee, George Elliott Clarke, Alden Nowlan, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Molly Peacock, Lorna Crozier, Anne Simpson, Emile Nelligan, Adam Sol, Barbara Nickel, Christian Bok and over 100 more. “No verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job.” -T. S. Eliot

About The Editors

Kate Braid (Vancouver) is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry. Her books have won the Pat Lowther and VanCity Book Prizes and been shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. She teaches at Malaspina University-College.

Sandy Shreve (Vancouver) is also the author of three books of poetry. She has received the Earle Birney Prize for Poetry and been shortlisted for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award and a National Magazine Award for Poetry. She founded Poetry in Transit in BC.

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The third in a series that launched to excitement and acclaim in 2009, The Best Canadian Essays 2011 covers an impressive variety of topics. New series editor, Christopher Doda, and guest editor, Ibi Kaslik, infuse the series with a breath of fresh air—selecting insightful and provocative essays from Canadian magazines that range from personal insights on post-partum depression, a pro-smoking diatribe, and an appreciation of the great opera singer Maria Callas to pieces on “wage slavery”, the plight of zoo elephants, Canada’s ongoing war in Afghanistan and much more. The Best Canadian Essays 2011 exemplifies the outstanding quality and stunning diversity of Canadian nonfiction writing today.

About the Guest Editor

Ibi Kaslik is an internationally published novelist, freelance writer, and teachers. Her most recent novel, The Angel Riots, is a rock’n'roll comic-tragedy and was nominated for Ontario’s Trillium award in 2009. Her first novel, Skinny, was a New York Times Bestseller and has been published in numerous countries. A native of Toronto, Ibi teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and works as an art educator for youth.

About the Series Editor

Christopher Doda is an award-winning critic, editor, and poet. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Among Ruins (2001) and Aesthetics Lesson (2007). His poems and reviews have appeared in journals and magazines across Canada and he was an editor at Exile: The Literary Quarterly for five years. He is currently the review editor for the online journal Studio.

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The outstanding success of The Best Canadian Poetry in English series continues in 2011 with guest editor Priscila Uppal.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011 proudly continues a series that kicked off with a bang in 2008 and thrives under the stewardship of esteemed editor Molly Peacock and a different acclaimed poet guest editor each year.

This year Priscila Uppal chose the fifty best Canadian poems published in Canadian online and print literary journals in 2010. With this anthology, readers– often baffled by the proliferating poems and poets– are able to tap into the remarkable and vibrant Canadian poetry scene.

About the Guest Editor

Priscila Uppal is a poet, novelist, and York University professor. Her publications include Ontological Necessities (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize), Traumatology, Successful Tragedies (Bloodaxe books, UK), Winter Sport: Poems (written as Canadian Athletes Now poet-in-residence for the Olympic and Paralympic Games) the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation and To Whom It May Concern, and the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy. Time Out London recently dubbed her “Canada’s coolest poet.” Visit priscilauppal.ca

About the Series Editor

Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush; a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece; and a one-woman show in poems, “The Shimmering Verge.” She is a contributing editor of the Literary Review of Canada and a faculty mentor at the Spalding MFA Program. Her latest work of nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delaney Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, which was nominated for BC’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

Praise for The Best Canadian Poetry series

“Some of us can only afford a half a dozen or so subscriptions to literary magazines, so the publication of The Best Canadian Poetry in English, now in its third year, is a welcome event.”
- Maxianne Berger, Rover Arts

“This would be an excellent book for the academic and the casual poetry fan who wants to dust off the rust in their CanLit poetry ligaments.”
- Michael Peckham, Broken Pencil

“The collection is a unique glimpse at a diversity of poets, from Ottawa’s David O’Meara to Margaret Atwood to the reverend P.K Page.”
- Cormac Rae, Ottawa Xpress

This sparse and powerful poetic debut, weaves a tale of heartache, dissolution, and coming of age.

Onion Man is an intense and masterly sculpted series of linked poems set in London, Ontario, in the late 1980s– a time in Canada when the recession lay like a lead weight on the shoulders of young people, leaving the future bleak.

The poems are told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl working for the summer at a corn canning factory, and they follow her relationship with her factory job, her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally ill grandfather, and the man who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.”

The Onion Man doesn’t speak English and is tormented by the other workers. After his son dies, he commits suicide at the factory, and the girl finds his body. This traumatic event causes her to rethink the direction of her life.

About the Author

Kathryn Mockler teaches poetry and screenwriting at the University of Western Ontario. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and her Honours BA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University. Excerpts of Onion Man were shortlisted from the 2010 CBC Literary Award. Her writing has been publishing in Rattling Books, La Petite Zine, This Magazine, Geist and subTerrain. The films have been broadcast on TMN, Movieola, and Bravo and have screened at numerous festivals. Originally from London, Ontario, she now resides in Toronto.

Praise for Onion Man

“Mockler can’t hide anything in lines this clean and spare. Onion Man delivers a bold, candid voice. It’s a book of brave choices. We have a winner in Kathryn Mockler.
– Michael V. Smith

“With Onion Man, Mockler does for the Pillsbury factory was Dante did for hell. But Mockler is funnier. Nearly every piece on this epic, romantic novel-in-verse cracked me up and, like the best comedians, Mockler breaks your heart while she makes you laugh. Her deadpan wit is dead-on and her understated insight is fathoms deep. You’ve never read a book of poetry like this.”
– Sharon McCartney

How to Get a Girl Pregnant is a frank and funny memoir about a dyke trying to get pregnant.

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez has known that she was gay since she was three years old and wanted to have a baby for almost as long. But how is a butch Chicana lesbian supposed to get sperm? Picking up men at nightclubs and restaurants? Asking queer male friends for a donation? Using sperm banks dominated by blue-eyed and blond-haired donors?

This candid and humorous memoir follows Karleen’s challenges, adventures, successes, failures, humiliations, and triumphs while attempting to fulfill her dream of giving birth to a child. It is a confession of desire, humility, and the search for perfection.

About the Author

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is the screenwriter of the award-winner film Tomboy, and the author for the children’s book Are You a Boy or a Girl?, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She is a professor of education at Trent University. Raised in LA, having lived in Berkeley and San Diego, she now makes her home in Toronto.

In this crackling debut, Ashley Little creates a new anti-hero — one whose audacity is matched by his vulnerability.

PRICK is narrate by twenty-one year old Anthony “Ant” Young: an artist, an asshole, and an anti-hero. After fleeing a violent home life in Calgary, Ant moves to Victoria, BC, where he earns his tattooing apprenticeship under Hank the Tank, a founding member of the powerful Lucifer’s Choice motorcycle gang. Under Hank’s guidance, Ant learns the craft and business of tattoo, but he is also exposed to a vicious and frightening criminal underworld.

Written in intense, rapid-fire bursts, PRICK explores themes of addiction, desire, and remorse. As Ant’s life stumbles out of control, he struggles to hold on to the one thing he really cares about.

Ashley Little follows in the footsteps of Bret Easton Ellis and Heather O’Neill in this unforgettable, disturbing and darkly funny tale.

About the Author

Ashley Little received a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria. She won the 2008 Okanagan Short Story Contest. Her work has appeared in Broken Pencil, The Danforth Review, Room and the anthology Writing Without Direction: Ten and a Half Stories by Canadian Authors Under Thirty (Clark-Nova, 2010). She lives in Ucluelet, BC.

Praise for Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist

“Fearless, the straight stuff! An arresting look at the world of tattoo; graphic as a freshly embroidered skull on virgin skin. Via the morally ambiguous point of view of an eager young apprentice, PRICK is an entree to a world not often seen and even less understoof. With wistful shades of Willie Vlautin and al the grit of Charles Bukowski, Ashley Little lushly demonstrates that hers in an important new voice in unflinchingly real storytelling.”  – Dennis E. Bolen, author of Kaspoit!

Award-winning poet Jim Johnstone unites science, poetry, and art in an innovative and intellectual examination of the symbolism associated with locusts.

A long poem that probes love and loss in fragments of verse and hybrid-media collage, Sunday, the locusts is a post-apocalyptic tour-de-force.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines including developmental biology, geology and philosophy, Jim Johnstone and Julienne Lottering blur linguistic boundaries to create a unique collaborative text.

Hymn, map, portent—Sunday, the locusts warns against inevitable extinction while also revelling in the vivacity of personhood.

About the Author

Jim Johnstone (b. 1978) is a writer and physiologist in Toronto. He is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008). His poems have been published in several Canadian magazines, including Descant, enRoute, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, and PRISM International and anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010. He is the founder and editor of Misunderstandings Magazine and poetry editor of Cactus Press. See jimjohnstone.wordpress.com.

About the Illustrator

Julienne Lottering was born in South Africa but has been living in Canada and exhibiting in Toronto, Lyon, and New York since 2000. Her artwork has appeared on the book cover of Life and the Sheath of Enlightenment and in Misunderstandings Magazine.

Praise for Patternicity

“Patternicity transforms the mundane into the otherworldly.”
—Mark Callanan, Quill & Quire

“I love Patternicity for its dirty noises . . . Jim Johnstone’s forms are shapely, but feral. His music is beautifully rational, complex and charismatic.”
—Carmine Starnino

An anthology of poetry and fiction with the city of Paris as its unifying thread.

The stunning variety of writing in this volume addresses the city of Paris in all its complexity, while challenging the mythology of expatriate Parisian literature. The anthology contains entries as diverse and disparate as an excerpt from John Berger’s novel, Here is Where We Meet; Suzanne Allen’s ekphrastic poetry, a tongue-in-cheek take on the nineteenth-century novel by Helen Cusack O’Keeffe; Canadian writer Lisa Pasold’s story of a forced extended stay in Paris; and an interview with the celebrated American poet Alice Notley.

Strangers in Paris presents anglophone Parisian writing as it is today, without the veneer and expectations of stereotypes, romantic notions, or iconic representations. More than anything, this anthology is a landmark, a notice that begs and entices readers to explore the current English-language authorship developing in and about Paris.

Featuring work from Suzanne Allen, Mia Bailey, David Barnes, Barbara Beck, Edward Belleville, John Berger, Judith Chriqui, Marie Davis, Sion Dayson, David Eso, Megan Fernandes, Jorie Graham, Jeffrey Greene, Jonathan Hamrick, Isabel Harding, Marty Hiatt, Margaret J. Hults, Andrea Jonsson, Julie Kleinman, Antonia Klimenko, Sam Langer, Colin Joseph Wolfgang Mahar, Alexander Kolya Maksik, Jessica Malcomson, Danielle McShine, Alice Notley, Helen Cusack O’Keeffe, Lisa Pasold, Rufo Quintavalle, Alberto Rigettini, Sarah Riggs, Eleni Sikelianos, Kathleen Spivack, Cole Swensen, Elizabeth Willis, and Neil Uzzell.

Editor Biographies

David Barnes moved to Paris in 2003 with the idea of staying for six months. He is still there. He won Shakespeare and Company’s short story competition, Travel in Words, in 2006 and now runs a writing workshop there and a weekly open mic poetry night in Belleville called SpokenWord. His stories have been published by Spot Lit Magazine, Upstairs at Duroc, and 34th Parallel.

Megan Fernandes is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently writing a dissertation on cognitive approaches to twentieth-century Irish and American literature. During her time in Paris, she has conducted research at the Center for Literature and Cognition at the Université Paris VIII and will be published in the upcoming issue of Upstairs at Duroc (2010). She has presented at conferences in the US, Ireland, and Poland and has an essay on Beckett to be published in the literary journal, Miranda (University Press of Toulouse).

Figure skater turned roller derby girl Neddy will bowl you over in Heather Wood’s uplifting book about growing up and deciding for yourself.

Neddy rejects the sacrifices necessary to succeed as a figure skater—early mornings, a diet of apples and celery, and the pressure to perform—in favour of the rough and tumble adventures and fiesty camaraderie of the roller derby community.

Her father is out of the country while she embarks on her first year of university, so Neddy is free to consider her guilt about not following in her mother’s footsteps, navigate a new love, and discover who she really is and what she really wants.

Praise for Roll With It:

“Readers will roll and spin and root for Neddy. I certainly did!” —Sheree Fitch, author of Pluto’s Ghost

“A fun, painful, yet joyful celebration of one athlete’s coming of age, readers will find Neddy’s story of smashing it up on the derby floor irresistibly engaging—this book is for anyone who has ever seized a challenge, put on a pair of skates, or believed in the long shot.” —Ibi Kaslik, author of Skinny and The Angel Riots

“Neddy’s my kind of young woman: fearless, opinionated, and not afraid to wipeout on the derby track. Any girl who identifies with tough, in- your-face heroes, rather than perfect princesses, should read this book immediately. Then go out and buy some roller skates and a helmet!” —Emily Pohl-Weary, author of A Girl Like Sugar and Strange Times at Western High

About the Author

Heather J. Wood was born and raised in Montreal. She now lives and writes in Toronto. Tightrope Books published her first novel, Fortune Cookie, in 2009.

Governor General’s Award finalist Ruth Pierson’s third collection of poetry articulates the oppositional emotions that develop with the loss of a loved one.

While humour, fond remembrance, and wry awareness break through, contrariness tinges many of the poems in this collection, a contrariness rooted in rueful self-examination, in feelings of living at cross purposes with the expected and the polite, of seeing the world aslant.

At the heart of Contrary is an unflinching portrayal of the emotional maelstrom that overtook the poet as she faced the dying and death of her only brother.

These are poems that mount an opposition, poems that contradict and argue, sometimes in jest, sometimes in deadly seriousness, poems that read unexpected messages into paintings and photographs, poems that are attuned to the dialectic undercurrents of living.

About the Author

Ruth Roach Pierson took up the pen in pursuit of poetry after a distinguished career in academia. Her poems have appeared in ARC, Event, The Fiddlehead, Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, Pagitica, Pottersfield Portfolio, Prism International, Queen’s Feminist Review, Quills, Room of One’s Own, and Vallum as well as a number of anthologies. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their two cats, Haiku and Orange Roughy.