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.

ISBN-10: 1-926639-41-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-26639-41-3
Price: $19.95
Pub Date: Fall 2011

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

ISBN-10: 1-926639-39-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-39-0
Price: $15.95
Pub Date: November 2011

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

ISBN-10: 1-926639-36-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-36-9
Price: $18.95
Pub Date: Spring 2011

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

ISBN-10: 1-926639-32-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-32-1
Price: $19.95
Pub Date: May 2011

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).

ISBN-10: 1-926639-33-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-33-8
Price: $15.95
Pub Date: Spring 2011

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.

ISBN-10: 1926639197
ISBN-13: 9781926639192
Price: $15.95
Pub Date: Fall 2010

Cool-burning with the strange and the sensual, Come Closer takes the imposing realities of political, environmental, and social upheaval, and infuses each with the personal.

From poet and award-winning filmmaker Leanne Averbach comes a new collection of poems. Come Closer draws on themes as widespread as Averbach’s left-wing-activist and trade-union-organizer past, the loss of her parents, the Iraq War, and the homeless, all seen through the gritty lens of New York City and with a persistent inner dialogue about love, family, and doubt.

Praise for Fever:

“Witty, cynical and startlingly lusty, Averbach’s lushly lyrical, ‘thick wet strokes’ of irreverence are finely wrought with haunting immediacy. Her work provides a must-read collection: highly charged eroto-comic and compelling snapshots that linger.”
—Adeena Karasick

“Averbach’s poems swing from worldly to wild.”
—Georgia Straight

About the Author

Leanne Averbach is a Canadian poet and filmmaker. She has been published and has performed with musicians across Canada, in the US, and in Italy. Her first book, Fever (Mansfield Press), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize in 2006. Her companion CD Fever is a fusion of her spoken words and the blues/jazz accompaniment of the Vancouver group Indigo. Averbach’s second short film based on her poetry, Teacups & Mink, has garnered numerous awards.For more information visit www.leanneaverbach.com.

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-18-5
ISBN-10: 1-926639-18-9
Price: $15.95
Pub Date: Fall 2010

Monster is a poetry collection that Pandora would want to open, containing poems that Eve would bite into.

In a sophomore collection that is bound to cause a stir, David Livingstone Clink takes you on a journey into the belly of the beast, a journey that is both dark and surreal, strange and unusual, a departure from the safe neighbourhoods where people don’t lock their doors at night. But all is not dark! There are the unusual and surreal places that bend your mind, that make you look at things you thought you knew but in a different light, and there is humour. But there is also elder abuse, infidelity, molestation, murder, suicide, serial killers and shapeshifters, six-legged dogs and bodies hanging from barn rafters, spiderwebs and fallen cities, steampunk airships muscling into the night, and always the shadows helping us define our shape, how we feel, and, ultimately, who we are.

Click to read an excerpt from Monster.

Praise for Eating Fruit Out of Season

“When I picked up Eating Fruit out of Season, Clink’s first full-length poetry collection, I expected mostly to laugh and be amused. Instead, I felt nearly the entire spectrum of human emotion. Clink writes with an earnest necessity I didn’t know was in him.”
—Jacob Scheier, Prairie Fire

“Clink’s debut suggests the possibility of a less isolated and obscure voice for the contemporary poet.”
—Maurice Mierau, Winnipeg Free Press

“Nowhere in Canadian poetry will the prosaic mind discover verse so barbed and ironic as in this text, while inspired intellects must find it a source of prophetic nostalgia and exquisite, fleshed-out wisdom. Herein is Ontario pastoral and Space-Age romanticism, both scrutinized by a poet who inks truth that is satire.”
—George Elliott Clarke

“I found reading Eating Fruit out of Season to be like, well, like eating fruit out of season—unpredictable, intriguing, not every bite to my taste, but I didn’t want to stop eating.”
—Maureen Scott Harris

About the Author

David Livingstone Clink’s poetry has appeared in The Antigonish Review, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, The Prairie Journal, and in ten anthologies, including I.V. Lounge Nights, Garden Variety, Imagination in Action, and the forthcoming Tesseracts XIV (fall 2010). He edited the poetry anthology, A Verdant Green. His first book of poetry was Eating Fruit Out of Season. He lives in Toronto.

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-20-8
ISBN-10: 1-926639-20-0
Price: $15.95
Pub Date: Fall 2010

An unconventional and profound mixed-media poetry collection that blends traditional and avant garde forms to explore remembrance, grief, and mourning.

Daniel Scott Tysdal follows up his first award-winning collection of poetry with The Mourner’s Book of Albums, an emotionally striking and formally ambitious exploration of the elegiac tradition and the twenty-first-century attitude to remembrance and grief. Encountering a wide range of arresting events—from a best friend’s suicide to the war in Afghanistan, from improvised memorials to the plastinated corpses of Body Worlds—these innovative poems survey the forces and forms that shape what and how we mourn. The sonically lively lines, the vivid images, and the richly textured voices of the The Mourner’s Book of Albums are composed in a variety of traditional and unconventional forms—the lyric, the ballad, the graphic poem, and the fabricated document, to name a few—as a means of grappling with the many acts and practices that link the living and the dead. Tysdal compiles the albums, however fluid and fragile, that hold them together.

Click to read an excerpt from The Mourner’s Book of Albums.

Praise for Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method:

“Daniel Scott Tysdal’s poetry is an exhilarating mix of pop culture, philosophy, mythology, and visual art. Here is a poet who possesses the rare combination of experimental instinct and communicative acuity. Read this book for its confident virtuosity, its innovative spirit, and its surprising generosity.”
—Jon Paul Fiorentino

“Tysdal recognizes and deconstructs—playfully—the patented absurdity of conventional language. He employs academic, literary, and pop cultural terms, references, discourses, and images to underscore the implicit argument here that standard semantic structures—rhetorics—obscure truth and, thus, Justice. Yet, for all their high-minded, critical jouissance, the lyrics are lively with accessible puns, jokes, games, and satire.”
—George Elliot Clarke

“Tysdal at his best creates a complex, multidimensional, and often contradictory layering of thought and feeling; this tremendously rich, inventive, and energetic book is a most auspicious debut.”
—Malcolm Woodland, “Letters in Canada 2006: Poetry,” University of Toronto Quarterly

About the Author

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006), which received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). His work has appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals and has earned him both an honourable mention at the 2003 National Magazine Awards and a place in the finals of the CBC’s 2005 National Poetry Face-Off. He teaches creative writing and English literature at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-16-1
ISBN-10: 1-926639-16-2
Price: $19.95
Pub Date: Fall 2010

The outstanding success of The Best Canadian Poetry in English series continues in 2010 with guest editor Lorna Crozier.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010 proudly continues a series that kicked off with a bang in 2008 under the stewardship of esteemed series editor, Molly Peacock, and inaugural guest editor, award-winning poet Stephanie Bolster. The 2009 edition was expertly curated by A.F. Moritz, winner of the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize. And this year, Lorna Crozier has chosen the fifty best Canadian poems published in Canadian literary journals and magazines in the preceding  year. With this anthology, readers—often baffled by proliferating poems and poets—will be able to tap into the remarkable and vibrant Canadian poetry scene, checking out the currents—and cross currents—of poetry in a volume distilled by a round robin of distinguished editorial taste.

Click to read an excerpt from the Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010.

Featuring work from Ken Babstock, John Barton, Anne Compton, Allan Cooper, Mary Dalton, Barry Dempster, Kildare Dobbs, Don Domanski, Glen Downie, Sue Goyette, Rosemary Griebel, Adrienne Gruber, Jamella Hagen, Steven Heighton, Warren Heiti, M.G.R. Hickman-Barr, Maureen Hynes, Michael Johnson, Jim Johnstone, Sonett L’Abbe, Evelyn Lau, Katherine Lawrence, Ross Leckie, Tim Lilbum, Dave Margoshes, Jim Nason, Catherine Owen, P.K. Page, Rebecca Leah Papucaru, Marilyn Gear Pilling, Leonore and Beth Rowntree, Armand Garnett Ruffo, Lori Saint-Martin, Peter Sanger, Robyn Sarah, Eleonore Schonmaier, David Seymour, Melanie Siebert, Sue Sinclair, Karen Solie, Nick Thran, Carey Toane, Anne-Marie Turza, Paul Tyler, Patrick Warner, Zachariah Wells, Patricia Young, David Zieroth, and Jan Zwicky.

Praise for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008:

“Lovers of poetry should buy this volume: read some good poems, and encourage the future of this series.”
—Rover Arts

Praise for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009:

“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

“If poems outside Moritz’s personal aesthetic are understandably absent, the chosen fifty, presented alphabetically from Atwood to Zwicky, are in no way devoid of delights, and my notes record many remarkable moments.”
—Maxianne Berger, Rover Arts

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

About the Guest Editor

Lorna Crozier has received numerous awards for her fourteen books of poetry, including the Governor-General’s Award-winning Inventing the Hawk. She has also edited anthologies, among them Desire in Seven Voices and, with Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast and two anthologies of new Canadian poets, Breathing Fire 1 and 2. Her most recent book is Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir. She has read her work in every continent except Antartica and last year a collection of her poems translated into Spanish was published in Mexico City. She lives in Saanich, BC, and teaches and serves as Chair in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.

About the Series Editor

Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush (McClelland & Stewart, 2009), Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton) a memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece, and a one-woman show in poems, “The Shimmering Verge” produced by Louise Fagan Productions (London, Ontario). She has been series editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English since 2007, as well as a contributing editor of the Literary Review of Canada and a faculty mentor at the Spalding MFA Program. Her poetry, published in leading literary journals in North America and the UK, is widely anthologized. Her latest work of nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (McClelland & Stewart, 2010).

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-13-0
ISBN-10: 1-926639-13-8
Price: $14.95
Pub Date: Spring 2010

Fearless and insightful poems that illuminate one woman’s experience of chronic illness, relationships and gender identity, and solitude.

Anna Swanson’s poetry leads you through a life that tries to deal with a misunderstood illness, a gradual acceptance of one’s sexuality, and a sometimes onerous relationship with nature. Her writing is as honest as it is complex, and it attempts to reconcile an identity that has been distorted by illness through a profound analysis of memory and individual meaning. With poems that run the gamut from fearful to the absurd, that are at once deep and pithy, Anna Swanson proves in The Nights Also that she is a brave new voice in Canadian poetry.

Click to read an excerpt from The Nights Also.

Anna Swanson studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her poetry has appeared in PRISM International, The Antigonish Review, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, and numerous other literary journals. She has paid the rent by planning festivals, selling books, serving drinks, making maps, walking on stilts, bowling with teenagers, writing press releases, and watching for forest fires. She now lives in Vancouver, BC, and works as a children’s librarian.

Praise for The Nights Also:

“There are the nights, yes, but in this startling debut collection ‘each day is a / thin steel catwalk of light’ and ‘the sun makes its arc across the mouth’ . . . Each word and image is freshly forged. The poems are smart, original, and daring, the footwork so assured that Anna Swanson dances with the future with no missteps. This is a strong new voice that reaffirms my faith in the heartbeat and vision that poetry can give us.”

—Lorna Crozier

“As meditations on illness, these are extraordinary—sad, undermining, and, sometimes, spiked with a sense of humour.”

—Tim Lilburn

“ ‘Oh dear body,” Anna Swanson writes in her impressive debut collection, “How did we get here?” How indeed? Throughout The Nights Also, Swanson asks: What does it mean to be frail and human. What is illness? Health? Gender? Memory? Love? And though Swanson doesn’t (thank God) arrive at any definitive answers, her skill and delight in exploring life’s mysteries and complexities are palpable. These poems—intelligent, passionate, and beautifully executed—announce the arrival of a gifted poet, one I hope we’ll be hearing from for years to come.

—Patricia Young

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-09-3
ISBN-10: 1-926639-09-X
Price: $16.95
Pub Date: Spring 2010

Ian Burgham once again presents poems of compassion that celebrate all manner of the heartland’s hazards and risks.

In his third collection of poetry, The Grammar of Distance, Ian Burgham writes from his gut and his heart. His imagery is, by turns, sensuous and rough-hewn, soft and hard. The poems crackle with sonic energy; they whinny and stamp. They whistle in the dark. His poetic landscapes frequent the windswept coasts of Scotland; but in this collection, we also find him doing terribly Canadian things like snowshoeing, surveying, chopping wood. Sometimes Al Purdy can be heard in Burgham’s voice and, occasionally, Patrick Lane. His penchant for storytelling and Celtic elegiac moods makes him a solid candidate for the position of poetic counterpart to Alistair MacLeod. Like all strong poets, Burgham’s imagination breaks past borders. Tribal and intense, his poems are conversations with loved ones, lost ones, and all the poets with storms in their bones. They are feisty. They rant. They grieve. They celebrate. Burgham is a thinker, a philosophical poet, a restless soul who asks big questions.

Click to read an excerpt from The Grammar of Distance.

Ian Burgham is an associate of the League of Canadian Poets. Born in New Zealand, raised in Canada, he has lived and worked for extended periods of time in both New Zealand and Scotland. He studied literature at Queen’s University and at the University of Edinburgh. He worked as an editor for Canongate Publishing and later became publisher of Macdonald Publishing in Edinburgh. He has previously published two collections of poetry, A Confession of Birds, a chapbook published in the UK in 2004, and The Stone Skippers, published in 2007 by Tightrope Books and nominated for the 2008 Relit Award. He currently divides his time between Toronto and Kingston. In 2004-5 Burgham won the Queen’s University “Well-Versed” Poetry Award. His work has been published in many Canadian literary journals including Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2), The New Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, Queen’s Quarterly, dANDelion, Harpweaver, Precipice, Jones Avenue, and Ascent Aspirations.

Praise for The Stone Skippers:

“… a voice you don’t want to miss.” —Di Brandt

“ … concision, leanness and directness …”—A.F. Moritz

“rare and remarkable … the work of one who has the ear for the possibilities of language …”—Alexander McCall Smith

Ian’s poetry has also been integrated into jewelery by artist Jeanine Payer. View the beautiful creations on Jeanine’s website: www.jeaninepayer.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-926639-10-9
ISBN-10: 1-926639-10-3
Price: $14.95
Pub Date: Spring 2010

Poems that reflect the individual’s experience in the urban jungle, combining observation and insight that every city dweller will recognize.

The city, at once benevolent and indifferent to its residents, is the inspiration for this debut collection of poetry by Suzanne Bowness. In the first poem, a young woman arrives in the big city, where “in the beginning, anonymity is everywhere,” and wonders what her life there will bring. Using this new arrival as her starting point, Bowness moves on to develop urban themes of anonymity and collectivity alongside individualist themes of freedom, loneliness, and growing self identity. Part private reflection, part love letter to the metropolis, The Days You’ve Spent pulls back the curtain on city life, finding beauty in neon signs and profundity in laundromats. In these poems, the individual and the city interweave, and urban immersion becomes an essential element in personal growth.

Suzanne (Sue) Bowness is a writer and editor whose poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada and Pagitica. Her play The Reading Circle won first place in the 2006 Ottawa Little-Theatre One-Act Playwriting Competition. She is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Ottawa with a focus on nineteenth-century Canadian magazines.

ISBN-10: 0978335155
ISBN-13: 9780978335151

Price: $21.95
Pub Date: 2008

This collection of graphic poems brings together eighteen works that fall somewhere between a graphic novel and poetic verse.

Participating authors reside across the country and include Derek Beaulieu, Christian Bok, Stacey May Fowles and Marlena Zuber, Tim Gaze, Jake Kennedy, Mark Laliberte, Donato Mancini, Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff, Gustave Morin, Marc Ngui, Paola Poletto, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Jen Pickering, and Sally McKay.

Their poems tackle the broad topic of boredom: Is boredom a symptom of the absence of love? Does it suggest our present task is too easy?

Inside, graphic doesn’t always trump poetry and thus the ultimate tug of war is in the most captivating sense a real yawnyarn between word and image. We like images and we like words.

With epigonic respect to Dada and concrete poetry and with of-the-moment admiration for the graphic novel we’d like to think (we do think!) editors Jake Kennedy and Paola Poletto have collected something other. They are also flatlanders, mandalas, leg chewers, leaf-shakers, dogs, televisions, bricks, calligraphy, typefaces, remote controls, emblems, tazers, lightning bolts, hotels, and sinking cities. All of them sticking intrepidly an unwavering index into the hirsute gargoyle ear-well of boredom.

Click to read an excerpt from Boredom Fighters.

Jake Kennedy is a poet, prose writer, and teacher. His work has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies. His chapbook, Hazard, is published by BookThug. Jake currently teaches in the English Department at Okanagan College.

Paola Poletto is an arts administrator, mixed media and installation artist, writer and curator. Artist-led projects have included Kiss Machine Magazine (co-founding publisher since 2000), Inflatable Museum (on-line exhibit 2001-2004), Girls and Guns (travelling exhibit Toronto-London, 2003; Budapest-Albania-Montenegro & Serbia, 2004), and Robot Landscapes (exhibit Toronto, 2004). She is senior director of programs at Design Exchange, Canada’s national centre for design (www.dx.org), where she oversees youth programs, professional programs, exhibitions, museum collection and research. She is also the director of digifest (www.dx.org/digifest), a festival of design and media culture produced by Design Exchange in partnership with the Ontario Science Centre and Harbourfront Centre.

DOWN WITH ARBOREAL THOUGHT! // A Steel Bananas Project

ISBN-10: 1926639073
ISBN-13: 9781926639079
Price: $18.95
Pub Date: Fall 2009

“From its opening statement, ‘This Book Is a Rhizome,’ to Adebe D.A.’s ‘Poemagogy,’ to John Unrau’s ‘New Age Muskie Considers a Change of Lifestyle,’ Gulch privileges the rhetoric of (and itself exists as an example of) that ever-regenerative genre, the manifesto.”
– Andrew Dubois, University of Toronto Quarterly 80.2

“…the reliability of GULCH is the space it provides for new visions, new styles and new writers.”
– Rabble Magazine

“Gulch plays with the idea of collaboration and does it well, with a buffet of new and exciting work from today’s up and coming talent.”
– Broken Pencil Magazine

Inspired by the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose is a rhizomatic exploration of the modern Canadian literary community.

Drawing on the postmodern themes of detachment and disjuncture, GULCH seeks to create an optimistic snapshot of the pluralities and complexities that constitute the post-pomo literary landscape. Focusing on the theme of fragmentation, Steel Bananas members Sarah Beaudin, Karen Correia Da Silva and Curran Folkers have collected pieces from community artists, Professors, lit students, burgeoning young talent as well as established writers in order to compile a collection that resists the notion of wholeness, privileging instead the multiplicity and diversity found in contemporary globalized culture. This assemblage of poetry and prose bares the innovation and cultural critique of post-millennium Canadian writers, and seeks to expose the beauty of discontinuity.

Featuring work from Adebe D.A., Stephen Cain, Ewan Whyte, Spencer Gordon, Chris Felling, Matthew Hall, Daniel Tysdal, Chris Eaton & Virtual Collaborators, Amanda Lee, JJ Steinfeld, Emma Healy, Wally Keeler, Jon Eskedjian, Vincent De Freitas, Craig Alexander, Heather Babcock, Richard Rosenbaum, Jerry Levy, Alex Consiglio, Sarah Beaudin, Ursula Pflug, Kathleen Brown, Matthew Moliterni, Darryl Salach, Shannon Robinson, Miles Henry, Shannon Webb Campbell, John Unrau, Nathaniel G Moore, Zack Kotzer, Firdaus Bilimoria, Jimmy McInnes, Steph Tracey, James Arthur, Melanie Janisse, Corrigan Hammond, N Dana Jerabek, Shannon Maguire, Ryan Tannenbaum, Karen Correia Da Silva, James Papoutsis, Christopher Olsen, Alyksandra Ackerman, Curran Folkers, James Hatch, John C Goodman, Andrew McEwan, John Nyman, Mark Reble, Jamie Ross, Devon Wong, N Alexander Armstrong.

Click to read an excerpt from GULCH.

Steel Bananas is a not-for-profit art collective and culture zine. They publish a rag-bag of contemporary Canadian writers and art-bums on the 15th of each month, aiming to critically and playfully explore contemporary cultural theory and the varying facets of contemporary urban culture. They’re proud to augment all virtual content with print media or in-the-flesh art happenings around Toronto, and to support independent, alternative, and marginal art in Canada.

http://www.steelbananas.com

ISBN-10: 1926639049
ISBN-13: 9781926639048
Price: $14.95
Pub Date: Fall 2009

Carla Drysdale’s poems in Little Venus challenge the reader, tackling the hard subjects of child abuse, sexual exploitation and the failure of some families.

The character of Little Venus runs through the poems burning with rage and want in an incendiary chant that the reader can’t ignore. Little Venus is a haunting collection that will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.

Click to read an excerpt from Little Venus.

Carla Drysdale was born in London, Ontario and was educated at Ryerson university in Toronto as well as Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her poems have appeared in Canadian and US journals, including the Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, the Fiddlehead, Global City Review, Confrontation and LIT. She lives in Geneva, Switzerland with her husband and two sons.

ISBN-10: 0973864532
ISBN-13: 9780973864533
Price: $14.95
Pub Date: 2006

The poems in this collection are erotic and wry, a first hand tour through the world of today’s woman for whom desire is no longer a dirty word.

Wallin’s poems explore where the sensual woman has been and where she s going. If Candice Bushnell was a poet, these are the sort of poems she would write.

Click to read an excerpt from A Thousand Profane Pieces.

Myna Wallin is an author and editor in Toronto. She is also an organizer and host of the Art Bar Poetry Series. Her first poetry collection was A Thousand Profane Pieces (Tightrope Books, 2006), and her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Algonquin Square Table Anthology, Contemporary Verse 2, Existere, Eye Weekly, Kiss Machine, Literary Review of Canada, Matrix, Misunderstandings Magazine, Nod, Surface and Symbol, Taddle Creek, and Word: Canada’s Magazine for Readers and Writers.

www.mynawallin.com

ISBN-10: 0973864583
ISBN-13: 9780973864588
Price: $21.95
Pub Date: 2007

In The Stone Skippers, Burgham launches dazzling poems that explore the central core of our humanity upon the Canadian literary landscape.

The poems examine how love is a territory we map with little skill. The speaker returns again and again to the distances we set up or have imposed upon ourselves by relationships of desire and love, all against the motif of conversations inner conversations, day-to-day conversations, one-sided conversations, unfinished and halting conversations.

Click to read an excerpt from The Stone Skippers.

Ian Burgham is an associate of the League of Canadian Poets. In 2004 he won the Queens University Well-Versed Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of both Queens University and the University of Edinburgh, and has lived for extended periods in various parts of the world. He served as a senior editor at Canongate Publishing in Edinburgh during the early 1980s. His poems have been published in a number of literary journals and magazines including dANDelion, Queens Quarterly, Scottish Arts Journal, Harpweaver, and the Literary Review of Canada. Burgham has had one poetry book published in the United Kingdom: Confession of Birds, (2003 chapbook). His first full collection of poems, The Stone Skippers, will be published in Australia and New Zealand by Sunline Press, Perth (introduction by Newcastle Prize winning poet, Roland Leach) and, in the UK by MacLean Dubois Publishers in February 2007 (Introduction by novelist and poet, Alexander McCall Smith). He is currently working on his third collection. Ian works as a volunteer to further the efforts of the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry. He is an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Queens University.

ISBN-10: 097833518X
ISBN-13: 9780978335182
Price: $14.95
Pub Date: 2009

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk’s second collection of poetry is dangerously sarcastic, Toronto-local, bitter, sweet, and bruising in its honesty.

Challenging the notions of what a girl runs from, both literally and figuratively, Somewhere to Run From takes on complex settings from which to depart: poverty, pop and sub-culture, madness and normative sexuality among these locations.

Click to read an excerpt from Somewhere to Run From.

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk is a Montreal-born, Toronto-based author, performer and activist with an extensive background in community radio. She has been published in magazines and anthologies across North America and is a regular contributor to NOW, Broken Pencil Magazine, and Herizons as well as writing for This, $pread, HOUR and others. Her first book, Emergency Contact, was released with McGilligan Books in 2006 to wide critical acclaim and was taught through the English Department at York University.

ISBN-10: 0978335139
ISBN-13: 9780978335137
Price: $14.95
Pub Date: 2008

In Open Slowly by Dayle Furlong young lovers tangle, tumble and dance their way through the urban landscape. They lose each other and rediscover each other in cafs and bars, over latt and beer while the city watches and waits for solitude to reassert itself.

As the title suggests this is a book to be opened slowly, savoured like a surprise gift from a lover who will inevitably be forgotten, even while the gift remains.

Click to read an excerpt from Open Slowly.

Dayle Furlong studied English Literature & Fine Arts at York University. Her writing has appeared in Taddle Creek, Kiss Machine, The Puritan, Word & The Voice. She works as a literary publicist, a screenwriter ‘s assistant and for Descant Magazine. She has lived in all regions of Canada and has travelled throughout Central America, Asia & the US. She currently lives in Toronto.