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:

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).