These books are some of the latest poetry collections written by Canadian authors. Covering subjects from pop culture to the Indigenous experience, each one is a treasure.
Grappling Hook by Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang
Taking its title from Tomas Tranströmer, local author Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang's Grappling Hook sifts the debris of the twenty-first century for insights into identity, desire, and the everyday struggles inherent to motherhood.
Nothing Will Save Your Life by Nancy Jo Cullen
Nothing Will Save Your Life by local author Nancy Jo Cullen is an explosion of pop culture, femininity, sex, religion and motherhood held together with humour and lightened with fragments of joy.
Quiet Night Think by Gillian Sze
During the remarkable period of early parenthood, Sze's new maternal role urges her to contemplate her own origins, both familial and artistic.
The Quiet in Me by Patrick Lane
In this final collection, Patrick Lane cultivates the quiet of living in a body amongst so many other bodies — the trout in the lake, geese arriving with the wind, a raccoon fishing in a river — ultimately revealing a tangled web of life and a speaker who sees both beauty and pain brimming around him.
Iskotew Iskwew by Francine Merasty
This book is about memories and experiences growing up on the Pelican Narrows Reserve in northern Saskatchewan in the 1980s: summers spent on the land and the pain of residential school. With this collection, the author wants to teach and inform Canadians about her experiences growing up as an Indigenous woman in Saskatchewan.
Orion Sweeping by Anne Marie Todkill
Anne Marie Todkill's debut recalibrates the anxiety of the present. It gives doubt a hearing, finding resilience in fragility and grace in unexpected places.
You Still Look the Same by Farzana Doctor
A moving collection of poetry about navigating mid-life, full of humour and wit, from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor.
Cane, Fire by Shani Mootoo
Through these deeply personal poems and Mootoo's own artwork, we begin to understand how a life can not only be shaped but even reimagined.
Hail, the Invisible Watchman by Alexandra Oliver
In taut poetic structures across three succinct sections, Alexandra Oliver's conflation of the mundane and the phantasmagoric produces a scintillating portrait of the suburban uncanny.
