Versus
From Montreal's metro stations and streets to pastoral mise-en-scènes, William Vallières' first book, Versus, is a lyric bildungsroman filled with portraits of seduction and infatuation, loneliness and buried shame. "What yesterday had fought to bud / Is stunted under ice today." These are darkly canny poems about childhood, familial histories, lost love and the weariness of spending one's "being being / Everything I'm against." Deftly crafted, intense and compact, with barbed insights arrived at through verbal twists and syntactic half-turns, Vallières' voice is entirely his own.
Resisting Canada
The poems included in Resisting Canada address, among other things, Indigenous agency, cultural belonging, environmental anxieties, and racial privilege. These poems ask us to judge and resist a statecraft that refuses to acknowledge past and present wrongs. Think of Resisting Canada as a poetic letter to Canada’s politicians and leaders.
Resisting Canada gathers together 28 poets for a conversation bigger than poetic trends. Its organizing principle is Canada—the Canada that established residential schools; the Canada grappling with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the Canada that has been visible in its welcome of Syrian refugees, yet the not-always-tolerant place where the children of those refugees will grow up; the Canada eager to re-establish its global leadership on the environment while struggling to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty on resource-rich land and enabling further colonization of that land. In the face of global conflicts due to climate change, scarcity, mass migrations, and the rise of xenophobic populisms, Canada still works with a surface understanding of its democratic values—both at their noblest and most deceptive.
The poets:
Jordan Abel
James Arthur
Marie Annharte Baker
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Wayde Compton
Beth Cuthand
Rosanna Deerchild
Marilyn Dumont
Marvin FrancisLouise
Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer
Jim Johnstone
El Jones
Christine Leclerc
Canisia Lubrin
Lee Maracle
Sachiko Murakami
Arleen Paré
Michael Prior
Shane Rhodes
Janet Rogers
Armand Garnet Ruffo
Ingrid Ruthig
Gregory A. Scofield
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Karen Solie
Moez Surani
Derek Webster
Rita Wong
What We Carry
These are beautifully written, intelligent, accessible poems. - Cary Fagan, Writers' Trust Newsletter
A keen awareness of mortality underlies the poems in Susan Glickman’s vibrant seventh collection...These lyric poems have an unassuming grace and clarity. – Barbara Carey, Toronto Star
The respect paid to nature in this book is palpable and the sadness at its destruction is equally strong. The technical dexterity is as powerful as the emotions and shows a poet at the peak of her creativity. - Candace Fertile, Quill & Quire
The Suicide's Son
The poems in James Arthur’s new collection, The Suicide’s Son, convey a mastery of resonance and form...irony and playfulness. - Cora Sire, Montreal Review of Books
Still, there is something in the opening gesture of an Arthur poem that has a sobering effect on our sensibility. ... Particular ideas or claims, like the statement of the belief in original sin, operate as centrifugal forces around which the narrative and imagistic pieces of an Arthur poem find their orientation. - Darren Bifford, HANGWIRE
Afterwords
The belief in translation as an act of self-portraiture drives Afterwords, Geoffrey Cook's ambitious reimagining of German poems by Goethe, Heine, Rilke and Brecht. Cook's versions not only transform these foreign texts into English poems in their own right, but enrich and expand his uniquely prismatic voice. Cook brings a contemporary and Canadian tone to his adaptations, which also showcase the exacting craftsmanship for which his first collection, Postscript, was praised. Afterwords is a book that daringly celebrates authorship as a shared project. "Do you not feel," writes Goethe, "that, in my songs, I am one and the other, too?"
