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?"

The Hardness of Matter and Water fulfills a poetic odyssey Québécois poet Pierre Nepveu began over four decades ago. Through a sequence of four prose poems, his anonymous protagonist walks from the heart of present-day Montreal into its southwestern margins, where the metropolis began centuries ago and which now “lays out its memories on the young grass.” Questioning his sense of belonging, social unease and mortality as he walks, and following “a shadowy voice that neither sings nor speaks,” Nepveu transports readers across wide spans of history, geography, metaphysics and speculation.

A 2016 finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in French, rendered in English by award-winning translator Donald Winkler, The Hardness of Matter and Water is poetry at its meditative, insightful best.

"Robin Richardson’s poems take no prisoners, have a strange and authentic music all their own, and mark her … as one of the best young poets of her generation."– Thomas Lux

"Richardson uses the poetic image like a tourniquet on the eyes while a self-aware wound is inflicted elsewhere in the imagination."–Margaret Christakos

“What I love most in these poems is their insistence on being of two minds. There is such tension here between past and present, contact and isolation, heart and head, the resignation of our species to this current moment and its stubborn hopes for a future. What a smart, moving first
book!” – Julie Bruck

“A phrase maker of astonishing power, Laura Ritland’s subjects are civility, kindness, hysteria, the body, art and migration. An achingly elegiac work, East and West surveys the ruins of memory, family and selfhood, and draws out of them a poetic identity rooted in compassion and realism. This
book is magnificent.” – Richard Greene

In East and West, Laura Ritland deploys a penetrating wit, explosive technical prowess, and profound ability to discern the human truths within the muddle of the human condition. The cognitive leaps of this bold and beautiful book.” –Rhea Tregebov