"The poetic catalogue of ordinary things that James Pollock creates in Durable Goods is wry and bracingly dark. The poet's cool eye on the everyday makes the familiar strange, as objects seem to conspire to educate us in a dire metaphysic. An oscillating fan is "a time-lapse sunflower in a cage"; a dishwasher is a "crazed assault/on indifferent death itself." But there's pleasure, even joy here as well: the genuine delight of naming precisely, of making an elegant architecture of meaning out of the stubborn, contrary things that surround us." — Mark Doty

"James Pollock's latest collection, Durable Goods, presents a speaker able to mine seemingly insignificant objects for the astonishing. These elegant but intimate poems echo the very best of Tony Harrison and James Merrill—works which, beneath the sparkle of their cheeky humour, exhale with vulnerability and generosity and edge towards the oracular." — Alexandra Oliver

In his commanding poetry debut, Wolf Sonnets, R. P. LaRose undoes the sonnet's classical constraints, retooling the form for current political circumstances. Packed with family lore, these poems reflect on how deeply we can trust the terms we use to construct our identity. A proud citizen of the Métis Nation, LaRose even questions his right to identify as such: “I was made in someone else’s home,” he writes. Wolf Sonnets is verse obsessed with names, infinity, numbers, categories, and interconnectedness. Depicting his ancestors as wolves—symbols of survival and protection—LaRose bring fresh insight to his wider poetic project: castigating the inequality, greed, and racism inherent to colonialism.

"From selfhood to self-consumption, gunfire to the ‘black gasp suck(ing) back into the gun,’ the poems in Infinity Network loop, reverse, and reiterate, caught in the viral cycle that characterizes the violent, post-truth, solipsistic cultural moment. Poetry cannot, and should not, escape the consequences of the echo chamber we have made, and Johnstone is daring in his willingness to take it on—identity’s slippage, and the anxiety that comes as we commute through our days and nights, ‘the train burrowing / from station to station like a worm,’ through a network of strangers—as subject, image, and sound. Infinity Network’s diagnosis is clear: ‘The problem is / us.’ Let’s break some mirrors." —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

"What is fleeting and what is meaningful converge in Johnstone’s skillful, dreamlike—or fantastically big-screen-like—imagery." - Robyn Fadden, Montreal Review of Books

“Johnstone discovers new ways of cataloging and expressing one of the most challenging topics for a poet to handle, the abstract ideas of the infinite.” -Bruce Meyer, South Shore Review

Praise for The Chemical Life:

"Images so visceral, primal—yet controlled—that they leave us disoriented, seeing double." — Marcella Huerta & Tess Liem, Montreal Review of Books

"In many ways, Johnstone is a mysterious poet. The inner world of his poems is full of strange associations and dreamlike successions of images. It is a bold, skillful sort of poetry, and it makes one curious what canyons he will attempt in the years to come." — University of Toronto Quarterly

"Johnstone's poetry is incredibly efficient; there are no wasted words. Both thematically and technically, there is a dirty edge to many of these poems, which gives them a raw and uncensored feel." — The New Quarterly

Lorna Goodison has come to be recognised as a hugely significant and influential contemporary author. Through poems rooted in her Caribbean heritage and upbringing she has created a body of enchanting, intelligent and socially aware poetry in the authentic registers of her own tongue. —Simon Armitage

[Lorna Goodison’s] language is often spare and exact, and the portraits cut directly to the social realities that shape people’s lives. Many of these poems are detailed studies in character and they teach much about culture: it resides in people, and by contemplating others, we expand our understanding of our culture. Lorna Goodison goes further: she maps language onto this, and it is an English deeply inflected with the speech, life and rhythms of Jamaica. —Kaie Kellough