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Margaret Atwood's Power Politics first appeared in 1971, startling its audience with its vital dance of woman and man. It still startles, and is just as iconoclastic as ever. These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple, universal. Clear, direct, wry, unrelenting -- Atwood's poetic powers are honed to perfection in this important early work.

The best of beloved poet Alden Nowlan's explicitly honest, direct, and insightful poetry. Now featuring an introduction by Susan Musgrave 
 
Alden Nowlan, one of Canada's finest and most influential poets, died in 1983. He leaves a rich legacy of poetry that is accessible yet profound, and that speaks to people's lives with wry observation and keen insight. Alden Nowlan Selected Poems is for Nowlan fans and new readers alike.

What are we thinking at any given moment? What happens to a thought as that moment, on its way to oblivion, collides with its successor? Rambunctious, witty, joyous, and bittersweet, drift is an investigation conducted by a truly unfettered imagination.

How does the embrace of levity -- that warm, human voice, perceptive of its own limits -- find its way to the listener in today's shattered world? By blind burrowing? Heat fluctuations in loam and subsoil? Instinct and luck? Much like the mole of the title, Patrick Warner's poems accomplish great feats of imagination, exposure, empathy, and insight, disguised all the while as pleasingly modest creatures of accident and stealth.

Mean is a stunning exploration of the threshold and divide between our primeval origins and the meanness of our everyday lives. In this collection, the pastoral collides with the concrete terrain of motorbikes, prisons, and chainlink to capture our constructed isolation and our buried, yet resonant, connection to the land and seascapes that surround us. Ken Babstock's poetic voice is wholly original -- searing and pure in its realism, evocative and affecting in its search for a place to call its own.

Karen Solie launched to prominence with her first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine (2001), finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and winner of many other awards and citations. She continued her upward trajectory with Modern and Normal (2005), and is now considered one of Canada's best poets. Pigeon is yet another leap forward for this singer of existential bewilderment. These poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, and the eros of danger.

The appearance of Margaret Atwood's first major collection of poetry marked the beginning of a truly outstanding career in Canadian and international letters. The voice in these poems is as witty, vulnerable, direct, and incisive as we've come to know in later works, such as Power Politics, Bodily Harm, and Alias Grace. Atwood writes compassionately about the risks of love in a technological age, and the quest for identity in a universe that cannot quite be trusted.

Shortlisted for the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region) Brenda Leifso’s first volume of poetry is a stunning debut: haunting, disturbing but resolutely beautiful. With an unflinching eye, Leifso explores the uncertainty of memory, the legacy of place, the powerful dynamics of sexuality and secrecy, and the violence inherent in family relations.

Shortlisted for the 2012 Pat Lowther Memorial Award An ambivalent zoo-tour, an open-eyed meander through a landscape of made and contained things. A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature -- constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past -- through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title.