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The Fleece Era is Yukon-based, UK-born Joanna Lilley's first book of poems: a wry and eloquent testament to the intricacies of our various relationships. From the shattered pieces of our environmental puzzles to the labyrinth of family dynamics, Lilley makes these dilemmas come alive. Chillingly sparse, attractively odd and refreshingly frank, The Fleece Era embraces the complexities of human life with an unsettling mix of the sardonic and the compassionate.

At the heart of Karyotype is the Beauty of Loulan, a woman who lived four thousand years ago, her body preserved in the cool, dry sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Karyotype’s poems range from the title sequence, which explores the DNA and woven textiles of this woman and her vanished people (a karyotype is the characteristic chromosome complement of a species), to the firebombing of the National Library of Sarajevo, from an abecedarian hymn on the International Red Cross “Book of Belongings” to the experience of watching the televised invasion of Iraq in the dark of a Montreal night.

Shortlisted for the 1998 Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry Don Kerr's fifth poetry collection is a verbal joyride, an exuberant celebration of a book: a celebration of mountains and plains, of growing up and of being young, of being alive in the present moment and absorbing the feel of the road through the palms of your hands on the wheel. Autodidactic represents an erotics of the everyday, a tribute to place (and movement) and to family (and friends).

Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments is a collection of poems that zooms in and out of places and states of mind, from a lit bicycle shed in the back yard to a root canal in November, from a typhoon in Hong Kong to instincts astray in various Copenhagen neigborhoods. Elegantly translated by Canadian collaborators Per Brask and Patrick Friesen, these dreamlike poems attempt, with honesty and humour, to fathom what it is to inhabit a specifically unspecific point in life -- not to mention in the Universe.

With crisp, elegant language, sharp wit and resonant images, Julie Bruck's new book gentles the largesse of life out of its many smallnesses. The way a straw buoys up in a can of pop, or a friend’s dress holds her shape, even on its hanger: Bruck textures her poetry with a life "you could close your hand around." Bruck's is the urban world so many of us walk through, eyes closed. But Bruck's eyes are wide open, keen and collecting. With teeth and heart, she cracks open the ordinary to reveal life’s love and loss, joy and fragility, its extraordinary fullness.

Shortlisted for the 1990 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes) Marlene Cookshaw is a Cheshire cat of a poet whose naturally realized details illuminate a shifting wholeness on the "singing edge" between dream and waking. Hers is a quilted language at once covering and revealing our fascinating ordinariness. The long poem "In The Swim" subtly captures the desperate and humourous beauty of a seemingly plain life closely observed.

Stately and majestic, yet scuffed with wear and disillusion, the poems of Smaller Hours mount the sky like columns and fora of some archaic ruin. Through these ancient halls, Kevin Shaw tracks Eros, clearing away the rubble and polishing the marble, along the way exploring queer ways of keeping time. Music and movies, clocks and inventors populate these poems. History casts a shadow over all.Kevin Shaw's debut collection is a tour de force of control and grace; musical lines anchored by powerful rhythms dance into the reader's ear.

Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) once wrote of a desire to leave behind "one poem, one story / that will tell what it was like / to be alive." In an abundance of memorable poems, he fulfilled this desire with candour and subtlety, emotion, and humour, sympathy and truth-telling.

Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader's attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of British Columbia's coastal rainforest, these poems are full of life and decay; they carry the odours of salmon rivers and forests of fir; salal growing in the fog-bound mountain slopes.

On “A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould”:“The poem sits up at its greasy-spoon counter and recounts its tale, a kind of cryptic plain-speech, an inverted code, all the more puzzling for what it plainly says: ‘Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved,’ as Robert Frost said.” — Jeffery DonaldsonAbsorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure.