NNELS Upgrade

Is this life a route or a destination? Alyda Faber's assured début examines the ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth we inhabit, and asks the question, What is left of us when we are gone? In the quiet and unsettling poems of Dust or Fire, Faber speaks from the grief following death to explore the meaning of love and family. She is not afraid of gaps and ellipses, finding music in the silences. Her unflinching gaze explores the imperfections of our fleeting existence, our ambitions and relationships, our flawed humanity.

Allison LaSorda's Stray shows the formation of a considerable poetic talent. These poems are sun-bleached, at once gritty, raw, and playful. LaSorda can conjure childhood memories of beaches and ice cream, ponder the elemental force of the ocean, and plumb the depth of loss in a coal mine disaster. Bringing to mind the poetry of Robert Hass and Louise Glück, LaSorda presents the messiness of daily life with emotional honesty and humour. Stray examines intimacy, memory, and decay, often betraying existential bewilderment.

Winner, New Brunswick Book Award for PoetryA Quill & Quire Best Book of the YearLike the novella in fiction, the long poem is an oft-neglected form. Too long for publication in most literary journals and anthologies, too short to merit book-length publication, the long poem occupies a lonely space in literature. M. Travis Lane is a master of the form, in which her considerable poetic skills reach their apex. There are few that match her brilliance. This volume collects all of her long works — most of them now out of print — from a five-decade commitment to the art. M.

At one moment, a pure abstraction; at the next, an incontrovertible presence of hooves, antlers, and fur. The beating heart of this assured début by Richard Kelly Kemick is the Porcupine caribou herd of the western Arctic. In Caribou Run, Richard Kelly Kemick orchestrates a suite of poems both encyclopedic and lyrical, in which the caribou is both metaphor and phenomenon; both text and exegesis. He explores what we share with this creature of blood and bone and what is hidden, alien, and ineffable.

Katherine Leyton's fresh and vibrant debut collection takes on the sexual politics of the twenty-first century, boldly holding up a mirror to the male gaze and interrogating the nature of images and illusions. Confronting the forces of mass communication — whether television, movies, or the Internet — Leyton explores the subtle effects of the media on our perceptions and interactions, including the pain of alienation and the threat of violence simmering just below the surface.

In Fauxccasional Poems, Daniel Scott Tysdal imagines himself into poetic voices not his own, writing to commemorate events that never occurred, for the posterity of alternative universes — and the delight of our own. From the reign of the first philosopher king once envisioned by Plato, to the twelfth-century Iroquois colonization of Europe, to Barack Obama's career as a poet, to the lasting peace to come under the rule of the Democratic Kampuchea Global Party, Tysdal envisions the paths not taken and what might have been.

Shortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry PrizePart roving eye, part devotion, you wander hotel corridors, entering rooms not quite yours, trying on clothes, blankets, skins. Arguing with the body's limits and its trickery, you are always in disguise. Sometimes you're Leda; sometimes the swan. The rooms are haunted with gendered injuries of the past . . . but messengers arrive to guide you. In this stunning debut collection by Ali Blythe, every poem is unerringly built with hatches and escapes. Every line shimmers with life and shivers with fleeting materials.

Under the covers of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, David Eso and Jeanette Lynes collect letters and epistolary poems from more than 120 Canadian poets, including Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Louis Riel, Alden Nowlan, Anne Szumigalski , Leonard Cohen, John Barton, and Di Brandt, and many others, encompassing the breadth of this country's English literary history. Presented in order not of the chronology of composition, but according to the poets' ages at the time of writing, the poems in the book comprise a single lifeline.

"A society without poetry and the other arts would have broken its mirror and cut out its heart.--"Margaret Atwood. So boldly insists one of our greatest writers in Measures of Astonishment, a refreshing and eclectic mix of both deeply personal and formal essays that offer a glimpse into the minds of some of Canada's most influential poets. The contributors to this volume include Anne Carson, George Elliot Clarke, Anne Simpson, Tim Lilburn, Marilyn Bowering, A.F. Moritz, Mark Abley, Glen Sorestad, Robert Currie, Don McKay, Lillian Allen, and Gregory Scofield.

<p><i>What It Feels Like for a Girl</i> is a series of poems following the intense friendship between two teenagers as they explore pop icons, pornography, and the big, strange world of sex. They soon learn just how complicated sexuality is--and how confusing desire can be.</p> <p><i>What It Feels Like for a Girl</i> is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its “lessons” for the young woman who has never experienced sex in an unfiltered way.