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The big theme—perhaps the only theme—is the narrative that unfolds between the bookends of our birth and our death.  Each of us is born into a time and place—our present—and must answer the questions only we can answer for ourselves:  Who are we? What will we do?  What choices will we make?  The Largeness of Rescue helps us travel along our own storyline by doing what the best art does so well: engages us with ourselves and with our world, and encourages us to slow down and consider our very humanness.

Into the Open: Poems New and Selected is both a compendium and compression of the best and most representative of Susan McCaslin’s poetry over nearly five decades. In addition, it showcases new work. The explorations of Into the Open begin with McCaslin’s intense early interest in mystical Christianity, but expand to include global wisdom traditions from cultures east and west. Her work does not advocate for a particular system of belief, but exemplifies the open-ended probings of an inquiring mind.

Dancing on a Pin is Katerina Fretwell’s eighth poetry, and art, collection. Honest, stark, brave, and at times a humorous evoking of feelings and ideas, this collection of evocative poems is focused on the poet’s husband's illness (cancer) and eventual death, her close sharing of this process, and the frustration of dealing with modern medical treatment, that is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. But mostly, this is a series of poems that make meaning of two people on a journey.

The Size of a Bird is an invocation of desire in times of violence and trauma. Refusing to shy away from difficult topics the poet tackles addiction, abuse, suicide, and sexual violence while infusing each word with a relentless drive for life. Seeking pleasure, these poems navigate dangerous terrain, staying with ambivalence and probing its depths. Queer femininity seeks heterosexual masculinity with varying results. First dates and one-night-stands, alleyways and coffee shops, forest floors and skateparks, these poems reveal a world pulsating with want and rife with pain.

The poems in this collection explore the life of the poet’s mother who divorced in 1939, at a time when a woman divorcing was still frowned upon by society. This collection draws a picture of the artist and single mother who struggled with poverty, war, and the realities of daily life, yet still found beauty and comfort in her garden, and her art.

Journeywoman is the story in poems of the explicitly female journey made by women through girlhood, motherhood and beyond. The play on the word journeyman is intentional with the notion of completing an apprenticeship and seeking mastery of the trade implicit. The actual journey, both physical and intellectual, however, is what brings woman to that state of mastery and Journeywoman, through verse, provides just one itinerary. This unique collection explores the stages of womanhood as defined by this author: the waif, the mother and the crone.

Leave-Taking moves through stages of grief — the reckoning, the remembering, the rituals — after the sudden death of a spouse. The poems trace reflections on a long marriage, and what it is like to be left behind. The poems travel from Haida Gwaii on the west coast of Canada, across the mountains and into the prairie city of Winnipeg, to the beaches of Cape Cod; however, they stop often to rest in the quiet spaces found inside Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto.

This collection of both narrative and lyrical poetry moves between two strong voices that resonate with and against one another, a woman and a man, focusing on family relationships in all their intersections and differences. The poems are about daughters, granddaughters, son, mothers, spouses, and deal with love, sorrow, joy, loss, redemption: the stuff of living. Weaving through the collection are the words and spirit of Virginia Woolf, who has affected and inspired both poets over the course of their writing, parenting, teaching, and being.

In this compelling collection of poems and art, the colour of living is red with excitement, pain, sunsets, blood, and tropical flowers. Along the way, the poet  paints herself into the works of Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and Maud Lewis. Diane Driedger confronts  the body in two different contexts: through her participation in the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival and through her experience of undergoing breast cancer treatment and of being chronically ill. This is poetry that celebrates the body in all its varied forms.

The poems in Dark Water Songs begin on the margins of islands and ancestors, and fan out, probing love, loss and life’s dilemmas. They expand and deepen the poetic exploration which began with her earlier collections, mining the reciprocal spaces enabled by the hyphen between Jamaican and Canadian, exploring silences, the weight of memory, and a sense of the sacred. The collection contributes to the body of work by contemporary Canadian writers of Caribbean origin.