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Time touches everything, and in doing so changes everything. The Arrow of Time examines the challenges, transformations and surprises wrought by change, and celebrates the ways we attempt to measure our lives against this invisible force. From John Constable’s home at East Bergholt to the shattered streets of Nanking, China, in 1937, Meyer offers a fresh and lyrically commanding statement of the impact that time, death and love have on our determination to hold on to life.

This stunning collection will break your heart and put it back together again, as Pamela Porter unravels a long-held family secret in a moving personal search for redemption, face to face with the question of her own identity.

Follow Garry Gottfriedson in this new collection of combative poems as he compels us and Heaven to listen to the challenges facing First Nation communities today. Employing many of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) images and stories, Gottfriedson takes us inside the rez and into the rooming houses in the city cores, but always drawing new strength from the land and the people who have moved upon it. He speaks of “the smell of grandmothers and grandfathers / breathing the stories into our blood” so as to “wrap our newborn in freshly made Star Quilts.”

Pamela Porter's poems celebrate a world awaiting discover. She opens this new collection with a poem entitles “An Offering” in which she brings to the ceremony “poems / for every season — of dreams born, / burning, broken” and, in particular, one that “begins like a perilous grace” to develop as “naked and tender and wanting.” Throughout, one hears and sees images that connect both the poet and reader to other dimensions. Always for Porter, there is the moment tentatively coming into being where the mundane is transformed into something totally unexpected and otherworldly.

How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes’ new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes comes to terms with personal grief, she tries to find consolation in the place she shares with other beings.

Philip Resnick’s Footsteps of the Past constitutes a powerful set of reflections on the modern human condition. The book contains poems dealing with memory, recognition, and the slow passage of time, while others meditate on the deep wounds that chronic illness and disability instill. Some of the poems have a critical political edge, while others probe the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of our modern identities with cool detachment and unrelenting honesty.

These poems lead the reader into a world that reveals a balancing act between the familiar and known, the mysterious and wild. Some poems are narrative, some imagistic meditations, and some are small, playful pieces that edge into wisdom: “Here, here, you sing and now / Between me and what I see / lives eternity.” Throughout there is a unifying voice that is all Rappaport’s own and (unimaginably) blends skepticism with mysticism. The poems present themselves as both playful and worldly wise.

In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy. Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci’s Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan’s On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue.

Traditional poetry continues to hold its place in contemporary literature, in part, because of the emergence of women whose writing is informed by tradition but whose subject matter crystalizes in the personal search for meaning. This work represents a search through life, querying events and ideas. Thoughts are offered and ideas considered, but no real conclusion is reached as life’s constant flux shifts the perspective and importance of every event. Everyday moments and seemingly inconsequential acts are allowed their due while peace and strength show through the loss and effort.

"The Long Walk carries a lifetime's force of meaning. A deeply beautiful book." Anne Michaels In The Long Walk, Jan Zwicky bears witness to environmental and cultural cataclysm. Both prophetic and acutely personal, these poems extend her previous meditations on colonial barbarism and ecocide, on spiritual catastrophe and transformation. The voice now penetrates the steepest darknesses; it possesses extraordinary reach and density. Zwicky is one of North America's finest poets, and in this book she gives us her most profound work to date.