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Pin Pricks is a collection of deceptively simple poems and aphorisms, each of which expresses an understanding of what it means to be human in this high-tech, global age. The poems leap from urban first world concerns to third world struggles, from the solidly grounded to the surreal, from sombre to witty to frighteningly harsh. They constantly remind us that we are all intimately connected, struggling and fortunate to be alive. Like the pricks of a pin, they are short, sharp and memorable.

These elegantly crafted works of social and psychological realism, counterpointed with expressionistic and surrealist textures, employ a language teeming with images, ideas and rhythms. This versatile book of travel poems, portraits, a long dramatic monologue, epistolary and catalogue pieces will leave the reader emotionally and intellectually gratified.

No other Canadian writer is as thoroughly conversant with the fertile tradition of surrealism as Beatriz Hausner. She bestows the imaginative energy and erotic power behind this abundantly creative way of seeing on every poem in Sew Him Up: stitching together intelligent invention and free-flowing intuition in one charged, open-ended packet after another. What was domesticated breaks its shackles and runs wild; devotion to friends and family remodels a ferocious tenderness.

This is the third anthology of Italian Canadian writers organized and edited by Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni with support from Centro Scuola e Cultura Italiana, Toronto. The first Italian Canadian Voices in 1984 contained the first English language translation of Mario Duliani`s Petawawa memoirs, other works in the post WWII era, plus some early work by writers who are now well known. The second edition of Italian Canadian Voices, in 2006, reprised the first and added new names to the growing list of Canadian writers with Italian heritage. This new volume, Bravo!

A love-you-love-you-not daisy petal game for the 21st century, And the Cat Says… is a whimsical, delectable treat; a poetry collection which weaves in some strange haircuts, flying carpets and two sets of twins. Oh, and did we mention the horses?

One False Move is Tim Conley’s debut collection of poetry. As it tightropes along meaning in language, our understandings of, and relationships with, one another, and even our continued survival, it balances elegance with clumsiness, and disenchantment with unrepentant feeling.

This is a collection inspired by Coleridge’s doctrine of bringing the “the whole soul of a man into activity."

Through a dazzling variety of poetic forms and styles, this book restlessly explores such themes as identity, personal growth, love and friendship, Canadian landscape, climate change, visual art, and the roots of poetry itself, in moods of anxious and impassioned questioning, deep affection, dread, awe and grateful praise. This is acclaimed poet Allan Briesmaster’s most formally inventive, most philosophical-minded and most searchingly personal book to date.

An archaeologist of the human heart, Paul Zemokhol uncovers the memories of his Egyptian ancestors and their lost world by the Nile, and he starkly juxtaposes them with his own plain experiences of Canadian urban life in Toronto and Montreal. Writing in a style that is both lyrical and elegiac, Zemokhol yearns for a poetry that existed before him, finding remnants of it in his own memories, friendships, family relations and heroes. This collection will seduce the reader with its lilting musicality, sincerity of feeling and richness of imagery.

This collection offers five answers to the question its title implies: within us, in wild things, in change over time, in teething and in being left behind. Beginning in the prairies and moving both in time and direction, the poems navigate the terrors in the territories of love, faith, birth and death. The poet embraces folktales and children’s stories, the Bible and the weather, humanity’s murky past and its murkier future. Chantel Lavoie voices the fears we cherish, as well as the pain we seek, in mythologies near and far from home.