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Meditative, meticulously-crafted poems that nonetheless take seriously the idea that all poetry is a form of praise, and that "the habit of sadness just isn’t enough/ … / because it isn't joy." Gathering Wild is Marianne Bluger's second book.

Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths is a book-length series of poems written from the perspective of a daughter who reads Chekhov obsessively while spending a spring and summer caring for her mother, who is dying from pulmonary fibrosis. Through the prism of the relationships in Chekho's work and life emerges an honest, intimate, and even occasionally humorous portrayal of the energy we put into each other's lives during times of deterioration and suffering.

Shortlisted for the 2000 Governor General's Award for Poetry From the outskirts of the fevered empire, and the embers that were its heart, Moritz sings us to our selves -- our failures, our cruelties, our stupidities, and beauty which even now astonishes and leaves us breathless. Genuine political poetry is immensely difficult. Moritz succeeds, not because his list of atrocities is longer or more shocking, but because his vision is underwritten -- not whitewashed – by an ecstatic lyricism that knows evanescence is the only enduring truth.

These astute, generous poems give us contemporary Beirut in all its ravaged and incongruent beauty. This arresting first collection is, in part, a delicately balanced look at Beirut from the perspective of a Westerner who lives and works in that remarkable city. Whether writing about the Middle East or about domestic life, Di Nardo refuses to romanticize; he doesn’t moralize about the causes of perennial conflicts. He is that rare thing: a clear-eyed witness.

Shortlisted for the 1991 Pat Lowther Award In J.A. Hamilton's poems blood is red, black hearts are black. There is no flinching from things as bad as they can be, especially but not only for women. And yet, this passionate powerful writing radiates affirmation. "his good o, good old world" is livable still in acts of pure verbal magic.

Shortlisted for the 2005 Atlantic Poetry Prize, the 2005 Dartmouth Book Award and the 2005 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry Undone is a cornucopia of passionate poems arranged into three sections. "Forgotten" has mostly to do with the aftermath of a heart-rending breakup; "Kindred" features poems on fellow artists in poetry, music and painting (ranging from Georgia O'Keeffe to Snoopy, beagle-novelist); in "Apprentice," leaving is transformed into celebration, poem after poem about fierce loving of a world that we will have to leave.

Before his tragic death in 1992, Greg Curnoe had submitted to Brick Books a manuscript based on extraordinarily detailed research into the history of 38 Weston, his address in London, Ontario. The result is a journal/collage that traces the occupancy of that one small plot of land hundreds of years back into aboriginal times when land in this country was not plotted according to the laws of geometry. Deeds/Abstracts is an intensely concentrated and particular cross-section of Canadian history, layer upon layer upon layer.

Shortlisted for the 1987 Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Prize The hired hand of these poems was a stupid man. Nowadays he would be known as one of the employable retarded. Tom was lucky enough to find work and a home with the family of John B. Lee, people who understood him. And John B. Lee was lucky to have his whole life coloured by the presence of an apparently limited man who turns out to have been a poem. John B. Lee has with great tact and without a shred of patronizing found the words to make this inarticulate man live. Hired Hands is a remarkable accomplishment.

Winner of the 1994 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (QSPELL, now the Quebec Writers' Federation) In The Woman Downstairs, eloquence joins intimately with an attentive and hungry eye. Julie Bruck explores the accidents and acquaintances of life, its small coincidences and occurrences, its unexpected meetings. With a passionate distance, Bruck blends the outside observer's cool embrace with a desire to know intensely life’s eccentric smallnesses, to gentle the beautiful out of the mundane. By turns witty and thoughtful, Bruck's writing is always graceful, always a delight.

Frances Itani's third book of poetry consists of two deeply moving elegiac sequences commemorating the deaths of a sister and friend. In chaste and determinedly unsentimental language, Itani takes us through the crises all must face, ignoring none of their turbulence or anguish, yet leaving us with a renewed sense of humanity. In these two sequences, she accomplishes inspiring acts of homage and remembrance.