Published in 1956 to immediate acclaim, Leonard Cohen’s first published book contains poems written between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Now new generations of readers will rediscover not only the early, though no less accomplished and passionate, work of one of our most beloved writers, but poetry that resonates loudly with relevance today.
While the tone of Patricia Young's latest collection, Here Come the Moonbathers, is perhaps more dark, difficult and tragic than her earlier work, beautifully hedonic poems spark and sizzle throughout. The poems in this collection have wild freedom, different kinds of power, exploring the themes of love and longing and loss (especially the latter) with grace, bewilderment, playfulness, and occasionally anger. There's a surreal edge to many of these poems, a personal, political and ecological vis...
would you believe me when i make consorts of alphabet runaways & stayathomes i have rounded up where they wandered all over the page Dennis Cooley masterfully extends the genre of the abecedary to explore his curiosity of the limitlessness of human communication. With linguistic wit and complexity, his poetry carries the reader through the historical developments of the alphabet. He pries open letters and words to play with both their immediate meaning and the possibilities within the words them...
Ignored by critics and readers of the time, these poems were written by Canadians who witnessed the horror of World War I first-hand, forming an anthology in which the forgotten experiences of a decade are finally remembered.
When Mark Doty's My Alexandria was published in 1993, the response was one of unanimous celebration. Writing with unmatched technical virtuosity and stunning honesty Doty never flinches from his subject - how we live when what we live for is about to be taken from us - and the poems collected in My Alexandria revealed powerfully the inextricable connection between communion and loss. In Atlantis, Doty claims the mythical lost island as his own: a paradise whose memory he must keep alive at the s...
A poetic primer on mothering and motherhood, After Birth is unflinching in its celebration of new life. Proffering poems that are both alchemical and personal, Elizabeth Ross taps into the contradictions of creation -- joy, distress, lassitude -- all while her speaker tenderly hovers, like Nosferatu, over newborns. After Birth blood[ies] the word, and marks Elizabeth Ross as a writer to watch.
Gospel Drunk follows a speaker’s journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as “dragons in suits” collide with critiques of “the broken bicycle of recovery.” A child’s fingers interlace to...
Rain Shadow is a collection of poetry that explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and humans yearning to connect with something greater than themselves. The poems range through destabilized lives and landscapes, fathoming presence and absence, transformation and oblivion. They outline the major questions of our time as the poet crisscrosses western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Witty, playful, serious, and heartsore, Rain Shadow seeks to understand the space in which peo...
