Best Canadian Poetry 2019

A must-read for anyone with a stake in contemporary Canadian literature, or with curiosity about poetry on the world stage.

Guest editor Rob Taylor, author of the widely acclaimed collection The News, brings a passionate ear for rhythm, an eye for narrative compression, an appetite for vital subject matter, and an affinity for warmth and wit to his selections for Best Canadian Poetry 2019. The fifty ruggedly independent poems gathered here tackle themes of emergence, defiance, ferocious anger, gratitude, and survival. They are alive with acoustic energy, precise in their language, and moving in their use of the personal to explore fraught political realities. They emit a cloud of invisible energy, a charge. Featuring work by: Colleen Baran • Gary Barwin • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Ali Blythe • Marilyn Bowering • Julie Bruck • Sara Cassidy • Sue Chenette • Chelsea Coupal • Kayla Czaga • Sadiqa de Meijer • Adebe DeRango-Adem • Chris Evans • Beth Follett • Stevie Howell • Danielle Hubbard • Dallas Hunt • Catherine Hunter • Sonnet L’Abbé • Ben Ladouceur • Tess Liem • D.A. Lockhart • Jessie Loyer • Annick MacAskill • Domenica Martinello • Laura Matwichuk • Katie McGarry • Jimmy McInnes • A.F. Moritz • Alexandra Oliver • Alycia Pirmohamed • Marion Quednau • Claudia Coutu Radmore • Shazia Hafiz Ramji • Shaun Robinson • Yusuf Saadi • Rebecca Salazar • Ellie Sawatzky • David Seymour • Kevin Spenst • Mallory Tater • Souvankham Thammavongsa • Russell Thornton • Daniel Scott Tysdal • William Vallières • Katherena Vermette • Douglas Walbourne-Gough • Cara Waterfall • Gillian Wigmore • Ian Williams

“This is a book,” writes guest editor Souvankham Thammavongsa, “about what I saw and read and loved, and want you to see and read and love.” Selected from work published by Canadian poets in magazines and journals in 2020, Best Canadian Poetry 2021 gathers the poems Thammavongsa loved most over a year’s worth of reading, and draws together voices that “got in and out quickly, that said unusual things, that were clear, spare, and plain, that made [her] laugh out loud … the voices that barely ever survive to make it onto the page.” From new work by Canadian icons to thrilling emerging talents, this year’s anthology offers fifty poems for you to fall in love with as well. Featuring: Margaret Atwood Ken Babstock Manahil Bandukwala Courtney Bates-Hardy Roxanna Bennett Ronna Bloom Louise Carson Kate Cayley Kitty Cheung Dani Couture Kayla Czaga Šari Dale Unnati Desai Tina Do Andrew DuBois Paola Ferrante Beth Goobie Nina Philomena Honorat Liz Howard Maureen Hynes George K Ilsley Eve Joseph Ian Keteku Judith Krause M Travis Lane Mary Dean Lee Canisia Lubrin Randy Lundy David Ly Yohani Mendis Pamela Mosher Susan Musgrave Téa Mutonji Barbara Nickel Ottavia Paluch Kirsten Pendreigh Emily Pohl-Weary David Romanda Matthew Rooney Zoe Imani Sharpe Sue Sinclair John Steffler Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang Arielle Twist David Ezra Wang Phoebe Wang Hayden Ward Elana Wolff Eugenia Zuroski Jan Zwicky

"A best poem fulfills the promise set out in its first syllable, word, syntax, line break, and soundscape to its reader/listener." “What is a best poem?” asks Best Canadian Poetry 2020 guest editor Marilyn Dumont, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of four poetry collections. “A best poem fulfills the promise set out in its first syllable, word, syntax, line break, and soundscape to its reader/listener. The work required to complete a poem takes risk, skill, and practice, and the poems selected for this anthology all exhibit such attributes.” In precise language that exposes the attitudes inherent in English, innovative forms that illuminate their content, and mastery of music akin to a composer’s score, the fifty poems collected here fulfill their promises and, in doing so, demonstrate the country’s rich diversity and talent for invention—and the promises it might fulfill as well. Featuring introductions by series editor Anita Lahey and advisory editor Amanda Jernigan, and poems by: Kazim Ali • Amber Dawn • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Brandi Bird • Selina Boan • Margret Bollerup • Rita Bouvier • Tim Bowling • Frances Boyle • Di Brandt • Rob Budde • Mugabi Byenkya • Dell Catherall • Margaret Christakos Ivan Coyote • Barry Dempster • Kyle Flemmer • Susan Haldane • Louise Bernice Halfe–Sky Dancer • Jane Eaton Hamilton • Maureen Scott Harris • Dallas Hunt • Ashley Hynd • Babo Kamel • Conor Kerr • Don Kerr • Fiona Tinwei Lam • Natalie Lim • Tanis MacDonald • Nyla Matuk • Sadie McCarney • Tara McGowan-Ross • Erín Moure • Roger Nash • Samantha Nock • Erin Noteboom • Abby Paige • Geoff Pevlin • Alycia Pirmohamed • Jana Prikryl • Jason Purcell • Armand Garnet Ruffo • Rebecca Salazar • Robyn Sarah • Erin Soros • Kevin Spenst • John Elizabeth Stintzi • Andrea Thompson • Sanna Wani • Adele Wiseman

For more than thirty years, this celebrated anthology has introduced readers to the next generation of great Canadian writers. With settings ranging from a Saskatchewan wheat field marked by crop circles to a dystopian metropolis where people are under constant surveillance, the twelve stories in this collection represent the year's best short fiction by some of our most exciting emerging voices. An aspiring artist looking for inspiration in the "aliveness of the desert" gets less--and more--than she bargained for when she signs up for a residency at a roadside motel. After years of toiling to pay off a debt that has devastated his family, a young Chinese fisherman makes a magical catch that will change the course of his life. As a populist candidate stands poised to triumph at a political convention, his campaign strategist and childhood best friend reflects on the dark legacy of their relationship. A brutal assault on a Toronto taxi driver leads his friend on a desperate search for answers. When troubling stories of women's encounters with aliens start to dominate the news cycle, a reporter reluctantly returns to her hometown to cover the phenomenon. A carpet collector reimagines his family's fractured history by weaving new tapestries to tell their stories. Unsure of whether his client is really dying, an end-of-life gift professional must assess the man's extravagant last wish. A Ktunaxa grandmother tells a parable of why you shouldn't speak to Kupi (owl) at night.

Now in its 49th year, Best Canadian Stories has long championed the short story form and highlighted the work of many writers who have gone on to shape the Canadian literary canon. Margaret Atwood, Clark Blaise, Tamas Dobozy, Mavis Gallant, Douglas Glover, Norman Levine, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, Diane Schoemperlen, Kathleen Winter, and many others have appeared in its pages over the decades, making Best Canadian Stories the go-to source for what’s new in Canadian fiction writing for close to five decades. Selected by guest editor Caroline Adderson, the 2019 edition draws together both newer and established writers to shape an engaging and luminous mosaic of writing in this country today—a continuation of not only a series, but a legacy in Canadian letters.

“It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this.” In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, “a revelation in words by means of the words.” The epiphany here is not only the poet’s. It’s ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together—to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an “unspoken / Stranger no longer.”

In his follow-up to This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field is a provocative, powerful, and genre-bending new work that uses the modes of accusation and interrogation. He aims an anthropological eye at the realities of everyday life to show how they house the violence that continues to reverberate from the long twentieth century. In a genre-bending constellation of poetry, photography, redaction, and poetics, Belcourt ultimately argues that if signifiers of Indigenous suffering are everywhere, so too is evidence of Indigenous peoples’ rogue possibility, their utopian drive. In NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, the poet takes on the political demands of queerness, mainstream portrayals of Indigenous life, love and its discontents, and the limits and uses of poetry as a vehicle for Indigenous liberation. In the process, Belcourt once again demonstrates his extraordinary craft, guile, and audacity, and the sheer dexterity of his imagination.