Brick

A visceral, vital, unblinking debut collection of poems exploring kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site. We're often told that we are given only what we can bear. For some of us our first lessons are in how much pain we're made to think we deserve--and the resulting scars are always meant to be kept secret. Assiyah Jamilla Touré's debut collection is a record of those scars--not those inflicted on us by the thousands of little wars we live in everyday, but those that come afterwards, those we inflict upon ourselves to mark the path. Each and every poem in Autowar was written on a cell phone, transcribing an urgent revisiting of old sites of pain, and also a revisiting of one young person's power and ability--to hurt themself, or others. These poems are powerful evocations of how even our scars have worlds and lives. here in the dark, me-space i am insatiable for my flesh i just can't get enough of tiny after-wounds that's me giving, still too soft for my own teeth

"Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment..." Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness. An assemblage of "evidence" recovered from emails about paranormal encounters sent and received by Jeff ([email protected]), junk mail from false prophets, an annotated excerpt from Laura (Riding) Jackson's "The Serious Angels: A True Story," and transcripts of Actis' dreams, conversations, and messages to the dead, Grey All Over not only celebrates a rare, close, complicated father-daughter bond, it also boldly expands the empathetic and critical capacities of poetry itself. In pulling us outside the comfort zones of received aesthetics and social norms, Actis asks us to embrace with whole seriousness "the pragmatics of intuition" in all the ways we read, live, and love. "When a loved one dies, there's all this stuff to deal with, and in the midst of grief we begin to collect, sort, document, store, and discard. Andrea Actis has taken the stuff surrounding her father's death and created a book that is, like grief, in turns heartbreaking, wise, chaotic, drunk, wry, and always unflinchingly honest. This powerful testament of survival is for anyone who has felt the 'déjà vu in reverse' of grief. It is for the living." --Sachiko Murakami, author of Render "Love letter, experimental poem, meditation, conversation with the dead--Andrea Actis's compelling debut is unlike any memoir I've ever read. In one passage, Actis digs out the biggest piece of bone she can find in the vessel of her father's ashes and gently bites on it. Reading Grey All Over I had a similar sensation. Ash. Bone. Love." --Jen Currin, author of Hider/Seeker "This absolutely beautiful work makes plain that seriousness feels like love." --Aisha Sasha John, author of I have to live.

Governor General's Award-winning poet Arleen Paré combines the story of two first best friends with questions of the mystery of cosmic first cause. The poems in First, Arleen Paré's seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings. This layered evocation of the past--of childhood in 1950s Dorval, "a green mesh of girls friendships and fights"--and the intensity of the desire to know, give First its haunting beauty. "[T]he word though old fashioned," Paré writes, "is whence . . . unconditioned origins" when "no worthy question is ever answered on the same plane that it was asked; how to frame the question not knowing the plane on which I must ask it." "Arleen Paré's First is an intriguing Gertrude Stein as Nancy Drew mystery. Using prose poem narrative and an intense syntactic poetics, Paré discovers the cracks in memory as she documents the search for her first best friend. The cracks in this lyrical puzzle are heightened by a very active and assertive poetic language that compels as it decodes the investigation of childhood memory and desire. The writing in First demonstrates a powerful juxtaposition of the continuous present with the continuous past." --Fred Wah "This brilliant collection revolves around firsts, especially a first friend, 'the impress of her never gone.' So too with these poems--tough, sweet and poignant, so surely rendered and musically rich--the impress of these poems never gone." --Lorna Crozier

A wise and embodied collection of dreamscapes, sutras and prayer poems from a writer at her peak In Blue Sonoma, award-winning poet Jane Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what Eliot called the gifts reserved for age. A beloved partner's crossing into Alzheimer's is at the heart of this book, and his battered blue Sonoma is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. Rich in both pathos and sharp shards of insight, Munro's wisdom here is deeply embedded, shot through with moments of wit and candour. In the tradition of Taoist poets like Wang Wei and Po-Chu-i, her sixth and best book opens a wide poetic space, and renders difficult conditions with the lightest of touches. Grey wood twisted tight within the framework of the tree- impossible to snap off, forged as it dries. And in me, parts I can't imagine myself without - silvering. - from The live arbutus carries dead branches ...

Poems about a young two-spirit Indigenous man moving through shadow and trauma toward strength and awareness. Bones, Tyler Pennock's wise and arresting debut, is about the ways we process the traumas of our past, and about how often these experiences eliminate moments of softness and gentleness. Here, the poems journey inward, guided by the world of dreams, seeking memories of a loving sister lost beneath layers of tragedy and abuse. With bravery, the poems stand up to the demons lurking in the many shadows of their lines, seeking glimpses of a good that is always just out of reach. At moments heartrending and gut-punching, at others still and sweet, Bones is a collection of deep and painstaking work that examines the human spirit in all of us. This is a hero's journey and a stark look at the many conditions of the soul. This is a book for survivors, for fighters, for dreamers, and for believers. "Here is a spare and urgent voice that speaks of 'wounds and beauty, ' that gestures to a story of trauma and abuse while offering us a potent journey of self-reckoning and reclamation. Bones entwines brutality with the deepest tenderness and in its clear-eyed way asks us, as poetry must, to re-see the world." --Catherine Bush, author of Accusation and The Rules of Engagement "Tyler Pennock's poetry unfurls like breath: measured, light, caught, whispering, and vital. It charts memory with a steady hand and unerring allegiance to locating the 'beauty/in terrible things.' Bones addresses the effects of intergenerational, state-sponsored trauma with an enviable grace, inscribing and affirming life on the other side of overwhelming pain, abuse, and grief. It carries on, resilient, defiant, gazing at the stars, one breath at a time." --Laurie D. Graham, author of Settler Education "Tyler Pennock's Bones is a soft meandering through the memories of the narrator's hearthome: a place in which trauma, kinship, abuse, and nostalgia cradle one another in a circle. Here, poetics are deployed to inspect the most minute of objects with such wild abandon that the narrator transplants us into a world rife with sharpness so as to make the image complete, focussed, lifelike, photographic even as he continually 'wish[es he] were like water'. Here we find memory and dream animated in equal measure: two spirits sitting in a basement, a headless mother, a white bear, wihtiko, and a sister slowly vanishing. Lyrical, witty, heart-wrenching, and empowering, Pennock's debut book of poetry is a contemplative epic asking us to ponder the ethics of remembrance in all of its lacings of razing and revitalization." --Joshua Whitehead, author of Full-Metal Indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed

A visual exploration of the world's most extraordinary and inspiring concrete architecture - in a stylish and compact format. "Yes, concrete can be cold and imposing - but as the structures in the book attest, it can also be colourful, playful, and delicate." —Wall Street Journal In this new, reimagined, and easy-to-use stylish size, Concrete takes a fresh look at the world's most versatile and abundant building material. Collating fascinating and beautiful concrete buildings by some of the most celebrated architects of the last century, it features familiar projects from Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright alongside work from some of the leading lights of contemporary architecture including Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, and many lesser-known newcomers.

With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch's debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age. Poems that fuse text with performance, and find heroes in unexpected places. Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, brings a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, wrestling rings, and other traditionally masculine spaces. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing--Petch works hard. And whether it's as a union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject--grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence--is off limits. A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better. "Charlie Petch's Why I Was Late is a poetic debut with the wisdom of a sage and the emotional range of an expert comedian. ... Do yourself a favor and read this book. This is a master at work."--Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World "Why I Was Late is a vulnerable, authentic collection of poems - unpredictable and brilliant, sometimes grotesque and downright hilarious - Charlie Petch is a necessary voice in poetry." --Mary Lambert, author of Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across