Bricks

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

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

"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.

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 ...

An extraordinary debut set in Toronto, unfurling against the backdrop of an ancient Persian love story. The story of Layla and Majnun, made immortal by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi in the 12th century, has been retold thousands of times, in thousands of different ways, throughout literature. Against the backdrop of this story, to the sound-track of modern hip-hop, and amid the struggle of an immigrant family to instill an old faith under new conditions, Irfan Ali's Accretion hurtles towards an unsustainable, "greater madness." Majnun, one of the foundational literary characters who haunt Accretion, is also an Arabic epithet for "possessed." In this tradition, Ali has written a book from the places where the self is no longer the self; places where, in order not to shut down forever, the debris must be cleared, and the soul must inch towards love and hope, "on memory's dusty beams." Accretion is written in a contemporary lyricism that honours ancient poetic traditions. It is a familiar story, imbued with a particularity and honesty that only Irfan Ali could bring to the table. "Irfan Ali delves fearlessly into the beauty and cruelty of a utilitarian city and the chasms between people. The struggle between head and heart binds these poems. In fact, Accretion might be considered a roadmap for finding love in everything--ourselves, family, soul mates, urban life, and faith." --Emily Pohl-Weary, author of Ghost Sick "In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon prays, pleads, 'O my body, make of me always a man who questions!' Irfan Ali undertakes this mission in Accretion. He knows there's no Faith more unquestionably powerful than Faith that empowers constant self-questioning. ...His speaker's neither a zealot nor an infidel, but someone whose obsessions get mistaken by an imam for piety. Every poet's a theologian, but Ali recognizes that Faith 'is the path between lovers' games'..." --George Elliott Clarke, 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2016 & 2017)

Told in short prose, Glass Bricks tells the story of Lester's experience working both traditional and non-traditional jobs. Sometimes raw and often humorous, Lester shares stories about learning to work, working, and moving on.

Poems that highlight an excess, an emptiness, and a wilderness on the other side of use. In Unidentified Poetic Object, his twelfth collection of poetry, Brian Henderson strikes from language an "alphabet of lightning": an animacy and urgency in which every object is potent with actions, past and present; every action is alive with the potential of what it might move in the world. And since every object is more than we know in our eagerness to turn it to human use, Henderson wants us to dive into that unknown space. The world is composed of astonishing things, but we are obsessed by their use, their categorization, their systemization, their exploitation--a way of being in which every thing, every body, even the future, can be made available as raw resource. The words in these poems are perturbations or seductions rather than representational resources, are equivocal rather than instrumental; they seek to disrupt the order of the discursive, to trouble the elaborate plans humans have for managing and controlling the earth we abuse. Here words open to produce surprising ephemeral hybridities, things without theory or history or a notion of progress. They elide and interpenetrate, shout and are silent, and in those material interactions there emerges a resonant attention and a politic of tenderness. "Prismatic, at times apocalyptic, always sharp, Brian Henderson's poems range through physics, visual art, philosophy, history, and, of course, poetry, to probe the locales where worlds slip into other worlds. ...these rich riffs evoke deconstructed landscapes that expose the ruptures caused by settler colonialism. Laced with wit and a voracious mind, these poems are 'unsettling' in the best possible sense." --Jeanette Lynes

Poetry. In her first collection, THIN AIR OF THE KNOWABLE, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa's life--West Coast, Caribbean, prairies--ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations. A road-trip poem moves from prairie winter, "an icy scatter of gravel / the moving centre of this unpeopled world," past a cattle liner on its way to the slaughter house, but it also passes beneath the sky's "blazing scroll of light," and magpies "flashing black and teal in the sun." Landscape also functions metaphorically to suggest how historical settings play out in the exigencies of individual lives. Other preoccupations include poems that reflect on poesis itself--the strange poem-making compulsion to capture that which is largely inexpressible (hence "the thin air of the knowable"), and the role of dreams, memory, and intuition in shaping a poem's knowledge.