In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents, hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself.
ASSDEEP IN WONDER is a collection of heartbreaking and hilarious poems by “Canada’s answer to Billy Collins.” Raw and immediate, Gudgeon explores themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures. In simple love poems like “Let’s start small, my darling,” everyday anthems like “Future Tops of America, and visionary dreams like “The Revelations of Donald Trump,” Gudgeon tackles the tyranny of identity, the mystery of desire, the strictures of gender and the absurdity of homophobia in a style that’s hypnotic and highly accessible.
Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn’t exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest.
By Lyle Neff
Lyle Neff’s Bizarre Winery Tragedy is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism.
By Hilary Peach
Bolt, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over familiar and unknown landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from twenty years as a welder with the Boilermakers’ Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, Bolt investigates rough terrain and long horizons.
Bounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper’s fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing.
But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, Conyer Clayton’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is a collection of prose poems that employs surrealism, humour, and body horror to cope with CPTSD, assault, loss, fear, and the memories of it all.
The poems in Catastrophe Theories reflect an increasingly unstable, surreal, and catastrophic world. Written over the past decade, the poems in Mari-Lou Rowley’s oracular work capture the zeitgeist of the moment. A world where human folly and frailty compete with corpocracy and technological determinism against the stubborn magnificence of the natural world.
Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother.
