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Showing 21 - 40 of 10715 items
By Rebecca Thomas. 2020
In Mi'kmaw, three similarly shaped words have drastically different meanings: kesalul means "I love you"; kesa'lul means "I hurt you";…
and ke'sa'lul means "I put you into the fire." Spoken word artist Rebecca Thomas' first poetry collection is at once a meditation on navigating life and love as a second-generation Residential School survivor, a lesson in unlearning, and a rallying cry for Indigenous justice, empathy, and equality.By Douglas Walbourne-Gough. 2020
Shortlisted, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and Raymond Souster AwardLonglisted, First Nation Communities READ AwardFrom the author: I cannot let…
the story of Crow Gulch — the story of my family and, subsequently, my own story — go untold. This book is my attempt to resurrect dialogue and story, to honour who and where I come from, to remind Corner Brook of the glaring omission in its social history.In his debut poetry collection, Douglas Walbourne-Gough reflects on the legacy of a community that sat on the shore of the Bay of Islands, less than two kilometres west of downtown Corner Brook.Crow Gulch began as a temporary shack town to house migrant workers in the 1920s during the construction of the pulp and paper mill. After the mill was complete, some of the residents, many of Indigenous ancestry, settled there permanently — including the poet's great-grandmother Amelia Campbell and her daughter, Ella — and those the locals called the "jackytars," a derogatory epithet used to describe someone of mixed French and Mi'kmaq descent. Many remained there until the late 1970s, when the settlement was forcibly abandoned and largely forgotten.Walbourne-Gough lyrically sifts through archival memory and family accounts, resurrecting story and conversation, to patch together a history of a people and place. Here he finds his own identity within the legacy of Crow Gulch and reminds those who have forgotten of a glaring omission in history.By George Elliott Clarke. 2020
?I take Liberties—poetic—and take License to relate her story In her voice, to tell History Who she was—as I hear…
her say Or sing. [...] But still you will come face-to-face With a "Portia," whose life outshines All brilliance this black ink divines.... In his unique brand of spoken word, Africadian poetry, the incomparable George Elliott Clarke explores a personal subject: his great-aunt Portia White. The result is a stirring, epic poem vibrating with energy and music that spans White's birth in 1911, a coming of age amidst the backdrop of two World Wars, and her life-long love affair with music—from singing in to directing the Cornwallis Street Baptist Church choir to her bel canto tutlege at the Halifax Conservatory of Music to her final, command performance before Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1964. Portia White is a stunning testament to the first African Canadian to become an international star. Features vibrant illustrations by contemporary artist Lara Martina.By Anne Carson. 2020
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a meditation on the destabilizing and destructive power of beauty, drawing together Helen of…
Troy and Marilyn Monroe, twin avatars of female fascination separated by millennia but united in mythopoeic force. Norma Jeane Baker was staged in the spring of 2019 at The Shed’s Griffin Theater in New York, starring actor Ben Whishaw and soprano Renée Fleming and directed by Katie Mitchell.By Jasmin Kaur. 2021
Perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo and Rupi Kaur, this heartrending story told in prose, poetry, and illustration weaves together…
the stories of a mother and daughter’s lives.In this stunning sophomore novel, acclaimed writer Jasmin Kaur explores trauma, fear, courage, community, and the healing power of love in its many forms.Kiran flees her home in Punjab for a fresh start in Canada after a sexual assault leaves her pregnant. But overstaying her visa and living undocumented brings its own perils for both her and her daughter, Sahaara.Sahaara would do anything to protect her mother. When she learns the truth about Kiran’s past, she feels compelled to seek justice—even if it means challenging a powerful and dangerous man.if i tell you the truththat i’ve dugfrom the hardened depthsof this shrapnel-filled dirtwith these aching, bloody handswould you believe me?would you still love me?By Rebecca Salazar. 2021
An urgent, powerful examination of place and the ways in which all kinds of identities exist and collide.GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY…
AWARD FOR POETRY, FINALIST The poems in sulphurtongue ask how to redefine desire and kinship across languages, and across polluted environments. An immigrant family scatters over a stolen continent. Oracles appear in public transit, and online. Bodies are transformed by nearby nickel mines. Doppelgangers, Catholic saints, and polyamorists alike pass on unusual inheritances. Deeply entangled in relations both emotional and ecological, this collection confronts the stories we tell about gender, queerness, race, religion, illness, and trauma, seeking new forms of care for a changing world.By Roxanna Bennett. 2021
In unmeaningable, her previous Trillium Poetry Awards winning book with Gordon Hill Press, Roxanna Bennett renovated the North American disability…
poetics canon via her queer fusion of invisible and visible disability identities. The Untranslatable I builds on Roxanna's acute sense of form and cripping of myth by establishing a more reflective, heartbreaking voice that asks, "Was I chosen? Is this a gift or a curse?" and provides answers not as prescribed path or cure, but as beautiful song.By Tolu Oloruntoba. 2021
Personal, primordial, and pulsing with syncopated language, Tolu Oloruntoba?s poetic debut, The Junta of Happenstance, is a compendium of dis-ease.…
This includes disease in the traditional sense, as informed by the poet?s time as a physician, and dis-ease as a primer for family dysfunction, the (im)migrant experience, and urban / corporate anxiety. In the face of struggles against social injustice, Oloruntoba navigates the contemporary moment with empathy and intelligence, finding beauty in chaos, and strength in suffering. The Junta of Happenstance is an important and assured debut.By Jaye Simpson. 2020
it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational…
trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry: i am five my sisters are saying boy i do not know what the word means but— i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b, the hollowness of the o, the blade of yBy Hoa Nguyen. 2021
2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRYA collection inspired by Hoa’s mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus…
troupe, is verse meditation on Vietnam’s diaspora.Hoa Nguyen’s latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems inA Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.By Naomi Fontaine. 2021
By Elizabeth Acevedo, Olivia Gatwood, Mahogany L. Browne, Theodore Taylor III. 2020
"This collection of poems by women of color covers topics relating to social justice, activism, discrimination and empathy, focusing on…
the need to speak out and inspiring middle-graders." -VogueWoke: A Young Poet's Guide to Justice is a collection of poems to inspire kids to stay woke and become a new generation of activists.Historically poets have been on the forefront of social movements.Wokeis a collection of poems by women that reflects the joy and passion in the fight for social justice, tackling topics from discrimination to empathy, and acceptance to speaking out.With Theodore Taylor’s bright, emotional art, and writing from Mahogany L. Browne, Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood, kids will be inspired to create their own art and poems to express how they see justice and injustice.With a foreword by best-selling author Jason Reynolds.By Stephen Collis. 2021
“Can you walk away from a climate?” Maybe. But “in the future / everyone will have their fifteen minutes of…
blame.” A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe conceptually through its dissolution of the categories of “man-made” and “natural” disasters. How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous future impinges upon every moment? Collis provides no easy answers and offers no simple hope. What his book does instead is probe our current state of anxiety with care, humour, and an unflinching gazing into the darkness we have gathered around ourselves. All the while – in song, in lyrical outbursts, and in philosophical and speculative excursions – it asks what form a resistance to the tenor of these out-of-joint times might take. In doing so, it explores the links between the climate’s “tipping points” and the borders which constrain those who are fleeing the disaster – including the plants, animals, and peoples forcibly displaced by a radically altered world ecology.By Gwen Benaway. 2020
day/break, Governor General's Literary Award Winner Gwen Benaway's fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine…
body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, day/break asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world. Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, day/break reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations.Praise for day/break:"Gwen Benaway is quickly becoming a master poet. Four books in and blowing all of our minds, but I really think she's just getting warmed up. I wanted to write something brilliant to recommend day/break, but I can think of nothing better than Gwen's own words: 'we will not say love / knowing enough / of grief / to speak / truer words.'" —Katherena Vermette, award-winning author of The Break"What vision, what musicality! This astounding and brilliant examination of love and its discontents reminds me of Anne Carson's theory that love turns us into anthropologists of our own lives. From Benaway's day/break (her best book yet), we might learn how to democratize love's liberatory possibilities. How lucky are we to be reading in the time of Gwen Benaway!" —Billy-Ray Belcourt, award-winning author of NDN Coping MechanismsBy Alma Fullerton. 2022
A diagnosis of dyslexia could change everything for an aspiring fifth-grade gymnast struggling at school in this authentic, high-energy novel…
in verse. The print edition of this title is set in a font developed to be easy to read.The gym is where Claire shines and she’s on her way to qualifying for the state championships. But at school, she’s known as a troublemaker—which is fine with her since it helps her hide her reading problem. Claire has never been able to make sense of the wobbling jumble of letters on a page.When a sympathetic principal wonders if she’s acting out because she may have dyslexia, she’s stunned. Claire has always assumed she’s dumb, so she’s eager to get evaluated. But her mother balks. Afraid Claire will be labeled “stupid,” she refuses testing. Can Claire take on both her reading challenges and her mother’s denial? Is it worth jeopardizing her dream of the state championships?Told in clear and poignant verse and featuring black and white illustrations, Claire’s struggle with something that seems to come easily to everyone else will resonate with readers and have them cheering her on.By Farzana Doctor. 2022
A moving collection of poetry about navigating mid-life, full of humour and wit, from acclaimed novelist Farzana DoctorThis debut poetry…
collection from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor is both an intimate deep dive and a humorous glance at the tumultuous decade of her forties. Through crisp and vivid language, Doctor explores mid-life breakups and dating, female genital cutting, imprints of racism and misogyny, and the oddness of sex and love, and urges us to take a second look at the ways in which human relationships are never what we expect them to be.By Jónína Kirton. 2022
Standing in a River of Time merges poetry and lyrical memoir on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization…
on a Métis family. Kirton does not shy away from hard realities, meeting them head on, but always treating them with respect and the love stemming from a lifetime of spiritual healing and decades of sobriety. This collection unravels painful memories and a mixed-blood woman’s journey towards wholeness. The Ancestors whisper to Kirton throughout, asking her to heal, to bring them home, so that within these stories of redemption and loss the dead walk with us, their presence felt as the story unfurls in unexpected ways. Kirton does not offer false hope, nor does she push us towards answers we are not yet ready for. Instead, she gestures towards the many healing modalities she has explored as she discovers that the path to reconciliation is not only a long and winding road, but also that it begins with those closest to us.By Douglas Kearney. 2021
2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRYEschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho…
aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.By Liz Howard. 2021
The latest from the author of the Griffin Poetry Prize Award-winning collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent . GRIFFIN…
POETRY PRIZE, FINALIST I have to believe my account will outpace its ending. The danger and necessity of living with each other is at the core of Liz Howard's daring and intimate second collection. Letters in a Bruised Cosmos asks who do we become after the worst has happened? Invoking the knowledge histories of Western and Indigenous astrophysical science, Howard takes us on a breakneck river course of radiant and perilous survival in which we are invited to “reforge [ourselves] inside tomorrow's humidex”. Everyday observation, family history, and personal tragedy are sublimated here in a propulsive verse that is relentlessly its own. Part autobiography, part philosophical puzzlement, part love song, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos is a book that once read will not soon be forgottenBy Jen Sookfong Lee. 2021
In these devastating lyric poems Jen Sookfong Lee unfolds the experience of her narrator, following her through frost-chilled nights and…
salt-scented days, as she pulls at the knot of accumulated expectations around her trying to create space to want and to be. The Shadow List is a book filled with desire, where we question the politics of who gets to choose and who doesn't and where the narrator creates hidden lists of what she really wants. With a novelist's way with character, Lee builds a deep connection with the narrator of the poems, yet each individual poem creates a vivid snapshot of moments many will recognize. The slick of black ice, the killing light of day, the cheap, plastic diamonds ? they are all pieces of a life we gather and put in our pockets to remember with.