Poetry

#1 New York Times bestselling author Rupi Kaur presents guided poetry writing exercises of her own design to help you explore themes of trauma, loss, heartache, love, family, healing, and celebration of the self.

Healing Through Words is a guided tour on the journey back to the self, a cathartic and mindful exploration through writing.

This carefully curated collection of exercises asks only that you be vulnerable and honest, both with yourself and the page.

You don’t need to be a writer to take this walk; you just need to write—that’s all.

One of the Toronto Star’s 25 books to read this season • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books

An extraordinary career-spanning collection from one of the most revered poets and storytellers of our age.

Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood—a writer who has fundamentally shaped the contemporary literary landscapes—Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023 assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume.

In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful, and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voice to remarkably drawn characters—mythological figures, animals, and everyday people—all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own. “How can one live with such a heart?” Atwood asks, casting her singular spell upon the reader and ferrying us through life, death, and whatever comes next. Atwood, in her journey through poetry, illuminates our most innate joys and sorrows, desires and fears.

Spanning six decades of work—from her earliest beginnings to brand-new poems—this volume charts the evolution of one of our most iconic and necessary authors.

_________________

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize;The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

From the bestselling author of Rumi and the Red Handbag comes a new collection of essays about the intersection of poetry, painting, photography and beauty. Inspired by the words of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and the art of Irving Penn and Georgia O'Keeffe, Lemay welcomes you into her home, her art and her life as a poet and photographer of the every day. Lemay shares visits to the museum with her daughter, the beauty in an average workday at the library, and encourages the budding writer. Take a long walk through the fragrance, the colours, the beauty and the simplicity Lemay brings to this pocket-sized collection of essays punctuated by moments of flowering. Make an appointment with flowers, and an appointment with life.

A treasure trove of new poems by one of our most sought-after poets: poems that range from descriptions of the Detroit of her childhood to her current life on Cape Cod, from deep appreciations of the natural world to elegies for lost friends and relationships, from a vision of her Jewish heritage to a hard-hitting take on today’s political ironies.

Ceaseless Rain is a meditation on grief. It is a carnival ride where the floor drops out, it is a ghost apple, it is the bones left in the birdbath by crows. This is where the redemptive power of rain streams down in an eclectic mix of images, revealing the daily routines of a hospice residential home. Written in both free verse and halibun, the poems combine to create an intimate portrait of love and humour at the end-of life journey. This is a collection to hold close to the heart.

Everyone has a dog story, from the salesman at Home Depot to the passenger on a plane who confesses about the scar on his face. The poems in Mahoney’s third collection explore the concepts of identity and ownership through rich linguistic textures and voices. From a boy’s fascination with Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred to uniquely imagined Biblical dogs, Off Leash delves into the anguish of dogs loved and lost, and the joy of homecoming.

In her first collection of new poems in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous. 

We’re Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.

Three poems from the collection, originally published in The New Quarterly, were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry.

Praise for We’re Somewhere Else Now

“We’re Somewhere Else Now is a gravely beautiful collection, chronicling days ‘spent and drying.’ No poet has published anything close to it this year, and it confirms Sarah as one of our best.”
—Carmine Starnino, The Walrus

“Robyn Sarah’s work is powerful, visceral, but also elegant and pared down when it needs to be, employing both high formalist rhymes and minimalist beauty. Her poetry collections are consistently lauded, and this one I believe will be no different.”
—Chris Banks, The Woodlot

“Sarah’s verse is an antidote to the soul’s virus . . . Her diction seems so direct, but between the words and lines she meditates in musical nuance and wit to cast doubt on simple and complex truths.”
—Michael Greenstein, The Seaboard Review

“This collection grapples with contemporary life in a way that is both stylized and vulnerable . . . Sarah’s ability to tie scenes of everyday life to highly abstract concepts and ideas results in compelling poems.”
—Anna Roberts, The Tribune

“This is a triumphant return from Robyn Sarah, and her first book of new poems in a decade. With her characteristic quiet wisdom, Sarah turns her attention to the pandemic years, capturing both the strangeness of isolation of that period, and the subtle beauty that persists in daily life.”
—Open Book

Praise for Robyn Sarah

“[Her poems] illuminate the reader’s privacy without destroying the poet’s. And elegant play is going on even in the most acutely painful moments of clarity, a play of pure energy.”
—Margaret Avison, Canadian Women Studies

“[Hers] are the sort of metaphors that poets everywhere dream of conjuring. Metaphors that in their clarity of sense, image, and sound create spaces for meaning to reside—meaning that is elusive or otherwise impossible to articulate, but that leaves the reader with a heightened sense of recognition.”
—Anita Lahey, The Walrus

“In our positive-thinking, smiley-face popular culture, Robyn Sarah looks at the shadows cast by light.  Her poems, with their focus on the passage of time, the emptiness around the presence, the unknowing around the known, are infused with the “black baptismal water” of duende, as they choose the braver joy of life thrown into relief by that dark awareness.”
—Sonnet L’Abbé

“The cool delight of her poetry is to turn those subjects of routine forgetfulness into words that quiver in the heart . . . Sarah knows the language: its pressure points, its traditions, its crevices. Trained as a musician, she also understands flow and timing, when to sing and when to keep silent.”
—Mark Abley, Montreal Gazette

“So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience.”
—Eric Ormsby, Books in Canada

“Robyn Sarah’s My Shoes Are Killing Me is a lyrical power. A richly inventive, precise, meditative collection . . . This is a transformative work that continuously surprises the reader.”
—Jury citation, Governor General’s Award for Poetry 2015

Available for the first time, #1 New York Times bestselling author, Rupi Kaur, presents a gorgeous boxed set of her books milk and honey and the sun and her flowers.

Global sensation and internationally renowned author rupi kaur’s milk and honey celebrates the challenges and triumphs facing the modern woman. In strikingly personal, yet widely relatable poems accompanied by original illustrations, Kaur challenges the idea that women should be quiet, gentle, and submissive and instead encourages women to be strong, powerful, and proud. Each of the four chapters (“the hurting,” “the loving,” “the breaking,” and “the healing”) serves a different purpose and explores the many kinds of pain and healing of life’s experiences. From breakups to trauma, kaur leads readers through life’s most bitter moments to find their hidden sweetness.

Paired with milk and honey in this exquisite boxed set: the sun and her flowers, a vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honouring one’s roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself. Divided into five chapters and illustrated in kaur’s signature style, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms.

“Truthfully I can only tell you what’s missing” writes the heartbroken protagonist at the beginning of Victoria Mbabazi’s The Siren in the Twelfth House. But this isn’t a book that succumbs to grief. Mbabazi’s poems are siren songs, reclaiming love from pain, and rediscovering joy through the destruction and eventual rebuilding of astrological houses. Prepare to slow dance through this profound and powerful debut.

Praise for The Siren in the Twelfth House:

The Siren in the Twelfth House combines meta-allegory with a strident exploration of the vicissitudes of love and companionship. Its anthropomorphic signs bring the astrological into the quotidian, a logic to randomness of experience, and a symphony from the 12 orchestral sections of the skies. As we trace the transformation of the titular siren, we cannot help but have our own gazes and capacities for orphic interpretation sharpened as well.—Tolu Oloruntoba, The Junta of Happenstance, and Each One a Furnace

With a sweeping grace and theatrical, cinematic flare, Victoria Mbabazi writes us into the delicious tropes and archetypes of astrology—from the signs to the houses to the transits—with the careful, precise eye of a poet. Siren in the Twelfth House is bright with a familiar ancient fascination—what we have with the stars, with the sky and, most of all, with each other.—Sanna Wani, author of My Grief, the Sun

Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”

Praise for Precedented Parroting:

Each poem in Precedented Parroting is a singular, sublime murmuration, their words swooping, shape-shifting, and thrumming with life.—Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits

The rhythms and soundscapes in Precedented Parroting are virtuosic. They make me think of waves or air currents that memory, narrative, relationship, and emotion are set loose on. Feathers are composed of barbs, as loss is, observes Tran in the early pages of this book, one implication being that, like feathers, loss can both enable and necessitate flight. An immensely powerful, clear-eyed account of harm, dislocation, and survival through generations.—River Halen, author of Dream Rooms