home body | rupi kaur
Regular price $22.00 Sale price $17.60From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey and the sun and her flowers comes her greatly anticipated third collection of poetry.
rupi kaur constantly embraces growth, and in home body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present, and the potential of the self. home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself - reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.
i dive into the well of my body
and end up in another world
everything i need
already exists in me
there’s no need
to look anywhere else
—home
Rupi Kaur Poetry Boxed Set
Regular price $40.00 Sale price $32.00Available 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.
Things No One Else Can Teach Us
Regular price $24.99Best Canadian Poetry 2021
Regular price $22.95“This is a book,” writes guest editor Souvankham Thammavongsa, “about what I saw and read and loved, and want you to see and read and love.” Selected from work published by Canadian poets in magazines and journals in 2020, Best Canadian Poetry 2021 gathers the poems Thammavongsa loved most over a year’s worth of reading, and draws together voices that “got in and out quickly, that said unusual things, that were clear, spare, and plain, that made [her] laugh out loud … the voices that barely ever survive to make it onto the page.” From new work by Canadian icons to thrilling emerging talents, this year’s anthology offers fifty poems for you to fall in love with as well.
Featuring:
Margaret Atwood
Ken Babstock
Manahil Bandukwala
Courtney Bates-Hardy
Roxanna Bennett
Ronna Bloom
Louise Carson
Kate Cayley
Kitty Cheung
Dani Couture
Kayla Czaga
Šari Dale
Unnati Desai
Tina Do
Andrew DuBois
Paola Ferrante
Beth Goobie
Nina Philomena Honorat
Liz Howard
Maureen Hynes
George K Ilsley
Eve Joseph
Ian Keteku
Judith Krause
M Travis Lane
Mary Dean Lee
Canisia Lubrin
Randy Lundy
David Ly
Yohani Mendis
Pamela Mosher
Susan Musgrave
Téa Mutonji
Barbara Nickel
Ottavia Paluch
Kirsten Pendreigh
Emily Pohl-Weary
David Romanda
Matthew Rooney
Zoe Imani Sharpe
Sue Sinclair
John Steffler
Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang
Arielle Twist
David Ezra Wang
Phoebe Wang
Hayden Ward
Elana Wolff
Eugenia Zuroski
Jan Zwicky
Dearly | Poems | Margaret Atwood
Regular price $32.95The collection of a lifetime from the bestselling novelist and poet.
By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.
Before she became one of the world's most important and loved novelists, Atwood was a poet. Dearly is her first collection in over a decade. It brings together many of her most recognizable and celebrated themes, but distilled - from minutely perfect descriptions of the natural world to startlingly witty encounters with aliens, from pressing political issues to myth and legend. It is a pure Atwood delight, and long-term readers and new fans alike will treasure its insight, empathy and humour.
Detours: An Anthology of Poets from Windsor & Essex County
Regular price $19.95
An anthology of poets from Windsor & Essex County showcasing the eclecticism that characterizes the region: the traditional and experimental, the academy and community, the established and emergent, the internationally renowned and promising apprentice. A rich literary heritage, Detours pays tribute to such luminaries as Bronwen Wallace, Di Brandt, Joyce Carol Oates, Marty Gervais, and Phil Hall, while highlighting work by emerging poets such as Alex Gayowsky, Dani Couture, Darryl Whetter, Kate Hargreaves, and Robert Earl Stewart.
The Flower Can Always be Changing
Regular price $15.95Winner 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner 2021 Governor General Literary Award for Poetry
Longlisted 2022 Gerald Lampert Award
Longlisted 2022 Raymond Souster Award
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.
Praise for The Junta of Happenstance
Tolu Oloruntoba uses a “safecracker ear” (“Child at Sleep”) to perceive both the subtle and overt mechanics of human interactions and to explore the interlocking parts of past and present, individual and community, and the here and there.—Samantha Jones, ARC Poetry magazine
The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba’s dazzling debut collection, collides the language of revolution with the landscapes of the body. These poems go beyond the desire to ward off death. They emerge out of a life intimate with death’s randomness. Like the vicissitudes of war, Oloruntoba’s poems make peace with accident and fate. They bring breath to survival. ‘If the timeline ahead is/ infinitely longer than the/ knives behind, perhaps/ as we set to mending/ we can heal more/ than we ever undid./ But we, too,/ would like a piece of the plunder.’ These exquisite poems leave an imprint both violent and terrifyingly beautiful.—Judges’ Citation, 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Tolu Oloruntoba’s voice in The Junta of Happenstance is at once thoughtful and authoritative, metaphorically rich and lyrically surprising. Oloruntoba’s language travels through history and myth to speak to today and engage with a future transformed by new understanding. The combination of craft and spirit cuts a fine place for this debut work, expanding our literary view.—2021 Governor General Literary Award Peer assessment committee: Kaie Kellough, George Murray and Anna Marie Sewell
Walk in the Woods
Regular price $24.95Walk in the Woods is an adventure about going out on the best and the worst days of the year and taking a walk in the jigsaw puzzle of the wetlands, forest, savannah, and prairie areas that hug the near edges of Windsor, Ontario. It’s a place that some older residents still call Yawkey Bush. It’s a gem that caught the attention of the legendary environmental activist David Suzuki who said Ojibway was a “priceless … tiny pocket of nature that reminds us, perhaps, of what once was and what could be …” With that in mind, Marty Gervais, Windsor’s poet laureate emeritus, explores this “tiny pocket” and spent most of the Covid-19 pandemic walking and carrying a camera nearly every day into the far reaches of Ojibway, Black Oak, the Tall Grass and Ojibway Shores. His photographs are a diary of that journey. Gervais also teamed up with Windsor’s Poet Laureate Mary Ann Mulhern, and city’s Youth Poet Laureate Alexei Ungurenasu to celebrate this rich environmental treasure in southwestern Ontario.
I ventured out daily, marvelling at a world I had never really known. I carried a camera. I photographed and documented what I was experiencing. Mostly, I walked alone. I went out when it was misty, overcast, and when it was sunny, and I never missed a snowy day … It was a walk of meditation, reflection, gratitude, and it was a walk about learning what I was seeing… – Marty Gervais
First I Fold The Mountain
Regular price $18.95In this new book, Terry Ann Carter, a poet and paper artist, and the author of six collections of poetry, we see a writer and an artist grappling and celebrating life’s grand mysteries surrounding language and love, and aging. Writer Kate Braid says, “With the delicacy of lacework and finely folded paper … Terry Ann Carter’s poems show us the world through a magnifying glass.” And Governor General Award Winning poet Robert Hilles says, ‘these poems celebrate the imagination and the intimate and tangible moments of truth.”
The Marshwood Songs
Regular price $18.95The Marshwood Songs looks to showcase a verse distinctive to the landscape of Windsor/Essex.
The title denotes and celebrates the natural environment of Southwestern Ontario’s original wetland landscape, while also characterizing its inherent liminality—both in terms of borderland and topography.
These poems operate as a record of regional duality, moving back and forth between rusticity and cityscape, expressing a conflated history and immediacy of local environments. Each poet effuses material according to the distinction of their intuitive perspectives and cultural backgrounds. Nick Hildenbrand incorporates observations influenced by his long-standing familial roots in LaSalle, and Jovan Stefanov, a Macedonian-Canadian, incorporates motifs from his family’s heritage into the collection.
The poetry in The Marshwood Songs is supplemented by several illustrations from local artists Emily Conlon & Hrista Stefanova. Through The Marshwood Songs, each artist hopes to transform Southwestern Ontario’s variegated regional imagery into a universal tapestry.
Inheritance
Regular price $18.95The Lifeboat
All night in his lifeboat my father sang
to keep the voices of the other men
who cried in the wreckage from reaching him,
he sang what he knew of the requiem,
of the hit parade and the bits of hymns,
he sang until he would never sing again,
scalding his raw throat with sea-water
until his ribs heaved, until the salt
wept from his eyes on dry land,
flecked at his lips in his squalling rages,
streaked the sheets in his night sweats
as night after night the reassembled ship
scattered its parts on the shore of his bed,
and the lifeboat eased him out again
to drown each night among singing men.
Inspired by a shipwreck endured by her father during the Second World War, and by his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and eventual suicide, Inheritance is a powerful poetic debut by the winner of the 2013 Boston ReviewFiction Contest and The Malahat Review Far Horizons Award.
Praise for Inheritance
“Powell’s poems are full of lively vignettes in which realism strikes lyrical sparks off harshness.”—Times Literary Supplement
“[Powell’s] description is beautiful and tender…the land of elegy overlaps the land of dream.”—The Fiddlehead
“Powerful … full of dark nostalgia.”—Nathan Englander
Thicket
Regular price $18.95Melanie Janisse-Barlow’s second book of poetry, Thicket, is a treatise on risk and the uncertainties of language in the modern world. In poems that gather and collect force page after page, Thicket negotiates humankind’s overwhelming desire to communicate, and the discomfort that comes with the process of entanglement/disentanglement. When Janisse-Barlow writes of a “thousand awkward conversations,” she’s working away at the knots of language, unraveling and recombining the threads to create self-styled lyric essays. Thicket is a linguistic tour de force.
Praise for Thicket
In a sense the gorgeous mutant child of Jenny Holzer and Ken Babstock, given its power-blocks, loaded with neologisms and linguistic triple-axels, yet wholly hers—Janisse-Barlow’s Thicket is a thrillingly original and word-perfect satellite containing masses of tight images—immaculate goosenecks, glitter, snails, stone lions and dogshit—it is a colony of rage, rescue, love and humbling grace.—Lynn Crosbie
Thicket is a masterful book. Stories, images, dreams, ideas and elements of dailiness weave through and nestle within Janisse-Barlow’s gorgeous, and absorbing, stanzas. I read and re-read these poems, finding something new each time. As poet herself observes: “Pass us over and we can slip back and forth unannounced.”—Lynn Crawford
Hump
Regular price $18.002010 John Hirsch Award for most Promising Manitoba Writer
Winner 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Poetry Prize
Finalist 2011 ReLit Award
Hump is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to adequately represent the wonder and devilment of being-with-child. Hump is a love poem written simultaneously to a father and child, to a lover and the glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty, faded, but still greener-than-most.
Praise for Hump
Gordon channels Adrienne Rich’s dichotomy of love and frustration.—Winnipeg Free Press
Ariel Gordon’s writing allows the reader access to the essence of a place and time. Her command of language brings an importance to moments both fateful and seemingly insignificant. Her work displays a surprising combination of ease and conviction, of playfulness tempered with insight, and evokes a vivid sense of the word in its studied context, the image in its rightful place.—Jury for Hirsh Award
Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.—Robert Kroetsch
The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed.—Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry
Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut.—CV2
Ceaseless Rain
Regular price $18.95Ceaseless 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.
Off-Leash
Regular price $18.95Everyone 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.
Thimbles
Regular price $18.95
In this heart-wrenching collection, Vanessa Shields chronicles the life of her Nonna, Maria, from her origins as a seamstress in Italy to her eventual death from dementia. These raw, prosaic poems thread together grief, memory, loss, and love into a conversation that speaks across pages, years, and oceans. Shields bravely interrogates her own feelings of guilt, grief, and curiosity with unflinching precision. As she attempts to navigate and accept Nonna’s decline, Shields takes on the role of witness as she excavates the larger narrative that is her Nonna’s legacy. Thimbles is a courageous celebration of the transformative power of love across generations.
Praise for Thimbles
Shields has an ear for the ocean, the fugitive word, insect symphonies and the luscious unsaid. Thimbles is a beautiful blaze of a book, a paean to generations of gently brave women, but, most of all, an unforgettable tribute to the gospel of Nonna.—Kyo Maclear
The Junta of Happenstance
Regular price $19.95Winner 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner 2021 Governor General Literary Award for Poetry
Longlisted 2022 Gerald Lampert Award
Longlisted 2022 Raymond Souster Award
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.
Praise for The Junta of Happenstance
Tolu Oloruntoba uses a “safecracker ear” (“Child at Sleep”) to perceive both the subtle and overt mechanics of human interactions and to explore the interlocking parts of past and present, individual and community, and the here and there.—Samantha Jones, ARC Poetry magazine
The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba’s dazzling debut collection, collides the language of revolution with the landscapes of the body. These poems go beyond the desire to ward off death. They emerge out of a life intimate with death’s randomness. Like the vicissitudes of war, Oloruntoba’s poems make peace with accident and fate. They bring breath to survival. ‘If the timeline ahead is/ infinitely longer than the/ knives behind, perhaps/ as we set to mending/ we can heal more/ than we ever undid./ But we, too,/ would like a piece of the plunder.’ These exquisite poems leave an imprint both violent and terrifyingly beautiful.—Judges’ Citation, 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize
Tolu Oloruntoba’s voice in The Junta of Happenstance is at once thoughtful and authoritative, metaphorically rich and lyrically surprising. Oloruntoba’s language travels through history and myth to speak to today and engage with a future transformed by new understanding. The combination of craft and spirit cuts a fine place for this debut work, expanding our literary view.—2021 Governor General Literary Award Peer assessment committee: Kaie Kellough, George Murray and Anna Marie Sewell
A Dance of Self-Isolation
Regular price $18.95In this collection, Windsor’s Poet Laureate Emeritus Marty Gervais, Poet Laureate Mary Ann Mulhern, Youth Poet Laureate Samantha Badaoa, and Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens reflect and respond to the COVID-19 global pandemic through poetry. The poems included capture the impact of the pandemic, as well as the hopes, dreams, challenges, triumphs and fears of an entire community navigating lockdown and recovery in truly unprecedented times.
I Am That Woman
Regular price $18.95Vanessa Shields turns the themes of femininity and motherhood upside down in this, her first book of poetry. She holds nothing back in telling the raw truth of being a woman in the 21st century. But amid the biting wit and brutal honesty, there is also that sweet reflection of the poet who breathes life into words that tell the story of someone brave enough to be that woman. Vanessa Shields in I Am That Woman dares to challenge the modern story of a wife, a mother, a lover and a friend.
Whisky Sour City
Regular price $16.95Sex, love, alcohol and pollution are on tap within these pages. Whisky Sour City is a collection of poetry written by people who have experienced both the sour and the sweet of Windsor, Ontario. The rich sense of history, community and family in this book is enticing, and the humour and sense of southwestern Ontario are welcoming. This book is a celebration, a memory and an invasion to readers to call a toast to he unique city that is Windsor, Ontario.
