Poetry

The final work from Leonard Cohen, Canada's most celebrated poet and an artist whose audience spans generations and whose work is known and loved throughout the world.

The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems, selected and ordered by the author in the final months of his life. Featuring lyrics, prose pieces, and illustrations, the book also contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker.

An enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen's storied literary career, The Flame showcases the full range of Leonard Cohen's lyricism, from the exquisitely transcendent to the darkly funny. By turns devastatingly sad and winningly strange, these are the works of a poet and lyricist who set out to explore our darkest questions and came back wanting, yearning for more.

Visceral and playful, tend reflects the intimate awkwardness of modern life. Hargreaves’ latest collection explores feelings of being distanced from loved ones, physically and emotionally; striving to be better (at chores, at intimacy); and tending to the things that fracture.

These poems are anchored in the body, straining the edges of spaces that bodies and language inhabit: between sealing in and digging out; restlessness and isolation; memory and planning for the future; gaps in texts and reiterations. tend is an immersive work, as validating as it is illuminating.

Praise for tend:

“These poems are an elegant romp through tangled city gardens and teeming waste bins of memory and human consciousness. The domestic realm is a wilderness, a trash heap, a broken string of pearls. All at once, this beautiful book is the milky crystal on the green chain, the broken eggshell in your compost, the lost slipper through a rotten board. tend takes your hand.” —Shannon Bramer, author of Precious Energy

“Clever and controlled, tend grounds you in the gross and astounding musculature of language, and doesn’t skimp on the viscera. The poems in this collection gather and sing to the ways in which we tend to ourselves, to the world, and to others—and how so often these messy, generous acts bleed together. Through rituals, commands, instructions, and advice, Hargreaves expertly engages a variety of tactics and wields a distinct yet collective lyrical voice with a scalpel-like precision. I felt like I lived in the body of every poem, and every poem lived in the specific, chaotic detritus of the world.” —Domenica Martinello, author of All Day I Dream About Sirens

“tend is a master class in poetic restraint. Hargreaves’ brilliance lies in her ability to cleave poems to their core, to ‘strip words/like veins from a leg/or bones from a fish.’ She is ruthless in her delivery—stacks lines together like kindling for a fire, drops a lit match and walks away, leaving the reader to smoulder.” —Adrienne Gruber, author of Q & A

“tend is an apiary of lists buzzing with to-dos that lilt and tilt. Hargreaves skillfully merges a miscellany of terms and quicksilver minutes into a work of persistence. Day-to-day knickknacks slip next to gentle warnings and medical debris. A work full of mettle.” —Christine McNair, author of Charm

“tend is an optimistic and occasionally joyful collection of dark complexities, centred around care, from self-care to gardening, and the ways in which we wish to interact with the wonderfully complex and convoluted worlds of nature, other humans, poems and ourselves. Hargreaves utilizes rhythm throughout the poems assembled here that is quite interesting, allowing a breathless, halting or otherwise propulsive patter to further her poems as much as anything involving language, meaning or purpose.” —rob mclennan, periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics

Press Coverage:

Most Anticipated: Our Shelf 2022 Fall Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

48 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in fall 2022 —CBC Books

Kate Hargreaves is the author of the poetry collection, Leak, as well as Jammer Star, a roller derby novel for young readers, and Talking Derby, a book of prose vignettes. She holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, where she received the Governor General’s Gold Medal in Graduate Studies. Her work has appeared in literary journals across Canada, the US, and the UK. As a book designer for numerous Canadian presses, Hargreaves has received honours from the Alcuin Society for Excellence in Book Design, the CBC Bookie Awards, and the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. She grew up in Amherstburg, Ontario, and lives and works in Windsor.

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.

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.

“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

The 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.

"The heart. Beats."

Hanan Hazime's chapbook "Aorta" searches every definition of heart, explores the meaning and method of the object and the symbol, hoping to find an answer to the way pain and pleasure digs its way into people. Hazime re-maps the heart, re-explores the rhythms, and leaves the reader listening to their own heart beat.

In 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.”

Words and images are innumerable. They are like fish, varied in size and species. They serve a purpose — to feed and to nurture. They swim circles around us. They bewilder and they beguile and, most often, their beauty and their mystery strike us with awe and wonderment.

The 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

"Ticker taped by rain we strode,
counting down to the promised flood:

two boys dipped in the absurd;
two mystery men in blue."

Khashayar Mohammadi’s vivid and rhythmic poetry sequence paints a doomed affair between two young Iranian men through a haze of jazz, liquor, and an oncoming flood. Mohammadi weaves together images of self-discovery, immigration, and tradition to create an exploration of emotion which is cigarette scented and blue stained in its beauty. Teeming with life and motion, Mohammadi’s verse beats with the visceral pulse of having loved and the faith that you will love again.

Whose version of history gets told? What interpretation of truth makes it into our consciousness? Jon R. Flieger’s "all the great and terrible" explores these questions anchored in the life of William Wallace Denslow, Wizard of Oz illustrator and self-proclaimed King Denslow I of Denslow Island. The work blends biography, lyricism, and image; it incorporates crossing out, overlapping, and intersecting text into a polyvalent inquiry of what it means to write and rewrite history.

"your ashes have been reassembled into your descendants.
[…]the birds lift your blood 
while taking flight"

Some people bury their grief; Rena Su excavates hers, digging up bone after bone to assemble the skeletons of the dead. In "Preparing Dinosaurs for Mass Extinction," Su explores death as an extinction event that buries the living as well as the dead.  Read as Su digs herself out, examining the monuments we create to the dead, observing how memories turn to sand with their bodies, and sending fruitless warnings back through time.

Rena Su is a writer from Vancouver(ish) and writes a little too frequently about dinosaurs, cyborgs, and offbeat pop culture references. Her work has been recognized by the Pulitzer Centre, The Poetry Society of UK, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, among others. When not writing, Rena enjoys coding impractical things, watching documentaries, and playing the ukulele. She thanks you for stumbling across the vast expanses of the literary world and landing on her debut chapbook.

"First we deprive the host of lilac
And turmeric until her antibodies
Dwindle and shrink"

A body at war is a beautiful terrible thing, a body at war with itself even more so. Both grotesque and picturesque, Amy LeBlanc’s "Undead Juliet at the Museum" laces together the weight of isolation, a healthy skepticism of “miracle cures”, and portraits of the “monstrous” women who have come before into a folkloric rendering of one woman’s journey with chronic illness. The delicate bodies of LeBlanc’s poems leave the reader with an ache in their ribs and a taste for the sublime.

Amy LeBlanc is the Managing Editor at filling Station magazine. Amy’s debut poetry collection, "I know something you don’t know" (Gordon Hill Press 2020) was long listed for the 2021 ReLit Award and was selected as a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Her novella, "Unlocking," was published by the University of Calgary Press in June 2021. Her work has appeared in Room, CV2, PRISM International, and the Literary Review of Canada among others. Amy is a recipient of the 2020 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and has been a finalist for an Alberta Magazine Publishers’ Association showcase award for poetry. "Undead Juliet at the Museum" is her third chapbook.

"I enter the lighthouse
megalamp beam loop. There is care in illumination. I think illumination
is loving. I think
I’m sweeping for something
in the wide hidden ocean."

In Cristina Holman’s "Repeater," words are both escape from and reinforcement of anxieties. Holman navigates through thought loops constant and unending, and images that return back over and over. Fear is at the forefront, but by the end this fear is a pathway out, is washed away as we are washed away by the words.

Cristina Holman lives and writes on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She was a participant in the 2017/18 Artspeak Studio for Emerging Writers and the 2018 Banff Centre Emerging Writers Intensive. Her debut chapbook, published with Artspeak Gallery in 2018, is titled "Stop Wincing/We’re Fine". Her work can be found in Bad Nudes magazine and Poetry is Dead.

"I am twenty six but still
unborn my umbilical cord a root
when I’m ready slice release
me into our one dream"

From the streets of Selkirk to the “malevolent prairie,” Shawn Adrian’s Metis "head birth & one hundred heads hydra" merges mythology, religion, and the Manitoba landscape to explore the slice of life of its narrator. Adrian leans into the land’s uneasiness and violence seeking moments of peace and calm, those “highs/ lined with laughter.” In these poems, Adrian shows spaces where we can find resilience.

Shawn Adrian is a Metis writer currently living in Selkirk, Manitoba. In 2018, he graduated from The University of Winnipeg, where he worked toward a B.A. in English with a specialization in creative writing. During his time in university, he received the Joan Baragar Scholarship in English. He was also selected for the Sheldon Oberman Mentorship Program by the Manitoba Writers Guild. Among other identities, he’s been called a student, an athlete, an employee, a friend, an uncle, a brother, and a son.

Some boys howl. Some boys wake up in liquor stained hotel rooms. Some boys find themselves bathed in neon. And some boys don’t. "bottle rockets," a chapbook by Orlando based writer Ryan Skaryd, weaves a non traditional coming of age narrative which confronts the crafting of self within the queer community and today’s volatile cultural climate. From childhood bathroom, to college dorm bed, to club entrances; Skaryd paints an evocative portrait of the oft messy and always electric road one walks to settle into their own skin.