The Flame: Poems and Selections From Notebooks
Regular price $22.00The 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.
tend
Regular price $20.00Visceral 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.
Best 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
milk and honey | rupi kaur
Regular price $19.99Watch rupi kaur live now on Prime Video.
“Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade.” – The New Republic
#1 New York Times bestseller milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.
The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
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
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 Flower Can Always be Changing
Regular price $15.95From 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.
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.
Suck & Spit
Regular price $18.95An ancestry enthusiast,Laurie Smith has traced her roots to Emperor Charlemagne, as well as Lady Godiva, which explains her hair and love for horses. This collection of poetry is based on this exploration, yet another spinoff of her interest in Darwin and his influence.
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.”
There Will Be Fish
Regular price $18.95Words 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.
There Will Be Fish is Peter Hrastovec’s third volume of poetry. It is a celebration of life’s constant joys – family and friendship, travel and discovery, the icons who inspire and stir our souls.
This is eclectic writing covering many themes and locales as diverse as baseball stadiums, jazz clubs, a doctor’s office, or scenes from the street. Penned both abroad and at home, this collection of poems draws upon recent events and journeys — pre—pandemic travels to Croatia and the glorious islands of Dalmatia, road trips into the U.S. and the pleasures and pitfalls of cottaging in his native Ontario.
Here, you will find humour – memories of first dates, tussles with technology and the finer points of skinny dipping – and pathos – honouring memories of loved ones as in a father who shares the painful news of the death of a child). The tension and isolation that has gripped the world these last two years were unprecedented.
The pause in civilization’s ongoing march has afforded an opportunity for this poet/lawyer to sit back and take stock of those things that are truly vital. Whether it is the act of observing nature’s serenity, celebrating a coveted baseball legend, or embracing music and art in all their manifestations, Hrastovec has constructed personal reflections with language and images meant to draw and catch the reader’s attention.
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
soft inheritance
Regular price $21.95
In her exceptional poetic debut, Fawn Parker meditates on grief, illness, and the open-handed relationship between material objects and memory. Written after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Soft Inheritance follows the poet’s rapidly evolving reality where “kindness is a scar,” though “not all scar-makers are kind.” Both a treatise on the sick body and the state of “after”—post-caretaking, post-breakup, post-moving, and post-death—these poems question what is inherited, and ask what can safely be left behind. A diamond ring? A cancerous gene? Soft Inheritance is a finely crafted love letter to the people and places that imprint on a life.
Praise for Soft Inheritance:
“In this hard-edged and harrowing debut collection of poems, Fawn Parker ponders a mother’s mastectomy, chemotherapy and death. She traces a hidden world of love and envy that grows under the soil of grief, and, in language reduced to its bones, articulates a hard-won vision of intimacy and consolation.”—Richard Greene
“Goodness, kindness, and love all leave scars in Fawn Parker’s stunning new collection. These scars slash the key to her empire of love and pain; of illness and strength; of sex and violence; of science and Nature and beauty’s bleeding, beating center. Soft Inheritance hits like a prizefighter; hard with its vast intelligence and deep tenderness, scarring and healing the divine terrible with the power of a benevolent demon.”—Lynn Crosbie
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.
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.