POETRY BOOKS

Title: Tendrils 

Author: Michèle Vinet

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 96 pp.

ISBN: 9781772310740

Price: $16.95

Tendrils, as foliage on scorched leaves, as ribbons around a gift of love, as the giddy, nervous need to seek the perfect vine or leaf to shelter artistry, act as curlicues and hideaways wherein to shield a wonderworld where cascades of colour from a dam burst forth in lawlessness and thunder. The poems in Tendrils quell the hand when grammar fails and syntax bleeds, when fiction runs amok. This poetry collection is a vibrant play, a solo for two, with exuberance and bewilderment. 

Title: Mister Blackhurst 

Author: Louis-Philippe Hébert

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 72 pp.

ISBN: 9781772310566

Price: $16.95

In Mister Blackhurst, the author explores the essence of the human soul, questioning the circle of life and the mysteries beyond death. The poetry collection ominously begins as an isolated man regains consciousness on a hospital bed, but his world appears much different. He can no longer control his surroundings, and strange people enter and exit his room, collecting his belongings before they disappear. Seemingly trapped from within, Mister Blackhurst must learn to understand the complex nature of existence as he roams along the boundaries of life and death. Now, reality is more unpredictable than he could have ever imagined. 

   

Title: The Philosophy of As If

Author: Fraser Sutherland

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 86 pp.

ISBN: 9780978439569

Price: $16.95

The Philosophy of As If is a poetry collection that describes ideas that may not correspond with reality but help us to interact with reality better. Fiction writers often say that they tell a higher truth, but poets like to pretend that what they write is sincere, direct truth-telling. However poems are also fictions, and deal with what might be. Poets behave "as if" the world matches their models. The poems in this collection play on tension between desire and disillusion, between actuality and fantasy. The real yields what might be: the actual becomes the imaginary.

   

Title: The Sandcastle Diary

Author: Louis-Philippe Hébert

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 64 pp.

ISBN: 9781926956749

Price: $15.95

The Sundcastle Diary portrays the author’s journey through life and the everlasting reflections of the heart. The poems illustrate deep emotions written in a thoughtfully artistic way with vibrant interpretations stemming from the complexity and simplicity of human beings. Challenging, thought-provoking, and moving, these poems were inspired by the author’s own life experiences. Each poem was created to encourage thoughts and understandings of spirituality, happiness, success, heartache, loneliness, love, judgment, and ultimately the concept of living a well-balanced life overall. With a fresh take on writing poetry, Louis-Philippe Hébert successfully demonstrates his creative talent and explores a wide range of emotions and perceptions, persuading us to examine the world we live in. 

   

Title: Love's Not The Way To

Author: Stan Rogal

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 80 pp.

ISBN: 9781926956381

Price: $14.95

This book is a collection of haiku poems dedicated to the life and works of Richard Brautigan. The poems reflect both his oeuvre and his life, not only as a tip-of-the-hat homage but also as a way of reintroducing his poetic sensibility to a newer and wider audience. There was something of the English-language Japanese poetic forms that made perfect sense to the aesthetic of Richard Brautigan, and Stan Rogal comes to these forms through a Brautigan lens in this poetry collection. Stan Rogal chose the haiku form as Richard Brautigan is best known as a minimalist writer, and he became quite famous in Japan for his short, imagistic poems and for his sensitive and humorous dealings with the transitory notions of love and death.

 

Title: The Bay of Lost Love

Author: Victoria Sedova

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 72 pp.

ISBN: 9781926956343

Price: $15.95

This poetry collection guides us through a sensational journey of love. The poems and images ignite our imagination, connect us to our current, past and future feelings, and touch that special spark inside. Throughout the book we linger in pain and strife trying to find a remedy for our troubled souls. In the realm of love, the power of words is far better for conveying exactly what we are feeling, whether we want to seduce, plead, flatter or convince, proclaim the depth of our devotion, or even reveal a broken heart. We become bitter as we harden our hearts, lose trust, feel betrayed and blame everyone around us for the emptiness that engulfs us. 

Title: The Silence of the North

Author: Alan D. Butcher

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 104 pp.

ISBN: 9781926956152

Price: $16.95

The Silence of the North is a poetic reflection of Canada's least known and most enigmatic Arctic region. Alan Butcher challenges our notions of landscape and wilderness, culture and perception, the limits of experience, and the nature of being. He offers a finely wrought sensibility, which elevates the subtle topography of life’s quiet events. This is a poetry collection that investigates the human understanding, parting the veil of the mundane to reveal passion, beauty, myth, and mystery of the Canadian Arctic. These poems are restless and inquisitive. They echo a desire to forge a voice that is as curious as it is distinctive.



Title: Above and Below the Waterline

Author: Marianne Paul

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 96 pp.

ISBN: 9781926956008

Price: $16.95

The river winds through Above and Below the Waterline, the first collection of poetry from novelist, Marianne Paul. The author navigates the joy and the grief that is life in the process of being lived, those events and passages that mark the flow of time, the undercurrents of family, the rough waters and calm waters, the challenges and dysfunction - but beneath it all, love. Water speaks volumes, Marianne Paul tells us. The paddler learns to read river in the same way a child learns to read symbols on the page - the contours and patterns that hint of submerged rocks, that forewarn of swifts and rapids, the shallows, the gentleness and respite of flat waters.

Title: Whistle for Jellyfish

Author: The Field Stone Poets

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 120 pp.

ISBN: 9781926956015

Price: $16.95

Whistle for Jellyfish is a poetry collection written by six award-winning poets - Sylvia Adams, Brock Currie, Gill Foss, Glenn Kletke, Barbara Myers, and Margaret Malloch Zielinski. Their decision to write a collection of travel poems was based on a desire to share experiences in a way that would preserve their distinctive voices and relate all aspects of travel, from anticipation and pleasure through deterrents, hardships and imbroglios to revelations and the varied features of journey. With disparate histories and viewpoints, the collection comes together as a journey itself, as an organic whole with implied narrative.

    

Title: The Serenity of Stone

Author: Michael Fraser

Genre: Poetry

Format: Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.5, 96 pp.

ISBN: 9780978379346

Price: $16.95



The poems in The Serenity of Stone emerge from places as disparate as Fraser's childhood in Grenada, adolescence in Edmonton, and teenage years and adulthood in Toronto. They span the themes of diasporadic life, themes ranging from landscape and family history, romance and love, crime and racism to kindness and abuse, squalor and education. Stylistically the poems fall into many camps. The work is rooted in many traditions, from hip hop to the English canon. Fraser skilfully combines a hip street element with the attention to high standards of detail and style.