Turnstone Press

Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness - but what is madness? In a world that has traded Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs for Prozac and where zombies masquerade as the living, who is really mad? Through the eyes of an artist boxed in by tradtition, Kristian Enright’s debut poetry collection Sonar wrestles with language, mental health and identity.

Monstrance bears witness to the possibility of hope and faith in an uncertain world. These poems unflinchingly acknowledge the devastation of fear and hostility, but they also marvel when “light bounces off the breakfast plates,” or “the sewing-machine-stitch spoor of a pocket mouse appears” in the snow. Sarah Klassen looks past the particularities of the ordinary and reaches for the sacred.

Making awareness into language is the act that binds the elements of Sally Ito’s newest collection of poetry, Alert to Glory. Whether the focus is on parenting, biblical texts, or on creativity itself, Ito discerns the moment in which the word might become wondrous—moments when the mind-bell is struck dumb, and the hollow fills with shuddering sound, agog with itself.

Is he talking about botany or…hmmm…ahhh…well now. The very act of reading Steven Ross Smith’s fifth volume of his Fluttertongue series draws shock, secret smiles and out-loud exclamations from the most stoic, stuffedshirt readers of poetry.

Gardens and roadkill, even the moon, all play a part in Carla Funk’s collection of emotional poems that capture the fleeting impressions of the human experience.

Di Brandt has surpassed herself in this extraordinary book, which hurls itself upon our desperate environmental, emotional, spiritual condition with fury and eloquence and headlong grace.-- Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of Carta Marina