Full Length Poetry Collections

Full Length Poetry Collections

• Pollination Field, The

  Kim Fahner is part Fae queen, part spirit. Her poems are chains of keys that open rooms where our minds fly “on dragonfly wings.” —Yvonne

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• love in a dry land

  love in a dry land is an absolute delight. —rob mclennan, the book of smaller

  • Praise:

    There isn’t anyone beyond Cooley able to offer such wild, prairie vernacular, let alone one riffing off a singular work by Sinclair Ross. From Country Music to The Bentleys to love in a dry land, Dennis Cooley playfully provides lyrics as pure gesture, intellectual wordplay and spinning puns in a magical articulation and expansion of open form. Okay, cool it, krazy mclennan, I hear Cooley say, but he can’t deny any of it. love in a dry land is an absolute delight. —rob mclennan, the book of smaller

    Between the lines of As for Me and My House, if you squint, love in a dry land materializes. In this long poem, Dennis Cooley revives characters who’ve long been cast in the amber of CanLit canonization. These pages uncover the subtle graces in a home where regrets stick on fly paper, corn syrup coats anxieties, and desires glow behind lampshades. —Nathan Dueck, (1979– )

• A Road Map for Finding Wild Horses

  [E]xactly what the world needs right now —Shawna Lemay

  • Praise:

    The hidden world so delicately and carefully and respectfully observed by Trisia Eddy Woods is exactly what the world needs right now. She does not shirk from the brutal aspects of what she sees but allows the reader/viewer to hold their gaze because she presents her subject with remarkable tenderness and patience and care. If her work sometimes hurts to look at it is only because it is both exquisitely beautiful and at exactly the same time so aware of loss.

    —Shawna Lemay, Everything Affects Everyone and Calm Things

    This beguiling book calls us to enter a realm of patience and tender observation, and rewards us with moments of magic. As we follow the writer on her year-round treks to observe wild horses, we are led towards the sense that our humanness is no longer separate, and to see that an encounter with a quiet doe or a wild stallion offers us a bridge between worlds. The poems glance at the wilderness impacts of forestry and other human activities, but don’t dwell on the damage. Instead, in lines that are precise, spare and yet vivid, Trisia Eddy Woods offers us a hope rooted in deep attentiveness.

    —Alice Major, Knife on Snow

• Heart’s Hydrography
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Winner: Word Awards, Specialty Book
    • Winner: Word Awards, Writer of Colour

  Everyday perceptions made radiant.

  • Praise:

    Winter landscapes, water landscapes, the landscapes of family love and frustration, and of the soul’s seasons - all these are mapped by Sally Ito with deep compassion and richly tactile images. Everyday perceptions made radiant.

    —Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

• seas move away
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Shortlisted: Saskatchewan Book Awards, Best First Book Award

  [Leow's] work pounds away at the façade of Canadian tolerance and diversity. It’s funky with the fermentation of colonial rule, and bitter as

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  • Praise:

    In Seas Move Away, Joanne Leow guides us through the tumultuous present of migrant life, readying us with the necessary allegories to weather the coming storms. Leow gifts us with new maritime languages for diaspora, a counterpoetics for geopolitical and imperial violence, a sedimentary song for life anew.

    —Adrian De Leon, barangay: an offshore poem

    Collisions, erosions and fractures occur in both external and internal landscapes in Joanne Leow’s Seas Move Away. Lyrical and intimate when addressing lovers and family, Leow’s voice shifts into an incisive investigation of colonial legacies, interrogating and unsettling what is assumed as necessary or wise. Travelling between tropical tidal longings, and the stultifying cold of Saskatchewan winters, the poems in Seas Move Away embody a palette of rich hues and nuanced textures.

    —Lydia Kwa, Oracle Bone

    This is an oceanic collection. Leow’s lyrics, like sea currents, carve out deep recesses into the mind. Her courageous interrogations of power are scalpel-like, delicately exposing the “what histories are interred” in island, cities, and prairie. Her work pounds away at the façade of Canadian tolerance and diversity. It’s funky with the fermentation of colonial rule, and bitter as a medicinal tonic. Don’t just stand at the edge of this multiplicity—swim in with your strongest strokes.

    —Phoebe Wang, Walking Occupations

• Black Umbrella
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Shortlisted: High Plains Book Award, Woman Writer

  A tough and tender collection that contributes to one of the most compelling narratives of the modern age - the contemporary family in

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  • Praise:

    These intimate and intertwined poems gleam with a tenderness that belies their tensile strength. Lawrence mines consequential moments with sharp insight, revealing fissures in her life and the lives of those closest to her. Here is a sure-footed poet whose inventive language wrests bittersweet wisdom and uncommon grace out of the ordinary. Black Umbrella is an extraordinary collection, rich and indelible.

    —Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Following the River: Traces of Red River Women

    The poems in Black Umbrella chart a lifetime’s emotional weather in deft, compelling strokes. With insight, compassion, and piercing wit, Katherine Lawrence retraces the winds that blew her from steel town to prairie, mourns her losses, and reminds us that what we need is not the answers to all our questions, but "the true names." Black Umbrella is a beautiful, resonant book.

    —Susan Olding, Big Reader and Pathologies: A Life in Essays

    Katherine Lawrence’s Black Umbrella delves into "the sub-rosa conspiracy of the psyche," unearthing memories like tiny fragments of bone. Deeply personal, this work is a fearless recounting of love and betrayal, arrivals and departures, childhood trauma, love again. "Sly as a butcher’s thumb," Lawrence plays with language and imagery like a child with a knife. A precocious child. A sharp knife. Ultimately revealing a "brave, surefooted, animal self."

    —Mari-Lou Rowley, Unus Mundus

• Flyway
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Winner: 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry
    • Shortlisted: Margaret McWilliams Award for Popular History
    • Shortlisted: McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

  A deeply personal long poem about migration and legacy and their resonance in a modern world.

  • Praise:

    None have rendered the wrenching of war’s dislocations with such intensity and beauty as Sarah Ens. Flyway is sorrow artfully spun into a lyric that mends as it quests, gathers, scatters, and laments. Her family’s story of the all too common women’s flight for survival emerges with intimacy and urgency. This book is a triumph for any time, but savor it now, as power and grace in a troubled world.

    —Julia Spicher Kasdorf

    Flyway situates itself as a poem in a biodiverse temporality where all species of home is rooted. Its address, O / downtrodden / stray, directed to those scrambling for purchase on a soft ridge of song is a balm so many people on the planet could use right now as they journey to be welcomed. The question that persists, that thrums beneath this poem is as simple and endangered as tallgrass: How do you remember home?

    —Sue Goyette

    Flyway charts the devastation and dislocation of war, a haunting that becomes an inheritance. Tracing migrations both inexorable and precarious, with the tallgrass as her teacher, Sarah Ens creates a work of imagination wider than the horizon.

    —Laurie D. Graham

    Flyway is a tender and urgent re-negotiation of place, displacement, memory, and war. The poems are elemental, touched by bread and metal, grass and stone.

    —Benjamin Hertwig

• Death Becomes Us

  Death Becomes Us captures, with masterful grace and restraint, the intensity of absence and the importance of grief.

• Nostalgia for Moving Parts

  Nostalgia for Moving Parts reminds us how to hear and see the ephemeral in the eternal and the eternal in the ephemeral: the moving parts of all

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  • Praise:

    When Diane Tucker hangs up a payphone in Nostalgia for Moving Parts' title poem, she observes that 'there is (oh unexpected pleasure) a real click.' When she lays down to sleep: 'the prayers / that fight up through me make a sort of hum.' Click and hum. Nostalgia and prayer. What's been and what will always be. Nostalgia for Moving Parts reminds us how to hear and see the ephemeral in the eternal and the eternal in the ephemeral: the moving parts of all our lives.

    —Rob Taylor, Strangers

    Diane Tucker's gentle humour combines with a refreshing directness of language and a sharply observed sense of colour and texture. As she explores her own Vancouver background and memories, she meditates on the loss of her parents and her own ageing.

    — Christopher Levenson, Night Vision