Prairie Stories

Prairie Stories

• 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

• Sweetest Dance On Earth, The

  The importance of Di Brandt’s poetry to Canadian literature cannot be overestimated.

• 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

• Best of the Bonnet, The

  It’s fantastic, it’s hilarious … The Daily Bonnet is so funny! —Miriam Toews

  • Praise:

    It’s fantastic, it’s hilarious … The Daily Bonnet is so funny!

    —Miriam Toews