In Bait & Switch, Jim Johnstone—poet, editor, and erstwhile physiologist—turns his considerable analytic powers to Canadian poetry, presenting a series of essays and reviews exploring the state of Canadian poetry in the 21st century through the lens of a trained scientist.With characteristic empathy and a researcher’s eye, Johnstone explores a variety of topics, including the legacy of science poetry in Canada, the spark that gives rise to the pre-poem moment, and technolo...

CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves?Written after a brain tumour diagnosis, The King of Terrors is a treatise on living with illness and the way that language, relationships and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Johnstone's poems oscillate between the personal and the public, the clinical and the ...

Mercurial and modern, The Next Wave is an output-based anthology of 21st century Canadian poetry. Curated by Jim Johnstone, it features 40 early-to-mid-career Canadian writers selected from a diverse range of national and international presses. While The Next Wave surveys poets from across Canada, its contributors are the product of a global mindset—a distinct generation of writers characterized by the variety of their formal and aesthetic choices. Gathered into an anthology that’s pertine...

Like the “page turned down to make another / page,” Dog Ear explores the marks we leave on a world whose social and political markers are constantly shifting. In his fourth book of poems—and most powerful work to date—Jim Johnstone establishes himself as an exquisite observer of decay, both physical and spiritual. This is a universe where man resembles “the final / generation of a species branching / towards an in-between.” Johnstone’s poetry blurs past and present, private and public in a...

Praised for his darkly psychological accounts of extreme experiences, Jim Johnstone’s fifth book of poems explores his most difficult terrain to date: mental illness and addiction. Like Coleridge's opium dreams, Johnstone's narratives in The Chemical Life are hallucinatory, coloured by his use of both prescription and recreational drugs. Returning often to the notion of rival realities—“in everything, there is a second state”—Johnstone is brilliantly disruptive and disorientating;...

Light After Dark is a powerful collection of poetry by Jay Bramburger that explores the human experience in all its complexity. From love and loss to struggle and healing, these poems shine a light on the moments that shape us, both the painful and the uplifting.With raw honesty and emotional depth, Jay captures the journey through darkness toward hope, resilience, and self-discovery. Each poem tells a story—of heartache, perseverance, triumph, and the quiet victories that...

Light After Dark is a powerful collection of poetry by Jay Bramburger that explores the human experience in all its complexity. From love and loss to struggle and healing, these poems shine a light on the moments that shape us, both the painful and the uplifting.With raw honesty and emotional depth, Jay captures the journey through darkness toward hope, resilience, and self-discovery. Each poem tells a story—of heartache, perseverance, triumph, and the quiet victories that...

Light After Dark is a powerful collection of poetry by Jay Bramburger that explores the human experience in all its complexity. From love and loss to struggle and healing, these poems shine a light on the moments that shape us, both the painful and the uplifting.With raw honesty and emotional depth, Jay captures the journey through darkness toward hope, resilience, and self-discovery. Each poem tells a story—of heartache, perseverance, triumph, and the quiet victories that...

Light After Dark is a powerful collection of poetry by Jay Bramburger that explores the human experience in all its complexity. From love and loss to struggle and healing, these poems shine a light on the moments that shape us, both the painful and the uplifting.With raw honesty and emotional depth, Jay captures the journey through darkness toward hope, resilience, and self-discovery. Each poem tells a story—of heartache, perseverance, triumph, and the quiet victories that...

Light After Dark is a powerful collection of poetry by Jay Bramburger that explores the human experience in all its complexity. From love and loss to struggle and healing, these poems shine a light on the moments that shape us, both the painful and the uplifting.With raw honesty and emotional depth, Jay captures the journey through darkness toward hope, resilience, and self-discovery. Each poem tells a story—of heartache, perseverance, triumph, and the quiet victories that...

Light After Dark is a powerful collection of poetry by Jay Bramburger that explores the human experience in all its complexity. From love and loss to struggle and healing, these poems shine a light on the moments that shape us, both the painful and the uplifting.With raw honesty and emotional depth, Jay captures the journey through darkness toward hope, resilience, and self-discovery. Each poem tells a story—of heartache, perseverance, triumph, and the quiet victories that...

Paul Vermeersch’s new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body’s experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the ac...