A lingering, long-haul collection of writing about sailing for readers of Julietta Singh and Kyo Maclear.In Relative to Wind, Phoebe Wang delivers a poetic rendering of her decade-long journey of learning to sail and a deep dive into what it means to be a newcomer to an old tradition. From working alongside crewmates in tempestuous conditions to becoming an avid racer and organizer to drafting a wistful love letter to a Wayfarer dinghy—while examining the ...

The second collection from the acclaimed author of Admission Requirements.This astonishing new collection of poems contemplates our obligations to live in a creative, generative, and revolutionary way amid a cascade of global contingencies.In a four-part meditation on what it means to live on occupied land and in colonial time, the subject of these poems has moved beyond arriving and departing and wakes each day to meet her commitments and to heal ...

**A Globe and Mail Best BookA debut collection from a startling new voice in Canadian poetry.**The poems in Admission Requirements attempt to discover what is required of us when we cut across our material and psychic geographies. Simultaneously full and empty of its origins, the self is continually taxed of any certainties and ways of being. The speaker in these poems is engaged in a kind of fieldwork, surveying gardens, communities, and the haphazard cit...

"Fire! Wake up! The shelter is on fire!"His students affectionately call him "Doc Survival." He's Quebec's Indiana Jones in a forest setting. Searching for the treasures of the wilderness has been his life-long quest; with passion as his only guide, he has dared to penetrate the forest on its own terms, facing increasingly difficult challenges in the hope of becoming nature's confidant, of learning her secrets.Professor emeritus André-François Bourbeau holds a Guin...

In The Geography of Arrival George Sipos revisits the city of London Ontario where his family settled after immigrating to Canada from Hungary in 1957. Divided into short chapters each related to a different local landmark the book depicts the world through the eyes of a boy getting the hang of North American culture and of an adolescent finding his way in the larger world. A few years ago says Sipos "someone I knew moved to London Ontario the place where I had grown up in the lat...

An impressively entertaining tale about the frailty of human civilisation by the leading Flemish writer Peter Verhelst, now for the first time in English.Warning: This story is narrated by a gorilla. He is plucked from the jungle. He learns to chat and passes the ultimate test: a cocktail party. Eventually he is moved to an amusement park, where he acts in a play about the history of civilisation. But as the gorilla becomes increasingly aware of human frailties, he must choose betw...

In this eloquent collection, award-winning writers from the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia describe a personal encounter with the natural world that moved them, enhanced their understanding of nature, changed them, or was in some other way of prime importance to them. These essays describe childhood memories, everyday walks transformed into life-changing events, being in the grip of a great force, startling encounters with wild animals, and even one fantasy.Contributor...

Titanic is written in 'Triplicism' and revolves around a conversation between SO or SM Lightoller (Highest Ranked) surviving officer on RMS Titanic and Millvina Dean a two month old who was carried from sinking ship. She was steerage, which is third class, and was saved in a bundle of cloth, but would have no memory of what happened.In the poem Lightoller tells her what happens on his final deck inspection, one hour and forty minutes before the Titanic hit's the Iceberg.He ...

Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Book AwardMarooned in the shiftless, unnamed space between a map of the world and a world of false maps, the poems in Methodist Hatchet cling to what’s necessary from each, while attempting to sing their own bewilderment. Carolinian forest echoes back as construction cranes in an urban skyline. Second Life returns as wildlife, as childhood. Even the poem itself -- the idea of a poem -- as a unit of ...

Mean is a stunning exploration of the threshold and divide between our primeval origins and the meanness of our everyday lives. In this collection, the pastoral collides with the concrete terrain of motorbikes, prisons, and chainlink to capture our constructed isolation and our buried, yet resonant, connection to the land and seascapes that surround us.Ken Babstock's poetic voice is wholly original -- searing and pure in its realism, evocative and affecting in its search f...

In his brilliant third collection, award-winning and critically-acclaimed poet Ken Babstock finds momentary stays against our gathering darknesses in the irrepressible, acrobatic, free play of the mind. Poems of conscience collide with the problems of consciousness, the concrete and the conceptual find equal footing, and formal beauty mixes with imagistic brinksmanship as the speaker attempts to leave our "homes half-sheathed Tyvek" and "drift into the pain of our neighbours." Like Babstoc...

Much of this poised and luminous book is rooted in an idea of epiphany, an aesthetic of everyday incarnation; not the sudden and profound manifestation of essence or meaning, but the smaller steps taken toward it. The moments in which, as Joyce writes, “the soul of the commonest object…seems to us radiant.” If epiphanies are for theologians, perhaps the little steps towards them are for poets like Eve Joseph, and for all of us who attempt to see beyond the names we give things to the names...