In Prime, Miranda Pearsons first collection of poetry, the narratives of female identity, the white wedding, and the enshrined position of the mother are interrogated, using the lyric as a form of cultural critique in an examination and mockery of romantic love and heterosexual relationships. At the same time, the poems constitute an irreverent, lush romp, a celebration of friendship and absurdity.Gritty and darkly humorous, Pearsons verses address modern myths head-on in a world w...

Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the...

Tracks and ley-lines pull us, carry us / past Lindisfarne - or an imagined glimpse / drifting holy in the distance, / another reality running through it.A rail is a track, a support, and a barrier. In this collection, spanning the personal and the political, Kentish pathways lead to London, to Yorkshire, to Faroe, then circle back to the west coast of Canada. An appeal, a railing against, these poems reach for beauty and compassion amidst uneasy global upheaval.Miranda Pear...

Tracks and ley-lines pull us, carry us / past Lindisfarne - or an imagined glimpse / drifting holy in the distance, / another reality running through it.A rail is a track, a support, and a barrier. In this collection, spanning the personal and the political, Kentish pathways lead to London, to Yorkshire, to Faroe, then circle back to the west coast of Canada. An appeal, a railing against, these poems reach for beauty and compassion amidst uneasy global upheaval.Miranda Pear...

The stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood are remarkably simple – a family is drawn together by shared and separate losses, a child’s reality conflicts with his parents’ memories, a young man struggles to come to terms with the loss of his father.Yet each piece of writing in this critically acclaimed collection is infused with a powerful life of its own, a precision of language and a scrupulous fidelity to the reality of time and place, of sea and Maritime farm.Fo...

Winner of the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes), shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award for first book and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards.Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it's hard to believe this is a first book. Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to a...

From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets—117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds’s poetry “pure fire in the hands” and cheered the “roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.” This rich selection exhibits those qualit...

Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)Winner, CNFC Readers' Choice Award for "Threshold"In this debut collection of personal essays, Silcott looks at the tangle of midlife, the long look back, the shorter look forward, and the moments right now that shimmer and rustle around her. Here is love, grief, uncertainty, longing, joy, desire, fury, and fear. Also wandering bears, marauding llamas, light and laundry rooms.Praise for Everything Rustles

WINNER OF THE VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS C.J. DENNIS PRIZE FOR POETRYSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PREMIER'S BOOK AWARDSDisarming, warm, and always accessible, Cate Kennedy’s poems make ordinary experiences glow. Everything that suffuses her well-loved prose is here: compassion, insight, lyrical precision, and the clear, minimalist eye that reveals how life can turn on a single moment. Musing on the undercurrents and ...

By the author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE and ALIAS GRACEA beautifully bizarre assortment of short stories and prose poems. Writing on an eclectic range of subjects from 'Bread' and 'Strawberries', to 'Fainting' and 'Women's Novels', Margaret Atwood brings her astonishing world view to the comings and goings of ordinary life. The pretentious male chef is taken down a peg, a gang of cynical five year olds concoct a poisonous brew; and knowing when to st...

From the prize-winning poet: "A stunning volume . . . A master of the understatement, Matthews is wryly philosophical and self-deprecating." — BooklistWhen William Matthews died, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, America lost one of its most important poets, one whose humor and wit were balanced by deep emotion, whose off-the-cuff inventiveness belied the acuity of his verse. Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously un...

The Burning Alphabet confirms and extends Barry Dempster’s reputation as one of Canada’s most respected poets. Underpinning these poems, as in his previous work, there lies an unswerving dedication to emotional and spiritual honesty, clear-eyed recognitions rendered without pomp. In one section, "Sick Days", he focuses on that "other place" of chronic illness. Other poems present arguments against suicide, and explore the tropical wonders of a woman’s closet. The closing section renders, w...