DUSIE

Once more, I offer my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive, imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. This is my fifteenth annual list [see also: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since dusie-maven Susana Gardner originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write up their own versions of same, and I thank her both for the ongoing opportunity, and her original prompt.

I recently caught “The best Canadian poetry of 2025” list via the CBC website, and saw not one but three poetry titles I hadn’t been aware of. Did you know Canisia Lubrin had a new poetry book this year? You probably did, whereas I did not. Did you know about Ben von Jagow? Sarain Frank Soonias? Jason Purcell’s latest? I’ve been waiting for a copy of Vera Hadzic’s, also. I’m also hearing some amazing things about Melissa Powless Day, as well. I mean, I hate being behind, and I’ve already attempted to get these books, get some interviews happening with them two poets I hadn’t heard of previously. Either way, I appreciate CBC including my latest, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), on such a glorious list! And you know, if you ever wish to sign up for our occasional email list for VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival (including information on our Ottawa Poets Laureate) or my weekly "Tuesday poem" email list, check out the link here!

This year, as well, we lost Canadian poets David Phillips (1944-February 10, 2025), David Dowker (May 20, 1955 – March 24, 2025) and Judith Copithorne (1939-2025), and Canadian-American poet Larry Sawyer (1970-2025).

The first half of the year had me attempting to close out my two non-fiction projects—“the green notebook” and “the genealogy book” [I’ve been posting excerpts-in-progress from both of these over at the substack for some time]—some two and a half years focusing on non-fiction prose, as spring into summer moved me to focus on two new poetry manuscripts—“Fair bodies of unseen prose” and “dream logic: poems from a Sunday prompt”—before launching fully into a new poetry manuscript back in July, thanks to our adventures across Ireland: “The Museum of Practical Things” [see my write up on such here]. Oh, and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press) landed in October. I’ve had some nice write-ups on that.

Some further remarkable titles I caught this year included Fast-Vanishing Speech: The 2023 Douglas Lochhead Memorial Book Arts Panel: Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis and Christopher Patton (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Michael e. Casteels’ debut novel, Furthermore, the Lake (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025) [see my review of such here], SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) [see my review of such here], Sadiqa de Meijer’s collection of essays In the Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books, 2025) [see my review of such here] and sophie anne edwards’ A Mouth of Vowels (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Via my substack, I’ve been stretching out slightly longer reviews of prose titles, with a recent piece on Stephen Collis’ Knock Down House (Pamenar Press, 2025) [see my essay here], among others. I’ve also been posting short stories and other essays over there as well. I keep telling myself I’m going to review further journals, but only managed an issue of filling Station: filling Station #84 : let slip the dogs.

Presuming my count is correct, I’ve posted some one hundred and fifty-ish book reviews across 2025, the bulk of which on the blog, but further at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics as well as through Rob Manery’s SOME and Chris Banks’ The Woodlot: from poetry books and chapbooks, anthologies, essay collections, novels, literary journals, and further prose works. Is that all there is?

1. Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory: I’m intrigued at Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. Set as chapter-sections, Katelnikoff repurposes each writer’s words as a response to those same works, offering a way across the work that is, in fact, through. In his own way, he turns their words back as a mirror to themselves. “In short,” he writes, to open the Erín Moure essay/section, “how can we be true to the way the brain works?” Katelnikoff’s process has echoes of the way Klara du Plessis has been composing essays over the past few years, specifically through her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023): the critic is not removed from the material but an essential part, offering the critic a way into the material comparable to the creative non-fiction explorations through the 1970s and 80s by writers such as Myrna Kostash and Brian Fawcett. Whereas du Plessis places the critic directly into the material, Katelnikoff, instead, places the criticism directly into the material, and the material discussed directly into the criticism. Poets have been working elements of essay-poems for years—poets such as Phil Hall, Erín Moure, Laynie Browne and the late Barry McKinnon, for example—swirling across theory through the lyric, but Katelnikoff offers critique through repurposing the language being critiqued, taking the process a whole other level, writing essays from the inside. As he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “All of the essays in this collection are written with the permission of the writers whose textual materials have been recombined. In each essays, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first section are direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences are spliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” It’s a fascinating process, and a fascinating read. See my full review here.

2. Matthew Gwathmey, Family Band: The third full-length collection by Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, following Our Latest in Folktales (London ON: Brick Books, 2019) and Tumbling for Amateurs (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023), is Family Band (Guelph ON: The Porcupines’ Quill, 2024). There’s long been a playfully-askance approach Gwathmey has taken blending formal elements of lyric and narrative, and this collection is no different, offering sharp lines across a folksy, familial and detailed backdrop. “2022 is the year of the lilac,” he writes, to open the poem “LILACS,” according to the almanac. // So tonight let’s walk the trail behind our house. // To the bushes growing in very great plenty and already divided. // Find an offshoot. Plant it in our side yard where it scent can flourish / in the full sun. // Water and wait. We’ll alternate scions with random grafts, // until its flowers appear at eye level, appearing just before summer / comes into season, // blooms lasting only a couple weeks.” Through short, sharp lyrics, Gwathmey swirls together a mixtape’s-worth of earworms and experience, documenting road trips, birdwatching, visual art, nature walks and playing music, a broadband of all that circles the domestic of family life, rippling quietly outwards. “Savannah sparrows gather ten times / their weight in detail to orchestrate / the ratio of land to water,” he writes, as part of the lyric “BIRD CARTOGRAPHERS,” “call a light tsu. Caroline / chickadees, cleaner edge of cheek patch, / mark dots of cities and dashes / of contours using a broad palette.” I particularly enjoyed the triptych prose-poem sequence “PHOTOGRAPHS OF BUILDINGS / BY DIANE ARBUS,” the first of which begins: “Chimneys can’t push out but so much steam, even the outline’s unfocused in blurry vapour. A quiet loosening of rigid matter. And how far they jut into the postsecular project of this guy, the sky. Just imagine such alternatives.” See my full review here.

3. Michael Boughn, THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 2: I’ll admit I’ve seen but a scattering of titles by Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn over the years, from his incredible collection of essays, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2024), to poetry collection Great Canadian Poems for the Aged, Vol. 1 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012), as well as the chapbook The Battle of Milvian Bridge (shuffaloff, 2021), not to mention his chapbook In the shadows (2022) that I produced through above/ground press. Whenever I do encounter his work, I’m always curious why it hasn’t received more attention than it has, Boughn somehow sitting as one of our unheralded senior Canadian poets and thinkers. Wrapped together as eleven chapbook-sections and pamphlet coda is THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 2 (2024), the first edition of which is produced in a hand-numbered edition of twenty-five copies (mine is number twenty-five). Subtitled “A Hyperbiographical Users Manual,” this book-length assemblage follows THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 1 (Brooklyn NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), and extends across eleven sections, each of which are set in their own numbered chapbook-binding. Boughn’s is an extended and packed lyric sentence of collaged language, reference, sound and influx, a poetics reminiscent of Stephen Cain’s recent Walking & Stealing (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], but with a far denser language and heft of materials. “Midden heap / of nothing’s discarded remains,” he writes, in the first section of the fourth poem-chapbook, “layer // after layer after layer has already / signified more than decency would have / circulate in polite company , a normative / exclusionary sig-fix designed to keep power / well-contained and ordered according / to bleach requirements […].” There is just so much happening, so many simultaneous directions, to his ongoingnesses through these lines. See my full review here.

4. DM Bradford, Bottom Rail on Top: I’m just now seeing a copy of Montreal-based poet and translator DM Bradford’s second full-length collection, Bottom Rail on Top (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a follow-up to Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021). Composed across an accumulated thirteen poem-sections, from “rope to” and “ashes to” to “new corps” and “lil chug,” the short poems of Bottom Rail on Top exist as sketch-notes, lyric bursts that suggest the gesture but are intricate and precise in their execution. As the back cover offers: “Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sees D.M. Bradford stage one personal present alongside American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation—a call and response between the complications of legacy and selfhood.” There is a kind of call-and-response to how these poems assemble, a through-line of notes and their commentary, akin to a kind of Greek chorus or counter-narrative. Each section, a cluster of short sketch-poems, with the occasional prose-commentary, providing a blend of further narrative, additional information and a kind of summing-up, set at the end of a handful of sections. The third section, “stock,” for example, ends with a prose block that begins: “Not a poem but a succession of little cuts. You hear about Sally Hemings over and over again. You don’t hear that much about Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s first wife, being Sally’s half-sister. You don’t hear much about Betty Hemings, Martha’s father’s enslaved mistress, Sally’s mother. You don’t hear much about the other half-siblings, how many of them Martha, along with Thomas, inherited, the Hemings family among 135. Commonplace horrors.” Not a poem, Bradford repeats as a mantra across the title of each poem and the opening of each commentary, suggesting a push against the impossibility of the lyric while simultaneously offering its artifice, even as the poems work through and across it, connecting Bottom Rail on Top to works such as M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008), for example. “Not a poem,” Bradford writes, near the end of the fifth section, “but to write at last / past the old place / one last time // by boat / the breeze and the sunshine / north by fatherlands / ten days and ten nights [.]” See my full review here.

5. Eva H.D., the natural hustle: poems: I’m only seeing this now, Toronto poet Eva H.D.’s the natural hustle: poems (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2023), a collection that follows her full-length debut, Rotten Perfect Mouth (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and collaborative art/photography volume with photographer Kendall Townend, Light Wounds (2021). The poems that make up the natural hustle offer an assemblage of declarative scenes; a montage of moments wrapped around other moments, attending the immediate, it would suggest, of both the author’s urban landscape and memory. “Every summer,” she writes, as part of the poem “DONNA SUMMER,” “you entertain thoughts you’ve had before; through / a sweating glass, lacerated with heat, consider // whether there’ll ever be enough July, consider / the menu, the news from Aleppo, the breathing/ Chablis. You misapprehend, fail to think through / anything but your own righteous outrage, friends’ / afflictions, your partisan posture.” Through H.D., the past and the present interact, intermingle and even react, providing a suggestion that there are no singular moments, but those that connect in loose sequence. Everything holds, somehow, and everything connects. Composed as first-person narratives, these poems are rooted in landscape, even across great distances, meditative swirls and the backlash of recollection. “Back to the highway.” she writes, as part of the extended sequence “GOD AND THE PATH TRAIN,” “Ramones doing their / Cretin hop syncopations like a / bulimic mid-vomit like / this one song just has to leave my body, / a car cuts us off so close it’s / practically driving backwards. // Sunflower dust on everything.” See my full review here.

6. Em Dial, In the Key of Decay: I’m just now seeing a copy of Toronto-based poet Em Dial’s full-length debut, In the Key of Decay (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), a collection of lyrics held in monologue, gesture. I’d seen Dial’s poems recently in Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025) and was impressed, although I’d even think their poem included in that particular anthology a direction I’d like to see further. Their poems in this collection are a narrative blend of performative and meditative, offering elements of beauty and decay and everything between, amid and through, a collection, as the back cover offers, that “pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history.” “In my worst nightmares,” the poem “On Beauty” begins, “I am pregnant / my body swelling out / with a demon but a small task to country. // Just as when awake, I am begging / myself into a somewhere thumbing / my ribs for the definition of country / other than the two blue passports / kissing in the desk drawer.” The poems in In the Key of Decay are declarative, considered. In the Key of Decay is a solid opening, and I’m intrigued by Dial’s formal considerations, pushing against the boundaries of lyric constraint, but one open to further possibilities (such as their poem in Permanent Record, which does move into some really interesting structural territory). The poems are smart and wild and restrained, offering elements of fantastic monologues and short scenes and lines that lean into the musical. See my full review here.

7. Tea Gerbeza, How I Bend Into More: From Regina, Saskatchewan poet Tea Gerbeza comes the full-length debut How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), a collection that curves into multiple articulations around childhood scoliosis, reminiscent of similar work I’ve seen by Gatineau, Quebec filmmaker and poet Jennifer Mulligan, a poem or two from her chapbook …like nailing jello to a tree… (above/ground press, 2007). Through Gerbeza, much as Mulligan’s poems, a staggered line runs down the centre of pages, of poems, composing a line of bent spine with text on either side, offering visual approximations of “parentheses,” as Gerbeza’s poem “glossary of parentheses” visualizes, “around my spine [.]” Constructed as intimate notes on childhood illness, family response, suffering, privacy and disability poetics, the poems are built on the foundations of the narrative “I,” occasionally as curved or curled, writing a sequence of notes on effect, response and experience. “I take a photo to post / instead find myself reading pamphlets / about girls with Scoliosis. Images / tell me │ ( )ing helps the right / kind of patient, the right / patient will avoid / surgery, this the body’s goal.” Across swirls and scatterings of cut-ups, photographs, clippings and a staccato of scars, Gerbeza collages fragments of text and image, leaning into the text-laden photographed object so prevalent in the work of Toronto-based poet Kate Siklosi. Her lean might be visual, but the foundation of the collection sits in text. “If I don’t exist Scoliosis doesn’t either,” she writes. Further on: “I explore territory I’ve long kept private / in crescents curled with no open centres [.]” What is interesting about Gerbeza’s line, the visual of which runs through the collection as an approximation, a textual stand-in for her own spine, is how it holds as foundation through the collection, both through subject matter and text: everything within the collection is set in relation to that single element. As the poem “Clearing Up the Question about ‘My Suffering’” begins: “If suffering is private │ then why should I explain? / if I explain, do I start from my head │ to my toes [.]” She offers notes on the spine, so that she might write through it, into it. See my full review here.

8. Oana Avasilichioaei, Chambersonic: Furthering the evolution of Montreal poet, translator and performer Oana Avasilichioaei’s explorations around sound, language, meaning and performance comes Chambersonic (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), her seventh-full length poetry title over the past twenty years. Avasilichioaei’s work has moved from origins of language, translation and between-ness into a poetics deeply engaged with the intersections (within the between-ness, as well) of text, sound and performance. “It begins with desire.” the section “Chambersonic : Soundpace // Eavesdropping / on the Process of a Dilettante Composer,” subtitled “(on the making of Chambersonic : Episodes for an Absent Film),” begins [with back-slashes set here as included in the text, not as line-break notation], “A longing for what is yet to be conceived. Faint and fragmentary glimmers of ideas, sound heard in the mind’s ear: elongated resonances, long drawn-out frequencies advancing and receding in waves, layers, reverberations // static, silent extensions // sometimes sparse, sometimes full // a sea of glass, a more active, rougher sea of surf and foam and wind // plucked chords // long vocal vowellings fading into breathlessness.” Chambersonic is constructed as a long poem across fifteen sections/scores, two bridges and an opening breath, “Chambersonic Intro: Fellow Statements,” a poem subtitled “(an audio work & lathe-cut vinyl / imagined from Fellow Statements, Fellow Murmurs, 04:48),” a five stanza/prose block text that begins: “Breath The closing of the door transforms the sound studio into a cocoon. / Soft light demarcates the edges, while at the centre stands a simple install- / lation: a small table, chair, recorder, and two vocal microphones. The outer / world seems unfathomably distant in both time and space.” The scale of this project is impressive, incorporating intervals, echoes, sound scores and layerings, as Avasilichioaei’s Chambersonic not only holds the full-length collection as her field of composition but one that incorporates sound and breath as foundational, echoing off the boundaries of the physical object of the book. “Voices will one day ignite and spill over,” she offers, to open the section “Chambersonic : Echoes,” “fill in new fractures. They will not / retract but keep on spilling.” See my full review here.

9. Monroe Lawrence, About to Be Young: I’m very taken with this full-length debut, this book length poem, by Vancouver Island-born Rhode Island-based poet Monroe Lawrence, About to Be Young (The Elephants, 2021), a book that only recently landed on my doorstep. Going back through my files, it is curious to realize that I’ve mentioned Lawrence once before, as one of the winners of The Capilano Review’s sixth annual Robin Blaser Poetry Award [see my note on such here], although there doesn’t seem to be an acknowledgments of poems published elsewhere in the collection, so I’m unable to tell if that winning poem included here. About to Be Young is composed as a small, compact, fragmented and expansive book-length poem, set as more accumulation than narrative, offering a fresh way of approach both the lyric and the line through which the long poem is held. “Please, I felt broken / away, / Resisting to write out / in the other room,” they write, a third of the way through the collection, “I could / held my book at my side, leaned / Back / and cried [.]” There’s something of the larger structure, the syntax, of this book-length lyric that leans closer to the French long poem tradition; American poet and translator Cole Swensen is thanked in the acknowledgments, which makes me suspect that the influence on Lawrence is a conscious one. The lyric of About to Be Young seems far closer to the work of Emmanuel Hocquard than to, say, the work of Robin Blaser, Robert Kroetsch or Jack Spicer. “I cannot fit inexpressiveness / Snowing my mouth,” Lawrence writes, offering moment upon moment of sparkling grace. There’s a blend of abstract, large canvas and lyric declaration he offers through these poems, one more focused on tone and accumulation than straightforward thought. Each moment, stands; and accumulates, into the sum of something greater, other. See my full review here.

10. Sean Howard, overlays: I’m fascinated by Cape Breton poet Sean Howard’s latest poetry title, the deceptively-subtle and sleek production of his wildly inventive overlays (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), a book subtitled “( scored poems ),” with addendum “from Sea Run: Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, by Peter Sanger.” The poems that make up Howard’s overlays quite literally respond to the work and structure of Nova Scotia poet, prose writer and critic Peter Sanger’s critical monograph on the late John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1978), a monograph originally published by Xavier Press in 1986 (a “fully revised and expanded edition” appeared with Gaspereau Press in 2023). As British Columbia poet Kim Trainor writes of the first edition of Sanger’s monograph in a review on her blog back in March 2014, the book is “a meticulous line by line commentary on Thompson’s Stilt Jack,” and Howard’s collection holds to the structure and spirit of Sanger’s short work while entirely dismantling the language. “Canada, still harrowing? Pen / knife (but why?),” opens the poem “IX: SCRAPES,” “scraping star- // light from stone. Keats’ cease / fire (so the world we shut // up…): negatives leave / room for the dark. // Left standing, / children’s // voices / over // the wall.” One might say that Howard’s project responding to Sanger’s text is very meta, set as an homage to an homage, a response to a response, riffing off Sanger writing on Thompson. “Key / note,” opens Howard’s “XXXV: GREENS,” “silence’s / tonic: soon, a // plenty. History’s / dead aims: as Joyce // might sway, gnaw- / ledge is dour…(Me- // thodically, Occam cuts / the world shaving: High // Table, Apollo’s spoon / on the moon.)” The poems are precise, playfully clipped and exact, seeking the moment within the moment, within and around the boundaries of Sanger’s own possibilities, and Thompson’s as well. Howard’s poems are precise, but packed with a density that is both wildly propulsive and accumulative, offering a joyfully-jagged rhythm and staccato that display him clearly having an enormous amount of fun across this myriad of collaged lyrics. See my full review here.

11. Farah Ghafoor, Shadow Price: Award-winning Toronto-based poet Farah Ghafoor’s full-length debut is Shadow Price (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2025), a collection that wraps a first-person lyric around temporality, death, capitalism and colonialism, and the dangers of not knowing or understanding history. “The Present is reminded of its bones only when broken,” she writes, as part of “Natural History Museum,” “and then the Future is considered, its supposed desires / and plans. The Future, for whom the door is always open, / a sweet wind blowing in petals and leaves, sticks and feathers. / The same doorway through which the Present passes, / and forgets what it was doing, its reasons why.” The movement and evolution of time is a thread running through Ghafoor’s poems, articulating how it moves but in one direction, however far one looks back. “I’ve been lying for a long time,” she offers, to open “The Jungle Book: Epilogue,” “so let me tell you a story. / Despite the bravado of the dog quaking before the wall, / we can never go back to who we were.” Set in five sections—“SHADOW PRICE,” “TIME,” “THE LAST POET IN THE WORLD,” “THE PLOT” and “THE GARDEN”—Ghafoor’s expansive and epic lyrics offer shimmering narratives, flipping between the present and the past, the old and the new, articulating time as something physical, something that can be touched, held. Ghafoor is a natural storyteller, and her lyrics offer the temperament of the ancient seer, able to discern what is long behind and ahead, all that is hidden and all that is obvious; what others simply refuse to see, if only they’d listen. “To obtain my severance package,” she offers, as part of the extended lyric narrative of “The Whale,” “I will be required / to hold my breath until further notice. / Of course, I can barely register all of this / without the aural support that my insurance did not cover.” She weaves such marvellous and magical tales, such gestures. “They have all the time in the world,” she writes, as part of “The Jungle Book: Epilogue,” “but the story must end, as all stories do.” This is an absolutely solid debut. See my full review here.

12. Terese Mason Pierre, Myth: I know there have been many eager to see what Toronto writer and editor Terese Mason Pierre could do through a collection beyond a chapbook, so it is good to see the release of her full-length debut, Myth (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2025), a collection of physical and precise poems on and around stories, storytelling and how stories take hold. These are poems as foundational as the earth or the ocean, offering sharp and astute first-person observational, declarative and descriptive lyrics. “My grandfather says we can eat what we kill.” she begins, immediately setting the tone with the opening line of the opening poem, “Fishing,” “We wade into the water and find a shark.” Terese Mason Pierre’s poems tells stories, including those that hint of their implications, meanings and true purposes. In the end, myths are the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the stories that warn, catch and inform, stories that can propel us forward, hold us back, distract our attention or inform our world-view, including times when all of the above occur simultaneously. “My mother tried to tell me I was broken,” begins “Dead Living Things,” “and I shut her away. Who died and made her oracle? / Where my mouth falters, my skin reserves.” Oh my, this is good. Myth is a striking and deeply complex debut. See my full review here.

13. J.R. Carpenter, Measures of Weather: United Kingdom-based Canadian poet J.R. Carpenter’s latest is Measures of Weather (Swindon UK: Shearsman Books, 2025), a book that self-describes as a collection “about more than just weather. What isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure?” The collection offers a suite of sharp lyrics, each holding titles that echo off each other: “Of Fire,” “Of the Moon,” “Of Time,” “Of Witches,” “Of Dew,” “Of Nothing.” There is something of the title-thread reminiscent of what California poet Elizabeth Robinson has been working on for a while now, such as in her Excursive (New York NY: Roof Books, 2023) and On Ghosts (Solid Objects, 2013) [see my review of such here], to Anne Carson’s infamous collection Short Talks (London ON: Brick Books, 1992), with each Carson prose poem in the collection titled “Short talk on _____.” The title-structure allows for a kind of ongoingness, an umbrella under which anything might happen or occur, including threads that might relate to the specifics of each title. For Carpenter, she offers a measurement beyond immediate measurement, composing a sequence of lyric meditations on physical, intellectual and even outer space and celestial bodies. “2 August 1786 // I want to trouble you / in absence,” the sequence “Of a New Comet” begins, “with the following / imperfect account [.]” What is it about the weather? Lisa Robertson composed The Weather (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2001) while living in England, another Canadian poet in the UK writing her own book-length lyric examination (a book Carpenter quotes at the opening of this collection, also). “of magnifying and multiplying glasses,” Carpenter writes, to open the sequence “Of Glass,” “I have neither studied /nor practiced [.]” There is almost a way through which Carpenter utilizes Robertson’s The Weather as a jumping-off point, providing a work that responds, in part, to that classic title, but stretching that measure much further. Referencing time, weather and space, this collection is a measure of measurement itself, seeing how expansive one can explore through the smallest examination, the smallest measure. “what is the real temperature / of bodies of a different nature / in similar circumstances,” she writes, as part of the extended “Of Dew,” “of bodies a little elevated / and similar bodies / lying on the ground // sometimes bodies / having smooth surfaces / become colder in air [.]” In pinpoint lyric, Carpenter offers a remarkable scaffolding that displays the whole shape, showcasing the ease in which she can articulate her finely-tuned lines, a movement of moments across conceptual space, time and motion. See my full review here.

14. Anna Veprinska, Bonememory: The full-length poetry debut by Calgary-based poet and academic Anna Veprinska is Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025), a collection of first person lyric observations dealing with conflict, heartbreak and intimate loss. As the back cover of the collection writes: “Memory is stored in the body. Memory sprouts in families and is transmitted from one generation to the next. Memory imprints at the level of bone.” This is a book of questions, and prayer, composed as poems with clear, sharp edges that write of generations, distance and the body, working through losses deeply felt, including that around immigration, colonialism, chronic illness and other upheavals. “Gravesite / suggests the dead are a site to behold,” she writes, as part of the poem “A goose lays eggs on the side of a highway,” “and aren’t they?” Further on, the poem “Testimony” offers: “Somewhere / there is a mouth generous // with opening. / Each lip stirs // in service of its own / secrets.” Referencing the discovery of unmarked graves on multiple sites across Canada of former residential schools in the poem “Shoes,” she offers: “How much of this country is an unmarked grave?” She ties these recently-held memorials and acknowledgments to similar memorials at the Auschwitz museum, writing: “What comes from the reification of metaphor?” She writes of pain, and the bewilderment of patterns, repeating, all of which is held in the body. “Empathy,” the same poem concludes, “the lie with whom wee sit making small talk / until decorum dictates we can depart. / 215 Indigenous children. Makeshift memorials / of children’s shoes coast to coast. / How much of this country is an unmarked grave?” See my full review here.

15. Jake Byrne, Daddy: Poems: It is good to finally see a copy of Toronto poet and editor Jake Byrne’s second collection, Daddy: Poems (Kingson ON: Brick Books, 2024), following their full-length debut, Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2023). Across a loop and reloop of articulated, traced and repuporsed trauma, Byrne’s poems offer a curious blend of sexual swagger, explorations through and into “patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and queer desire” (as the back cover offers), and a degree of tenderness, including the very fact of the author dedicating the collection “to the memory of a little cat / named My Sweet Princess (2018-2023).” The poems assembled here are expansive, allowing for this large project built out of intricately-crafted small parts, opening with a poem of short lines held aloft by such wide open space. “My father calls to talk about my poems,” Byrne writes, offering a four-line stanza at the top of an otherwise empty page, “and seamlessly incorporates my words into his paranoid delusions. / He says I ought to be more careful what I write, implies the poems / come from a demon birthing itself through the vessel of my body.” This is Byrne in a further step of moving beyond composing poems to composing books, something already evident in the umbrella of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin, a structure that encompassed the entirety of the poems in that collection, but Daddy: Poems provides a more overt and more coherent book-length structure; and the coherence is further impressive through the assemblage of a variety of lyric shapes and purposes. “My parents taught me many things the hard way.” the poem “A POEM ABOUT MY PET CANARY II” offers, “But I cannot for the life of me recall / what the moral of this lesson was. // Do poems require moral lessons?” There’s a vibrancy to Byrne’s lyric, whatever the subject matter; an energy that can’t be denied, making for a powerful collection on trauma, desire and how one might move forward, even through the flailing, a flailing that might hopefully find its way toward something more stable, certain. “sometimes you know / by the crackle of static in the air,” begins the poem “event coordinator moving into / project management,” “the vibrations in the puddles / on the sopping sauna floor. / i had so rarely felt the virtues of a / tall white man before marco.” See my full review here.

16. Tolu Oloruntoba, Unravel: The third full-length poetry title by award-winning poet Tolu Oloruntoba, following The Junta of Happenstance (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2021) and Each One a Furnace (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2022), is Unravel (McClelland and Stewart, 2025). There is a powerful navigation Oloruntoba works through his lyric first-person narratives, offering deeply thoughtful meditations on all that might be called location. “Shrill bullets, sheep ballet, this hobble:,” he offers, as part of the poem “OF PASSPHRASES STRONGER THAN 4 WORDS WITH / 1,000 ITERATIONS,” “I still cannot pronounce shibboleth. / I wanted into the cult of ikigai like nothing // before or since. If I had been so punished, / then I must have been righteous, and my reward / must have waited.” These poems attempt placement, attempting to best situate his thinking, and articulate how he sees the chaos and beauty of the world through his engagements through, as Reginald Dwayne Betts suggests, as part of his back cover blurb, “the intersections of identity, migration, fatherhood, and history.” These are poems about how best one might move through the world, despite and even because of all it contains, both without and within. These are poems on perspective: “You’d consider that map / upside-down,” he writes, as part of “MAGIC LAND OF THE SHADOWS,” “but only because / you believe Europe belongs on top.”

Oloruntoba offers deep attention to the smallest moments, small things, which allow for larger revelation; the only way, perhaps, to get there from here. “I have been troubling / the shoreline,” he writes, as part of the poem “EKPHRASIS,” “as cryptids do.” There is an informed and steady progress of thought across Oloruntoba’s lyric, deeply considered and gestural; wise and empathetic, even as he unravels—as to reveal, and not to pull apart, damage or dismantle—his own observations for the sake of further insight. “We / who are at our most human when / we are yearning.” he writes, as part of “DEMONSTRO,” “My Cain-mark, your / Cain-mark, shows even, especially / in this gropesome dark.” See my full review here.

17. Zane Koss, Country Music: Guelph, Ontario-based poet and translator Zane Koss’ second full-length collection, following Harbour Grids (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2022) is Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025), a book-length poem of stories, ghosts and the country music of rural British Columbia upbringing. It is a very different tone and approach from, say, the music of Dennis Cooley’s Country Music: New Poems (Kalamalka Press, 2004) or Robert Kroetsch’s “Country and Western” section of his Completed Field Notes (University of Alberta Press, 2002). As the back cover offers, Koss’ music emerges from stories told around campfires or the kitchen table, held “against the backdrop of rural British Columbia,” offering working-class tales of “humour and violence of life in the mountains.” Koss weaves these stories through and around the shape of an understanding of his own origins, and how he got to where he is now. As he writes, early in the collection: “where have our fathers / gone i have still lived more years / of my life // on a dirt road than a / paved one, / i tell people that, and // though true, it doesn’t / feel that way; mike, / where have we gone [.]” He opens the book, the poem, with a sequence of storytelling narratives to establish his foundation of a good story, plainly told; conversational, sections of which feel comparable to The Canterbury Tales, but all told by the same unnamed narrator. The poems, the extended long poem, of Country Music, is structured in accumulating sections, offering short narrative bursts of storytelling lyric, notational across the pause and parry across each storyteller’s particular diction. See my full review here.

18. Adam Haiun, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid: The full-length debut by Montreal poet Adam Haiun is the intriguing I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a book of lines, grids and shapes set across each other in lengths. I might imagine that if the late Canadian poet and dramatist Wilfred Watson (1911-1998), once famous for his own grid poems (but more enduringly well-known as being the husband of writer Sheila Watson), had been able to shake Modernism, he might have emerged as Adam Haiun. I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid offers a long poem sketchbook of narrative threads set in overlapping text, overlapping grids, moving in multiple directions simultaneously, and deliciously difficult to replicate in the form of a review (although I shall make an attempt). “And where am I to / be found in this equation.” he writes, early on in the assemblage of untitled pieces, set in the table of contents as a listing of first lines demarking self-contained pieces, twenty-one in all. “The head the hindquarters intact / the heart presumably obliterated / if any logic governs the placement / of organs. And you only notice / today how there are little grey / apartments above that grocery / store. The miniaturizing impulse. / In terms of the heart. In relation / to the glands. All the pungency / of the ripe orange in the stairwell / and the recognition of the smell / as belonging to her very pits. The / stretch of land that constitutes a / lesson from out of the past. The / engorgement.” The author’s note at the end of the collection—“Although I wrote this book in the voice of a digital speaker, I employed no generative software in its composition.—suggests a kind of polyvocality of not just overlapping text but overlapping sound, furthering structural echoes of some of the work of Montreal poet, translator and performer Oana Avasilichioaei’s own explorations around sound, language, meaning and performance, most recently through her seventh full-length collection, Chambersonic (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024) (although there are numerous over the years that have played with an overlapping of text, certainly, from Chris Turnbull to bpNichol to jwcurry, among others). Haiun’s overlapping sentences and phrases play the glitch and stagger, overlay and staccato of fragments across a far broader tapestry of construction and destruction, how things are built and how they fall apart. Every sentence a further step across an endless stretch of narrative across the length and breath of the long poem, as he writes, mid-way through the collection: “The head the hindquarters intact / the heart presumably obliterated / if any logic governs the placement / of organs. And you only notice / today how there are little grey / apartments above that grocery / store. The miniaturizing impulse. / In terms of the heart. In relation / to the glands. All the pungency / of the ripe orange in the stairwell / and the recognition of the smell / as belonging to her very pits.” See my full review here.

19. Mahaila Smith, Seed Beetle: poems: The full-length poetry debut by Ottawa-based poet Mahaila Smith, following two chapbooks, including one through above/ground press, is Seed Beetle: poems (Hamilton ON: Stelliform Press, 2025), a speculative collection set as an assembled manuscript composed well into an imagined future. “I found the following material in notebooks and desk drawers,” the “Foreword” begins, “in blog posts and hard drives during the process of creating the Nebula Armis fonds in the years following her passing. An archive of her poems is now housed in the Chamberlin Collection of Poetry of the Toronto Public Library.” The “Foreword,” by the way, by the fictional “Dip Seshadri,” is dated “New Haywood, 2102.” The most overt comparison to this collection would be the full-debut by Toronto poet and filmmaker Lindsay B-e, The Cyborg Anthology: Poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020), a collection of poems by robot poets put together some two hundred years in the future, or even the way the late Robert Kroetsch wrote the fictional archivist Raymond assembling the work of a lost poet and her work, The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001). Set in three sections, Nebula’s poems write of repeated layers of death and rebirth, technological advance and environmental crises, utopia and its failures. The narrative framework of this imagined future is curious, interesting; and I’m intrigued at why, specifically, Smith wrote out this future through the lyric as opposed to prose; wondering, perhaps, if there might be a novelization at some point from an alternate perspective around the same narrative this collection offers. Held together, the poems each provide narrative moments of lyrically-straightforward narrative sketches that together accumulate into a larger and broader concern with how technology interferes with repair, and has the potential to interfere with utopia itself. Nebula’s poems offer depictions of days and networks, beetles and histories, and fingers through dirt; as a warning, a look at and through where we might land from the perspective of having been through it. See my full review here.

20. Jessica Bebenek, No One Knows Us There: Poems: The full-length poetry debut by Montreal-based poet Jessica Bebenek, following eight chapbooks, as well as landing on the shortlist the Writers’ Trust of Canada RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, is No One Knows Us There: Poems (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2025), a collection self-described as one that “presents two distinct and moving portraits of womanhood. The first is that of the devoted, caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realities of palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older, compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenek rewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing.” And there is such grief, such loss, here. Bebenek’s narrator works through grief as it is happening, and, again, years later, revisiting what can’t help but shift through the intervening time. Part of what will be interesting through Bebenek’s further and future work will be seeing how such a lyric will develop, given an opening salvo that already seeks to articulate loss from two temporal perspectives. This is a strong collection, one that holds to foundations even as Bebenek’s narrator works to comprehend, to clarify, all that has happened and her origins, and all where she might eventually land. Early on in the collection, there is the poem “On the Night of the Morning / My Grandfather Died,” with all the immediacy such an event might provide, as the poem ends: “But there is no fall. / We went home. / Chose one board / and then another, / one street and walked down it, / screeching with the thing / that made us.” See my full review here.

21. Michael Chang, Things a Bright Boy Can Do: From Manhattan-based Canadian poet and editor Michael Chang, following titles such as Heroes (Temz Review/845 Press, 2025), Toy Soldiers (Action, Spectacle, 2024), SWEET MOSS (Anstruther Press, 2024), SYNTHETIC JUNGLE (Northwestern University Press, 2023) and EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS (GreenTower Press, 2024), is the full-length Things a Bright Boy Can Do (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025). I’m all With chapbooks produced over the past two years through Temz Review/845 Press and Anstruther Press, as well as an author biography that cites publication in Canadian journals such as Capilano Review, Contemporary Verse 2, the Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review and PRISM International, Canadian literature is certainly paying attention to Michael Chang, as much as Michael Chang seems to be attending Canadian publishers; perhaps a return north is being considered? On the surface, the poems in Chang’s Things a Bright Boy Can Do are accumulative, whip-smart, hurt and funny, sassy and queer, comparable in many ways to the work of New England-based poet and editor Chen Chen, speaking first-person lyric monologues around emergencies and histories, childhood recollection and literary interveavings, violence and linguistic measure, cultural references and expansive gestures. “i detect your silence,” Chang writes, as part of “ATONEMENT,” “you you practiced // personification of ALLURE // fresh face pummelled red & teal // according to that distant sheepdog narcissa [.]” There is the sass, the casual glance and gesture of the deeply felt, deeply considered; the highly-literature “flirty to righteousness, wrathful to lackadaisical,” providing an echo between the two, but in Chang, something different, as well: something looser, almost freer, allowing for the movement of the gesture to direct the narratives. “Matthew DICKMAN was so upset he could not stand,” the expansive and gestural “BABY DRIVE SOUTH” writes, “Michael DICKMAN was investigated by another agency due to / a conflict of interes // Paul MULDOON told you his horse was larger than yours // CACONRAD sent anthrax to Betsy DeVos & was awarded / the Medal of Freedom [.]” At turns thoughtful, joyful, meditative and silly, Things a Bright Boy Can Do offers a perspective on how one might live best and simply be within the world, within the moment, whatever else might be happening or happened, or even yet to happen. Or, as the poem “KING OF THE WORLD” writes, just at the end: “on this day // we go back to our old routine [.]” See my full review here.

22. Jessica Popeski, The Problem with Having a Body: Following the chapbooks The Wrong Place (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2015 ) and Oratorio (Anstruther Press, 2015) comes Toronto-based “dis/abled opera singer, Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Music, and internationally published, intersectional ecofeminist poet” Jessica Popeski’s full-length poetry debut, The Problem with Having a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025). As the back cover offers, this is a collection of poems “that unites Jessica Popeski’s preoccupations with intersectional ecofeminism, epigenetics, and the inheritance of fractured, grandmaternal generational lines. It reconciles private and public conflicts, examining how political and geographical rupture and war zones generate traumatic, ancestral memory by chronicling experiences of moving through the world with dis/ability and anorexia. Accompanied by the insistence of matrilineal song, these poems ask loud questions about cyclical bouts of anxiety and depression, madness, illness, voicelessness, and disordered eating.” The poems in The Problem with Having a Body hold a precise measure of descriptive nuance; offering precise rhythm, hush, halt and flow. “when it rains it drizzles ceaselessly,” the short sequence “flatline” begins, “so everything gets soaked / in my dreams i sleep / until six // ribs are scaffolding / stretch skin like cellophane / over leftovers [.]” Popeski writes through narratives of illness and the body, and matrilineal lines; of long-term dis/ability, wrapping her subject matter tight around the provocations of the book’s title, and the title poem, that offers: “the problem with having a / body is you have to carry // it everywhere with you. / mine has held the curlicue / of three babies & still // i’ve no one to show for it; / a hoard of manila medical // files cramped & yellowing.” See my full review here.

23. Karen Solie, Wellwater: poems: The latest by award-winning Canadian poet and editor Karen Solie, following Short Haul Engine (London ON: Brick Books, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), Pigeon (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2009), The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, 2015), The Living Option: Selected Poems (Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) and The Caiplie Caves (Anansi, 2019), is Wellwater: poems (Anansi, 2025). Solie is a curiosity in Canadian poetry, one of the few poets of her (our) generation that sees broader attention in other counties, with books and journal publications regularly in the United Kingdom (including a selected published there, for example), and her work has, over the years, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize, as well as been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She’s also a Guggenheim Fellow, which make for an even shorter list across Canadian poetry—the only other examples I can think of are A.L. Moritz, Tim Bowling and Anne Carson. And all of this done, of course, with a quiet and modest confidence across the depths of a Saskatchewan lyric. Solie is very good at crafting a scene with intricate nuance and unexpected turns, whether image or narrative, and this collection offers poems that hold to the tight image-scene, with others that open up across the narrative a bit more, allowing air through the lines across a greater narrative and lyric distance. There is almost a kind of restlessness articulated through these poems, with an inability to remain still even across multiple poems on and around stillness, but rarely in the same geography, the same moment, beyond that aforementioned Saskatchewan (and Toronto, I’ve noticed). The poems, together, cite a restlessness, or perhaps a curiosity, perpetually seeking to reach across another horizon to seek a better understanding of what might be out there, whether through moments across geography, or even across the narrator’s own past. It it the clarity, one suspects, she seeks. “An empty bottle rolled under the passenger seat / and back out again // as my grandfather drove,” the poem “DUST” writes, “one foot on the gas, one on the brake, // it was a clear glass bottle with white lettering, / and a sense of the conditional crept in through the vents // like dust, the incense of the road / scrubbing the air of clarity, of all eels but the demands of dust, // what you need replaced / with what you don’t – you are ignored // by everything as you struggle with it.” It is through, one might suggest, these moments together, that we might best know and appreciate these poems. See my full review here.

24. Jessi MacEachern, Cut Side Down: The latest from Montreal-based poet and scholar Jessi MacEachern, following A Number of Stunning Attacks (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2021), is Cut Side Down (Invisible Publishing, 2025), a playful, polyphonic study through sexy and indelible poems on and around reading, influence and how far one might fall into text. “My inkpot finally ceased blushing.” the poem “The Eighteenth Century Is Silent,” begins. “With the heavenly hierarchy / I dipped my pen. / I told my fellow poets we were only the bodies / of ghosts following birds of the heart.” Bending body and line, Cut Side Down is structured with an introductory poem and a triptych of poem sections: “RAVISHING THE SEX INTO THE HOLD,” “DO I ENJOY THE WORK?” and “WHEN A FOLK, WHEN A SPRAWL,” an earlier version of which appeared as an above/ground press chapbook. “Start here with the cut edges of the book.” the introductory and untitled open poem begins, “They are standing at attention for you.” MacEachern sweeps through a cadence of evocative sound and gesture, offering a poetic focused on twirling lyric expectation, reordering words and expectation. “My inkpot finally ceased blushing. / With the heavenly hierarchy / I dipped my pen.” the first section’s opening poem, “The Eighteenth Century Is Silent,” begins. “I told my fellow poets we were only the bodies / of ghosts following birds of the heart.” There is such sprawl, such open joy across these gestures. “Absence is no thing / to mourn.” she writes, to close the poem “Cunt Was Her Favourite Word,” “It feeds / our immortality.” Through a delight of bustling solitude, MacEachern blends the immediate of a first-person lyric gymnastics with appearances by Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Virginia Woolf and Renee Gladman, each writer present in the text because their writing remains so present, all blended into MacEachern’s swoops and swirls and contained mayhem. See my full review here.

25. Kyo Lee, i cut my tongue on a broken country: I’m very taken with the clear and resolute first-person lyrics of Waterloo, Ontario-based Kyo Lee’s full-length poetry debut, i cut my tongue on a broken country (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), especially given, as her author biography offers, Lee “is the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and the youngest finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award.” Youth, it would seem, is a featured selling point for this collection, and Lee’s poems offer a reaching, a searching, but one already thick with knowing, speaking a wisdom already gathered along through her years like moss. “Van Gogh did not eat yellow paint to get happiness inside him.” she writes, as part of the poem “can you be a poet & be happy?,” “He ate it to kill himself. / I want to smear paint all over myself / & then fall from the sky. Colourful monsoon. / Art is not because of but in spite of pain. / I want to believe this. / But yesterday I started writing poetry again / & stockpiled single-use razors under my bed.” The poems are wise and propulsive, and I’m impressed by the clear confidence with which she speaks through all that she is working to figure out, against what she already knows, and works to articulate. “The train back from Seoul. / The world outside is turning green,” the poem “Field Notes from Time” begins, “& time is slowing down. The sun is lower here // & we run west to beat it to its end.” The cover copy for the collection offers that this “intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope. It explores the Asian American diaspora, queerness, girlhood, and the relationships between and within them, pushing and pulling on the boundaries of identity and language like a story trying to tell itself.” There is an enormous amount of activity running and rushing through this collection, and Lee has a remarkably good handle on it all. These are thoughtful and compelling poems, carefully considered and wonderfully smart and curious, providing intimate confession, lyric gesture, meditation and monologue, and, when required, playful, sassy and savage turns across some complex and even difficult terrain. As Lee writes as part of “out of the blue”: “There are some proverbs in Korean / that i wish to not remember in English.” This is a collection of youth and knowing and swagger and unknowing and wisdom and seeking, of asking questions and searching for answers amid the wreckage. This is an impressive debut by a new voice I look forward very much to hearing more from. See my full review here.

26. Cecily Nicholson, Crowd Source: The fifth full-length poetry title by Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson, following Triage (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014), Wayside Sang (Talonbooks, 2017), which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and HARROWINGS (Talonbooks, 2022), is Crowd Source (Talonbooks, 2025). According to the back cover, Crowd Source “parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledging season, journey across Metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practicing ecological futurities benefitting corvid sensibilities.” Held as a book-length suite in thirteen numbered lyric sections, Nicholson’s extended, expanded sequences are stitched through fragment and ongoingness, stretching a single line along a book-length thread. “to realize what’s common / pause for the count / and continuity / keep time,” begins the seventh section, “blackbirds are common / in the thousands / mythical / about this femme’s feet [.]” She speaks of crows and through crows, setting all else to a foundation of corvids across spaces occupied and altered by human activity. Nicholson’s lyrics, her small points and moments, accumulate across great distances, holding each moment in relation. Nicholson articulates relation and interrelation, offering the myriad ways in which elements of the world connect together, held in place, at least here, in language, from climate, capitalism and human occupation, all seen through the wisdom of crows. “one of the greatest spectacles / the city ever sees,” she writes, to open the ninth section, “twice daily most seasons / dawn to dusk in lotic spectacle // quantum listening / with an innate sense of numbers // contours sensing a line / between the earth’s magnetic field // synthesized de novo surviving / billions of years as memories / stored in cells [.]” She writes blackbirds and grackles, crows and Vancouver’s SkyTrain, weaving quoted language into such meditative lengths as a kind of day book, riffing off moments and sources, crow activity and colonial impact. See my full review here.

27. Junie Désil, allostatic load: The second full-length collection by British Columbia poet Junie Désil, following eat salt │ gaze at the ocean (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020), is allostatic load (Talonbooks, 2025), a collection titled after a term coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar in 1993, referring specifically to the wear and tear on the body that accumulates as an individual is exposed to repeated or chronic stress. As the cover copy informs, the poems in this collection navigate “the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuous years marked by global racial tensions, the commodification of care, and the burden of systematic injustice,” specifically one that seeks to “hold the vulnerability and resilience required to navigate deep healing in a world that does not wish you well […].” Across detailed, intimate and meditative lyric stretches, Désil offers first-person explorations and exhaustions across the difficulties of navigating not only her own particular wear, but a medical system determined to undermine her experiences. As she writes as part of the poem “in the doctor’s office,” near the opening of the collection: “when i look at you / and people of your ethnicity // i would say you should / start on Metformin. // scrawls on her notepad she /tells me have a think.” Throughout, Désil attends the long line, the ongoing thought, one that extends within and between each poem, less a narrative than a sweep, a suite, a flow. Set with single-poem “prologue I” (“searching for indicators”) and three numbered section-clusters of poems—“allostatic load,” “weathering” and “medicine”—the first two sections holding a single-poem “prologue II” (“Coping Like John Henry”) between them, offering a suite of poems in slow build, a spread-out and accumulative description of stress, excess, medical complications and stressful interactions before the eventul emergence into something that might provide salve. This collection asks: What does care look like through such perpetual onslaught on the senses? How might care even be possible? “when the medical-office assistant ushers me down the hall,” begins “on my Nth visit to yet another medical professional,” “and asks me to get on the scale / it fails to tell her that the number reflects / the cares i neglect to dispense, / emails i forgot to dispatch – including the ones sitting / rent-free in my brain, the owed return phone calls, / and text messages, and emails, and to-dos, / and 252 open tabs, and / unfinished conversations settling in my chest, / on my hips, in my thighs. i eat my feelings / because it’s unacceptable to have them, no that’s not / true. i portion control my emotions and keep / my mouth busy so as not to earn the angry Black woman / badge.” See my full review here.

28. Hajer Mirwali, Revolutions: The full-length poetry debut by Hajer Mirwali, “a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto,” is Revolutions (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a collection that the back cover writes “sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities.” Composed as a book-length suite, this collections weaves and interleaves such wonderful structural variety, offering a myriad of threads that swirl around a collision of cultures, and a poetics that draws from artists and writers such as Mahmoud Darwish, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Naseer Shamma and Nicole Brossard, writing tales of mothers and daughters; and how one self-edits, keeps hidden, and also provides comfort, solidarity. “Yes,” Mirwali writes, as part of the poem “January 23,” “a very good daughter who loves / her motherlands and her God. // A daughter more or less. // A daughter + and –. // Never the same twice.” What becomes fascinating is in how all of these moments that Mirwali articulates connect across distances, moving from collage into coherence, writing the interconnectedness between each of these disparate narrative threads. As she writes as part of the section “BORDER TONGUE”: “Sand in an hourglass falls in concentric circles until the space is filled then reaches back to where it fell from. I take photos of the camera’s small screen send them to Baba in Iraq.” She writes of multiple points of departure and relationships to people, to individuals, to geographies and geopolitical crises; she writes of home, of hearth. She writes of the contradictions of where the heart may go and how one connects to the world, seeking solace and urgency, a connection to where part of her might always remain. See my full review here.

29. Amy LeBlanc, I used to live here: The second full-length collection by Calgary poet Amy LeBlanc, following I know something you don’t know (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2020), is I used to live here (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), “an examination of chronic illness, disability, and autoimmunity.” On the surface, I used to live here might seem to hold echoes of ” Guelph poet Jessica Popeski’s The Problem with Having a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025), but both are, instead, part of an expanding wealth of titles that connect through a conversation around “disability poetics,” a conversation that Gordon Hill/The Porcupine’s Quill has been deliberately working to expand for some time. Across a quartet of first-person lyrics—section titles set as “The Leech House,” “Sympathetic Magic,” “Something in the Water” and “Copse, Corpse, Catastrophe”—LeBlanc’s poems sit amid tightness and looseness, providing carved lines the space through which they might properly breathe. The gestures of LeBlanc’s second full-length collection write through witches, Shakespeare’s Juliet, Hecate’s daughter, Anne Boleyn, and even Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man’s girlfriend, infamously killed by Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin in the 2014 flick Spider-Man 2, but in the original books way back in 1973) in the poem “Gwen Stacy,” that begins: “The night Gwen died, / the Bow River flooded / knocked / over / signs, taxi cabs, dog leashes turned loose / along the tide.” She writes of historical and fictional women not allowed their own agency, beyond their associations to others. Or on illness metaphors, as through the poem “Counterpoints to / illness metaphors,” seeking an updated language to reframe or reshape a sequence of experiences too long misunderstood, dismissed or outright ignored. “Not an alarm clock,” she writes, “a car with two doors / strip mall / inverted heart [.]” That does seem to be the crux of this collection: seeking a new language to reshape and reframe perception around this particular lived experience; finding a new way to speak on illness and disability, for the sake of a far better understanding of what has so often been compartmentalized as either imaginary or invisible. LeBlanc wishes you, the reader, to better understand from the inside what you’ve only seen so far from the outside. See my full review here.

30. Jeff Derksen, Future Works: Very good to see a copy of Future Works (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), the latest poetry title by Jeff Derksen, a poet, critic and professor who currently divides his time between Vancouver and Vienna, Austria, and who emerged across those heady days of 1970s and 80s language-exploration through and around The Kootenay School of Writing (originating in Nelson, British Columbia’s David Thompson University Centre, relocating to Vancouver when the government shut David Thompson down in 1984), blending language experimentation with and through social and political commentary. Following poetry titles including Until (1987), Down Time (Talonbooks, 1989), Dwell (Talonbooks, 1994), Transnational Muscle Cars (Talonbooks, 2003) and The Vestiges (2014), Derksen’s Future Works offers a heft of references and lines and commentaries stitched together as a rush of a shape, a coherent mass of accumulated texts that form the structure of his poems. “Ants close down the North American banking system with / a highly coordinated strike on ATMs: over New Year’s Eve, / individual bills are carried out of the machines,” he writes, as part of the extended opening poem, “MORE THAN HUMAN LABOUR,” “moved along / predetermined routes, and stashed in complex underground / networks. Two ants are captured but refuse to five up their / comrades. In solidarity, they eat each other.” More power in union, one might say. There’s playfulness to Derksen’s serious poems, one with a wry glance across what might otherwise seem serious, dark or even absurd. “I was working in a gas station,” the prose piece “MY SHORT NOVEL” begins, “a greenhouse, in delivery, in gardening, in editing, in teaching, in administration. The weather has a new name and it is no longer adorable.” The distance of time since his prior collection was published offers a slightly different perspective on his ongoing work, providing a reminder at just how much the structure and poetics of Canadian (Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary) poet ryan fitzpatrick’s work really has evolved and been influenced by poets such as Jeff Derksen [see my review of ryan fitzpatrick’s latest collection here], both poets presenting moments and meaning through the context and collision of moments and references into and across each other; how ideas of capital, labour, language and capitalism relate and interrelate across layerings and collage of direct statements. “My hard edge paintings / are a list / of demands,” begins Derksen’s poem “MY HARD EDGE PAINTINGS, a poem subtitled “after Pierre Coupey,” “or plans where colour / rushes into / our kinetic future / on a hard-to-observe land / to so-called light / upon in the shadows / under the cover / of canvas, an advance / like walking out / into the city [.]” There is a curious way that Derksen’s approach engages ethics and perspective, offering an alternate way of realizing the lyric, one that speaks of late capitalism and global war zones, future climate catastrophes and contemplative wit across what might otherwise appear as a collage of references, laid end to end, built to produce something far larger and ongoing. “or the most beautiful thing / may be the space you make / it as you imagine it / conceived built inhabited altered,” he writes, to close the poem “THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING,” “by an encounter that swerves / to what is possible / an act an action / an unscripted learning [.]” See my full review here.

31. Natalie Lim, Elegy for Opportunity: The full-length debut by Vancouver poet Natalie Lim, winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, and author of the chapbook arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022), is Elegy for Opportunity (Hamilton ON: Buckrider Books/Wolsak and Wynn, 2025). I’m curious about the way Lim approaches narrative and her first-person lyric: offering the suggestion of something relatively straightforward, but curving a bit. “I’ve only written love poems for months so it feels like I’ve written no poems / at all.” she offers, to open the prose poem “Love Poems Don’t Win Contests,” that begins the collection. “Instead of writing, I’m sitting on a park bench in early spring, the air so heavy with pollen and promise that it’s hard to breathe. I make eye contact with a dachshund wearing a coat and yet all I do is complain.” There’s something intriguing and almost wry about the way Lim acknowledges the economy of poem composition, including attempting contests, writing her failure as an accomplishment (or the other way around, perhaps). “I am scared of killing everything I touch,” she writes, to open “On Biology,” “this includes people, which is new, / and plants, which is not. / did you know we lose vertebrae / as we age? we’re born with thirty-three and die / with twenty-four, usually, the lower ones fusing together / by the time we call ourselves grown.” Lim’s poems are immediate, and the collection provides a myriad of lyric shapes and purposes as Lim feels out possibility, the way one could argue a debut full-length collection should be, seeking out what options the lyric form might allow. She works poems big and small, expansive and uniquely condensed. There’s a meandering element I quite like, a fresh counterpoint to far too many poems that one can see the ending from the beginning. Lim’s poems are thoughtful, unafraid of exploring within a particular moment, or making sharp turns; they move as needed with a quiet confidence. I’m quite taken with her short poem “Winter in Ottawa,” a poem she is possibly unaware holds a title similar to one of John Newlove’s final pieces. See my full review here.

32. Jumoke Verissimo, Circumtrauma: Poems: From award-winning Toronto-based Nigerian poet, novelist, children’s writer and critic Jumoke Verissimo, following the poetry titles I Am Memory (Lagos, Nigeria: DADA Books, 2008) and The Birth of Illusion (Nigeria: FULLPOINT, 2015), as well as the novel A Small Silence (London UK: Cassava Republic, 2019), comes her first full-length Canadian title, Circumtrauma: Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a book-length poem that captures and articulates the details and ripples of the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970). Histories such as these have rippling effects throughout a population across years, and history forgotten, after all, dooms to repeat. As Verissimo writes as part of her preface to the collection: “I began researching the Nigeria-Biafra War (also known as the Nigerian Civil War) because I wanted answers on why the conflict has stayed on the bodies of even the unborn. How does one capture the unacknowledged edged pain that resonates across generations and may even inform the lens from which social relations are formed?” There are structural echoes of Verissimo’s accumulated lyric articulating witness comparable to Kingston, Ontario-based poet and critic Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s full-length debut 100 Days (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2016), a collection of one hundred poems through one hundred days of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, or even, to a lesser degree, the full-length poetry collection articulations of history and the ripples of trauma through working archival materials of further recent titles such as Montreal poet, editor and translator Darby Minott Bradford’s full-length debut, Dream of No One but Myself (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] or Vancouver poet and editor Andrea Actis’ full-length poetry debut, Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Through Verissimo, her lyrics hold together precisely because of the way she pulls them apart, focusing on individual moments, elements and parts of speech, collecting together to form a far wider and complex tapestry. The length and breadth are entirely held though such deep attention and precision. “a rickety train pulled up / heads disappeared,” she writes, early on in the collection, “our brothers left home / for a godforsaken place / our brothers returned / with a gunshot in the head [.]” There’s a lot to admire about literary work that attempts to deliberately uncover and examine such brutal history, especially for those stories buried, overlooked or simply forgotten (I was first made aware of Ottawa’s “Mad Bomber of Parliament” in 1966, for example, thanks to a poem by Judith Fitzgerald, from her 1977 Coach House Press poetry title lacerating heartwood). The stories might fade, but the body remembers, even across generations. Facts and stories matter, and to lose the stories of such brutality is to render an entirely different violence. “we were all brothers / massacred / albeit on a very small scale,” Verissimo writes, as part of “10111110-b,” “we are all memory’s children / superior in our pain [.]” Circumtrauma swirls a lyric notation of accumulated moments, offering archival moments across and through a devastation that continues, rippling across generations. Or, as she writes early on in the collection: “our body is a people: before and after [.]” See my full review here.

33. Paul Vermeersch, NMLCT: Poems: The latest from Toronto poet and editor Paul Vermeersch, following his Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is NMLCT: Poems (ECW Press, 2025), a collection very much constructed as a book-length project. I’m always intrigued to see the first collection by any poet, following the publication of a selected; to look at a new work composed after having examined, and self-examined, even if rather broad in scope, the length and breadth of a career in poetry. “Words say there is another place.” the poem “ESCAPE FROM MCHNCT” begins. “But who will make it there?” Vermeersch’s eighth full length poetry collection (if one counts the selected, which seems only fair), it is interesting in how his work has evolved from articulating echoes of nostalgic looks at once-imagined futures from the mid-twentieth century into this assemblage of four-lined stanza blocks, themselves accumulating into a narrative structure of speculative fiction, setting a conflict between animal and machine. “Submerged in celestial shadow,” the poem “THE SECOND MOON BEHIND THE FIRST MOON” writes, “saturated and rattling with frags / of cyborg nightmares, the collective unconscious of articifial life, none / of this will be remembered. But it can be recovered.” Throughout the collection, Vermeersch builds his bricks of lyric narrative in lengthy and even gymnastic lines, more oriented in propulsive, almost staccato, sound than in his prior work. He builds his bricks, four lines per, whether through sequences of four poems, one to a page, including the opener, “On Monstrosity,” and to close, “Deep Water / Amnesia,” with the bulk of the collection, not to mention a further interruption or two, made up of self-contained poems, each of which, themselves, as quartets of these poem-blocks. His structures are rhythmic, even propulsive, offering line breaks when needed to maintain that particular four-line shape. And through this assemblage of stanza-bricks emerges a book-length narrative umbrella composed to examine the tensions in that imagined future, between the binaries of machine (“MCHNCT”) and animal (“NMLCT”) (humans are most likely on either side of that particular binary, I suppose, depending). “Here you are.” the poem “WELCOME TO MCHNCT” writes. Composed as a response to recent more overt cultural shifts across technology (and vice versa, of course), including elements of artificial intelligence programs that continue to propagate, seemingly against our will, this collection furthers a growing (and intriguing) thread of speculative fiction across Canadian poetry, one that also includes Toronto poet and filmmaker Lindsay B-e’s full-length poetry debut, The Cyborg Anthology: Poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020), an anthology shaped around speculative fiction, exploring ideas of consciousness, being, artificial intelligence and technology, and Ottawa-based poet Mahaila Smith’s own full-length debut, Seed Beetle: poems (Hamilton ON: Stelliform Press, 2025). Much as with Smith’s work specifically, Vermeersch’s poems provide a landscape of speculative conflict as warning for the present, of where this all might be heading, akin to James Cameron’s original 1984 film, The Terminator. See my full review here.

34. Gillian Sze, An Orange, A Syllable: Having been startled by how quietly good I thought her prior title, quiet night think: poems & essays (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2022), I was intrigued to see Montreal poet Gillian Sze’s latest, the poetry collection An Orange, A Syllable (ECW Press, 2025). As quiet night think: poems & essays was a blend of meditative, first person lyric prose and poems around the swirls and reconsiderations of self, culture and being that accompanied her new motherhood, this latest shifts those leanings back into the shape and approach of the poem a bit further down Sze’s narrative/parenting line. This is very much a sequel to that prior collection, offering further insights into culture, language, self and possibility through the ongoing lens of motherhood, partnership and domestic patter. An Orange, A Syllable is built as an accumulation of lyric prose blocks, seventy-six in sequence. Occasionally there might be a symbol set atop one of these blocks, as to suggest a new line of thinking, a new sequence or cluster, five in total across the collection. Throughout, Sze writes of love, of language and the new ways she’s learned to approach and encounter, both within and beyond a domestic space that almost sounds set within the Covid-19 era: “What is out there? I think I have forgotten. My world thicks down / to the sweetness in each fold of laundry. The growing tower of cotton, / tidy and eversteady. For a while, I can stop thinking and let the hands / spread across the sleeves, the hems, the stitches. The hands know where / smoothness is right, know where to put the parts and when the folds / are finished.” Again, as a furthering of her prior collection, Sze writes of engaging language, her own background and self in new ways, engaging with the immediacy, and the layers one gains through attempting to communicate such to one’s children (with familiar echoes, certainly, of my own accumulation, through the book of smaller, of prose poems through and amid a similar period of domestic, parenting small children). To attempt to speak on any of this requires one’s own understanding, after all. This is a sharp and meaningful collection, and reason, once more, to go through that prior collection as well. See my full review here.

35. Melanie Dennis Unrau, Goose: From Winnipeg poet, editor and scholar Melanie Dennis Unrau comes the debut full-length poetry title, Goose (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2025), a book-length visual poem project of simultaneous excavation and erasure that emerges from the work of “Canadian Development of Mines expert and Word War I veteran” Sidney Clarke Ells (1878-1971), the self-declared “father of the tar sands,” specifically his 1938 collection of poems, short stories and essays, Northland Trails (1938). Through an expansive visual sequence, Unrau works her project as one of critical response, working to engage with and, specifically, against the original intent of Ell’s language back into itself, and the implications of what those original intents have wrought. The book is set with an afterword by the author, and an opening “FOREWORD” by McMurray Métis, that opens: “There is a long history in Canada and indeed across the world of European ‘explorers’ appropriating the knowledge, skills, and labour of Indigenous peoples for their personal and collective gain, only to tur around and declare the territories of Indigenous peoples ‘terra nullius,’ and their cultures and ways of live inferior and unworthy of respect. This dialectic of appropriation-negation is familiar to Indigenous people across the globe. And so it is with Fort McMurray, its oil sands, and their ‘father,’ Sidley Ells. Through research, community and public awareness, and the construction of our cultural centre, McMurray Métis hope to correct these self-serving and distorted narratives, and assert our historic and continued presence, way of life, and self-determination. Let this foreword be one small step in that direction.” Visually expansive, with a delightful use of image and space, Unrau moves through the language, sketches and, seemingly, the typeface, of Ells’ 1938 collection to unravel an acknowledgment of the Indigenous peoples within that space, and the environment and landscape of those pilfered, poisoned lands, showcasing the illusion of self that Ells presumed upon that landscape, flipping a script of belonging that was never his to take. “Inspired by books like Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps, M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong!, Syd Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia, Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men, and Lesley Battler’s Endangers Hydrocarbons,” Unrau writes, as part of the book’s “AFTERWORD,” “I started to make visual poetry out of found text and images from Northland Trails. After some experimentation, I developed a method of building poems and critical arguments about Northland Trails by tracing words and illustrations from its pages.” See my full review here.

36. Steffi Tad-y, Notes from the Ward: The second full-length collection by Manila, Phillipines-born Vancouver-based poet Steffi Tad-y, following From the Shoreline (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022) is Notes from the Ward (Gordon Hill Press, 2025), a book composed, the back cover offers, as a “collection of poetry exploring bipolar disorder and psychotic break through lived experience and a poet’s eye.” Through sharp, first-person lyrics, Tad-y offers a variation on the declarative point-form, providing a precision across difficult subject matter, writing phrases that accumulate across her lyric stretches. The foundation of Tad-y’s lyric clarity holds each line in place, even through descriptions of untethering; a lyric one might hold on to, for dear life. In the poem “Mangroves,” as she writes: “Back in the truck with Dad & Uncle. I tell them how the trees are / skin & sanctuary to the coast, protection against the onslaught / of storms. // My father places his hand on the headrest of my uncle in the / driver seat and says, Families can be mangroves too.” What holds the collection together as a coherent unit are the dozen numbered title poems throughout, gathering her thoughts in a space that blends both attempting to heal and the challenges of existing in such a physical and mental space. As “Notes from the Ward #3,” a poem subtitled “After Ocean Vuong’s ‘Reasons for Staying’,” begins: “Think of the next thirty years, mother asked. // The magnolia tree at Oben Street still a pleasant memory. // Of the book, black with deep blue letters, music despite my lack / of understanding.” Tad-y offers lyric declarations underneath titles set as umbrellas, suggesting and directing and hinting at the context of lines that blend direct with the indirect; her poems provide a tone of attempting clarity through these poems, these ward-notes, seeking both as documentary and process. While working through Tad-y’s poems, I’m reminded how, in his novel Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (translated by David Homel; Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1994), Dany Laferrière wrote that he composed his first novel—referencing his debut, How to Make Love to a Negro (Without Getting Tired) (translated by David Homel; Coach House Press, 1987)—“to save his life.” See my full review here.

37. Isabella Wang, November, November: In the “Afterword” to her second full-length collection, November, November (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a follow-up to Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, 2021), Vancouver poet Isabella Wang writes of her ongoing engagement with the work of the late Salt Spring Island poet Phyllis Webb (1927-2021). The poems that make up Wang’s November, November are composed with such deep and delicate precision; as a calendar of meditative space around grief, homage, illness and recovery. “parts of this body are negative / parts of this body are diffusely positive,” she writes, as part of the poem “THE BODY IS” in the third section of the book, “this body is whole / this body goes by one given name / except the parts of it removed [.]” Structured in five sections—“CONSTELLATIONS: NOVEMBER 2020,” “PASSAGE 2: NOVEMBER 2021,” “PASSAGE 3: DECEMBER 2021,” “PASSAGE 4: NOVEMBER 2022” and “PASSAGE 5: NOVEMBER 2024”—the third and fifth of which are composed of shorter, self-contained pieces, there is something really compelling in the way Wang offers this collection as a deep engagement with Webb and her work through a particular period, through Webb’s death and Wang’s cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery. Wang’s poems allow for influence and engagement with Webb’s work without overtaking Wang’s own lyric, offering a foundation for possibility across a delicate, open-hearted and deeply mature lyric. Webb’s work might have been the engine, but Wang is clearly at the wheel. Wang has become quite adept at pulling at the small moment, allowing the line to extend across a great distance, offering her own take on the long poem through sequences, sections, clusters of poems and, eventually, this book-length, meditative suite, all of which is wrapped around attention, and a deeply-attuned ear. See my full review here.

38. Guy Birchard, Most By Books: I was recently intrigued to catch a copy of Victoria, British Columbia poet Guy Birchard’s Most By Books (Victoria BC/Parry Sound ON: Symple Persone Press, 2023), a chapbook designed and produced by poet Jack Davis “in a private edition of forty copies.” I was fortunate enough to discover Birchard’s work through a title produced by Beth Follett, Only Seemly (St. John’s NL: Pedlar Press, 2018), a title I picked up a small number of extra copies of when the press folded, the book is just that good. I give them away, here and there, to those that I think should be reading it, as well as to counter the fact that there is something about Birchard’s approach to almost going out of his way to sit just under the radar, releasing new work with small or even smaller, ephemeral presses. The title of Birchard’s latest collection, Most By Books, is excised from a longer quote, set on the title page to include the full—“They do MOST BY BOOKS who could do much without them.”—lifted from the prose work Christian Morals (1716) by the English writer Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a posthumously-published work originally composed as advice for his eldest children. Through nearly forty pages of lyric heft, Birchard reshapes Browne’s advice, leading by example through a selection of poems rife with reading. “From my fingers,” begins the poem “Mustapha Reached His Koran Back,” “off the shelf from which I had casually picked / up The Book in barely enough time to open it, Mustapha, with / dignified tutting, his father projecting approval, retrieved the / Koran from my hands, from before my eyes.” These are poems built from books, from not only reading but years of intense, dedicated and ongoing study; the kind of attentions that lesser poets proclaim loudly across author biographies, entirely the opposite of what Birchard writes for his: “Scholar of nothing. No degrees. No prizes. Neither profession, trade nor career. A lay poet. Anglo-Canadian.” There is such an interesting way that Birchard uses writing, uses what we might think of as poems, as a way of thinking through writing and big ideas. “Augustine, rhetorician / that millennium and a half ago,” opens the piece “Homage to Sarah Ruden for Her Confessions,” “yet crazy as Beckett or Roberto Benigni / by virtue of the sedulousness and circularity // of his case, for want of confidence enough to match her / predecessors, drives our current lady translator to her cups.” This is Birchard, the well-read thinking reader, the intellectual crafting poems out of reading notes, allowing the lyric to explore and examine. He writes of St. Augustine and The Troubadour Club in West Hollywood, Jack Kerouac and Saint Pancras, moving across incredible distances through a short cluster of lines, stepping one foot ahead of another, keeping such detailed notes as he journeys. His poems blend study with journey, a wandering through language that explores alternate corners and catalogues of language. Dedicated to the late writer and critic Stan Dragland (1942-2022), Birchard’s bricolage, his own ‘journeying through bookland,’ one might say, is certainly comparable to Dragland’s work, but holds a different tenor, whether to Dragland’s work or the work of that other poet of bricolage (as Dragland wrote), Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall. “Exiting the cinder block shower next morning,” writes the poem “Butterflies & Turtle,” “not a / soul around, sunlit, stepping into his gotch, his shoulders / and damp, bare back were suddenly a drift of Painted Ladies / alighting. // Guy fetches the camera a look of small-c concern.” There’s a density to Birchard’s lines that hold a different kind of weight, perhaps, well beyond the myriad of alternate reference, offering not just connecting reading and ideas from across an alternate spectrum, but, veering occasionally into Old English, one that holds a depth of language, and language meaning. See my full review here.

39. MA│DE, ZZOO: In case you weren’t aware, collaborative duo MA│DE, “established 2018,” as the biography in their full-length poetry debut, ZZOO (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) reads, “is a collaborative writing entity, a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace – artists whose active solo practices, while differing radically, serve to complement one another.” The publication of ZZOO, which appears through Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Books imprint, follows a quartet of chapbooks, the work from some of which falls into this new collection: Test Centre (ZED Press, 2019), A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books, 2020), A Barely Concealed Design (Puddles of Sky Press, 2020) and Expression Follows Grim Harmony (JackPine Press, 2023). The poems and illustrations that make up ZZOO actively play with and between the binary, composed as a blended work of smart and engaged language bounce and clatter and precision, resonating with sound and lyric play across the human-animal divide. There is a bounce and clatter, but one of a density of lyric, one that works to interrogate relations and interrelations, offering a collaborative language between and across language, sparking a binary through a binary, and where they might possibly connect. The poems are layered, and sharp, writing in the midst of, or even between, or beyond, the work of these two, such as the single sentence of the poem “PITCHDOWN BAY,” that reads: “The small sound of a falling snowflake, / slow it down, low frequency rumble / of a whale, both melting into the ocean / in time, the water glowing as bright / as lanterns, and sailors drowning as if / they’d seen lighthouses, more lost men / entering from the shore’s mouth, that / emptiness between the stars, pupils / compensating for this hard blanket of / deadlight night, still surrounded by / silnt shorebirds, nested, watching, / stringing the surface of the water / like quickening nix when they alight.” See my full review here.

40. Qurat Dar, Non-Prophet: I’m impressed by the meditative and exploratory “serious play” (what bpNichol termed it) of the full-length poetry debut by the former Mississauga Youth Poet Laureate Qurat Dar, her Non-Prophet (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2025), winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize. “The sunlit dargah knows / no prayer but that of survival.” Dar writes, as part of the poem “Snail Responds to the Ring of Crushed Eggshells / I Put Around the Lettuce,” “A porcelain cage that / could spear you in its shattering. Ask yourself: / do the dervishes spin or spiral?” As judge Kazim Ali wrote to blurb the collection: “I loved Non-Prophet for so many reasons: this book speaks to my own experience and history, it addresses questions of spiritual and daily live (and for many of us, those two are inseparable), but perhaps most importantly, these are exciting and immediate poems that continue the great legacy of Claire Harris. As Harris did in her poems, Qurat Dar bravely confronts a cultural imperative to silence or acquiescence with refusal; more than refusal, but response.” Claire Harris (1937-2018), for those unaware, was an award-winning Canadian poet based in Calgary, born in Trinidad, and who emigrated to Canada in 1966. As her online entry at The Canadian Encyclopedia offers: “Using such verse techniques as contrasting prose and poetry on the page, or alternating journalistic prose with the voice of prophecy, Harris dramatizes and makes public the psychological struggles experienced by racialized women who face oppression.” Through Dar’s Non-Prophet, she articulates her own seriousness beneath such performative gestures, and a sense of spiritual through the everyday, as Manahil Bandukwala offers as part of her own blurb for the collection: “As we hurtle towards annihilation, Dar combines rich Islamic and Sufi mythology with deepfakes and Teams lights. The poems loop and circle through destruction and renewal, diaspora and home, worshipper and worshipped.” “I / see a thousand patient / fingers where others / see God.” Dar writes, as part of “Waiting for the Moon to Howl Back.” Or “The opposite of eulogy is a prophecy,” a poem (with such a striking title) that reads with such being and purpose, and a repeated declaration of presence that the narrator appears to be directing, first and foremost, to herself. See my full review here.

41. Anna Swanson, The Garbage Poems: St. John’s, Newfoundland poet Anna Swanson’s second full-length poetry title is The Garbage Poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), a book that follows her full-length debut, The Nights Also (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2020), which itself won both the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and a Lambda Literary Award. The poems that make up The Garbage Poems are composed, as the whole collection is framed, via prompt, utilizing the accident of finding abandoned refuse (and language) at various locations to prompt and propel her poems, with the resulting short narrative lyrics set into sections based upon where such materials were gathered. “All words (except titles) from garbage collected at a swimming home in Flatrock, NL.” offers the subtitle of the first section, “Flatrock,” or the section “Big Punch Bowl,” that adds that “All words (except titles) from garbage collected at Big Punch Bowl Pond near St. John’s, NL.” The use of such a particular prompt is reminiscent of Carin Makuz’s The Litter I See project, which began a decade ago by asking Canadian writers to compose prose or poetry using the prompt of a photograph of trash, wherever it might have been found or abandoned. Swanson’s poems articulate such lovely bricolage, stitching narratives as a collage of subject, accumulation and language, stitching narratives from found materials into reason, logic, story. “We are not sorry. We are / the ice that will not melt,” writes the ending of the poem “For the Boys Cliff-Jumping / by the Memorial Stone,” “the special extract in the root beer of not aging, / the sparkling under-king, the carbonated wet dream, // the premium formula good stuff. We are, / at a price you do not know, // at any price, / this.” Swanson crafts her articulations with the building blocks what is lost, set aside, discarded, writing youthful hijinks and Queer desire, flailing about and feeling invisible, set aside or silenced; writing what is seen but not noticed, what is noticed but not fully understood, and how each object, each story, is changed through the process of looking. As the poem “For the Two Girls in the / Lower Pool, Kissing” offers: “You know the cost of caution / is always more.” She writes her narratives as a sequence of coming-of-age, of coming out, of attempting to find and be found instead of feeling, being, lost. “Call it form,” she writes, “sure, these limits, // this room of too few words whose walls / I hit first, before my own faltering.” See my full review here.

42. Jane Shi, echolalia echolalia: I’m intrigued by the long sentence, sentences, that stitch together to form Vancouver poet Jane Shi’s full-length debut, echolalia echolalia (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a collection that follows her debut chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Vancouver BC: Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). Stretching across the length and breadth of the one hundred and twenty compact pages of her debut collection, hers is a remarkable extended thought across lyric meditation and formal invention writing the body, loss, nostalgia and layers not simply reconsidered, but recycled, repurposed. “a tide-pool winter a hiss / of hot violets little fibres / along my bedspread brush of threaded grass / in the grubby broken cinema of memory scrub / my back filthily in the thick sublunary lust / starts would make canyons o me the vast valleys / airless marshes where travellers stumbled,” she writes, to open the poem “worship the exit light,” a poem subtitled “A found poem created / from my wordpress poetry journal / of my late teens (2008-2016) [.]” These are such lovely visual and gestural sweeps, such as the poem “I want to face consequences,” which begins with and leads into such an expansive swirl across the page, one of a number of such she composes throughout: “17 / years / old, and / still throwing / tantrums, the suburban / problem so specifically / misdiagnosed / as the problem / of picky eating, on a sunday 10 / years later she’ll check / into a resignation hostel, become / an audible ghost, beckon a make-believe / social worker to arrive at her pillowside like a tooth / fairy.” There’s a coming-of-age or coming-into-being element to these poems, but one far more self-aware and wry, more playful, than most examples I’m aware of, providing a sense of exploration and wonder, collaging observation with cultural and pop culture references, and what one carries no matter where one lands. See my full review here.

43. Manahil Bandukwala, Heliotropia: The second full-length poetry title by Manahil Bandukwala, a writer and visual artist who currently divides her time between Ottawa and Mississauga, Ontario, is Heliotropia (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a collection shortlisted both for the City of Ottawa Book Awards and the Archibald Lampman Award. Heliotropia follows on the heels of a handful of chapbooks, both solo and collaborative, as well as her full-length debut, MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was itself shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, the same year she was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star. “I dig out a hole and find things I once held / so tight,” she writes, to open the poem “August,” part of the poem-sequence “Seventeen Months of Distance,” “though nothing stopped their time to leave. / Fur shed when they moved // into bigger and better lives. We are never ready / to absorb the emptiness of loss, but must // pause to howl at the chameleon of being.” Set as a suite of stand-alone poems amid poem-clusters, Heliotropia is a collection of first-person narrative lyric heart. As her first full-length collection, MONUMENT, as she offers as part of an interview last fall, began as “a single poem that sought to highlight obscured Mughal women in history,” a poem that evolved into a manuscript, having outgrown those initial boundaries, this new collection writes (as the cover copy provides) “a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved.” Heliotropia is a collection composed, purposely and unapologetically, of first-person love poems, something the “serious writer” has long been told to steer of, whether through creative writing classes or elsewhere (and for good reason, as most contemporary love poems hold a combination of hollow, cringe and smarm; the usual accomplished approach is from the side, not head-on), often set aside, as well, for the sake of the more ironic and postmodern distance. And yet, this impulse is where many writers begin, often in youth, falling into attempts at writing that can’t progress thought beyond that initial feeling, unable to find or reveal the poem, and the language, beneath what the heart only knows. Through Heliotropia, Bandukwala approaches her subject, and her lyric, with an eye on study, working her way through the collection with a balance of exploratory distance and pure feeling, held together through the bonds of craft. “The illiterate man feels / in the dark for words / he did not write. // Outside his house,” Bandukwala writes, as part of “The Splitting,” “some men say / he is a madman, others say he is / a poet // who believes enough words will build a bridge to a life after now / where only beings lighter than air float. // But the illiterate man is neither.” See my full review here.

44. Emily Austin, Gay Girl Prayers: As part of the recent shortlist reading for this year’s Archibald Lampman Award, Ottawa writer Emily Austin spoke of composing the poems that became her full-length poetry debut, Gay Girl Prayers (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), while simultaneously working on what would become the first novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead (2021). These were poems, she said, but she didn’t necessarily presume anyone would be interested in reading them. The poems of Gay Girl Prayers, each of which are titled after each specific chapter and verse source, exist as a reclamation, set as responses through her own Biblical studies and Catholic upbringing. “Take the stones you plan to throw at her / for not screaming,” she writes, to rework “Deuteronomy 12:23-27,” “or not screaming loudly enough / while she was raped / put them inside of your pockets / and walk on water [.]” As she said at the event, she didn’t think of these as poems per se, or herself as a poet, and instead focused on two further novels (with another forthcoming), all of which appear with Atria Books and Simon & Schuster Canada: Interesting Facts About Space (2023), We Could Be Rats (2025) and Is This a Cry for Help? (due to appear in January 2026). What she composed as her own playful sketch-notes responding to some of the Bible’s darker elements, then, were temporarily set aside. “Your mother came named from her mother’s womb / and retured there gutted,” the poem “Job 1:21” writes, “Cover yourself in a golden chamois / return to the forest adorned [.]” Gay Girl Prayers, as the copy for the collection informs, is a “collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community,” a curious blend prompted by, among other factors, the fact that her author biography provides that she “studied English literature, religious studies, and library science at King’s University College and Western University.” The poems of Gay Girl Prayers, quite literally, work to reclaim agency against certain Biblical language, especially those elements too often cherry-picked and weaponized. “Heaven is ten girls / who take their lamps / to one another’s bed chambers / to light their rooms /until they sleep.” writes a short poem near the beginning, the title set at the end as a footnote, rewriting “Matthew 23:1.” These are poems translated away from weaponization or shame, away from the suggestion that any of God’s creatures, so to speak, as they truly are, has any less value than any other. These are poems of reclamation and biting humour, attempting a kind of play through translation, comparable in form to other book-length poetry-projects such as bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (1969) or Derek Beaulieu’s THE NEWSPAPER (2013), but with a far different and more specific intent, approaching the source material as something that requires adaptation beyond simple translation, however the approach. Far too often, Biblical text is approached as unironic, pure fact instead of as a living, breathing text; a series of book-length metaphor texts, lessons that should be held as guidelines for approaching thought, instead of a bludgeon with which to weaponize. Through Gay Girl Poems, scripture offers a new way of approaching text, some of which sit as koans, one to a page. In Gay Girl Poems, Austin has allowed her own responses, turns, and twists to open up new possibilities through antiquated language, and antiquated thinking. See my full review here.

45. Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, The Alphabet of Aliens: prose poems: The fourth full-length poetry collection, and fifth title overall, by Calcutta-born Mississauga, Ontario-based Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, is The Alphabet of Aliens: prose poems (Mawenzi House, 2025). Following Bloodlines (2006), Could You Please, Please Stop Singing? (Mosaic Press, 2016) and Uncharted (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2021), the poems across The Alphabet of Aliens blur the boundaries between short prose and lyric, subtitled “prose poems,” but landing, more often than not, in the imperfect designation of flash fiction or postcard stories. “At the corner of South Linn and Washington is a consolation,” opens the piece “The Curry Shop,” “but mostly empty. I entered once but didn’t eat, instead, suffering an immediate deflation upon touching the menu, traded stories, conflating places and times.” I’ve noted previously how the self-declared prose poems of the late Connecticut poet Russell Edson (1935-2014), said to be the father of the American prose poem, felt more akin to flash fiction than even the short fictions of writers such as Lydia Davis and Kathy Fish, so the declared boundaries surrounding prose poems have been blurred for some time. Across seventy-nine individual pieces, each ranging from one to three pages in length, Nag composes a series of first-person narratives, of first-person reports, offering sketch-notes on activity and an interiority, monologues blending observation, commentary and documentary. As the first of the three-sectioned “Place is a Sentence” begins: “To prove you are capable of belonging you had to reveal your place. Since they were busy touching different parts of your tongue you could say nothing else. What is place anyway? The scent of your tilled back garden, someone said, opened a window. And in the strong headwind when you floated up like a shadow of three pasts, they freaked out.” See my full review here.

46. Stephanie Bolster, Long Exposure: The long-awaited fifth full-length poetry title from Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster is Long Exposure (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025), a title I’ve known of as in-the-works for some time, given an excerpt of the work-in-progress appeared as the chapbook GHOSTS (above/ground press, 2017). As well, her title that takes on a slightly different sheen, given that fourteen years have passed since her prior full-length title. Long exposure, indeed. Bolster is, as you might already know, the award-winning author of White Stone: The Alice Poems (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 1998), which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Gerald Lampert Award, Two Bowls of Milk (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), Pavilion (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2002) and A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (London ON: Brick Books, 2011), as well as a small handful of chapbooks (including four from above/ground press). Across her published work to-date, Bolster continues to focus on the book-length project, but through a poetic that began with an attention to finely-honed and self-contained, densely-sharp lyrics, gradually evolving into this new flavour of book-length suite: a stretched-out sense of the fragment, which accumulate across the sentence and staggered narrative into the form of the long poem. As she writes, mid-way through Long Exposure: “Rail cars full of oil slid faster down / the slope until at the curve where the town / was a birthday party exploded and a woman / with cancer who’d chosen not to mark / this year still lives because she didn’t / go. All that long-dead / plankton lit the sky.” As the back cover of Long Exposure provides: “After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. These questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in.” In her own acknowledgments at the end of collection, Bolster offers: “What began in 2009 as an interrogation of my unsettling fascination with Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans became an education that has lasted for 16 years and does not end here. I am grateful to those who have supported this project, reading drafts, asking questions, and posing challenges.” See my full review here.

47. Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress: I’m intrigued by this full-length debut by Vancouver poet Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a poetry collection that “invites the reader to take a freight elevator ride into the guts of heavy industry,” and featuring back cover blurbs by Canadian poets Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, two of the originators of the 1970s Canadian “work poetry” ethos (amid those Kootenay School of Poetry origins) that also included early work by poets Phil Hall and Erín Moure [see my longer note on some threads on “work poetry” as part of my recent review of Philadelphia poet Gina Myers’ Works & Days]. Shah’s lyrics provide a fascinating patter, one that utilizes the subject matter of labour across scenes of industrial sites and restaurant workers, composing what appear at first glance as first-person descriptive narratives, but one capable of nuanced twists and turns of sound and meaning. “dendrobranchiata,” begins the poem “prawn,” “you throw your roe out / like you remove a cava cage / spill the wine, let life flow / into its briny flute [.]” There’s almost a way her lyric is closer to the language model of poets such as ryan fitzpatrick or Peter Culley than Wayman or Braid, existing somewhere between those two points, offering labour as her building blocks but language as her poem’s propulsion. “here,” begins her poem “fear and probability,” “a woman’s soft body / is found only / in cubicle fabric nests // but I am a huntress / sparkles under steel toes / shuffling between petrochemical rainbows / into open bays / under heavy-lift ulnae / along the riverfront [.]” She offers her perspectives through and around labour, and around gender, a conversation less prevalent than it should be, even despite the high percentages of women working across various industries for decades. The language flourishes, provides flourish. While labour exists as her surrounding subject, much as Gina Myers, Shah sets her poems at the moment of actual, concrete and physical work, writing, as the short poem “ulnaris/radialis” begins: “egret, backhoe— / hand origami’s / carpal puppetry / prepares her for / the work of days / of women; [.]” See my full review here.

48. Natalie Rice, Nightjar: The second full-length poetry title by Natalie Rice, a poet recently relocated to Nova Scotia from Kelowna, British Columbia, is Nightjar (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), following her full-length debut, Scorch (Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], a collection I described at the time as having been composed through “a carved hush.” “How to stay with / what was hidden—,” offers Nightjar’s opening five-page poem “The Sea Rose,” “to clutch / hip to hip // with a hole to the heart / until the pitted cliffs / revealed themselves.” There is such a delicate precision to her lyrics, unselfconscious and thoughtfully, carefully set. Rice composes her poems as field notes, as sketches, offering carved lines on movement and landscapes, emerging through trees and farm spaces, turning her lyrics carefully between nimble fingers. As the opening poem continues: “Maybe there’s an ocean / behind the fog, I said / long before // we made new / weather and other forms / of breaking.” I appreciate the way her lyric speaks from the edge of human occupation, of language, peering deep into the trees and the barrens. “To turn the mountain inside // out and wear it / against the skin. This is now // a love poem,” she writes, in the short piece “Anything May Take the Form of a Cup,” “but there is a town / on the edge of a fossil bed.” Set as a triptych of numbered sections, her poems are sharp, but not overpowering, providing a deep and abiding calm across loss, history and human distance. See my full review here.

49. Ronna Bloom, In a Riptide: I was curious to go through Toronto poet and educator Ronna Bloom’s latest, In a Riptide (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), aware that she’s had a stack of published collections since I first discovered her work through her debut, Fear of the Ride (Ottawa ON: Carleton University Press, 1996) and follow-up, Personal Effects (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2000). She’s published a few more titles since those days, including the recent A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023). “I’m not just feeling,” the poem “Don’t Be Superficial, ‘Cause We’ll Soon Find Out” in this new collection offers, “I’m seeing. / And I’m here, committed to breathing, / joy, and painting, until there’s nothing left.” Composed as an assemblage of first-person narratives, Bloom’s sketchworks write on illness and age and all that comes with it, but resist lyric closure or expectation. “I turn to look at myself / and wait for one of us to speak.” she writes, to close the short poem “Area 3.” Or, two pages prior, as she closes the first of two parts of the poem “Vulnerable to,” writing: “I resist poetic redemption. Let it be this.” There is something of the document, of a kind of meditative reportage, to Bloom’s lyrics, utilizing the space of the lyric to recollect, collect or leave one’s mark. “I need to write closer to the truth,” she writes, as part of the extended poem “The Party,” “not the wished-for truth. / To be roughed up a bit. Stop protecting myself from the end. / It’s an end not an ending.” Mortality is there, but it was always there, and this is Bloom, writing from within a particular moment, a particular period of time and of life, without urgency, but attempting a clarity and a comprehension, so that she might be able to move forward. “Please tell us, they said, if you will leave the light on,” she writes, as part of “Is It Safe?,” “if you’ll come back, / what you did here and with whom, / and will we be lovely, will we be lonely, / will we be lucky?” See my full review here.

50. Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, The Book of Interruptions: The fifth full-length collection from queer, Toronto-based, Iranian-born poet, writer and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, is The Book of Interruptions (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn 2025), following on the heels of their full-length debut, Me, You, Then Snow (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021), the dos-a-dos WJD [conjoined with The OceanDweller, by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, trans. from the Farsi by Mohammadi] (Gordon Hill Press, 2022), the collaborative G (with Klara du Plessis; Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2023) and solo collection Daffod*ls (Pamenar Press, 2023), as well as a plethora of chapbooks. Gestural and expansive, there is an element of worldbuilding to Mohammadi’s lyric, one that returns the structure to the crossed-out (or interrupted) vowel through their use of the * symbol from prior work (specifically ), writing a narrative structure concurrently fragmented, populated and isolated, swirling amid staccato struggles with faith and cities, queer experience and a litany of restless, thoughtful observations around feeling unsettled in a secular Toronto, while holding on to a cultural history of the poem that connects to that stretches back thousands of years. With each collection, Mohammadi furthers a complexity of their engagement with the long poem, the book-length accumulated lyric, a trajectory that is as striking as it is propulsive. And yet, each work begins fresh, composed with an open curiosity, and an array of questions, some new, and others, that need to be asked more than once, for the sake of a broader, even ongoing, response. See my full review here.

51. Fenn Stewart, women & roosters: The second full-length collection by Vancouver poet and editor Fenn Stewart, following a trio of chapbooks (including one with above/ground press) and a full-length debut, Better Nature (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017), is women & roosters (Book*hug Press, 2025), a book-length lyric suite that furthers her ongoing explorations and critiques of colonized space. “I want to put my foot but there’s nothing there to stand on like a two-by-four that rotted out of the deck my uncle’s fixing with leftover bits of cedar gone like a rotten tooth from a head that wants its tooth back gone like a man with a wife gone like the sleeping bag from the back of my dad’s car in high school” she writes, in an almost breathless rush, early on in the collection. At times, the prose is subtle, quiet, beautifully straightforward; other times, propulsive, almost breathlessly so, rushing “I learned (from T’uy’tanat-Cease Wyss) that huckleberry bushes are much, much older than you think. It takes like a hundred years for them to get as tall as me, and I’m not tall. When we were kids, there was a family that wouldn’t let their kids eat huckleberries. Blueberries are blue, they said firmly to their children, so those aren’t huckleberries. You can’t eat them: they’re poisonous, because they’re red, and they’re not huckleberries. They are, though—I’ve been eating them all my life, and I’m still here.” women & roosters is composed in a structure akin to a journal, offering self-contained entries that build and meander, ebb and flow, offering certain echoes of titles such as George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970) to K.I. Press’ Pale Red Footprints (Pedlar Press, 2001), Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (New Star Books, 2001) to Kate Sutherland’s The Bones Are There (Book*hug, 2020), although Stewart’s title is composed as a journal, instead of from a journal or archive. Perhaps a more apt comparable would be Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley’s Vixen (Book*hug Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] (which is fitting, as Ridley was Stewart’s editor for this collection); although Ridley’s collection was composed via more overt lyric fragments over Stewart’s lyric prose, the overall structures both provide a flow between sections, moving across a slow and lengthy distance, and a horizon one can’t necessarily see until there. See my full review here.

52. Rahat Kurd, The Book of Z: As the back cover of Vancouver poet, writer, editor and cultural critic Rahat Kurd’s The Book of Z writes: “For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha – ‘the wife of Aziz’ in the Qur’an – and her passion for Yusef has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry, in Muslim folk traditions, and in Persian and Mughal miniature painting. At the same time, as the Biblical ‘wife of Potiphar’ she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in misogynistic cautionary tales and canonical Western art. Rahat Kurd writes in the vividly imagined voice of a Zulaykha who considers her Abrahamic lineage from its estranged and fragmented reality, asking what consolation human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.” Zulaykha is a figure found depicted in both the Biblical Old Testament and the Qur’an, and, as Arizona-based Religious scholar Agnès Kefeli offers, “in the biblical and Qur’anic interpretations of Joseph’s story, Potiphar’s wife bears all the blame for sin and disappears quickly from the narrative.” Alternate versions of her narrative, whether through Turkish or Persian literature, aren’t nearly so harsh. Still, there is something compelling in the way Kurd seeks agency for Zulaykha through The Book of Z, furthering a lineage of literary works that seek to provide a perspective that counterpoints and contradicts the male gaze, whether Dominican-British author Jean Rhys lifting Mr. Rochester’s first wife, the Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) in her Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), or Montreal poet Susan Elmslie writing André Breton’s surrealist muse in her I, Nadja, and Other Poems (London ON: Brick Books, 2006). Through Kurd Zulaykha is finally provided, one might say, access to her own story. “As a girl I wished for a small space of my own. A perch above a vista; a safe enclosure. Jami says I was the daughter of a Maghribi king,” Kurd’s Zulaykha writes, in a letter to Yusef, “but I lacked royal inclinations: to gaze on meadows and mountain peaks and breathe, mine, all mine, to discern the glacial age in a sip of icy river water, to give my attendants the order, prepare the next expedition.” Composed through opening poem, “In the Subjunctive Mood for Love,” and sections held as sequence, suites or otherwise clusters of lyric, prose poem and the ghazal: “Zulaykha, Protagonist,” “Dear Yusuf,” “Zulaykha Addresses the Patriarchs,” “Ghalib Praises My Dream of Yusuf,” “Zulaykha Surveys Her Art History,” “Zulaykha Considers Her Options,” “Zulaykha Alone,” “Ashura,” “Akhlaq,” “Inheritance,” “Zulaykha Is Floored by Emily Dickinson’s Poem 1311,” “Emily Dickinson’s Work Ethic” and final poem, “Introspective Ghazal.” Exploring form as well as narrative, Kurd offers prose poem sequences, explorations through the lyric fragment, akin to Dickinson. She offers declarative passages and structures and patterns adapted into English patter, comparable to the German-language prose constructions that American poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop adapted into her English-language prose lyric. Kurd offers a rich and expansive blending of traditions and concerns through her engagement with Zulaykha, including her own homage to the ghazal, specifically referencing the classic Urdu poet of the form, Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (1797–1869), commonly known as Mirza Ghalib. As she offers, as part of her “Introspective Ghazal”: “Could what passed between them be called a mere glance / if ex post facto legal jargon hid its a priori guarantee of sex? // I honour the poets and painters in whose mystic hearts / Zulaykha’s fidelity persists, exalting a spirituality of sex [.]” See my full review here.

53. Scott Jackshaw, Stigmata: The full-length poetry debut by Edmonton-based poet, scholar and editor Scott Jackshaw is Stigmata (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), an expansive long poem across five sections of lyric stagger, staccato and extended gestures. “something must be put into phrases,” begins the poem “Reparation,” “leans into my distant splinter, a door / prolapses, I spoil my crust with dirt // with the water stains on my ceiling, lamp full of moths / bending floor of my desire [.]” Across a tapestry of gestures, examinations and explorations, Jackshaw’s lyric multitudes include an element of the monologue, of performance, blending the divine, desire and the profane across a meditative and performative theology of action and interaction. Composing a narrative line of point and counterpoint, Jackshaw’s moments ping against each other, offering a book composed with opening and closing poems, two cluster-sections of lyrics, and a further lyric sequence, the title poem, held at mid-point. As the ten-part title sequence opens: “In the episteme of grief many worlds will resemble a thread. I go down on a local prophet. As the spirit moves I’m carried along with his breath.” In Christian mysticism, the stigmata links back to the nail-wounds on the body of the crucified Christ, the mark seen as one’s mystical union with Christ’s suffering, but also referring to any physical mark or sign of a particular disease or suffering. Through Jackshaw, the mark and moments of physicality in their extended thought-clusters and prose sequences a theology conjoined with sexuality, offering a lyric intermingling terrible sex and “the cult of the wound,” noise and grief, confession and prayer, writing, in the opening poem, “The Mystical Theology”: “I made a list of bright red holes.” The poems, Jackshaw’s lyrics, point and counterpoint, offering an ebb and flow declarative gestures, composing a book-length residue, both tender and profane, of what happens, what is possible and the residue that remains, after all of the happening has subsided. See my full review here.

54. Billy-Ray Belcourt, The Idea of An Entire Life: The latest from Vancouver-based writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt, a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta and Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar, is the poetry collection The Idea of An Entire Life (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2025). “How we exist in the world / depends on how we describe it.” begins the opening poem in the collection, “AUTOFICTION.” The poems in this collection are quietly gestural, earth-shaking, precise and performative, offering a layering of direct statements, narrative storytelling and subtle truths. “Picture the women waiting at the forest’s centre,” Belcourt writes, as part of the poem “20TH-CENTURY CREE HISTORY,” “their hands / folded into little coffins. // Not even the snow falls with such imprecise hunger.” There is a way that Belcourt has of stitching together the present moment with threads of memory and history, writing declarative details of and around Queer identity, family history and survival, utilizing factual details as building blocks into something larger, deeper. As any poem might require, in that particular moment. “I want to call attention to the dead,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CRUISING UTOPIA SONNETS,” “to the barely / living. I want to remind you of the gravity and / the challenge of responding to the world, of simply / being in the world.” There is a dream-like quality to elements of these poems, blended with concrete realities, each side complementing the other in quite striking ways, hitting all the right notes of lovely, of devastating, of loss and heartbreak and wonder. These are poems of witness, of memory; of documentation; a book of the whole world, the whole body, an approach that seems to be how he approaches the books of his I’ve seen to date, including elements of his entire world in that particular moment into the work. This is, arguably, what the best work is supposed to, each poem and line offering a different facet, a different fragment, of something far larger and more expansive as a unified whole. A book of an entire life, indeed. See my full review here.

55. Drew McEwan, tours, variously: The latest from Toronto poet Drew McEwan, following Repeater (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012) and If Pressed (BookThug, 2017), is the long-awaited tours, variously (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a book-length suite structured as a kind of call-and-response between extended lyric sections: “a tour, variously,” “exit strategy,” “a tour, variously,” “arger’s interiors,” “a tour, variously,” “theory of rooms” and “a tour, variously.” “I brace another entryway within a room.” the opening sequence begins, “You frame the performance of a beginning.” Described on the back cover as “a guided tour, a tour of a series of empty rooms,” the open-ended complexity of tours, variously does read as an exploration of space, of being, moving between an uncertainty of rooms. In the first section, a bit further along: “My madness is the madness of sequence.” The ebbs and flows of tours, variously hold an array of threads of awareness around depictions, rhetorical function and narrative gesture. “Without the ‘now’ of standardized speech,” she writes, “the / loiterers drag bruised aphorisms. Or so say the / lawyers on the courthouse’s brutalist concrete / steps. Or so say the courthouse’s brutalist / concrete steps. Either way the difference / amounts only to the distance between arrival / and departure lounges.” tours, variously is composed as a long poem talking out self-aware elements of self and being around language and depiction (“Has my narration become cold and inhuman?”), writing an exploration of betweenness, becoming and having become, having been the whole time, achieving an exploration not of uncertainty but of seeking, plumbing the depths of language into a solid ground. See my full review here.

56. ryan fitzpatrick, No Depression in Heaven: The latest from Calgary-returned (by way of Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver) poet and editor ryan fitzpatrick is No Depression in Heaven (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a collection that follows and furthers a more overt Alberta-centred cultural thread, as established in their prior collection, Sunny Ways (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023) [see my review of such here]: a collection of longer pieces that included writing prompted by and through Edward Burtynsky’s “massively scaled photographs” documenting and depicting the Alberta Tar Sands. In a recent article in the Calgary Guardian, fitzpatrick describes No Depression in Heaven as “a ‘poetry LP’ of improvisatory pieces that works through the history and forms of country music.” Set in two clusters of extended poems, “Side A” and “Side B,” the structure and content of fitzpatrick’s latest plays off the Alberta near-stereotypical ethos of “country and western music”—very different from, say, Dennis Cooley’s Country Music: New Poems (Kelowna BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004) or Zane Koss’ recent Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025), not to mention any other of the multitude of prairie poets over the years approaching bluegrass riffs on the lonesome cowboy or open, empty prairie (numerous of which, we now know, were deliberately-placed ideas across the North American prairie by a variety of racist government agents and agendas, to push First Nations peoples “out of the way” for wave upon wave of settler occupation). And yet, one can see linkages in fitzpatrick’s latest to the poems in Robert Kroetsch’s “Country and Western” section of his Completed Field Notes (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2002), each poet offering their own section of lyrics composed in more overt country song-stanza shapes. “It won’t be long ‘til value streaks / Right through White City’s square,” fitzpatrick writes, “With fifty miles of elbow room / On either side to spare [.]” See my full review here.

57. Eric Schmaltz, I Confess: From Halifax-based poet, critic and editor Eric Schmaltz comes I Confess (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a book-length poetic expanse that follows an array of chapbooks, as well as his full-length debut, SURFACES (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018), and critical titles including I Want to Tell You Love, A Critical Edition by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (co-edited with Christopher Doody; Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2021). Produced with an “Afterword” by American-based New Zealand poet, editor, academic and critic Orchid Tierney, there’s an enormous amount of play through Schmaltz’s I Confess; play, resistance, confession, self-awareness, visual expansiveness and lyric truth. It is as though he, as a poet who leans far more into experimental and conceptual forms, attempted to approach lyric’s “confessional mode” from an entirely different perspective, pulling apart the bones to thus reassemble into something else. “Remember, you can be as nervous as you like.” he writes, in his own call-and-response, “Nervousness and deception look different. // Do not move. Tell me when you would like to begin.” There are those who might see the confessional lyric as an exhausted form, although through Schmaltz, a whole new life is introduced. Through text, photographs, visual text, waveforms, erasure, utterance, polygraph charts and accumulation, Schmaltz explores the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric; exploring certainty and uncertainty, as he investigates text-forms and perceived truth, attention, poetry and poetic form. A caveat, whether descriptor or warning, by the author at the offset, offers: “This book is a document of truth’s performance under duress. // Some of what you will read is true; the rest is poetry.”

In many ways, the core of the book’s content is familiar—who am I and how did I get here—but examined through a unique blend of experimental and confessional, each side wrestling for a kind of control that might not be possible. Given the foundation for this particular mode of inquiry is the use of polygraph, it introduces a whole other layer of tension, of resistance: “I confess,” as the poem, the pages, repeat. “We’re going to focus on some background questions.” Schmaltz writes, “This part of the session ensures that you are able to speak truthfully and that you are mentally and physically fit to proceed with the polygraph test today. // Please answer the following questions truthfully.” There are occasionally ways through which certain conceptual poetry-based works can articulate human elements more deeply, more openly, than the lyric mode, something I felt as well through Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Book 1 (Coach House Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], and Schmaltz manages a dual-core through this work that counterpoints brilliantly, working from the most basic of human questions across a structure of the nature of being, the nature of expansive, articulated, inarticulate and impossible truth, composed across an expansive bandwidth. See my full review here.

DUSIE

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Tuesday poem #668 : Farah Ghafoor : Excerpt from "The Last Poet in the World"

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Tuesday poem #667 : Matthew Taylor Blais : Chicama

Tuesday, January 06, 2026

Tuesday poem #666 : Ealhwine : Illeism

Thursday, January 01, 2026

A ‘best of’ list of 2025 Canadian poetry books