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 full-length poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. This is my fourteenth annual list [see also: 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.
Is my reviewing slowing down? It does feel this year, and the prior also, have held fewer book-length reviews, perhaps as I focused deeper into fiction and non-fiction (another collection of short stories, and nearing the ends of two hefty non-fiction manuscripts—“the green notebook” and “the genealogy book”—both of which I’ve been posting excerpts of for months now through my enormously clever substack). There has also been at least one Canadian publisher that, frustratingly, seems to have dropped me from their reviewers list (and another handful that don’t seem to respond to my queries)? I think I’m a good enough reviewer, and the blog is receiving some 3,000-4,500 daily hits these days, so I’m not sure what the resistance is all about). Admittedly, doing these annual round-ups I find helpful to realize just how much I’ve done, as most of the year all I can see are the books I haven’t yet had opportunity to even open, let alone review (so many I haven’t yet managed to get to; I do try to at least consider reviewing every single book that passes my direction). Either way, presuming my count is correct, I’ve posted at least one hundred and thirty poetry book reviews across 2024, which is quite a lot (although slightly less than in prior years; most at my blog, but further at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics as well as through Chris Banks’ The Woodlot), as well as a further fifteen reviews of other books, including anthologies, essay collections and further prose works. I’m pleased I managed to get a mound of chapbook reviews posted (nearly forty, by my count), as well as some journal reviews. Is that all there is?
I wonder, occasionally, if I should be working similar ‘best of’ lists for chapbooks, or American full-length collections, or fiction, or a geographically-unspecified list of full-length collections, but then I remember that this list takes a full day or two to compile and post, so there you go. And you know this list always includes a few stragglers from the year prior, yes? I mean, I can only do so much during a calendar year. Beyond that, I always mean for these lists to be shorter, but I couldn’t think of a list without including every book on this list. Is there simply too much exciting work being produced right now? Oh, and my On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press) came out this year! You should pick up a copy!
1. Fawn Parker, Soft Inheritance: The author of the fiction titles Set-Point (Winnipeg MB: ARP Books, 2019), Dumb-Show (Arp Books, 2021), the Giller Prize-nominated What We Both Know: a novel (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2022), and the forthcoming auto-memoir Hi, it’s me (McClelland & Stewart), the first full-length poetry title by Fredericton writer Fawn Parker is Soft Inheritance (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2023), published under Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Books imprint. I’m intrigued by the back cover quote by Toronto writer Lynn Crosbie, and there are echoes and influence in Parker’s approach to narrative content, whether swagger or swipe, to Crosbie’s own fierce lyric: you can see it in Parker’s first-person storytelling slant that refuses to be held, or held back; occasionally reactive. “My husband says there is one place I can’t / do it and I do it there,” Parker writes, to open “POEM AGAINST MY HUSBAND,” “I don’t come, and I don’t want to / so instead I write couplets.” The poems lead with swagger, but hold through precise measure, as Parker crafts sharp lines of meditative, observational grace, composing short monologues across a lyric surrounding grief, maternal loss, marriage, caretaking and how one even begins to feel safe. As the same poem ends: “But for the love of things / I do nothing. // My work needs me like an infant— / this is why we understand each other.” See my full review here.
2. M.W. Jaeggle, Wrack Line: I’ve known his name for a while now (through seeing copies of his three published chapbooks), so was curious to see a copy of Wrack Line (Regina SK: University of Regina Press, 2023), the full-length debut by Vancouver-born Buffalo, New York poet M.W. Jaeggle. Wrack Line is a collection of carved lyrics exploring and examining form, from prose blocks to sonnets to more open forms of the lyric. Jaeggle works through first-person lyric narratives to articulate grief, loss and distraction, writing out the distances and the distances between, as the piece “POEM BY FRIDGE LIGHT” offers: “Here I am in the culvert where we found a car’s die mirror. / Here I am in the fields of horsetails, / in the blackberry with stained fingers. // Here, there’s no wristwatch on a nightstand, / just a mind kidding around / someplace unaware it’s unawake. // If I look up at the canopy now, the day’s / a shredded rag. If I close my eyes, / the light is honeycombed.” There is an intriguing way that Jaeggle works through form through an extensive reading list—examining and echoing form through the masters, as one does—and the poems offer an array of literary models, from cited poets Denise Levertov and Phyllis Webb to Paul Blackburn and Wang Wei, as well as hints of poets such as John Newlove, perhaps. His lines are solid, offering precise rhythms on memory and land, although it is the two-part opening prose poem, “AUTUMN, ACCORDING TO CHILDHOOD,” where the lyric of his line really shines, a sparkle and rush that rise above and beyond the precise specifics of his line-breaks, as the first poem opens: “Your mother whispers your name, draws your eyes away from the / loon threading water, tight stitch. Look, she says. Look: there’s a deer / chewing dandelion, right here in the yard. Knees bending, she slowly / breaks distance.” Either way, there are some stunning moments and movements across Jaeggle’s Wrack Line; I am very curious to see where he might go next. See my full review here.
3. Robert Coleman, Ghost Work: Poems: I’m intrigued by Newmarket, Ontario poet Robert Coleman’s fourth full-length collection, Ghost Work: Poems (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), “a suite of poems that explores a son’s gradual loss of his father from dementia.” The loss of a parent is one of those universal experiences, one poets have been articulating and exploring for as long as poems have existed, and the first-person narratives of Coleman’s latest collection around the slow erosion of his father offers lines and phrases set with subtle force, a striking ease and the most delicate care. “This walk is not ruined by absence— / loss comes easy to the cedars,” he writes, to close the short poem “To Test an Absence,” “birch peel and its sticky skin / that tests memory’s rule, what we hope / we can trust as we walk above / on what seems like solid ground.” This is a book of ghosts, made more difficult for the slow erosion of his father’s self throughout dementia (comparable, in certain ways, to my own father’s slow physical erosion due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). In the poem “Name,” Coleman writes on regularly calling his father “father,” so as to remind him their relationship, a poem striking and heart-wrenching for that simple and ongoing detail. “I run on as if words could shape an anchor,” he writes, “shape a father unoccluded, riven of doubt.” And yet, I find Coleman’s more compelling poems are the ones where he approaches his subject at a bit of an angle, allowing the language to propel, over the poems set to articulate a particular bit of information. “Tonight we char wild boar,” he writes, as part of the six poem sequence “Lost on the Way to Tortosa,” “aflame in tree boles. Yet here in the ash, / mockingly, new growth. // This is the flicker he misses, the nonsense spark. / I hear him, an ocean away, testing a tune.” See my full review here.
4. Chimwemwe Undi, Scientific Marvel: Poems: From 2023-24 Winnipeg poet laureate Chimwemwe Undi comes the impressive full-length poetry debut, Scientific Marvel: Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2024), a sharp and self-aware assemblage of prairie gestures, lyrics and examinations. “Good practice is dissolving my beloved / into traits,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “PROPERTY 101,” “either useful / or distinct.” This is an impressive collection, one comfortably powerful, without the awkward stretches of so many other debuts; she knows full well what she is doing, without any sense of showiness or hesitation, but a calm understanding of her own lyric, her own strength. “Taking its title,” as the press release offers, “from a beauty school in downtown Winnipeg that closed in 2017 after nearly 100 years of operation,” the lyrics of Undi’s Scientific Marvel investigate and interrogate the landscape of Winnipeg as city and cultural space, articulating alternate perspectives on what had so long been assumed, presumed or simply ignored. She writes a field guide of gestures, expectations, absolute delights and utter losses. “every horizontal edge the city hesitates,” she writes, as part of “FIELD GUIDE TO THE BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA,” “and they die in such numbers / with such specifity that scientists / name it and watch unmoved [.]” Undi tethers her lyrics to these local histories, that sense of Winnipeg space, fully acknowledging the self-described lineages through lovely, performative gestures, guttural markers and lines composed as direct offerings turned sideways. “It is bigger than its targets,” the short poem “IN DEFENCE OF THE WINNIPEG POEM” reads, in full, mid-way through the collection, “& still small, & there is nothing to do // & so much to be done, & here // at the centre of a bad invention, // it is, in fact, pretty cold.” See my full review here.
5. Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, Daffod*ls: I’ve been increasingly interested in what American publisher Pamenar Press has been producing lately (see my review of the Laynie Browne trio from last year, which included a title they produced), and the latest I’ve seen is by Toronto-based poet, writer and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, the book-length suite Daffod*ls (Pamenar Press, 2023). This is Mohammadi’s third full-length collection, following Me, You, Then Snow (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021) and the dos-a-dos WJD conjoined with The OceanDweller, by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, trans. from the Farsi by Mohammadi (Gordon Hill Press, 2022). Mohammadi is also the author of the recent and collaborative G with Klara du Plessis (Palimpsest Press, 2023), and already has a fifth full-length poetry collection, Book of Interruptions, scheduled for fall 2025 with Wolsak and Wynn. Structured very different than his first two collections, both of which suggest chapbook-length works conjoined into a larger unit, Daffod*ls is composed as a book-length suite, moving and flowing as a single unit of individual, accumulated lyric sections. The shift is interesting to witness, and one many poets have done over the years (I think back to Toronto poet Kevin Connolly’s infamous debut Asphalt Cigar, for example), watching in real time as a poet’s attention expands beyond the chapbook and into the collection. Set as an assemblage of slightly surreal first-person observations, musings and commentaries, Daffod*ls is a book-length lyric suite across more than a hundred pages of sweep and nuance, offering an expansive gesture into history, time and language. There’s a heft here, one that requires careful, repeated readings, even through what at times might appear a kind of rush. Through the space of Daffod*ls, Mohammadi utilizes the lyric form and space as a means of study, through which to explore the collisions, contusions and conflicts that emerge through the eyes of a narrator situated within and between two weighty world cultures. “I miss behind firmly sat in the middle of a patch of dirt you / can claw into. Its finished. skyscrapers no longer scrape the / sky. clouds have all moved out of our town. I used to write / differently so speak to me NOW, through the noise my hand / is piercing. you’ve got the right idea, sitting with coffee table / magazines and tuned into classical music.” There’s something of the inconsistent puncutations and capitalizations, and the asterisks, also, that provide a particular kind of immediacy, propelling the lines across the page, offering an urgency to these explorations, these declarations. See my full review here.
6. Rob Manery, As They Say: Vancouver poet and SOME magazine editor and publisher Rob Manery is one of a handful of west coast poets that seem to publish intermittently enough (comparable to Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak, Kathryn MacLeod and Aaron Vidaver; former Vancouver poet Colin Smith, now in Winnipeg, is also worth mentioning), that one might understandably lose track, one of many reasons why it is good to see his second full-length collection As They Say (Chicago IL: Moira Books, 2023). There are those that might recall Manery as an Ottawa poet during the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, collaborating with Louis Cabri as the Experimental Writers Group and curating readings at Gallery 1010, later publishing hole magazine and eventual chapbooks under hole books while curating the N400 Reading Series at The Manx Pub until he left town for Vancouver in 1996. There is such a wonderful heft to this collection, as though everything Manery had worked on prior has been a kind of lead-up into this (the Elegies poems appear near the end of the collection, as well). With poems that stretch and sequence, Manery’s is a language-fueled lyric of small movement across great distances, constructed as a kind of compressed expansiveness. “I at least / yield,” he writes, as the penultimate poem in the seven-fragment sequence “These Constant Moments,” “to inarticulate / distances // if you depend / on these // unwelcome convictions / these constant // moments / some borrow [.]” Manery’s poems hold such exact language and thinking, crafted and crisp stretches, providing such a delightful array of sound collision and jumble of meaning, providing the poems far greater than the mere sums of their parts. “Please tell me a story,” he writes, as part of the poem “If All My Woulds,” “just a little story, // hemmed-in between the Would / and the Should, or the Must. It wasn’t / always like this? I count my / self the same man whether / I want or have.” There’s a staccato to his short lines, enough that he writes less across the page than straight down, providing a language of craft and baffle, drawing vocabulary from multiple sources (depending on the piece), from Sophocles, John Donne, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Louis Cabri, Catriona Strang, Bob Hogg, Ted Byrne and Dr. Robin Barrow, among others. He utilizes collision and collage in such way to provide an effect of the pointed sketch, quick lines that simultaneously offer meditative pause and propulsive force. As he writes as part of the book’s acknowledgements: “The Elegy poems draw almost all of their vocabulary from John Donne’s Elegies (Signet Classic, edited by Marius Bewley). Each elegy in the series corresponds to the same numbered elegy penned by Donne.” Built as a highly deliberate work of meditative collage, As They Say is an assemblage of Kootenay School of Writing-infused language poetry as thoughtful and purposeful as anything I’ve seen. Rob Manery’s work has clearly been flying underneath the radar for far too long. See my full review here.
7. Allie Duff, I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought: As the back cover for St. John’s, Newfoundland poet, stand-up comedian and musician Allie Duff’s full-length poetry debut, I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) offers: “In I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought, the poet leaves her childhood home of St. John’s, Newfoundland to live in the country’s capital. Familial relationships, complicated by chronic illnesses, are juxtaposed with looming disasters, both actual and imagined, as the writer navigates her stubborn yearning to be ‘some other kind of woman,’ and to ‘live fiercely’ against the odds.” Duff composes a sequence of short narratives across the lyric, offering a portrait of home caught in part through her time away, and Duff offers a distinct view. “High in the red oaks / blackbirds dive and land,” she writes, to open the poem “Constance Bay,” “scattering clouds of white moths. // Sentenced to hunt / each moment and pin it down; / the past is mine, the past is mine, / and it’s nobody’s, too.” She writes of spring flowers in the capital, but more often than not, her gaze is east, glimpsing home in short threads on grandmothers and kitchens, the hostility of weather and dreams of reaching out, and reaching back. Duff holds to small spaces, small geographies, writing out short narrative bursts less as scenes than moments that string together through the collection across a far wider, and expansive, tapestry of landscape and being. She speaks of the weather, of family; she speaks of boatloads, and sheep. She writes of what intimately can’t be but anywhere else than in her corner of Newfoundland. “Something alive under the snow / makes it shiver,” she writes, to open “#DarkNL2014,” “like it’s asking not to be / shovelled, scraped, or salted. // For a few days / we get a taste / of living in the dark.” See my full review here.
8. Nicholas Bradley, Before Combustion: I found myself charmed by the heartfelt intimacies of Victoria, British Columbia poet Nicholas Bradley’s second full-length collection, after Rain Shadow (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018), his Before Combustion (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023). Before Combustion opens with a suite of poems that focus on the new moments of parenting, of fatherhood, offering such clear and quiet moments I haven’t seen prior around the subject, one I’ve also had the experience of enjoying three different times, three different ways: “I am the oldest / living thing // you know,” he writes, as part of “In the Beginning,” “an unshaven // bristlecone / bent over // your bed.” While there is an enormous amount of territory worth covering and recovering on parenting generally, the subject matter of fatherhood is still one that emerges with hesitation; a poem or two at most by any new fathers, perhaps, although there are exceptions. Before Combustion is a collection sectioned into quarters, with the opening cluster of poems focusing on that newness of life, that newness of expansion, becoming and being. As the two-page poem “Waiting Room” begins: “Your third night alive / I drove home // from the hospital / to find sleep // and left you sleeping / those few hours. // In darkness, having / forgotten // everything but food, / water, and how // to keep you fed, clean, / and quiet, // I entered the house / a stranger // and failed to notice / the oak leaves // letting go.” In certain ways, the entire collection is centred around that opening moment of new life, new fatherhood, echoing the way one’s entire world compresses into a single, singular moment at the birth of one’s first child, slowly rippling out a return to the world but with an entirely new perspective, an entirely new lens. The poems of Bradley’s Before Combusion begin with new life, but slowly do edge out into that return, offering graeftul turns of phrase and line-breaks and short phrases, each of which do provide a slowness, requiring deep attention, even through poems such as “There Must Be 50 Ways of Looking / at Mountain Goats on the Internet,” that begins: “Stoned, blindfolded, one /goat dangles above / a second, horns / sheathed, four / ankles bound / and then four more, / rhyming quatrains.” In certain ways, each section provides its own impulse, less leading up to combustion than reacting to a change or changes so life-altering they seem akin to an explosion. Or, as he writes to open the poem “Parable of the Drought”: “Not the end of the world but the onset / of another.” See my full review here.
9. Chuqiao Yang, The Last to the Party: There are long-awaited debuts, and then there are long-awaited debuts, such as Chuqiao Yang’s The Last to the Party (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry, 2024). Yang writes of a prairie childhood, various travel, family and family roots and youthful adventures, rebellions and reconciliations, her lyrics offering a richness that is confident and subtle. “Sometimes I float backwards,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “The Party,” “ten times / over the South Saskatchewan / until I’m only kite bones / and promise: watch me, / a mawkish pre-teen pedalling / uphill, licked by rime, / peering into a neighbour’s window.” There’s a thread of wistfulness, and even melancholy, that runs through these poems, as Yang articulates intimate distances, drifts and attempts to connect or re-connect. She writes of a closeness that never quite feels close enough, or is never meant to last, but occasionally, unexpectedly, might or even does. Listen to the lines of the wedding-poem “Epithalamium,” a poem that ends: “And while there may be // years so full of sadness // you will be reluctant to trek // the dogged trail ahead, // you will reach for each other’s // hand, feel the other’s pull, // and you will be at ease.” She writes of a lifelong search for connection and belonging, and of finally landing at a moment that allows itself that comfort. Her poem “Friday,” a piece that immediately follows “Epithalamium,” includes: “Now, we share the same space, and life is a wide, / paved driveway.” See my full review here.
10. Johanna Skibsrud, MEDIUM: The latest from Johanna Skibsrud, a writer who “divides her time between Tucson, Arizona, and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia” is the poetry collection MEDIUM (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024), a collection that “shares the lives and perspectives of women who – in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums – have helped to shape the course of history.” The author of three previous collections of poetry, three novels and three non-fiction titles, as she writes to open her “PREFACE”: “This project began a decade ago, while I was pregnant with my first child. I kept thinking during that time, and afterward—through those first all-consuming years of parenthood, two miscarriages, and the birth of my second child—about the ways in which women have served as mediums throughout history, and of the ways they continue to serve. I thought of and looked again for guidance from the powerful women whose bodies, minds, and spirits have acted as conduits of knowledge and intuition; as points of convergence for the past, present, and the future; as concrete points of channeling and accessing a way forward—or sideways, or otherwise.” The poems that make up MEDIUM are carved and constructed in a kind of layering, providing different elements across a book-length project almost as a polyphonic call-and-response. Skibsrub’s lyrics and asides offer a multitude of voices, structures and perspectives, from Helen of Troy to Anne Boleyn, Marie Curie to Roe vs. Wade, and Shakuntala Devi to Hypatia of Alexandria. The effect is almost choral, offering threads on and around multiple figures vilified across history, reclaiming the stories, purpose and legacies of an array of historical women. “We don’t know either Julian of Norwich’s real name or / what her life was like before she recorded her Revelations / of Divine Love—the first known book to be written by a / woman in the English language,” Skibsrud writes, “in the 14th century. Some / suspect she was a mother before taking her vows, and that / during the plague years she may have lost one or more chil- / dren.” Skibsrud writes akin to an anthology that leans into theatrical script, as different characters, including the narrator, take their turns in the spotlight. See my full review here.
11. Matt Rader, FINE: Poems: The latest from Kelowna, British Columbia writer Matt Rader is FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024), a book of fire, climate and crisis, including deforestation, mining and other increasingly-devastating resource-extractions. As his author biography inside the collection reads, Rader is the “award-winning author of six volumes of poetry, a collection of stories and a book of nonfiction,” the last title on that list being Visual Inspection (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2019). Composed across twenty moments organized in four cluster-sections (as well as a further poem, hidden as post-script, just after the acknowledgments and author biography), the poems in FINE articulate “a vision of the present from a deep future, charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm.” Across the poems of FINE, Rader offers long, meditative stretches, almost as a single, meditative length, through this year of catastrophe, offering a thoughtful, quiet and slow-moving sketchwork of point-form, writing of visiting his brother’s farm, watching the landscape hollowed out and the aftermath of a season of orange skies. As the poem “Working on My Brother’s Farm in Errington, BC” writes: “When we read / a silence / we change it. I can’t tell you / what it’s like / to be outside / language / inside language. The tall grass / at the edge / of the field makes shapes / in the breeze [.]” These are poems that exist from within a changing landscape, and one that sits nervously on a precipice of complete environmental, entirely man-made, collapse. Throughout, Rader offers lovely sequences of sharp moments, turns and observations across a poem-suite of sharp attention, deep concern and an abiding engagement with his landscape. Really, it is just as much the pacing of his short lines and line-breaks that make these poems as any other element, moving at exactly the correct speed as it makes its way down the page. As well, the ‘hidden track’ poem-as-postscript, “Lite Reading,” offers its own kind of conclusion to the collection, opening: “What does a good future look like? / I asked the plum tree / as I steadied myself / on the aluminum stepladder. In its bare branches / the tree held open a few choice pages / of daylight to read. That’s what it asks here, I said / but the plum knew that passage / from memory / being a natural, as it were, in the literature / of water and heat.” See my full review here.
12. Sarah Burgoyne & Vi Khi Nao, Mechanophilia, Book 1: From Montreal-based experimental poet Sarah Burgoyne & Iowa City-based Vietnamese-born poet and multi-genre writer Vi Khi Nao comes the collaborative Mechanophilia, Book 1 (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2023), produced through Stuart Ross’ imprint, A Feed Dog Book. I’ve been an admirer of Burgoyne’s work for some time, but hadn’t previously been aware of the work of Vi Khi Nao (although I’ve caught more than a couple of interviews she’s conducted, including this one with Sarah Burgoyne), the author of not only six poetry collections, a short story collection and a novel, but a prior collaborative work, the novella Funeral, with Daisuke Shen (Kernpunkt Press, 2023). Mechanophilia, Book 1 is composed as the first of an ongoing, potentially open-ended collaboration between the two, comparable to the two volumes of the “Continuations” series, composed as well via email, by Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy. It is interesting to get a sense of the crossing of vast, geographic distances between these two writers, something articulated as well in a review of Nao’s prior collaboration, almost as though she is working to either chase or bridge a number of solitudes. Mechanophilia, Book 1 is composed as a continuous, book-length piece across more than a hundred pages, following a numbering system of lines that accumulate, following the numerical structure of pi. A “collaborative epic,” as the press release offers, “by American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne (who have never met) that follows the omniscient conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet.” The numerical system is reminiscent, slightly, of those grid-poems that Canadian Modernist poet Wilfred Watson (1911-1998), a poet better known for being married to legendary prose writer Sheila Watson (1909-1998) than for his own work, spent his career focused upon. Through Burgoyne and Nao, there is the suggestion of the call and response, threads that myriad and move beyond the two distinct voices that mingle, weave and interweave, blending into each other as a separate sequence of a combined single voice. Through these two, references weave into and around each other, changing shape and texture as the poem furthers. Part of what becomes interesting through such a project is not only how such a project might progress across the further three volumes, but how the individual works of these two might adapt as well. See my full review here.
13. Kim Trainor, A blueprint for survival: poems: Writing from and through Delta, British Columbia and wildfire season while “charting a long-distance relationship,” Kim Trainor’s fourth full-length collection is A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), a book-length poem around climate crisis, fires and long-distance love. Furthering her examination of the book-length lyric suite, A blueprint for survival seems comparable Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024) for their shared book-length British Columbia perspectives around climate crisis and wildfires, but with added layers of emotional urgency. As Trainor’s poem “Iridium,” set in the first section, includes: “I can’t read anymore. / There is no clear way. I will venture out along white tracks. Mark ink / on green-ruled numbered pages. Lay down strips of black carbon. Scatter / signals of plutonium and nitrogen, Tupperware, chicken bones, lead. / Absorb radionuclides. Take shelter. Mourn. Make fire. Write poems. / Conserve. Despair. Decay.” There is a thickness to her lyric, writing undergrowth and foliage, of trees and scientific names. A few pages further into the first section, as the poem “Paper Birch” begins: “These are notes for a poem I meant to write in August, but poetry / seemed very far away then. The BC wildfires smudged the shoreline / of the Saskatchewan—everything ash on the tongue, like cigarettes / or coffee dregs, and the sun a smoked pink disc. / I had not seen you for weeks except by Skype (I’ll strip for you, / you said, and you did) but now in flesh meandering, / now talk, now silence, now climate change and / your research on the Boreal.” There is something of the long poem combined with both the poetic diary and book-length essay that Trainor offers in this collection, articulating crisis and climate but expanding into an agency of archival research and illustrations; she writes asides and footnotes and prose stretches through a lyric framework in an impressive book-length package. This is a highly ambitious and heartfelt collection, one that even provides echoes of the detailed lyric researches of one such as Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris, attending to the big idea through an accumulation of minute details. The scale of this volume is incredible. I don’t know how to begin. See my full review here.
14. Ellen Chang-Richardson, Blood Belies: Oh, I am absolutely delighting in the structures and shapes of Ottawa-based poet, editor and collaborator Ellen Chang-Richardson’s full-length poetry debut, Blood Belies (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2024), published through Paul Vermeersch’s Buckrider Books imprint. Even the back cover copy provides a liveliness, working to prepare any reader for the wealth of possibilities that lay within: “In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as they bring their father’s, and their own, stories to light, writing against the background of the institutional racism in Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late 1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s, Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?” There is such a wonderful polyvocality to this collection, a layering of time and tales told, including asides, overlapping and faded, fading text; a multiplicity within a singular frame, representing multiple ways, furrows and threads across this collection. The poems offer quick turns, clipped lyrics and inventive speech, writing heredity, silence and open space. Set through three sections, and a poem on either end of the collection to bookend, Chang-Richardson plays with space on the page through word placement, composed absence, swirls of text and image, erasure and hesitation, providing a forceful book-length provocation of slowness, storytelling, pulse and punctuation. “My brother and I sometimes posit” they write, part-through the collection, “that maybe they named him Sing in the hopes he would go through life / embodying a song – // past present and future interactions make us question that line of thinking.” Chang-Richardson writes of race, of family, of identity; of anti-Asian racism, and a history that provides an intimacy around such facts as Canada’s Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration in 1902, and The Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which prevented Chinese immigration into Canada until the Act was repealed in 1947. Chang-Richardson offers a delicate and powerful lyric of such strict, incredible precision, speaking only a single word or phrase or absence, where others might have offered pages. Through memory, archive, gymnastic language, erasure and an expansive, inventive sequence of forms, Chang-Richardson offers insight into and through family history, trauma, possibility and story, one that honours both past and the present, constructed as a larger portrait of family, history and self, but as much a loving and attentive outline of the author’s father. “I lost my wanderlust in tandem / to losing you --,” Chang-Richardson writes, near the opening of the collection, “ – but we no longer speak / of such things.” See my full review here.
15. Faith Arkorful, The Seventh Town of Ghosts: As part of this year’s spring quartet of poetry titles from McClelland and Stewart is Toronto poet Faith Arkorful’s eagerly-awaited full-length debut, The Seventh Town of Ghosts (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), a book that begins with her mother, and of origins. “i am going to tell you about yourself, she says,” the poem “ORIGIN STORY,” which opens the collection, begins, “which means she is going to tell me what she knows of / a beginning for herself.” The poems in The Seventh Town of Ghosts are thick, tangible and evocative, populated with family and familial connections; of familial spaces and cultural apparatus. “I can only guarantee my breathing in the present.” she writes, as part of the poem “WHAT ERA WOULD YOU TRAVEL TO IF YOU HAD A TIME / MACHINE?,” “This life is my only / chance. What comes before glows in the dark.” These are poems that seek, seek out and call out, responding and reacting in ways thoughtful, and with considerable weight. “I have no answers,” she writes, as part of the poem “LONG ISLAND MEDIUM,” “only small honesties. / The moon moves around us and us around / the sun. Every breath a plant makes is an / act of forgiveness. Winter is a chore and a / punishment. I know these truths.” A clear and confident debut, The Seventh Town of Ghosts is a book of truth and connection; a book of witness moving across the culture, amid the long shadow of ongoing and perpetual police violence. “I tried to explain the story and you said that if / the police don’t provide a reason for the stop then they / have done something illegal.” the poem “NO DIFFERENT” begins, “You are telling me this means / I am allowed to walk away. I am trying to explain that / I have never seen a police officer struggle to find a reason. / You and I do not share the same rules.” With a strong and optimistic heart at its core, this is a book that works to speak openly, while attempting to reconcile such differences, disturbances and brutal and blatant truths. Or, as the poem “JUSTIN TRUDEAU DREAMS IN BLACKFACE” ends: “This / country belongs to me. This body, all bodies. I am a kingdom of bodies. / Indeed, many will have to stand throughout my performance.” See my full review here.
16. Bren Simmers, The Work: The latest poetry title by Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers is The Work (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), following Night Gears (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2010), Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015), Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press, 2019) and If, When (Gaspereau Press, 2021). The Work, as the back cover offers, engages “with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portion of grief. Simmers writes of churning in an accumulation of losses—the sudden death of her father, the descent of her mother into dementia, her sister-in-law’s terminal illness—and of the work of slowly making wholeness out of brokenness.” There is an enormous amount of churning, as the book offers, through this collection, swirling and surrounding grief and illness and the roiling turmoil of familial health, all of which carry their own considerable and accumulative weight. “There comes a point / when the losses stack / up and all you want is / a few good years and / cash in your wallet.” Simmers writes, to open the poem “LOAD UPON LOAD,” the piece that opens the first of the book’s five sections. Simmers’ usual clear narrative lyric provides a tension through its very restraint and straightforwardness, writing the implications of grief, and the regrets around what can no longer be said, no longer be repeated, no longer be taken back. “The last night I was in an airport I ran / from one empty terminal to the next / looking for a time zone with my father / still in it.” she writes, to open the poem “ICE FISHING.” Further, to close the short poem, offering: “I could feed a village with / my grief. These days, / I don’t need a shelter or // an opening to talk to him. / Simply stand on the ice, / let the wind scale / my cheeks.” See my full review here.
17. Hamish Ballantyne, Tomorrow is a Holiday: I’m intrigued by the quartet of sequences that make up Vancouver poet Hamish Ballantyne’s full-length poetry debut, Tomorrow is a Holiday (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2024), a title that follows his chapbooks Imitation Crab (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Durham NC: Auric Press, 2022). Composed across the sequences “Hansom,” “Luthier,” “A&Ws” and “ROCK ROCK CORN ROCK,” Tomorrow is a Holiday is, as the back cover offers, “a witness at the margins,” all of which provides a curious and amorphous shape to that absent, outlined centre. “a letter from jimmy buffett to / benjamin treating the form,” he writes, as part of the third sequence, “of appearance of movement arrested / in the billboards advertising / billboard space: a whale encounters / an enormous incarcerated krill in a submarine [.]” There’s a lustre of the Kootenay School of Writing language-infused work poetry across Ballantyne’s lyrics, one that acknowledges labour, even across the patina of holiday, comparable to recent works by Vancouver poet Ivan Drury, Vancouver poet Rob Manery, Winnipeg poet Colin Smith, Windsor-based poet Louis Cabri or Vancouver poet Dorothy Trujillo Lusk. He speaks to the things around those things that are also around those things, writing rings around rings around that absent presence of centre. See my full review here.
18. Sylvia Legris, The Principle of Rapid Peering: Smart readers know that a new poetry title by Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris is worth noting, thus her latest, The Principle of Rapid Peering (New York NY: New Directions, 2024), following prior collections Circuitry of Veins (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1996), Iridium Seeds (Turnstone Press, 1998), the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Nerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005), Pneumatic Antiphonal (New Directions, 2013), The Hideous Hidden (New Directions, 2016) and Garden Physic (New Directions, 2021). There are few poets working this kind of tone and scale, writing a particular intimate depth across both the expanse and distance, although one might see Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, a poet originally from Saskatchewan, holding echoes (tendrils?) of Legris’ lyrics throughout her own. As the online blurb for the collection offers: “The title of Sylvia Legris’ melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of ‘rapid peering.’ Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist’s notebook in verse.” Presented, as well, as her Covid-era collection, Legris examines specifics that pinpoint deep enough to bleed into an abstract, writing an anxiety that works to ground itself, quite literally, into a comfort of foliage and gardens; what emerges out of both the wild and cultivated earth. “Ring a ring o’ roses.” she writes, as the second section of the twelve-part sequence “Viscum Album,” “Broom root and mistletoe. / Ligneous chatterers. / Lungs halo March.” Given such, the poems across The Principle of Rapid Peering situate themselves across a Covid-specific timeline, neither forefront nor backdrop but as a constant presence, with pieces such as “Forecast Issued 5:00 am CST / Sunday 27 December 2020” and “Forecast Issued 6:00 am CST / Friday I January 2021.” The collection also hosts two Covid-quartets, equally titled “An Anatomy in Four Seasons,” the first of which holds titles “The First Spring of Covid,” “The First Summer,” “The First Fall” and “The First Winter” (one presumes you can discern the titles from the second sequence easily enough, hopefully). The garden, within its seasonal timelessness remains, but within the shadow of this particular period. See my full review here.
19. Shō Yamagushiku, Shima: Another full-length debut from this spring’s McClelland and Stewart poetry quartet is Victoria, British Columbia-based Shō Yamagushiku’s book-length poem, Shima (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), a collection built as a collage-text of memory, witness, family history and scrapbook, detailing, as the press release offers, “the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community.” Opening with the prose-set “Shima,” the book collages a quartet of sections—“amerika-yuu,” “yamatu-yuu,” “uchinaa-yuu” and “yanbaru-yuu”—which combine into a long poem comparable to a book such as the late Barry McKinnon’s infamous I Wanted To Say Something (Prince George BC: New Caledonia Writing Series, 1975; Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1990), which was itself an essential long poem of leaving, collage, family history and recollection. “Uncle,” Yamagushiku writes, “Forgive me for shining this light / into your graveyard of an eye // Where are you?” And a few lines further: “You are being vaulted into currency / carved of timber bones, this relic // that you will become, you thought // you had a choice [.]” One might say that Yamagushiku’s narratives stretch out into an abstract as well, offering narrative concreteness across a far wider canvas. Even prior to the first piece, Shima offers a definition of the title: “shima, n. 1. A village; a community. / 2. One’s home village. 3. One’s fief. / 4. An island.” The definition informs, but says little, with the history of this Japanese city buried under the weight of what remains unsaid, but for through Yamagushiku’s lyric. Paired with the opening quote by the late Etel Adnan, from her collection Paris, When It’s Naked (The Post-Apollo Press, 1993)—“An ancestral forest within me stirs my / memory and makes life untenable.”—Yamagushiku frames a collection named for this ancestral city, writing around exile, utilizing family/archival photographs and the endless strands of history. “a vastness // disappears // abandons me,” he writes, early on in the collection, “to a cloudless night // all the stars // turn sleep’s path // away from me [.]” See my full review here.
20. Concetta Principe, DISORDER: The latest from Peterborough-based “award-winning poet, and writer of creative-non fiction, short fiction, as well as scholarship that focuses on trauma literature” Concetta Principe is the poetry collection, DISORDER (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2024), following her collections Interference (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 1999) and This Real (St Johns NL: Pedlar Press, 2017). DISORDER is composed with a focus on neurodiversity, the focus of which is quite unique, and an important one; working meditative stretches while attending an open conversation aimed toward dismantling stigma. Composing her DISORDER, Principe offers poems not as the opposite of “order,” but through a structure requiring its own attention, composing crafted lyrics on what isn’t a problem to be solved but a difference of perspective. “Just so you know knots / are the pyrotechnics of appetite // repressant;,” she writes, to open the poem “ICING ON THE CAKE,” “a kink in the intestine / of this birthday cake // wrapped in frosted lake; [.]” Principe utilizes the lyric as a sequence of narrative threads that work to examine, unpack and document the way she thinks and moves through the world, and there are echoes in her meditations that remind of works by Pearl Pirie, or Phil Hall, attempting to discern how the world works (or doesn’t work) through language (including a stellar cluster of prose poems). See my full review here.
21. Margaret Christakos, That Audible Slippage: I’m always amazed at the wealth of contemporary Canadian writing and poetic thought available in print, providing an array of Canadian poets working on a whole other level. To illustrate the point, my deeply-incomplete list of those better-than-best would include poets such as Sylvia Legris, Stephen Collis, Sandra Ridley, Jordan Abel, Erín Moure, Gil McElroy, Phil Hall, Anne Carson, Dionne Brand, Canisia Lubrin, Lisa Roberston and a multitude of so many others, all of whom are doing work that are difficult to compare, although echoes, patters and patterns of influence and conversations can’t help but reveal themselves, naturally. Another of those Canadian poets long working at a far higher level than the rest of us is Toronto poet Margaret Christakos, author of the recently-released collection That Audible Slippage (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2024). I’ve mentioned before my admiration for Christakos’ ability to simultaneously establish something self-contained through work that speaks and relates to her other published works. Within that particular trajectory, the original composition of That Audible Slippage roughly holds to a loose temporal boundary from her time as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2017-18, and there’s something about self-contained “residency” poetry titles I’ve always found intriguing, providing a space and time for a different kind of self-contained work. Through this, That Audible Slippage can be said to follow a string of other poetry titles compositionally specific to poet-in-residence positions, whether Moure hetronym “Eirin Moure” composing Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001) out of a University of Toronto residency, George Bowering’s The Concrete Island: Montreal Poems 1967-71 (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1977) out of a Sir George Williams residency, or even my own University of Alberta writer-in-residence collection, wild horses (University of Alberta Press, 2010). Spaces such as these are very different than the focused time of, say, two or even six weeks at The Banff Centre or three months at Al Purdy’s A-Frame or The Burton House Writer’s Residency, offering the ability to move beyond one’s day-to-day context across an extended period, all of which can’t help but provide a different kind of attention, focus and perspective. If we, as writers, are so changed, even if through context, wouldn’t the writing be so as well? See my full review here.
22. Dawn Macdonald, Northerny: From Whitehorse, Yukon poet Dawn Macdonald comes the full-length debut Northerny (University of Alberta Press, 2024), a collection set in and responding to her particular landscape, place and experience of what the rest of us in the lower parts of Canada refer to as the north. “Fireweed is edible and best before / the bloom.” she writes, as part of the poem “ROADSIDE WILDFLOWERS OF THE NORTHWEST,” “Pigweed, a sort of spinach. / Kinnikinnick, we called it / honeysuckle. There’s something else called / honeysuckle. We’d call it what / we want.” As she highlit during her launch a few weeks prior, the poems here refuse the easy depictions and descriptions, and even work to correct outside narratives on and around a place she knows intimately, but I would suggest she offers these elements not as foreground but as an underlay, beneath her depictions and observations, writing her own line across such intimate backdrop. “growth is its own / value proposition.” she writes, as part of the poem “INCREASE,” “love’s supposed / to be automatic / like transmission.” Macdonald’s poems flash light, offering intrigues of clarity, depth of lyric intrigue across narratives that depict and document a particular kind of angled roughness and wilderness. “One day the wind will have my heart, I guess,” she writes, as part of the poem “WALKING THE LONG LOOP,” “flash fried and let fly from the jar of ash, / assuming such litter is permitted, and you’re there / to flip that lid. / I could do worse than to lodge, / even the barest bonescrap, atop / a nodule of pine. Anything / with sap in it, a line / to the nearest star.”Playing off Emily Dickinson, her opening poem, “FIRST THINGS,” hold to the small moments of chickens and broken eggs, writing: “Riddle wrapped up inside, / cased, laid, brooded, clucked upon, clean // as a whistle. An egg’s / a thing / with features, but, order / of operations applies – a flashlight shone clean / through the inside / illuminates outline, diagram, edges blown: [.]” See my full review here.
23. Simina Banu, I Will Get Up Off Of: The second full-length collection by Montreal poet Simina Banu, following POP (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020), is I Will Get Up Off Of (Coach House Books, 2024), a book-length suite akin to a deck of cards, working through layers of depression, regression and response. As the back cover writes: “How does anyone leave a chair? There are so many muscles involved – so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate.” From the cluster of lyric explorations of her full-length debut, Banu shifts into a structure of prose lyrics that cohere into a book-length structure, the first page of which opens with a single fragment—“I will get up off of”—before the following page furthers that thought, leaving the space where the prior page, that prior phrase, had left off. Composed in a sequence of prose blocks, there is something less of the prose poem to this stretch of pieces than a poetry book’s-worth of prose extensions across the lyric sentence, each broken up into blocks, each returning to that same Groundhog Day moment. “this monobloc but Goya’s dog drowned in mud.” she writes, a few pages in. “It’s true the dog gazed upward, but she was looking at mud, and guess what, the mud wasn’t looking at her. If we want to be accurate, she was looking at oil, she was oil, and everyone was plastered. Me too, over and over and over: the oil fills my stomach, and the mud fills me.” There is something compelling in how Banu rhythmically returns each lyric opening to “this monobloc,” offering book title as the presumed opening phrase of each poem, perpetually returning to the beginning, to begin again, offering a tethered and unsettlingly stressed variation on Robert Kroetsch’s structure of composing the long poem; by continually returning to the beginning, one can keep going indefinitely, after all. And yet, Banu’s seemingly-unbreakable narrative tether is entirely the crux of the problem her narrator wishes to address, reducing the complexities of depression and anxiety down to the simplest, and deceptively so, of questions, asking: How does one get up from a chair? See my full review here.
24. Domenica Martinello, Good Want: The second full-length poetry title by Montreal poet Domenica Martinello, following All Day I Dream About Sirens (Coach House Books, 2019), is Good Want (Coach House Books, 2024), a collection that immediately opens with quotations by American poet Mary Ruefle and New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird, with a further reference within to American poet Dorothea Lasky, all of whom are well known for working variations on Martinello’s similar engagements with a first-person lyric tautness of swagger and pop culture confidence. “Inside my body was a strawberry / stain. Sturdy and sweet,” Martinello writes, to open “SOLSTICE,” “then suddenly / squelched. I choked out everything // that one populated my life. / Summer had no curfew. Flowers died, / public pools dried up and were used // differently.” There’s an echo of Toronto poet Lynn Crosbie’s work here as well, although Martinello’s poems appear to aim for more compact and even straightforward lyric sentences across such potential emotional or narrative messiness. The structures of these poems are bone-tight, even within the bounds of such expressive narrative gestures. “Snapshot: gold ring in the mud underneath the old deck. // The house sold,” she writes, to open the poem “BAD EYE,” “their tall blond children fled. I once coveted // a ring from one of them, muscular and goofy, all smile, no bite. // He swallowed my contact lenses in a glass on the nightstand, // fell in love as I pegged him on his childhood bed.” Martinello’s poems in Good Want offer an oratory, a lyric less of performance than as preached from only slightly above, writing her sharp strikes, crafted lines and disorienting wisdoms clear-eyed and gestural; hers is a craft that is obvious, of carved and burnished steel. See my full review here.
25. Ben Robinson, The Book of Benjamin: From Hamilton poet Ben Robinson comes the full-length The Book of Benjamin (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2023), a project that alternates between an ongoing block text on the left side and short, observational moments that accumulate across the length and breadth of the book on the right. “MARRIED ON JUNE 29, 2015,” the block text writes, early on in the collection, “EARL AND MICHAEL BENJAMIN-ROBINSON WERE THE FIRST SAME SEX COUPLE TO LEGALLY MARRY IN THE STATE, STARTED THE FIRST BLACK GAY PRIDE CELEBRATION IN MISSISSIPPI IN 2004 AND OPENED ITS FIRST LGBT RESOURCE CENTER. THEIR WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER, BENJAMIN ROBINSON, A PHOTOGRAPHER OF 15 YEARS, PLAYED A MAJOR PART IN GETTING THEM IN TO THE COMPETITION, PAUL SAID.” The simultenaety of these paired texts is reminiscent of the structure of the second trade collection by poet Darren Wershler (formerly Wershler-Henry), the tapeworm foundry, or the dangerous prevalence of imagination (Anansi, 2000), a book that ran a simultaneous and ongoing text across the length and breadth of the book along the bottom of each page, akin to a news ticker, providing an alternate to the book’s main action. Through The Book of Benjamin, Robinson’s two texts exist in tandem, akin to DNA strands wrapping into and around each other, with a further level of alternating subject, as the text on the right side moves from presumed biographical details and observations by the author around his own life and alternate Benjamins he has encountered along the way, to the Biblical Benjamin, out of Genesis; youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons, and brother of Joseph. “At work, I overhear an adult ask a child what her new sibling’s name is. The child freezes, just stands there until her mother jumps in to clarify that the newborn doesn’t have a name yet, but they are considering a few. One is Nora. // Later that afternoon, another customer comes in and one of my coworkers asks what their last name is. The customer stares at my coworker for a moment before replying, ‘Don’t have one’ and walking away. // Later still, a customer comes in whose last name is nobody.” The narrative of The Book of Benjamin unfolds (as overused as that word is, the descriptor is apt), slowly and surely, across an enormous distance through the most intimate of details. He writes of naming, as the back cover offers: “Like an obsessive baby name book with only one entry, The Book of Benjamin establishes links between identity, birth, and grief. Braiding the story of his stillborn sister with the Biblical account of Benjamin to explore how names and their etymologies might shape our self-understanding, Ben Robinson resists the individual focus of the memoir, while investigating new forms of masculinity.” The weaving of his late sister, braided through the narrative of the collection, acknowledges both a grief and his sister herself, little more left than than that memory, the grief and the fact of her name. Through The Book of Benjamin, the weaving of name and self ripples out into elements of family, from his parents and siblings, to him becoming a father himself, which can’t help but evolve into a conversation, and a book, for, about and through his lost sister. In many ways, The Book of Benjamin is less a book about the author and his name than a book that allows her, the late Emily Robinson, to be acknowledged, and discussed openly, and the rippling effects of both her and that unfathomable loss. See my full review here.
26. Tia McLennan, Familiar Monsters of the Flood: I was curious to see the full-length poetry debut by Pender Harbour, British Columbia-based poet Tia McLennan, Familiar Monsters of the Flood (St. John’s NL: Riddle Fence Publishing, 2024), part of a trio of poetry debuts produced through St. John’s, Newfoundland literary journal Riddle Fence, as it slowly moves to branch out into book publishing. Familiar Monsters of the Flood is a collection composed of small lyric scenes across a tapestry of family moments, writing a dream-scape around the loss of her father (my immediate namesake, incidentally). “To think of leaving / as if it were a train station / to move through and we are / always late.” she writes, as part of the poem “Late Letter to Dad.” The narratives of her poems are shaped, often shaved down to a single thought, a single thought-line, such as the short poem “Hungry,” as the first half of such reads: “Driving around the gravel bend / in Dream Valley and catching / a slim coyote gliding down / the middle of the road toward / me. I slowed, hoping to get a closer / look at something wild.” The poems are contained as small moments or scenes, held together across a soft cadence of sentences and line-breaks. There is an unease through these poems, one intertwined with memory, loss and grief, all of which are rendered in relation to that dream-scape, whether aside or from deep within. “I have updated your address / and added your darkest thoughts to the file.” she writes, to open the poem “Now You Have Full Access,” “You must fill out the forms / using only spit and moonlight. // If you forget your password, / press your face to the earth in springtime.” See my full review here.
28. Michael Goodfellow, Folklore of Lunenburg County: The second full-length poetry title by Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael Goodfellow, following Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022), is Folklore of Lunenburg County (Gaspereau Press, 2024). Goodfellow’s latest collection riffs off the volume Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia (Ottawa ON: E. Cloutier, King’s Printer, 1950) by Dartmouth, Nova Scotia folklorist Helen Creighton (1899–1989), the spirit of that particular collection utilized as a prompt for Goodfellow’s explorations on landscape, folklore and storytelling through the form of the narrative, first-person lyric. According to one online biography for Creighton: “She collected 4,000 traditional songs, stories, and myths in a career that spanned several decades and published many books and articles on Nova Scotia folk songs and folklore.” “A haunting was a dream you had with your eyes open,” Goodfellow writes, as part of “OTHERS SAID DISAPPEARANCE / WAS RINGED LIKE A TRUNK,” “just as the sky was paved with the light of stones. / The forest was a wall that painted itself. / The forest was a door that didn’t close.” As the back cover of Goodfellow’s collection offers, his poems “are rooted in the ethnogeography of Helen Creighton and the otherworldly stories of supernatural encounters that she collected on the south shore of Nova Scotia in the mid-twentieth century. For Goodfellow, these accounts evoke much more than quaint records of a primitive time and place.” Part of the strength of Goodfellow’s lyrics is his ability to offer such precise physicality, composing poems hewn, and hand-crafted with a hint of wistful, folkloric fancy in otherwise pragmatic offerings. “The light how stars are brighter / when you don’t stare at them,” he writes, to open “WINTER LEGEND,” “how a fall day could feel like spring, / how a dog won’t look at you when it’s frightened, // how ash is the last to leaf, / how on certain nights / it was said that animals could speak, // how we named the stars other things. / How often their names were animals.” There is something intriguing about how Goodfellow utilizes the suggestion of outside sources for his framing, from the “bibliography” of his full-length debut to now taking Helen Creighton’s work as a prompt through which to respond in his own way to what he sees, as though seeking an outside lens from which to jump off of, to begin to explore, in his own way, the landscape, stories and people of his home county and province. Through Creighton, Goodfellow responds to both the stories themselves and the collection of those stories. “The stories collected were fragmentary,” he writes, to open the prose poem “MOTIFS,” “not even stories / in some cases, just a line or two about what they had seen.” See my full review here.
29. Britta Badour, Wires That Sputter: Poems: I’m only just now going through Wires That Sputter: Poems (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2023), the full-length debut by the award-winning Toronto-based artist, public speaker and poet Britta Badour (a performer otherwise known as Britta B.). I get books in the mail nearly every day, and it took nearly a year to realize that McClelland and Stewart hadn’t actually sent along the spring 2023 list (which is why I’m so late), so this title only landed quite recently. There is such a wonderful sense of performative expansiveness to these pieces, poems composed through a blend of pattern, rhythm, confident gesture and deep sense of the personal. She writes with a sense of loss and of heart; an open-hearted intimacy, whether writing on family, politics or culture. “In May, if asked,” she writes, as part of “: If His Mama :,” “I would’ve said you’ll either have hurricanes / or become one.” These poems are performative, declarative and substantive, offering a deep sense of storytelling and rhythm, as well as a deep moral foundation, one that holds through and despite all as an anchor against any storm. “here we are bewildering,” she writes, as part of “: Letters to Miranda :,” “our single mothers’ make-believe, we sisters / here we are dancing to Boys II Men / here were are maybe four and six and Miranda is leaving / I repeat the alphabet for twenty years [.]” See my full review here.
30. R Kolewe, A Net of Momentary Sapphire: The latest from Toronto poet R Kolewe is A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023), a collection that “offers three closely related poetic sequences, random rearrangements of a poignant but obsessively recurrent source text – streams of consciousness in which no stable self can be elucidated.” There aren’t that many Canadian poets these days overtly working in the tradition of the long poem – Vancouver poets Stephen Collis and Renée Sarojini Saklikar, certainly – and Kolewe has been feeling out the boundaries of formal innovation across the long poem form for some time now, from his Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Bookhug Press, 2021), as well as through a handful of chapbooks. There are even fewer Canadian poets working so deeply and through such lengthy works via the recombinant—although works by Grant Wilkins, Gregory Betts, Margaret Christakos and Sonnet L’Abbé certainly come to mind. Across three numbered parts, three separate sequences—“PART ONE: The foretaste of a vision, but never the vision itself,” “PART TWO: Like the noises alive people wear” (part of which landed previously as an above/ground press chapbook) and “PART THREE: Beginning again & again is a natural thing even when there is a series”—Kolewe extends a sequence of collage-thoughts, writing a moment, another moment and a further moment in a lengthy, continuous string of gestures. “I can’t write what I really cant. / Remember leave things out I am like bees,” he writes, in the fifth part of the one hundred and twenty numbered sections of the second sequence, “That’s the real thing is what I said I said. // Ah, but then we would be come more than / modern, & death / always so contemporary.” See my full review here.
31. Tonya Lailey, Farm: Lot 23: “I’m prone to forgetting,” Calgary-based poet Tonya Lailey writes to close the opening poem, “Farms and Poems,” of her full-length debut, Farm: Lot 23 (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), “the purpose / of a farm / of a poem / has always been / the living in it.” According to her author biography on the back of the collection, Lailey “spent her childhood on a farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake. She started a winery there in 2000 with her family and winemaker Derek Barnet. Certified as a sommelier, she worked in the wine trade until 2020.” The length and breadth of the poems within Farm: Lot 23 explore and examine her relationship with that plot of family land, from the days of her grandfather and a history of that particular corner of Ontario to her own experiences growing up and eventually working within those particular boundaries. “I think about the new reaches of peaches,” she writes, to close the poem “Peaches,” “the cultivars we’ve bred and breed for travel. / And that year, after the war supports ended, // when my grandfather still farmed peaches / and Wentworth Canners closed, unable to compete / with plantation agriculture to the south, // all around the township peaches ripened / then rotted in piles.” She writes poems from the Niagara Peninsula—wine country, for those unaware—managing the music and rhythms of daily activity on a working farm, offering these as both documentary and as a way to speak to the human elements of familial life, such as the poem “The Give in Inches,” as she offers: “My parents sum / up the farm in twenty acres; the survey says / eighteen-point-five. They never do agree // on boundaries.” These are sharp poems, composed with enormous thought and care, composed as both portrait and a love letter to an eroding space. “On the other side / of the property line,” she writes, to open “Acre,” “the riverbank / the river, / chestnut, basswood, black walnut / American elm, black willow / bitternut hickory, blue beech, butternut / blue ash, sassafras—with its leaf asymmetry. // Nothing / in a / row.” Across opening poem and four sections—“CONCESSIONS,” “LINES,” “END POSTS” and “FARM PHOTO”—Lailey offers such a soft and subtle music articulating a working farm from the inside, not merely as reminiscence but contemporary, working and lived-in space. There’s a thickness, a density, to her detail, one that embraces the lyric but carves the lines so precisely to hold all that is required, but without sacrificing her music. She writes a precision to her lushness, on seasonal crops of cherries, peaches, pears and plums. “Away,” she writes, as part of “Out to the Farm in July,” “from the stewed lap / of the shore / and the scents in banks / of raspberries / spicebushes / fringed bromes / hop sedges / bonesets / running strawberries [.]” See my full review here.
32. jaz papadopoulos, I feel that way too: The full-length poetry debut by Lambda Literary Fellow, “interdisciplinary writer, educator and video artist” jaz papadopoulos is I feel that way too (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024), a collection of poems that, as Amber Dawn offers as a back cover blurb, “flay[s] rape culture open in ways that discourse cannot.” Across four sequence-sections—“The Rules,” “History of Media,” “I Feel That Way Too” and “Epilogue”— papadopoulos articulates a study of and around sexual violence via lyric narrative, composing a contemporary conversation of depictions, dismissals, agency and ongoing trauma through erasure, repetition, specific examples and cultural markers. “A beautiful man / asks if I would read him a poem.” papadopoulos writes, as part of the extended title sequence, “I open / whatever I’d last written: hyssop help me, hyssop health me // hyssop help me now. Flowers pressed / over the Ghomeshi trial, its inescapability.” I feel that way too offers an explosion of lyric exposition that bursts out of a conversation long repressed, until it has no choice but explode, and hopefully part of a larger, longer trajectory of cultural shift. The language papadopoulos utilizes is thick and rich with gymnastic, rhythmic density, including further in the title poem-sequence, as they write: “Bloated raspberry. Overfilled / red balloon fishnets bulging plump / diamond rubies. The cochineal / is a parasitic scale insect that lives on cacti in North and South America / looking like Jessica Rabbit’s lips / procreated with a cob of corn and the offspring / came out kernelled, in scarlet / rows, swelling at the seams.” This is a book about harm and solutions, and about how both are portrayed, mangled, represetend and misrepresented, writing out a string of savage truths and circumstances, and the possibility and impossibly, the very limitations, of language, thought and action. Or, as they write as part of the title sequence: “It is so very / frustrating / when none / of the words work.” See my full review here.
33. Clare Goulet, Graphis scripta / writing lichen: I’m fascinated by Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia poet Clare Goulet’s full-length poetry debut, Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), a collection of poems approaching language as the means through which to articulate a detailed study. “So pretty it shocks: pink smarties / shaken out of the box,” she writes, to open the poem “Icmadophilia ericetorum / candy,” “picked on a whim / for the green-room rider, pleasure spreading / its plush blue blanket every which way / over moss.” There is a curious way that Goulet’s language propels, composed as field guide, scripting a detail through language that suggests hers is a somewhat slippery subject matter: is this a collection around the collection and study of lichen, or a means through which to discuss something else entirely? Possibly both, honestly. Goulet’s poems provide a kind of layering, of waves and sweeps, writing around and through the subject of lichen, multifaceted enough to ply meaning upon meaning. “Lichen as armour is truth inverted: / a bullet-hole flowers,” she writes, as part of “Parmelia sulcata / hammered shield,” “cancer / takes root, a wound is blessé.” There is something comparable, obviously, to Goulet’s explorations through the minutae of plants, language and Latin to the work of Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris, although Goulet seems to offer her explorations not as an end but as a means through it, such as the poem “Zaubreyus supralittoralis / dreaming,” that offers: “I have not been honest, not told you / years collecting lichen made a river of forgetting / which meant not thinking / about him.” Akin to Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” or Monty Reid’s The Alternate Guide (Red Deer AB: Red Deer Press, 1985), the poems emerge out of the prompt of the original study of lichen, but instead wrap that research around other considerations, other functions, across the length and breadth of her lyric. She writes of the Greeks, intelligence reports, Shirley Jackson, Mae West, Plato, Mad Men, cartoon gestures and other touchstones, utilizing her research as both core and writing prompt, offering a solid line of meaning thick with context. See my full review here.
34. Chris Turnbull, cipher: The latest by Kemptville, Ontario poet and curator Chris Turnbull is cipher (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), a book of listening and attention; of being present, and outdoors. Set as a triptych of suites—“candid,” “contrite” and “ciper”—Turnbull extends her note-taking across a slowness, writing moments and local through a book of ecological space. “in now, when, then –,” she writes, as part of the first section, “compression – generated – / for this / instant-on-instant, [.]” Compression is a perfect word to describe Turnbull’s poem-structures, a kind of book-length accumulation of note-taking that exists amid the tensions of compression and expansion. Across the length and breadth of the book as compositional space, Turnbull composes short bursts of lyric that stretch out across a wide canvas, compelling and attending an ecopoetic of minutae and magnitude. “littoral zone – hundreds / list,” she writes, as part of the first section, “founder – dark reshaping clusters – /// easy / does it /// these domains / are fluid [.]” She writes of unsafe roads, ice on the river and bees messaging, a poem composed from and within a landscape, elements of which echo her ongoing rout/e, her project of placing poems along rural walking trails, and watching across time as the words fade and pages decompose’; a project, by itself, which echoes Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s collaborative Decomp (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013). Across cipher, Turnbull’s words hold, erode, corrode, and slip into soil. There is an element, also, that echoes Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” although, unlike Niedecker’s infamous poem that emerged as an extension of work-related research, Turnbull’s lyric exists as both research and reportage: these poems are simultaneous study and result, and of something ongoing, deeply intuitive and regularly attended. See my full review here.
35. Stuart Ross, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky: The latest from award-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, critic, editor, publisher and mentor Stuart Ross is The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2024), a collection assembled, as the back cover offers, as “a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes.” With so many contemporary collections seeking to cohere through shared tone or structure, this seems a highly deliberate miscellany, allowing for what each poem or situation might require, whether poems that reflect on quieter moments, homages and responses to friends, including Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell or the late Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, his late brother Barry, or offering his annual New Year’s poem, a tradition he’s kept up for a number of years. “In Michael’s office,” the poem “MICHAEL’S OFFICE” begins, “we are surrounded / by poetry. each passing month, / the space for books expands while / the space for people contracts. You feel / the poems on your clothes, your skin, / and your tongue. It is paradise.” He writes of shadows, mortality and depression; not as an edge but a kind of underlay, ever-present, and impossible to avoid. “That / tingling sensation in my pocket / is not chewed gum but a cluster / of stupid nouns that,” he writes, as part of the title poem, “joined at the hips, / creates a quivering language / uttered only by clouds.” He includes poems that riff on and respond to particular works by Nelson Ball, Charles North, Ron Padgett and Chika Sagawa, among others, as well as a further poem in his “Razovsky” poems, turning his family’s former name (before it was shorted to “Ross”) into an ongoing character, one that emerged in his writing during the 1990s, and first fleshed out as part of his collection Razovsky at Peace (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2001). There’s always been something intriguing about the way Ross has played this particular character, occasionally riffing as a variation on himself (who he might have been, perhaps, had his grandfather not anglicized their name), or even as a kind of red herring akin to the late New York novelist Paul Auster, introducing “Paul Auster” as a side-character in certain of his books, whether to distract or distinguish from who the main narrator might truly represent. See my full review here.
36. Paul Celan, Thricelandium, trans. Mark Goldstein: Further to Toronto poet, editor, publisher, translator and critic Mark Goldstein’s explorations through the work of Romanian-French poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) is Thricelandium (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), translated by and with a hefty introduction and even heftier afterword, “ON TRANSLATING PAUL CELAN,” by Goldstein. Thricelandium is but one step in a much larger trajectory through Goldstein’s thinking around Celan’s work, with other elements including: his poetry collection, Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010); his collection Part Thief, Part Carpenter (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021), a book subtitled “SELECTED POETRY, ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS ON APPROPRIATION AND TRANSLATION”; as publisher of American poet Robert Kelly’s Earish (Beautiful Outlaw, 2022), a German-English “translation” of “Thirty Poems of Paul Celan”; and as curator of the folio “Paul Celan/100” for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, posted November 23, 2020 to mark the centenary of Celan’s birth. It has been through the process of moving across such a sequence that I’ve begun to appreciate the strength of Goldstein as a critic, offering a thoroughness and detail-oriented precision to his thinking, working to articulate his approach to the material and his translations of such, that seems unique, especially one focused so heavily on the work of a single, particular author. Honestly, I’m having an enormously difficult time not reprinting whole swaths of his stunningly-thorough introduction, which deals with, among other considerations, Goldstein’s approach to the translation and how Celan’s work helped him develop his own writing. Across three poem-sequences—“ATEMKRISTALL · BREATHCRYSTAL,” “EINGEDUNKELT · ENDARKENED” and “SCHWARZMAUT · BLACKTOLL”—there is a lovely contrary and delicate quality to these poems, offered both in the original German alongside Goldstein’s translation. The language swirls, moving in and out, and through, blended and perpetual meanings that become clear as one moves through, holding a firm foundation of clarity by the very means of those swirlings, those gestural sweeps. See my full review here.
37. Melanie Siebert, Signal Infinities: From the very first line of the opening poem of Victoria, British Columbia poet and therapist Melanie Siebert’s latest poetry collection, Signal Infinities (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), comes an electrical charge: “As if breath has sourced a new element, / a charged conductivity, / proteins holding open each cell’s gates, // water or something like water presses in. // As if a fine mist wicks / between this thought and the next.” (“Water takes up the office”). Following her Governor General’s Award-shortlisted debut, Deepwater Vee (McClelland and Stewart, 2010), there is some big canvas stuff happening in Signal Infinities, a simultaneous structure of big ideas, small details and precise, sweeping gestures. “biting his hoodie strings / fountaining Basquiat dreads / saintly for math’s sake,” she writes, as part of the third section-sequence, “TRYING TO READ LAKE’S CASE NOTES,” “Gen Z levels of sleep deprivation / his voice is musical code / his concentration finessed / to a nanospear / tuned to every test like enemy footsteps [.]” Set with opening poem followed by five sections, Siebert structures her lyric accumulations across a framing of, as the back cover offers, “a therapist [who] takes up an apprenticeship to a lake, to bare attention.” She writes an ongoingness, from the quartet of the opening poem “Water takes up the office,” the suite of individual, interconnected lyrics of the section “THE SESSIONS ON REPLAY,” to the extended sequence of fragment-notes of the poem “Somatic Psalms” and the nearly twenty pages of similar structure across the poem-section “TRYING TO READ LAKE’S CASE NOTES.” “the first-time knife held / to his own throat,” she writes in that particular section-sequence, “does not emit / absorb or reflect light / in the spring-loaded slapdown / of five psych reports / ten years later more is unknown / than known [.]” Her lyrics offer themselves as strings of innumerable, interconnected moments, one step following another; an examination towards and into the possibility of clear-thinking, insight and clarity. See my full review here.
38. Keagan Hawthorne, After the Harvest: I’m just now getting into Sackville, New Brunswick poet and letterpress printer (founder of Hardscrabble Press, who is also in the process of taking over Gaspereau Press) Keagan Hawthorne’s full-length debut, After the Harvest (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023), a carved sequence of family stories cut and shaped into stone. Hawthorne sets up a landscape of east coast barrens, every word in its proper place, akin to the kind of Newfoundland patter and long descriptive phrases and sentences of Michael Crummey’s Passengers: Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2022). “Well, you know, we had a few good years,” Hawthorne writes, to open the poem “THE BOOK OF RUTH,” “no kids but a nice house, jobs, / and when the end came it was mercifully quick. // His mother moved in for the last few weeks / to help with care, and stayed on / after the funeral to help me clean things up.” There is a physicality to these poems that are quite interesting; a rhythm of storytelling, and a story properly told, through the rhythm and patterns of first-person ease across such descriptive motion. “It was a spring of record heat,” the poem “SPRING FEVER” begins, “when you walked down to the river, / found the pool above the beaver weir / and took off all your clothes.” See my full review here.
39. AJ Dolman, Crazy/Mad: The full-length poetry debut by Ottawa poet, editor and fiction writer AJ Dolman is Crazy/Mad (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2024), a book of anxieties, flailing, resistance, vulnerability and mental health struggles. “Ruptured spokes and axel / whine as moulded steel settles / into new shapes,” Dolman writes, as part of the poem “Trauma response,” “plastic, / deflated lung, a broken tradition; / cougar and hare motif homaging / histories of crosshairs / triangulated on hills of fog, / the many outcomes / that came before, / that will [.]” Set with opening poem “Overthinking” and three sections of poems—“HYSTERIA,” “NEUROSIS” and “MELANCHOLIA”—Dolman’s first-person lyrics move through an array of subjects, examining and highlighting rage, trauma, self-harm, vertigo, supernatural beliefs, atheism, personality disorders and memory loss. “There’s a story,” the poem “Memory loss” ends, “the night that happened, / but a man can’t tell a story like that. / He has to wait until everyone named within / is dead; can only hope to outlive them, / so that someday he can explain his certainty / to no one [.]” How does one write, or even find balance, through such struggle? There’s something interesting, also, how Dolman refuses closure, whether easy or otherwise, ending poems abruptly (although perhaps not as abruptly as they could be), often sans punctuation. It suggests both a sudden stop and a kind of ongoingness, how one poem, one crisis or concern, actually bleeds into the next. “All our forths and backs could be broken / into letters,” the poem “Difficulty concentrating” ends, “twenty-seven shapes, / a few scratches, but we whisper / our meanings in the kerning [.]” See my full review here.
40. Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise: I’m intrigued by the latest full-length poetry title by Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). The Size of Paradise follows prior full-length collections Black Stone (effing press, 2007), Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform Press, 2014) and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks 2021), as well as numerous chapbooks, including from Riot / September 2016, an Inside Out Journal (above/ground press, 2019), and at least two with Kirby’s knife|fork|book: Sons (2017) and Blur (2022). The Size of Paradise is composed as a kind of book-length sonnet-scape or sonnet suite, one hundred pages of one hundred untitled poems. These are pieces composed through constraint, albeit one focused more on a gymnastic language than I’ve seen of his work prior, offering an array of poems that each sit self-contained, as a kind of repeated response to a particular prompt. “Promised bomb falls at each step and the dead / persist in long slumber,” he writes, half-way through the collection, “cohabitants / of earthly paradise. Circle the many / objects composing you, insistent / collection folding me in.” There’s a collage-echo to the sentences and phrases assembled here, and I’d be interested to hear how these poems began, almost expecting a response involving the daily motion of composing a poem with the only constraint being the sonnet, a consideration of duration and of writing itself. I’m curious about the way Smith pushes at the boundaries of the sonnet form, stretching and extending outward in waves, the edges of these poems moving nearly as would lungs. As well, to move through these poems is to move across duration in an interesting way, through the very act of writing, and of reading. “To write is a / residue like beauty,” he writes, early on in the collection, “a deformity / one adapts.” A few pages further: “I can barely sense duration.” See my full review here.
41. Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Bad Weather Mammals: Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s latest full-length poetry collection is Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Slow States of Collapse (ECW Press, 2016). Bad Weather Mammals explores illness, depression, trauma, disability poetics, and a history of violence; working through and across an array of ongoing and lingering, old and new, challenges across a first-person lyric. To open the poem “Good Sick/Bad Sick,” she writes: “The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing.” As the back cover offers, the collection “navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, Best traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance.” Opening the collection, the prose-poem “Chapter of Accidents” sets the tone, introducing all that might follow: “I am thirty years old and this is the first year of my life I have lived in an apartment that did not have a mould problem, that did not have a man problem, that did not have a man with fists in your face problem.” This is what one needs to know before she begins, before she moves further back to where she had been, compared to where she is now. The poems in and across Bad Weather Mammals represents an unfolding, an unfurling, of reclaimed and repurposed self, despite and through whatever else had been, has come and still is. “Bronwen suggested the body / is the limit we must learn to love.” she writes, to open the poem “I Am Becoming a House,” a poem which suggests a reference to the late Kingston poet Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989). “I’m not one to love my limits: / I’m practicing being an empty house.” She writes of disability and poverty, both through her childhood and into adulthood, and the reduced options available to her through either, both. “My words,” she writes, to open the nine-part sequence “Pathography,” “always pale reflections for the language / of my organs. They say I am so lucky, to not have / a nephrostomy tube intubating my kidneys, delivering / my body of its own fluids, like E. I was lucky a nurse / didn’t have to come every other day to clean bandages / and disinfect the open wound like E. I got to stay in school, / collect a scholarship and student loans, pay rent, groceries.” She writes of agency, even when and through a seeming lack of such, forcing her way through, and hopefully past, the worst of it. As she writes, further along in the collection: “Consider: it is a privilege to have a story, to know your own / narrative as surely as you know your name.” See my full review here.
42. Zoe Whittall, no credit river: From Prince Edward County novelist, poet and television writer Zoe Whittall comes the prose poem memoir no credit river (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024), a book self-described as “a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally inventive as it is full of heart.” As the first line of the introductory poem-essay, “Ars Poetica / Poem in the Form of a Note Before Reading” begins: “IT IS A CONFUSING THING to be born between generations where the one above thinks nothing is trauma and the one below thinks everything is trauma.” Approached as a hybrid/memoir through the structures of lyrc/narrative prose poems, this is Whittall’s fourth poetry title, following Pre-cordial Thump (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 2008), The Emily Valentine Poems (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2006; reprinted by Invisible Publishing, 2016) and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan Books, 2001). Set with introduction and three numbered sections of shorter pieces, no credit river is constructed through a sequence of self-contained prose poems as a first-person essay/memoir with lyric tilt, offered episodically, each piece unfolding as a kind of lyric moment or scene. Rich with fierce intelligence and a deep intimacy, Whittall’s sequence of diary-poems unfold and meander, and there’s an ability that I admire about her (or her narrator, alternately) ability to be present, whether discussing the wish to possibly have a baby, the devastation of a break-up, or seeing an elk outside her window at Banff Writing Studio, all while allowing the blend of daily life and writing life to shape and inform. “Form is content, I tell the elk. My girlfriend and I have an arrangement,” she writes, as part of “Neurotic, / Bisexual, Alberta,” “a type of freedom whenever we travel. This makes me cconsider all strangers from a different angle. When I’m the one left at home it makes me sleepless and on edge. I go see Dave read from a new play. I watch Jonathan give a talk. When I’m with a woman, I look only at men, and vice versa. You should know you’re bisexual if you answer the question Are you ever just happy with what you’ve got? I know gender isn’t that simple.” See my full review here.
43. Ben Robinson, As Is: The latest from Hamilton poet Ben Robinson, following The Book of Benjamin (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), is As Is (Winnipeg MB: ARP Books, 2024), a collection that opens, appropriately enough, with a quote by the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe: “It is a long distance call from London to Putnam (25km). / It is not a long distance call from London to Glencoe (50km).” The quote emerges from Curnoe’s infamous Deeds/Abstracts (London ON: Brick Books, 1995), and Robinson utilizes As Is with similar intent, even if far different approach: attempting to explore and articulate his own relationship to geographic space and its wealth of history, from his own immediate back through well before European occupation. Whereas Curnoe explored the specific Lot upon which sat his house, Robinson explores specific elements of his Hamilton, Ontario, where, as his author biography has offered in the past, he has only ever lived. “I push my son through our neighbourhood.” he writes, to open “By-law to Provide for and Regulate a Waste / Management System for the City of Hamilton,” “It’s just us / and the dog people. A three-legged chair on a lawn, / a box spring at the curb with NO BUGS spray painted / on it in black.” Through long sweeps of short lines and historical space interspersed with shorter, first-person lyrics, Robinson provides As Is the feel of a kind of field notes, moving across and through layers of personal history, the history of Hamilton, and the occupation of centuries. “He didn’t realize that in this country,” he writes, as part of “Remediation,” “when a white man / runs his boat into something, it gets name after him. / Fifty years later, randlereef.ca is adorned / with a logo of a tern flying low over water.” Composed as a poetic suite on and around overlooked and neglected histories, Robinson folds in and incorporates research and first-person observation, moving in and across time, references and intimacies deep and distant, from kept lawns and parenting to city founders, landscapes and boundaries, and what passes for history, passing notes like waterways. See my full review here.
44. Michael Turner, Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems: The latest from Vancouver writer, poet and musician Michael Turner is Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2024), a collection that follows multiple poetry and prose titles across thirty-plus years that play with genre, music and narrative layerings, from the infamous Hard Core Logo (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993)—the only Canadian poetry title adapted into a feature-length film—Kingsway (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995), American Whiskey Bar (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), The Pornographer’s Poem (Toronto ON: Doubleday, 1999) and the most recent 9x11 (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018). As the back cover of this new collection offers: “Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introduction and ends with the songs – or in this instance, poems – to which they refer. Though these poems aren’t expressly critical, their formal method of construction qualifies them as that subgenre of poetry known as the protest poem.” Turner has long been engaged with the the hows of narrative, offering book-length twists, blending working-class first-person commentaries into the lyric, or a book-length poem as long as a particular city street. There are threads here that run through the length and breadth of Turner’s work, from an interest in genre, working class flexibilities, autofiction, tour notes, rock ‘n’ roll songbooks, the lyric sentence and the straighter lyric, and the dual-aspect of commentary and poem in Playlist provides an inverse kind of call-and-response to the pieces. It is almost a reversal of the poem-and-response of Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (McClelland and Stewart, 1978), or even Ken Norris’ COMMENTARIES (above/ground press, 1999), his chapbook-length prose poem response to his own full-length collection, The Music (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1995). Turner offers a story, and a song; another story, and another song. Sometimes the story is directly tied to the song that follows, but often it is not, allowing for a series of suggested links. There something of the folk-crooner, the work poet, through these pages. If Peter Culley (1958-2015) wrote songs, or if Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023) composed poetry titles, Michael Turner’s Playlist lands somewhere between, perhaps. See my full review here.
45. Mercedes Eng, Cop City Swagger: The latest from Vancouver poet and curator Mercedes Eng is Cop City Swagger (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), following my yt mama (Talonbooks, 2020), Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Talonbooks, 2017) and Mercenary English (Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2013), furthering her ongoing trajectory of poetic investigations of racism and colonialism in Canada. Eng spotlights a blend of archival and first-person commentaries on police action, police violence, in and across Vancouver, and the foundations of violence that extend out from the office of the mayor. Set in nine poem-sections—“Core Values,” “Corporate Values,” “Coporate Values,” “Tent City Citizens’ Safety,” “Public School Safety,” “Public Safety Budget,” “Workplace Safety,” “Indigenous Women, Girls, Nonbinary, and / Two Spirit Peoples’ Safety” and “Chinatown Public Safety”—Eng composes a book-length suite of critiques on perpetual state violence on and across vulnerable communities, and the very question of who and what, exactly, is being served. “I take the alley,” she writes, as part of the second sequence, “which I shouldn’t. It’s one of the last public spaces people who use drugs have left and I am taking up room. Several people are using, a woman’s hand is swollen from an abscess, and little hunks of meat are littered on the ground. In Chinatown there are several butcher shops as well as dumpster foragers so refuse spilled in the always is common but I see red meat cleaving from bone and cartilage for days. When I get to the church the police tape is gone and I can see blood on the sidewalk cracks.” In sharp bursts of prose lyric, Eng employs elements of the long poem into precise action, perhaps not far from what Dorothy Livesay originally intended for the “documentary long poem,” a form she employed across her own blend of politics and poetics. Eng writes an extended lyric through the official records and official responses of the mayor and the police chief, articulating a lyric from the ground level of police violence, not in a way of glorifying, but to document what she sees. Hers is a direct and urgent lyric, composed through archive, gesture and appeal through class and poverty, and the ongoing assaults upon both. See my full review here.
46. Andy Weaver, The Loom: The fourth full-length poetry title by Toronto poet Andy Weaver, following Were the Bees (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005), Gangson (NeWest Press, 2011) and This (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2015), is The Loom (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), one hundred and forty pages of an extended sequence-thread on the surrealities surrounding marriage, children, parenting and homestead through first-person lyric. As the back cover offers: “Andy Weaver led a life of quiet contemplation before becoming a father at the age of 42. Within three years he had two sons; two small, relentless disruptions to an existence which had, for a very long time, been self-sustaining and tranquil.” For some time, Weaver has been engaged in pushing his own variations upon a blend of the long poem/serial poem, and The Loom exists as an extended, book-length line. Composing sequences within sequences, he writes an excess that stretches itself through sequences and layerings, suites upon suites, clusters and accumulations, one held together and by this new foundation of domestic patter, and discovering how big a human heart might become. “Perhaps if a new content is / a new devotion,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CLEAVE,” “the result / of novel imagination, then / there is love even in reason—if / emotion is the first evolution / making ways for new forms of life, / then love is what gives us reason / for reason and saves us from the crushing / reality of reality.” Through the evolution of his lyric, passion and reason are no longer separate, distant poles, but a blended opportunity for enlightenment, calm and perspective, offering fresh layers of personal and lyric insight. Throughout The Loom, Weaver offers structural echoes of Robert Duncan’s lyric blocks and staggers, writing not an abstract articulating the spaces around and through the occult, but one of an open-hearted familial love, a grounding provided through his two young sons. “When I had journeyed half my life’s way,” he writes, near the opening of the collection, “I found I’d lost sight of love—just the sort / of line that mediocre, middle-aged men / have been using since the evolution / of male pattern baldness.” Through his explorations around family and children through a particular lens of the long poem, his work exists nearly as counterpoint to that of Ottawa poet Jason Christie, two modest and quiet poets (both with two young sons of similar age) simultaneously working their long lyric stretch of an abstract, accumulating domestic line. See my full review here.
47. Alice Burdick, Ox Lost, Snow Deep: poems: The latest full-length poetry title from Lunenberg, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick. Following the compactness of the poems of Book of Short Sentences, it is interesting to see how Burdick moves across longer forms. “To whom it may concern,” she writes, towards the end of the nine-page poem “Suspenseful demographics,” “you must surrender / the love song of sentient life. The truth is, / we will all be fuel cells. You brought me here / to speak with our fierce opponents, so / I might as well speak.” Ox Lost, Snow Deep held as an assemblage of thirteen longer poems, rife with surreal humour and first-person domestic, turns of phrase and observational twists. “It’s no problem to find the real story.” she writes, as part of “Suspenseful demographics,” “Live a wet dream, of which / an attack started the trajectory.” In each of these extended poems, it seems there’s always a direction she’s heading in but in no hurry to land, weaving and bobbing across her short sentences to see what might be possible along the way, which most likely alters her destination. Follow along with her sequence “Big Trouble in Little China Trouble,” for example, composed in response to the 1986 film Big Trouble in Little China, that begins: “Name, occupation: tourist bus. / Meat of this table a green flame. / Oh, sure. Sorcery because it’s real. I talk / and eat a very small sandwich in the Pork Chop / Express. The cheque is in the mail. / Rainy vegetables are funny. / Geese sing from boxes, / dumplings steam, / daytime dog.” While even an experienced reader of her work might wonder where she might be going, there’s never a sense of Burdick’s narratives at loose ends or lost, purposefully stretching out across a landscape of unexpected delights; we journey with her, seeing what she catches across the lyric. “They were not statistics / to themselves,” she writes, as part of “Life irritates art,” “Potentially infected salads // The printing press and mystic joy // The lyric, a scream // Too many write dull and straight / regardless of identity.” Her accumulations offer wisdoms and seek out questions, playful and incisive moments of sharp clarity carved through a musical flow of colliding words, sounds and ideas. “I thought the creatures around me were both here / and not. Not an absence of presence,” she writes, as part of the poem “Practice,” “but human at some point, even as echoes. Echoes of air made into form; my demands / were simple: you may enter only / if you tell me something interesting. / Practice memory to release into air.” See my full review here.
48. Stephen Collis, The Middle: Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis’ latest full-length poetry title is The Middle (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), furthering his array of poetry collections that speak to elements of climate crisis, social politics, community and human responsibility that include Anarchive (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2005), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008/2014), To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks, 2016) and A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks, 2021). Each collection of his to date is crafted as a book-length poem, but one that has evolved into an extended, ongoing trajectory of thought, writing from the deepest part of the centre. “To be in the middle is to be in relation,” he writes as part of his “PREFACE,” “moving between.” Across a sequence of “MOVEMENTS” and numbered “CANTOS,” it is curious to see the evolution of his ongoing work, and how he sets himself firmly in the tradition and foundation of the work of the late Robin Blaser (1925-2009): if the forest is indeed holy, one might suggest, then it requires protecting. As his “PREFACE” continues, a bit further along: “This long poem grown from the middle of life comes in three parts. The first finds its seeds in the assembling of a small library of Robin Blaser’s books – a decade after the poet’s death, his books arrived at the university where I work, like a long-whispered echo through the trees. so I ran through the Holy Forest like a madman – there was some urgency, the librarians said – so I ran, pulling quotations from volumes like branches broken from the trees, apples caught as they fell.” The Middle presents itself as a book-length poem of perpetual love, despite all ecological trauma we’ve inflicted upon the both the planet and ourselves, but articulating the conflict held between that devastation, that love. Self-described as an extension of Collis’ ongoing “investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering,” The Middle is the second volume of a projected trilogy; as a layering of one poem atop another, an expansive and introspective questioning of climate action and inaction, of state response; of music, movements and cantos, employing Blaser’s element of song across his examinations of the earth. “Without stopping / one after the other / lit out / for all haste / you move / your image moves,” begins “CANTO 25,” “words remain human / like blood coagulates / and quickens / like a plant / or sea fungus forming / from the begetter’s heart [.]” There’s a thickness to the collection, an intellectual and lyric heft, blended in such a way to not allow either to get in the way of the other, but intermingle comfortably; akin to the work of Blaser, one might say, able to absorb and engage with elements from his surroundings, his community, into something unique, lyric and purely his own. See my full review here.
49. Sophie Anne Edwards, Conversations with the Kagawong River: The full-length debut by Manitoulin Island poet Sophie Anne Edwards is Conversations with the Kagawong River (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), a book-length study structured and presented through a blend of lyric, visual poems, photographs and archival material. Edwards offers, as Dr. Alan Ojiig Corbiere writes in his statement that opens the collection, “a creative and meaningful book” that “grapples with a decolonial approach to writing about, and with, place – a place significant to both the Anishinaabeg of Mnidoo Mnising and settlers.” Self-described as a “site-specific engagement with an ecosystem of Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island),” Conversations with the Kagawong River emerges from “several years [she spent] learning to listen to the Gaagigewang Ziibi (Kagawong River) and to follow the rhythms and patterns of its flora and fauna, the weather and the water. She invited the participation of various collaborators – woodpeckers, otters, currents, ice, grasses. The resulting poems, supported by local Edlers, language speakers, and historians, make visible the colonial, environmental, and social processes that construct an ecosystem and (settler) relationships to it.” There’s an expansiveness to this collection, one that brings in an array of research and conversation and collaborate to form Edwards’ study of the river and its inhabitants, environment, ecologies and colonial interferences, comparable to how Fred Wah and Rita Wong’s collaborative art-text, beholden: a poem as long as the river (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018), to Lorine Niedecker’s 1966 poem “Lake Superior” (produced in a critical edition a decade back, which I reviewed here), or even the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe’s historical excavation of his London lot, Deeds/Abstracts (London ON: Brick Books, 1995). One could also cite further recent comparables such as Jennifer Spector’s Hithe (Connemara, Ireland: Xylem Books, 2021) or Chris Turnbull’s Cipher (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024) for an attention to minute, ecological detail across a constellation of lyric and visual expansiveness. Edwards attends to a listening, a conversation, one that includes the sound of the water, petitions to Colonial governments and traditional space, and the blend of visual forms, lyric and photographic montage is fascinating, opening up a layering of what might be possible through and across a poetry collection, structured akin to a gallery exhibition of more than two hundred rooms, two hundred pages. See my full review here.
50. Stephen Cain, Walking & Stealing: There is something curious about the accumulating distances between full-length collections by Toronto poet and critic Stephen Cain, from the relatively quick appearance of his first three full-length collections every couple of years—dyslexicon (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1998), Torontology (Toronto ON: ECW, 2001) and American Standard/Canada Dry (Coach House Books, 2005)—to the longer wait-times that emerged with False Friends (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017), and now, Walking & Stealing (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024). Some of us have been waiting, sir. There aren’t too many poets these days in Canada working through poems to see where the language might land or extend, offering the next steps in a conversation around poetics that seems to have quieted down over the past decade. Through Walking & Stealing, Cain offers himself as example of the standard-bearer for an exploration of thought and form, continuing a trajectory of sound and meaning collision, playfully battering around a lyric too often staid or safe. Where have all the language poets disappeared to? With so many poets of the aughts either shifted in poetic or publishing far less (if at all), Cain almost exists as a central Canadian counterpoint, one might say, to the west coast poetics of further still-standing poets Clint Burnham or Louis Cabri, all pushing further variations on a language-play through social commentary, countless quick references, and deliberate collision. “Canada Post- / Ashkenazi Anishinaabe,” he writes, as the eighth section of the nine-part “CANTO THREE,” “Two nations under clods / Anti-Semitism & assimilation // Fuck breathing fire / Spit sparks instead // Almost cut my fear / Flying my antifa flag // Smoke ‘em when you see them [.]” Are there any poets on this side of the country, still, referencing the work of Dorothy Trujillo Lusk (I would suggest there should be more, certainly)? For years, Cain was engaged in book-length sequences and stretches composed across ten sections, a kind of decalogue of extended language structures, whereas Walking & Stealing exists as a triptych that breaks down into further sections—the seventeen sections, some of which are broken into further sections, of “Walking & Stealing,” the ninety-nine short sections of “Intentional Walks,” and the nine “CANTOS” sequences of “Tag & Run.” The geographic composition points, setting the moment to the music of language, is an interesting mapping across Cain’s Toronto, almost an echo of bpNichol’s The Martyrology: Book 5 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982), a book I know that Cain himself has written extensively on, or Lynn Crosbie’s legendary “Alphabet City” abecedarian from Queen Rat: New and Selected Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1998), a book that should have won all the awards after it first appeared. The mapping of Cain’s Toronto becomes, if not direct subject, a kind of backdrop and prompt, allowing the landscape of his city to breathe into the animation of his language. See my full review here.
51. Kevin Stebner, Inherent: “Typefaces have personality built into their forms.” So writes Calgary poet, artist, bookseller and musician Kevin Stebner to open the end-note, or “Explication,” of his full-length assemblage of visual poems, Inherent (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2024). Stebner’s letterform work, as it would appear, builds on some of the prior and ongoing work done by contemporary Canadian poets such as Derek Beaulieu, Kate Siklosi, Amanda Earl and Gary Barwin, among others. Across the nine word-sections of Inherent, Stebner works through how letters are freed from language or even meaning, one might say, into elements of pure shape, simultaneously regressing and progresing through origin, back when shape implied shape and only itself. The book moves through and across thirteen letterform sequence-clusters—“Ultramatum,” “AdieuAdo,” “Totemic,” “Agalma,” “Significant,” “Süperiör,” “Peaceful,” “Brethren,” “Assemblage,” “Present,” “Kindled,” “Unbroke” and “WellWorn,” followed by the aforementioned “Explication”—providing an elasticity of letterform shapes and possibilities that move almost immediately beyond the realm of language purpose and meaning. There’s something ancient in these forms, something complex and yet basic in an understand of how letters begin, evolve and continue. This is a fascinating exploration of shape, and, if, through Kroetsch, a Phoenician might have had cause for grief, these forms could only delight. See my full review here.
52. Paul Celan, The Dark Oar, translated by Jaclyn Piudik: Presented as
a poem in three languages is The Dark Oar (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw
Press, 2024), offering an original poem by Romanian-French poet Paul Celan
(1920-1970) composed in German, alongside his own translation of the poem into
French, and subsequently, the translation from French into English by Toronto
poet and translator Jaclyn Piudik. As Piudik offers in her preface to the
collection, she purposefully chose to translate the poems from the French, as
opposed to translating directly from the German: “The Dark Oar brings
Celan’s French translations of his own German poems – 26 in total – into
English for the first time. Celan’s translations span some 17 years, from 1952
to 1969, through many phases of his life and his writing career.” She
continues, writing: “And while there are many fine translations of the original
German poems into English, the translation of Celan’s French versions of those
poems open a window into the poet’s relationship both to his mother tongue and
to his adopted language.” There is something I find fascinating about anyone
moving to write in a language beyond their mother tongue. Samuel Beckett
(1906-1979) and Milan Kundera (1929-2023), for example, who also moved into
France and composed works in French, each of them situated in their own unique
and very different forms of exile. Through Piudik’s offering, it allows for the
possibility of seeing further into the process of Celan the translator
alongside Celan the poet, catching the differences he might have himself seen
in the shifts between language, and a further project might be seeing just how
different these English translations might be to others taken directly from
Celan’s German. A book of companions and comparisons, especially for those able
to read German and French. See my full review here.
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