Once more, I offer my annual list of the
seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive,
imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles
I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. This is my fifteenth annual list [see also: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021,
2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since
dusie-maven Susana Gardner originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write
up their own versions of same, and I thank her both for the ongoing
opportunity, and her original prompt. I recently caught “The best Canadian poetry of 2025” list via the CBC website, and saw not one but three poetry titles I hadn’t been
aware of. Did you know Canisia Lubrin had a new poetry book this year? You
probably did, whereas I did not. Did you know about Ben von Jagow? Sarain
Frank Soonias? Jason Purcell’s latest? I’ve been waiting for a copy of Vera Hadzic’s, also. I’m also hearing some amazing things about Melissa Powless Day,
as well. I mean, I hate being behind, and I’ve already attempted to get these
books, get some interviews happening with them two poets I hadn’t heard of
previously. Either way, I appreciate CBC including my latest, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), on such a glorious list! And you know, if you ever wish to sign up for our occasional email list for VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival (including information on our Ottawa Poets Laureate) or my weekly "Tuesday poem" email list, check out the link here!
This year, as well, we lost Canadian poets David Phillips (1944-February 10, 2025), David Dowker (May 20, 1955 – March 24, 2025) and Judith Copithorne (1939-2025), and Canadian-American poet Larry Sawyer
(1970-2025).
The first half of the year had me attempting to close
out my two non-fiction projects—“the green notebook” and “the genealogy
book” [I’ve been posting excerpts-in-progress from both of these over at the substack for some time]—some two and a half years focusing on non-fiction prose, as spring into
summer moved me to focus on two new poetry manuscripts—“Fair bodies of unseen
prose” and “dream logic: poems from a Sunday prompt”—before
launching fully into a new poetry manuscript back in July, thanks to our adventures across Ireland: “The Museum of Practical Things” [see my write up on such here]. Oh, and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press)
landed in October. I’ve had some nice write-ups on that.
Some further remarkable titles I caught this year included
Fast-Vanishing Speech: The 2023 Douglas Lochhead Memorial Book Arts Panel:
Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis and Christopher Patton (Kentville NS:
Gaspereau Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Michael e. Casteels’ debut
novel, Furthermore, the Lake (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025) [see my review of such here], SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra
Revulva and Amanda Shankland (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) [see my review of such here], Sadiqa de Meijer’s collection of essays In the Field
(Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books, 2025) [see my review of such here] and sophie anne edwards’ A Mouth of Vowels (Toronto ON: Guernica
Editions, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Via my substack, I’ve been
stretching out slightly longer reviews of prose titles, with a recent piece on Stephen
Collis’ Knock Down House (Pamenar Press, 2025) [see my essay here],
among others. I’ve also been posting short stories and other essays over there
as well. I keep telling myself I’m going to review further
journals, but only managed an issue of filling Station: filling
Station #84 : let slip the dogs.
Presuming my count is correct, I’ve posted some one
hundred and fifty-ish book reviews across 2025, the bulk of which on the blog,
but further at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics as well as
through Rob Manery’s SOME and Chris Banks’ The Woodlot: from
poetry books and chapbooks, anthologies, essay collections, novels, literary
journals, and further prose works. Is that all there is?
1. Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory: I’m
intrigued at Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant
Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), a collection of
essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn
Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein,
Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing
the authors’ own words. Set as chapter-sections, Katelnikoff repurposes each
writer’s words as a response to those same works, offering a way across the
work that is, in fact, through. In his own way, he turns their words back as a
mirror to themselves. “In short,” he writes, to open the Erín Moure
essay/section, “how can we be true to the way the brain works?” Katelnikoff’s
process has echoes of the way Klara du Plessis has been composing essays over
the past few years, specifically through her I’mpossible collab
(Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023): the critic is not removed from the
material but an essential part, offering the critic a way into the material
comparable to the creative non-fiction explorations through the 1970s and 80s
by writers such as Myrna Kostash and Brian Fawcett. Whereas du Plessis places
the critic directly into the material, Katelnikoff, instead, places the
criticism directly into the material, and the material discussed directly into
the criticism. Poets have been working elements of essay-poems for years—poets
such as Phil Hall, Erín Moure, Laynie Browne and the late Barry McKinnon, for
example—swirling across theory through the lyric, but Katelnikoff offers
critique through repurposing the language being critiqued, taking the process a
whole other level, writing essays from the inside. As he writes as part of the
acknowledgments: “All of the essays in this collection are written with the
permission of the writers whose textual materials have been recombined. In each
essays, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first section
are direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences are
spliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” It’s a
fascinating process, and a fascinating read. See my full review here.
Oloruntoba
offers deep attention to the smallest moments, small things, which allow for
larger revelation; the only way, perhaps, to get there from here. “I have been
troubling / the shoreline,” he writes, as part of the poem “EKPHRASIS,” “as
cryptids do.” There is an informed and steady progress of thought across
Oloruntoba’s lyric, deeply considered and gestural; wise and empathetic, even
as he unravels—as to reveal, and not to pull apart, damage or dismantle—his own
observations for the sake of further insight. “We / who are at our most human
when / we are yearning.” he writes, as part of “DEMONSTRO,” “My Cain-mark, your
/ Cain-mark, shows even, especially / in this gropesome dark.” See my full review here.
17. Zane Koss, Country Music: Guelph, Ontario-based
poet and translator Zane Koss’ second full-length collection, following Harbour
Grids (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2022) is Country Music
(Invisible Publishing, 2025), a book-length poem of stories, ghosts and the
country music of rural British Columbia upbringing. It is a very different tone
and approach from, say, the music of Dennis Cooley’s Country Music: New
Poems (Kalamalka Press, 2004) or Robert Kroetsch’s “Country and Western”
section of his Completed Field Notes (University of Alberta Press,
2002). As the back cover offers, Koss’ music emerges from stories told around
campfires or the kitchen table, held “against the backdrop of rural British
Columbia,” offering working-class tales of “humour and violence of life in the
mountains.” Koss weaves these stories through and around the shape of an
understanding of his own origins, and how he got to where he is now. As he
writes, early in the collection: “where have our fathers / gone i have still
lived more years / of my life // on a dirt road than a / paved one, / i tell
people that, and // though true, it
doesn’t / feel that way; mike, / where have we gone [.]” He opens the book, the
poem, with a sequence of storytelling narratives to establish his foundation of
a good story, plainly told; conversational, sections of which feel comparable
to The Canterbury Tales, but all told by the same unnamed narrator. The
poems, the extended long poem, of Country Music, is structured in
accumulating sections, offering short narrative bursts of storytelling lyric,
notational across the pause and parry across each storyteller’s particular
diction. See my full review here.
36. Steffi Tad-y, Notes from the Ward: The second
full-length collection by Manila, Phillipines-born Vancouver-based poet Steffi
Tad-y, following From the Shoreline (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022)
is Notes from the Ward (Gordon Hill Press, 2025), a book composed, the
back cover offers, as a “collection of poetry exploring bipolar disorder and
psychotic break through lived experience and a poet’s eye.” Through sharp,
first-person lyrics, Tad-y offers a variation on the declarative point-form,
providing a precision across difficult subject matter, writing phrases that
accumulate across her lyric stretches. The foundation of Tad-y’s lyric clarity
holds each line in place, even through descriptions of untethering; a lyric one
might hold on to, for dear life. In the poem “Mangroves,” as she writes: “Back
in the truck with Dad & Uncle. I tell them how the trees are / skin &
sanctuary to the coast, protection against the onslaught / of storms. // My
father places his hand on the headrest of my uncle in the / driver seat and
says, Families can be mangroves too.” What holds the collection together as a
coherent unit are the dozen numbered title poems throughout, gathering her
thoughts in a space that blends both attempting to heal and the challenges of
existing in such a physical and mental space. As “Notes from the Ward #3,” a
poem subtitled “After Ocean Vuong’s ‘Reasons for Staying’,” begins:
“Think of the next thirty years, mother asked. // The magnolia tree at Oben
Street still a pleasant memory. // Of the book, black with deep blue letters,
music despite my lack / of understanding.” Tad-y offers lyric declarations
underneath titles set as umbrellas, suggesting and directing and hinting at the
context of lines that blend direct with the indirect; her poems provide a tone
of attempting clarity through these poems, these ward-notes, seeking both as
documentary and process. While working through Tad-y’s poems, I’m reminded how,
in his novel Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (translated by
David Homel; Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1994), Dany Laferrière wrote that
he composed his first novel—referencing his debut, How to Make Love to a
Negro (Without Getting Tired) (translated by David Homel; Coach House
Press, 1987)—“to save his life.” See my full review here.
42. Jane Shi, echolalia echolalia: I’m
intrigued by the long sentence, sentences, that stitch together to form
Vancouver poet Jane Shi’s full-length debut, echolalia echolalia
(Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a collection that follows her debut chapbook Leaving
Chang’e on Read (Vancouver BC: Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). Stretching
across the length and breadth of the one hundred and twenty compact pages of
her debut collection, hers is a remarkable extended thought across lyric
meditation and formal invention writing the body, loss, nostalgia and layers
not simply reconsidered, but recycled, repurposed. “a tide-pool winter a hiss /
of hot violets little fibres / along my bedspread brush of threaded grass / in
the grubby broken cinema of memory scrub / my back filthily in the thick
sublunary lust / starts would make canyons o me the vast valleys / airless
marshes where travellers stumbled,” she writes, to open the poem “worship the
exit light,” a poem subtitled “A found poem created / from my
wordpress poetry journal / of my late teens (2008-2016) [.]” These
are such lovely visual and gestural sweeps, such as the poem “I want to face
consequences,” which begins with and leads into such an expansive swirl across
the page, one of a number of such she composes throughout: “17 / years / old,
and / still throwing / tantrums, the suburban / problem so specifically /
misdiagnosed / as the problem / of picky eating, on a sunday 10 / years later
she’ll check / into a resignation hostel, become / an audible ghost, beckon a
make-believe / social worker to arrive at her pillowside like a tooth / fairy.”
There’s a coming-of-age or coming-into-being element to these poems, but one
far more self-aware and wry, more playful, than most examples I’m aware of,
providing a sense of exploration and wonder, collaging observation with
cultural and pop culture references, and what one carries no matter where one
lands. See my full review here.
43. Manahil Bandukwala, Heliotropia: The
second full-length poetry title by Manahil Bandukwala, a writer and visual
artist who currently divides her time between Ottawa and Mississauga, Ontario,
is Heliotropia (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a collection
shortlisted both for the City of Ottawa Book Awards and the Archibald Lampman
Award. Heliotropia follows on the heels of a handful of chapbooks, both
solo and collaborative, as well as her full-length debut, MONUMENT
(Brick Books, 2022), which was itself shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert
Award, the same year she was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising
Star. “I dig out a hole and find things I once held / so tight,” she writes, to
open the poem “August,” part of the poem-sequence “Seventeen Months of
Distance,” “though nothing stopped their time to leave. / Fur shed when they
moved // into bigger and better lives. We are never ready / to absorb the
emptiness of loss, but must // pause to howl at the chameleon of being.” Set as
a suite of stand-alone poems amid poem-clusters, Heliotropia is a
collection of first-person narrative lyric heart. As her first full-length
collection, MONUMENT, as she offers as part of an interview last
fall, began as “a single poem that sought to highlight obscured Mughal women in
history,” a poem that evolved into a manuscript, having outgrown those initial
boundaries, this new collection writes (as the cover copy provides) “a
meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a
sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover’s
growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved.” Heliotropia
is a collection composed, purposely and unapologetically, of first-person
love poems, something the “serious writer” has long been told to steer of,
whether through creative writing classes or elsewhere (and for good reason, as
most contemporary love poems hold a combination of hollow, cringe and smarm;
the usual accomplished approach is from the side, not head-on), often set
aside, as well, for the sake of the more ironic and postmodern distance. And
yet, this impulse is where many writers begin, often in youth, falling into
attempts at writing that can’t progress thought beyond that initial feeling,
unable to find or reveal the poem, and the language, beneath what the heart
only knows. Through Heliotropia, Bandukwala approaches her subject, and
her lyric, with an eye on study, working her way through the collection with a
balance of exploratory distance and pure feeling, held together through the
bonds of craft. “The illiterate man feels / in the dark for words / he did not write. //
Outside his house,” Bandukwala writes, as part of “The Splitting,” “some men
say / he is a madman, others say he is / a poet // who believes enough words
will build a bridge to a life after now / where only beings lighter than air
float. // But the illiterate man is neither.” See my full review here.
44. Emily Austin, Gay Girl Prayers: As
part of the recent shortlist reading for this year’s Archibald Lampman Award,
Ottawa writer Emily Austin spoke of composing the poems that became her
full-length poetry debut, Gay Girl Prayers (Kingston ON: Brick Books,
2024), while simultaneously working on what would become the first novel, Everyone
in This Room Will Someday Be Dead (2021). These were poems, she said, but
she didn’t necessarily presume anyone would be interested in reading them. The
poems of Gay Girl Prayers, each of which are titled after each specific
chapter and verse source, exist as a reclamation, set as responses through her
own Biblical studies and Catholic upbringing. “Take the stones you plan to
throw at her / for not screaming,” she writes, to rework “Deuteronomy
12:23-27,” “or not screaming loudly enough / while she was raped / put them
inside of your pockets / and walk on water [.]” As she said at the event, she
didn’t think of these as poems per se, or herself as a poet, and instead focused
on two further novels (with another forthcoming), all of which appear with
Atria Books and Simon & Schuster Canada: Interesting Facts About Space
(2023), We Could Be Rats (2025) and Is This a Cry for Help? (due
to appear in January 2026). What she composed as her own playful sketch-notes
responding to some of the Bible’s darker elements, then, were temporarily set
aside. “Your mother came named from her mother’s womb / and retured there
gutted,” the poem “Job 1:21” writes, “Cover yourself in a golden chamois /
return to the forest adorned [.]” Gay Girl Prayers, as the copy for the
collection informs, is a “collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and
biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+
community,” a curious blend prompted by, among other factors, the fact that her
author biography provides that she “studied English literature, religious
studies, and library science at King’s University College and Western
University.” The poems of Gay Girl Prayers, quite literally, work to
reclaim agency against certain Biblical language, especially those elements too
often cherry-picked and weaponized. “Heaven is ten girls / who take their lamps
/ to one another’s bed chambers / to light their rooms /until they sleep.”
writes a short poem near the beginning, the title set at the end as a footnote,
rewriting “Matthew 23:1.” These are poems translated away from weaponization or
shame, away from the suggestion that any of God’s creatures, so to speak, as
they truly are, has any less value than any other. These are poems of
reclamation and biting humour, attempting a kind of play through translation,
comparable in form to other book-length poetry-projects such as bpNichol’s Translating
Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (1969) or Derek Beaulieu’s THE
NEWSPAPER (2013), but with a far different and more specific intent,
approaching the source material as something that requires adaptation beyond
simple translation, however the approach. Far too often, Biblical text is
approached as unironic, pure fact instead of as a living, breathing text; a
series of book-length metaphor texts, lessons that should be held as guidelines
for approaching thought, instead of a bludgeon with which to weaponize. Through
Gay Girl Poems, scripture offers a new way of approaching text, some of
which sit as koans, one to a page. In Gay Girl Poems, Austin has allowed
her own responses, turns, and twists to open up new possibilities through
antiquated language, and antiquated thinking. See my full review here.
45. Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, The Alphabet of Aliens: prose poems: The
fourth full-length poetry collection, and fifth title overall, by Calcutta-born
Mississauga, Ontario-based Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, is The Alphabet of
Aliens: prose poems (Mawenzi House, 2025). Following Bloodlines
(2006), Could You Please, Please Stop Singing? (Mosaic Press, 2016) and Uncharted
(Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2021), the poems across The Alphabet of Aliens
blur the boundaries between short prose and lyric, subtitled “prose poems,” but
landing, more often than not, in the imperfect designation of flash fiction or
postcard stories. “At the corner of South Linn and Washington is a
consolation,” opens the piece “The Curry Shop,” “but mostly empty. I entered
once but didn’t eat, instead, suffering an immediate deflation upon touching
the menu, traded stories, conflating places and times.” I’ve noted previously
how the self-declared prose poems of the late Connecticut poet Russell Edson
(1935-2014), said to be the
father of the American prose poem, felt more akin to flash fiction than even
the short fictions of writers such as Lydia Davis and Kathy Fish, so the declared
boundaries surrounding prose poems have been blurred for some time. Across
seventy-nine individual pieces, each ranging from one to three pages in length,
Nag composes a series of first-person narratives, of first-person reports,
offering sketch-notes on activity and an interiority, monologues blending
observation, commentary and documentary. As the first of the three-sectioned
“Place is a Sentence” begins: “To prove you are capable of belonging you had to
reveal your place. Since they were busy touching different parts of your tongue
you could say nothing else. What is place anyway? The scent of your tilled
back garden, someone said, opened a window. And in the strong headwind when
you floated up like a shadow of three pasts, they freaked out.” See my full review here.
57. Eric Schmaltz, I Confess: From Halifax-based poet,
critic and editor Eric Schmaltz comes I Confess (Toronto ON: Coach House
Books, 2025), a book-length poetic expanse that follows an array of chapbooks,
as well as his full-length debut, SURFACES (Picton ON: Invisible
Publishing, 2018), and critical titles including I Want to Tell You Love, A
Critical Edition by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (co-edited with
Christopher Doody; Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2021). Produced
with an “Afterword” by American-based New Zealand poet, editor, academic and
critic Orchid Tierney, there’s an enormous amount of play through Schmaltz’s I
Confess; play, resistance, confession, self-awareness, visual expansiveness
and lyric truth. It is as though he, as a poet who leans far more into
experimental and conceptual forms, attempted to approach lyric’s “confessional
mode” from an entirely different perspective, pulling apart the bones to thus
reassemble into something else. “Remember, you can be as nervous as you like.”
he writes, in his own call-and-response, “Nervousness and deception look
different. // Do not move. Tell me when you would like to begin.” There are
those who might see the confessional lyric as an exhausted form, although
through Schmaltz, a whole new life is introduced. Through text, photographs,
visual text, waveforms, erasure, utterance, polygraph charts and accumulation,
Schmaltz explores the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental
lyric; exploring certainty and uncertainty, as he investigates text-forms and
perceived truth, attention, poetry and poetic form. A caveat, whether
descriptor or warning, by the author at the offset, offers: “This book is a
document of truth’s performance under duress. // Some of what you will read is
true; the rest is poetry.”In
many ways, the core of the book’s content is familiar—who am I and how did I
get here—but examined through a unique blend of experimental and confessional,
each side wrestling for a kind of control that might not be possible. Given the
foundation for this particular mode of inquiry is the use of polygraph, it
introduces a whole other layer of tension, of resistance: “I confess,” as the
poem, the pages, repeat. “We’re going to focus on some background questions.”
Schmaltz writes, “This part of the session ensures that you are able to speak
truthfully and that you are mentally and physically fit to proceed with the
polygraph test today. // Please answer the following questions truthfully.”
There are occasionally ways through which certain conceptual poetry-based works
can articulate human elements more deeply, more openly, than the lyric mode,
something I felt as well through Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Book 1
(Coach House Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], and Schmaltz manages a
dual-core through this work that counterpoints brilliantly, working from the
most basic of human questions across a structure of the nature of being, the
nature of expansive, articulated, inarticulate and impossible truth, composed
across an expansive bandwidth. See my full review here.
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