Untying The Apron
Daughters Remember Mothers of the 1950s
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
2013
Mothers of the 1950s were wasp-waisted, dutiful, serene, and tied to the kitchen with apron strings. Or so we thought. This collection of searing and startling poetry and prose unties the stereotype and reveals women who were strong, wild, talented, wise, mad, creative, desperate, angry, courageous, bitter, tenacious, reckless and...
Siamese twins, circus performers, burn victims, and scientists all clash in this vibrant and vivid collection. Throughout the poems, the experimental voice fills the page with broken lines, jump cuts, and a sense of nervous music. Merging poetry with theoretical science, this work occupies the gap between gravity and escape,...
Verge begins with a small fox waiting at the river's edge, symbolizing a woman at a turning point in her life. The fox lopes through the poems, at first looking back on the “cold yesterday” of childhood, then travelling with the poet as she moves through various changes and losses...
Romano Perticarini, Carlo Giacobbe
1989
This bilingual edition features the third collection of poetry from Romano Perticarini, who emigrated to Canada at the age of 33. It also earned the author a Bressani Award.
Giose Rimanelli, Achille Serrao, Luigi Bonaffini
1999
Rimanelli and Serrao meet for the first time in this collection of sonnets written under the aegis of the gaze, of certain thematic and stylistic preferences that include the use of dialect, a marked experimentalism, and a transgressivity that undermines the classical model of the sonnet.
Jean Royer, Antonio D'Alfonso
2018
This compilation of selected poems from three of his books is an excellent introduction to Jean Royer the poet. Overwhelmed by the deaths of his mother and his partner, Micheline LaFrance, Royer captures in poetic verse an emotional and intellectual world rapidly fading away. Always present one reads a sense...
In the writing of Wait, Ned Baeck intends to cut through the dishonesty and abuse that skew life. The subject is the struggle to live with integrity, and is as much about pain as love, squalor as aspiration. If the poems mark that the apprenticeship to poetry is endless, that...
What happens when we believe in something that isn't there? What happens when we doubt our own history? We cling to the solidity of physical space. Our abstracted sense of being swells to its limits, presses against its boundary of skin, bumps up against the world. Washing Off the Raccoon...
From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, We are no longer the smart kids in class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. A fantasia of academic disillusionment and...
Danielle Fournier, Christine Tipper
2011
Danielle Fournier was the winner of the 2010 Governor General's Award for French poetry for Effleurés de lumière (2009). To read Fournier is to plunge into the centre of a woman's heart and body -- a heart that continues to beat, to search and to hope spurred on by a...
In her debut collection of poetry, Conyer Clayton hovers in the ether, grasping wildly for a fleeting sense of certitude. Through experiences with addiction and co-dependence, sex and art, nature and death, she grapples for transcendence while exploring what it means to disengage. What is revealed when you allow yourself...
Merle Nudelman plumbs the nuances and vagaries which define our relationships and the shifting moments of lover, abuser, victim, and healer. The imagery in We, the Women is at once startling and evocative. Poems of layered scenes of domesticity and of the natural world border on the elegiac. In this...
In What If Zen Gardens …, Henry Beissel, often considered the master of the long poem, turns to the time-honoured tradition of the haiku to help bring to light what he calls “the world's hidden affairs.” Included in the collection are 19 black-and-white illustrations by Arlette Francière, themselves polished gems...
In his first collection of poetry, Max Layton takes the post apocalypse to new heights. Satirical in places, full of longing and remorse in others, the poems (each beginning with "When the rapture comes ...") bring together memories of family, trips to fantasylands, and outrageous humour. Life, in other words,...
Three Canadian soldiers awaiting deployment to Afghanistan beat a homeless man to death on the steps of their armoury after a night of heavy drinking. The poet, whose downtown Toronto home overlooks the armoury and surrounding park, describes the crime, its perpetrators, the victim, and a cast of homeless witnesses...
This is Ken Norris' ninth book of poetry which takes as its epigraph a quote from Henry Miller: "When the house is torn down the bed is left standing: the cosmosexual altar." The poems in this collection engage that condition. Whirlwinds of lovers. Voices out of the whirlwind. The bed...
Jacques Brault, Gertrude Sanderson
1986
L'ens dessous l'admirable describes Jacques Brault's inward, spiritual journey, with its risk of despair and desolation. It is essentially a grim voyage. Alone, in no man's land, drawn by the inevitability of death, tempted by the thought of release, the poet descends a dark road. There he encounters the mysterious,...
Richard Jeffrey Newman
2017
Richard Jeffrey Newman's collection of poems, Words for What Those Men Have Done, continues the exploration he began in The Silence of Men of how surviving childhood sexual violence has shaped his life as a man. Where The Silence of Men focused on ending the silence in which the men...
Writing Cultural Difference
Italian-Canadian Creative and Critical Works
Giulia De Gasperi, Maria Cristina Seccia, Licia Canton, Michael Mirolla
2015
Writing Cultural Difference is a welcome addition to Canadian literary studies. The publication of this volume certainly dispels the belief that Italian-Canadian writing was a passing phenomenon three decades ago. The new generation of writers no longer focuses on immigration or speaks the dialect of their grandparents, but that heritage...
Licia Canton, Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni
2013
Writing Our Way Home is an important contribution to literary studies. “Italian-Canadian writers are not just Canadian writers, but world writers,” states literary critic Elena Lamberti in the introduction to Writing Our Way Home. “They write from Canada with an original point of view on multiple (hybrid) identities and have...
In these poems, told from the writer's home on the outskirts of the city, dreams recur, lore emerges, memory merges with imagination, artifice with nature, and the physical with other possibilities. In choosing Elana Wolff as the 2004 Lichen Serial Poet, poet and critic David Solway writes of the winning...