“When I arrived at Burnaby’s Simon Fraser University in the spring of 1970, the dust had barely settled on the previous five years of growing pains. A Magical Time took me back to the many exciting moments that would leave a lasting impression on members of my student cohort for better or worse.” Ron Verzuh reviews A Magical Time: The Early Days of the Arts at Simon Fraser University by the Simon Fraser University Retirees Association (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $38.95 / 9781998526062
Couplets driven by narrative (or prose with poetic DNA), an extravagantly told book relates a 24-hour period in a city with inhabitants under the yoke of capitalism. —Joe Enns reviews Kingdom of the Clock, by Daniel Cowper (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025) $24.95 / 9780228023715
An attractive trio of limited-edition chapbooks meditate on grief, selfhood, memory, and catastrophe. —Steven Ross Smith reviews Summoning, by Jacqueline Bell (Salt Spring Island: Raven Chapbooks, 2025) 22.95 / 9781778160387, Modern Words for Beauty, by Mary Ann Moore (Nanaimo: House of Appleton, 2025) $25.00 / 9780978347499, and Day Song, by Sharon Thesen (Vernon: Broke Press, 2024) $12.00 / 981738725380
“Cumulatively, the effect is like a nocturnal landscape that is suddenly lit up by flashes of lightning. This is not a book to devour at one sitting but to savour briefly and return to often.” —Christopher Levenson reviews Dog and Moon, by Kelly Shepherd (Regina: U Regina Press, 2025) $19.95 / 9781779400383
Characterized by “portraits of the hard side of urban life,” “sparse lines and raw subject matter,” and a “steady current of hopelessness and aimlessness,” a novelist’s sophomore volume of poetry seems apropos for uncertain and accelerated times. —Kelly Shepherd reviews After Sunstone, by Dustin Cole (St. Louis: Farthest Heaven, 2025) $15.00 / 9798990692527
“Derksen has the gift of being able to embrace the language of institutions and structures—with their cold terms and semantics—into modes, sometimes personal, sometimes societal comment, that draw engagement, critique, and are accessible.” —Steven Ross Smith reviews Future Works, by Jeff Derksen (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025) $18.95 / 9781772016284
“While the detail in these poems can be distressing, the writer has shown in-depth feeling and in-depth writing that cannot be denied, but laid out, shared, even while the narrator is sometimes wildly enraged.” —Cathy Ford reviews allostatic load, by Junie Désil (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025) $18.95 / 9781772016062
With eclectic figures and images—from the Grim Reaper and the banshee to ripe fruit, seeds, and soil—a poet cannily examines “our frail human presence,” aging, and death with calm, humour, and wisdom. —Jane Frankish reviews Becoming the Harvest, by Pauline Le Bel (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025) $20 / 9781773861562
Poetic voices from coast to coast are gathered in a volume that reflects on our era—an “age of unprecedented environmental crises.” Collectively, their work strives to create room for “dreaming and transformation.” —Mary Ann Moore reviews Speech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, by (eds.) Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland (Guelph: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) $20.00 / 9780889844902
With glimpses of “one of the greatest spectacles / the city ever sees / twice daily most seasons / dawn to dusk,” a poetry collection draws an array of meanings from urban crows. —Heather Ramsay reviews Crowd Source, by Cecily Nicholson (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025) $19.95 / 9781772016581
“Existing Music is a deeply layered and memorable work of poetic metaphor and imagery, and Nick Thran succeeds in playing with sound and shapeshifting, or transposition, to evoke an ‘Oh’ in the reader as we look over his shoulder.” —Joe Enns reviews Existing Music, by Nick Thran (Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2025) $19.95 / 9780889714861
Personal darkness and a generational chasm are examined in an urgent long poem—where a grandmother reaches out to a youth immersed in video game realities. —Isabella Ranallo reviews Encrypted, by Arleen Paré (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025) $20.00 /9781773861647
A Griffin Prize winner, a Vancouver poet’s translation of a preeminent Mexican poet’s work is “a rich, complex, and challenging book” that proposes a “wall of poetry” against the insistent iniquities of the world. —Gary Geddes reviews Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by Homero Aridjis (translated by George McWhirter) (New York: New Directions, 2023) $28.95 / 9780811231732
“300 Mason Jars: Preserving History is a book to be treasured. Beautifully presented in colour, the delightful poems and contents of the mason jars can be savoured and preserved for years to come.” Valerie Green reviews 300 Mason Jars: Preserving History, by Joanne Thomson (Victoria: Heritage House, 2024) $34.95 / 9781772935162
“The more we are immersed in the life, activism, and writings of Tommy Douglas and Milton Acorn, the more we will be walked into a unique Canadian synthesis of faith, literature, and politics that has still much to commend it.” Ron Dart contributes an essay on the work of the late poet and storyteller, Milton Acorn.
“From the sexual imagery of butterflies, to the confused and chaotic state of mind brought on by natural landscape and creatures found in them, to the exploration of potential structure shown in consequential panels, Shadbolt appears to have been an artist who not only absorbed the natural world in the place called British Columbia but also attempted to describe the state of mind it created within him.” Trevor Marc Hughes reviews Jack Shadbolt: In His Words by Susan M. Mertens (ed.) (Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2024) $40 / 9781773272559
“This is what one of our master poets wants to give us now that he is an elder—this ordinariness of poetry, its roots in people, and the role of a poet as the defender of human connection, even with seemingly non-human things.”
—Harold Rhenisch reviews Out of the Ordinary: New Poems, by Tom Wayman (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $22.95 / 9781998526123
“Between the Bell Struck and the Silence contains poems of immense beauty while the speaker seeks redemption for psychological injuries of the past and finds it in nature. Porter’s deft handling of ‘a music of imagery’ (to borrow T.S. Eliot’s term), and her pitch-perfect tone makes this collection a poignant and rewarding read.” —gillian harding-russell reviews Between the Bell Struck and the Silence, by Pamela Porter (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2024) $20.00 /9781773861418
Referencing “graphic novels, pop-up books, make-your-own-adventures, fairy tales, Christian bedtime prayers, kids’ illustrated books, television, movies, werewolf stories, and the Internet,” an audacious, eclectic volume of poems explores and responds to binarisms. —Harold Rhenisch reviews In Your Nature, by Estlin McPhee (Kingston: Brick Books, 2025) $23.95 / 9781771316439
Admirable for the “profound hymn it presents of childhood,” a book of prose poems celebrates “the trickster energy of boyhood, it’s inimitable curiosity and acceptance,” even as it acknowledges “the poverty of a hard farming life.” —Harold Rhenisch reviews Sprocket, by Al Rempel (Qualicum Beach, Caitlin Press, 2025) $20.00 / 9781773861654
