Author’s third book of poems, is “a charming sequence that boldly documents the speaker’s firsthand experience with mental illness. Far from unfamiliar to those who have not been diagnosed with such an illness, the speaker’s thoughts and feelings represent an intensifying of the human spirit in all its joy and personal inadequacy and, most of all, in its need for a sense of purpose to feel whole.” —gillian harding-russell reviews Notes From The Ward, by Steffi Tad-Y (Guelph: Gordon Hill Press, 2025) $20.00 / 9781774221679
Please take a moment to contribute to our annual fundraiser at The British Columbia Review. In our 2024 campaign we raised $14,000 from 158 donors, which represents about a quarter of our income, the rest coming from grants, advertising, and partnerships. I hope we can equal that amount again this year. A big thank you to those who have already donated.
Evelyn Lau’s “Cursing, Flailing,” selected by Mary Dalton for inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry 2026 (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2025) $24.95 / 9781771966764
Solemn and autumnal when not wintry, a pair of ruminative poetry collections range widely as they reflect on troubled personal histories and the outside world. —Marguerite Pigeon reviews I Would Like To Say Thank You, by Joseph Dandurand (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025)
$19.95 / 9780889714908 and November, November, by Isabella Wang (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $19.95 / 9780889714847
Delightful while sobering and illuminating, a memoir-in-verse celebrates pop music as it revisits cultural history and queer coming-of-age in the ’80s and ’90s. —Brett Josef Grubisic reviews Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir, by Michael V. Smith (Toronto: Book*hug, 2025) $24.95 / 9781771669498
In pensive dialogue with twentieth-century history, and with Robert Polidari’s photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl, a poet outlines the politics of catastrophes as well as their aftermaths. —Harold Rhenisch reviews Long Exposure, by Stephanie Bolster (Windsor: Palimpsest Press, 2025) $21.95 / 9781997508014
Venerable poet “delivers an impressive thirteenth poetry book,” “a collection that is not only evocative and visceral but masterfully precise, honouring its namesake (a reference to the formerly common training routine of figure skaters to practice control, precision, and balance).” —Brooke Lee reviews Compulsory Figures, by John Barton (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025) $20.00 / 9781773861661
A poetry series—with an aim to “produce beautiful volumes and to alert readers to poems that remain vital to thinking about urgencies of the contemporary moment”—lives up to its ambitions with authoritative, revelatory essays and an impressive sampling of a poet’s “visceral,” “wry,” “potent,” “grim,” and intermittently comical poems. —Steven Ross Smith reviews Hunger: The Poetry of Susan Musgrave, selected with an introduction by Micheline Maylor (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025) $23.99 / 9781771126953
Acknowledging that “life’s mid-point [is] now far behind,” a writer’s volume of poems meditates on the past, family, nature, faith, love, and, generally (says our reviewer), “the latter part of life, with all of its disappointments and consolations.” —Carellin Brooks reviews The Time of Falling Apart, by Wendy Donawa (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $22.95 / 9781998526307
Like “a call to action, a protest, and an accusation,” a formally experimental and politically engaged collection of poems wrestles with—and questions—the ethics of the Vancouver housing market. —Jane Frankish reviews SCAR/CITY, by Daniela Elza (Montreal: McGill Queen’s UP, 2025) $19.95 / 9780228023739
“But mostly we see people alone, like the guy sleeping in a van or the haunting shot of two young women divided by a bus shelter pane, each intent on their phone. Why are we so alone, DeCroo’s poems wonder, and in one of them he hopes he will find a face that will provide the answer.” Sheldon Goldfarb reviews Night Moves: The Street Photography of Rodney DeCroo, by Rodney DeCroo (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2025) $40 / 9781772142396
Breakage-and-mending is a theme in an adroit and accomplished volume of poetry that delves into family history and unsettles romantic notions of settlement. —Harold Rhenisch reviews What is Broken Binds Us, by Lorne Daniel (Calgary: U Calgary Press, 2025) $18.99 / 9781773856391
In a non-linear and associative collection of poetic assemblages, a writer ponders an impressive assortment of ideas: from the afterlife and everyday life to queer masculine desire, settler culture, and the natural world. —Brooke Lee reviews The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems, by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2025) $25.00 / 9780771014017
“So, let’s welcome Enns as a new master poet to this tradition of fisher poets. Like the others he is a master at throwing a line—in his case, literally. At their best, the lines of his verse are exquisite casts. The poems through which they flash, stream, curl, and bend are pools of still water. Heart, mind, and world merge into attention.” —Harold Rhenisch reviews No Lines in Nature, by Joe Enns (Nanoose Bay: Joe Enns, 2025) $17.00 / 9781069299918
“In fact, gratitude is something I believe was on display in this enclave in the Coastal Room at the Gibson Public Market, an appreciation for the array of literary talent on the Sunshine Coast and across the province. That was certainly the message relayed by several literary award judges at this fifth annual event.” Trevor Marc Hughes reports on the recent Art & Words Festival events held in Gibsons this past weekend.
Selfhood, interpersonal relations, family history, and the wonders of the world are examined acutely in a debut collection book of verse, where some poems have greater immediate appeal than others.—Brett Josef Grubisic reviews Stolen Plums, by Alice Turski (Montreal: Signal Editions, 2025) $19.95 / 9781550656770
A “masterful book of poetry” studies and remarks on “the debris of our messy human experience: the relationships, the griefs, the final weeks of someone’s life, and the struggle to make sense of things, as well as the actual litter of our living in this world.” —Al Rempel reviews Parade of Storms, by Evelyn Lau (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2025) $18.00 / 9781772142457
“It was the same when he was very young and had to support himself by working in the UBC Bookstore (or Book Sore, as he called it). But it was worse when he had no jobs and had to resort to begging from friends like Al Purdy and John Robert Colombo, or applying for Canada Council grants, which at first turned him down, leading him to become bitter and complaining.” Sheldon Goldfarb reviews The Weather & the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003, by J.A. Weingarten (ed.) (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025) $95 / 9781771126830
“This must have been my first long journey. At the age of six it was certainly the event that made the greatest continuous impression on me, and the almost three years that it introduced, from November 1940, after much of the worst of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain had already been endured, to the Autumn of 1943, when we returned to London just in time for the Doodlebugs, the V1 Flying Bombs, gave me a different perspective on English life from what I would otherwise have had in suburban London, where I was to live for the rest of my childhood and adolescence.” Christopher Levenson contributes the introductory part of his memoir, Not One of the Boys.
“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
