No Matter the Wreckage


Sarah Kay - 2014
    No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's knack for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"), among other curious topics. Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join in on her journey of discovering herself and the world around her. It's an honest and powerful collection.

For Your Safety Please Hold On


Kayla Czaga - 2014
    Her poems are already making waves--several from this collection have received award attention, including: "The Fiddlehead"'s 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, "The Malahat Review"'s 2012 Far Horizon's Award for Poetry and an Editor's Choice Award in "ARC Poetry Magazine'"s 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. They have also been shortlisted for "The New Quarterly"'s 2013 Occasional Verse Contest, longlisted for CBC's 2013 Canada Writes Poetry Contest and have appeared in literary publications across North America.The poems in "For Your Safety Please Hold On" move in thematic focus from family, to girlhood, to adulthood, each permeated by Czaga's lively voice and quick-witted, playful language. They test the line between honest humour and bitter reality in a sophisticated, incisive manner that tugs at the gut and feels true.The linguistic hopscotch of Czaga's poems about girlhood is often beautifully juxtaposed with feelings of menace or a first taste of smothering expectations--"She sits. She sips her bright pink fingers. / She slips into smart short haircuts, yes, / she does so, and does herself up just so." While her pin prick meditations on contemporary adulthood suggest a yearning for personal meaning and purpose on a larger scale--"I still wander, sometimes, / my coat closing the world out of my body, with pockets / full of garbage, with my slender steady want. I still / make the bed and at bedtime unmake it."The irrepressible energy of the poems in "For Your Safety Please Hold On," paired with their complex balancing act between light and dark, humour and melancholy, innocence and danger, make this collection an extraordinary first offering.

Goldenrod: Poems


Maggie Smith - 2021
    Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​

Self-Portrait with Crayon


Allison Benis White - 2009
    "An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting" Cole Swensen."

The Door


Margaret Atwood - 2007
    These fifty lucid, urgent poems range in tone from lyric to ironic to meditative to prophetic, and in subject from the personal to the political, viewed in its broadest sense. They investigate the mysterious writing of poetry itself, as well as the passage of time and our shared sense of mortality. Brave and compassionate, The Door interrogates the certainties that we build our lives on, and reminds us once again of Margaret Atwood’s unique accomplishments as one of the finest and most celebrated writers of our time.

The Story of Our Lives: with The Monument and The Late Hour


Mark Strand - 1973
    He was the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990, and currently teaches at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He lives in Chicago.

The Fatalist


Lyn Hejinian - 2003
    It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

Cunt-Ups


Dodie Bellamy - 2001
    Prose. "CUNT-UPS is an explosion of textual sexuality that resists principles of formal ordering, is polyvalent in its voice and range, and as perverse in its sentence construction as its content. Its 'setting' is the mediated exchange itself, the fractured articulation of 'a female body who has sex writing about sex.' While the title might imply a gendered site of production, it also suggests a sexual/textual violence that is more than a mere 'disorganization of the senses' but a dismemberment of the gendered body as well. The text becomes a (feminist) desiring machine, its writing a prosthetic device mediating the traces of physicality, imagination, abjection, and pleasure."Throw on the switch, plug into the mediating machine, the flesh-object writes back, becomes subject, suspect, the gaze cut-up and fed back into vibrating loops of unobtainable desire."--David Buuck

Dancing with Joy: 99 Poems


Roger Housden - 2007
    Now, in "Dancing with Joy," he assembles 99 poems from 69 poets that celebrate the many colors of joy. Anything can be a catalyst for joy, these poems reveal. For Wislawa Szymborska, the catalyst is a dream; for Robert Bly, being in the company of his ten-year-old son; for Gerald Stern, it is a grapefruit at breakfast; for Billy Collins, a cigarette. "Dancing with Joy" includes English and Italian classical and romantic works; early Chinese and Persian verse; and poets from Chile, France, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and India, plus a range of contemporary American and English poets. Whether inspiration is what you need, or an affirmation of what is already joyful in life, "Dancing with Joy" is a welcome treat for Housden s numerous fans, as well as anyone looking for sheer happiness, marvelously expressed."

The Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das


Merrily Weisbord - 2010
    She was hailed and reviled as the first Indian woman to write an autobiographical cult classic about love and desire. Admirers dubbed her, "The First Feminist Emotional Revolutionary of Our Time." The tabloid press called her "The Love Queen of Malabar." Merrily Weisbord found Das's work so compelling that she flew to South India to meet her. The Love Queen of Malabar is the story of their decade-long friendship, an experiment in mutual revelation. Recounting the development of their relationship, Weisbord relates the dramatic events of Das's life, including her transition from celibacy to sexual awakening at age sixty-seven when, provoking the greatest scandal of her notorious life, she converted to Islam for love and renewal. Both observer and direct participant, Weisbord elegantly presents new biographical insights and cultural details about Kerala and India without exoticisation or stereotyping. The Love Queen of Malabar is an evocative and beautifully crafted work, as seamless as the finest novel, and will captivate readers across the globe.

Amplitude: New and Selected Poems


Tess Gallagher - 1987
    Poems consider women's roles in society, childhood, home, nature, language, communications, the past, and mortality.

Be(loved): Poetry and Prose for the Journey Home


Dakota Adan - 2020
    Hailed as “an essential book for those seeking self-love,” this heartfelt anthology lends voice to the heartbreak and healing of our soul’s quest to reunite with whom we always hoped we could be—ourselves.

Could You Ever Live Without?


David Jones - 2013
    Life is now nowhere Else. Live, live for Today I say, but The moments tick And groan, moan With the dismal passage Of time and I wait Forever for what Cannot be. Poems of feeling and experience, the anthology encompasses all of life and beyond: death, the universe, hopes, dreams, love, loss - all of existence contained in one work. Poetry that captures both moments and lifetimes, memories and hopes, reality and dreams. Poems to identify with, poems of life.

The Love That Keeps Us Sane: Living the Little Way of St. Thérèse of Lisieux


Marc Foley - 2000
    Thérèse of Lisieux.

Work, Love, Pray: Practical Wisdom for Professional Christian Women and Those Who Want to Understand Them


Diane Paddison - 2011
    They yearn to learn from someone who has climbed the ladder of success without sacrificing family or faith--something author Diane Paddison has done with excellence and grace.The stories Paddison shares about her corporate, personal, and spiritual life, as well as the lives of other women like her, are both inspiring and instructive, providing on-target advice and concrete examples of how to succeed without feeling overwhelmed or compromised.This is a working book for working women. Full of practical, proven guidance that is both professionally viable and biblically sound, each chapter includes sidebars featuring pertinent facts from current research, resources relevant to the chapter's topic, action-oriented "to do" lists, and other interactive material. Chapters also include questions suitable for discussion, making it an excellent resource for use in small groups.Work, Love, Pray is a valuable resource for professional Christian women, but it's also a must-read for the husbands, sisters, daughters, and friends who share their lives.