It is our turn," writes Conrad Black in this scintillating manifesto for how Canada can achieve an exalted role in world affairs. For over 400 years we have toiled in the shadows of our potential and achieved an indifferent recognition among other nations. Chipper, patient, and courteous, we have pursued an improbable destiny as a splendid nation in the northern section of the new world, a demi-continent of relatively good and ably self-governing people, but most would agree we have neither developed a vivid national personality nor realized our true potential. Our main chance, writes Black, is now before us and it is not in the usual realms of military or economic dominance. With the rest of the West engaged in a sterile and platitudinous left-right tug of war, Canada has the opportunity to lead the advanced world to its next stage of development in the arts of government. By transforming itself into a controlled and sensible public policy laboratory, it can forge new solutions to the tiresome problems besetting welfare, education, health care, foreign policy, and other governmental sectors the world over, and make an enormous contribution to the welfare of mankind. Canada has no excuse not to lead in this field, argues Black, who offers nineteen visionary policy proposals of his own. "This is the destiny, and the vocation, Canada could have, not in the next century, but in the next five years of imaginative government.

    One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

    —from "The Doomsday Clock"The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time—our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.

    At once a personal document as it is an occult text, Milk investigates overused paradigms of what it means to be a creator and encapsulates its horrors and joys—setting fire to the enigma that drives the vital force that enables poems, love, and life to happen.

    A mock elegy for the heady joys of old-time Soho, 'The Song of Lunch' displays the full range of Reid's wit, craft and human sympathy.

    In her haunting eighth collection inspired by articles from the weekly “Science” section of the New York Times, Hahn explores identity, extinction, and survival using exotic tropes drawn from the realms of astrophysics, mycology, paleobotany, and other rarefied fields. With warmth and generosity, Hahn mines the world of science in these elegant, ardent poems.from “On Deceit as Survival”   Yet another species resembles   a female bumble bee,   ending in frustrated trysts—   or appears to be two fractious males   which also attracts—no surprise—   a third curious enough to join the fray.   What to make of highly evolved Beauty   bent on deception as survival—

    Asian American Studies. "In YOU ARE NOT DEAD Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I'm happy to have read this book."--James Tate"There's a wild and wondrous poet plundering-through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts toward things we couldn't have known before she turned us toward them. YOU ARE NOT DEAD is precisely how this book can get you to feel and that is an almost otherworldly power. The poet who imagines and builds these poems is irresistible."--Dara Wier"That fluctuating space between the temporary and the infinite is an erogenous zone made all the more enticing when articulated so eloquently. 'We have a lifespan and O how we live it out.' Wendy Xu's poems posit for us a future, a presence, a body resistant to the ravages of time. Mortality is a far planet. Here in Xu's work, we are passionately, and gratefully, alive."--D. A. Powell

    The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one’s wild oats, having one’s mind expanded or blown, losing one’s wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.

    What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.”—John D’Agata“Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Jenny Boully has done it.”—Mary Jo BangA book with only beginnings and endings, all invented. Jenny Boully opens and closes more than fifty topics ranging from physics and astronomy to literary theory and love. A brilliant statement on interruption, impermanence, and imperfection.Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essay and [one love affair]*. Born in Thailand, she currently divides her time between Texas and Brooklyn.

    The Uses of the Body is her best book, its acerbic tone interspersed with lines of grave and startling beauty.” —Los Angeles Times"Like Richard Linklater's Boyhood,but for girls (and women): Deborah Landau's vividly relatable third collection, The Uses of the Body, reminds us that coming of age lasts well beyond adolescence.” —Vogue* “As freshly immediate as ever, award-winning poet Landau reveals that ‘the uses of the body are manifold,’ moving in four sections with a roughly chronological feel from wedding parties to flabby bodies around the pool to the realization ‘But we already did everything’—all with an underlying sense of urgency: ‘Life please explain.’ As Landau explores her physical self and her sexuality, she’s tart, witty, fluid, direct, and brutally honest, and her work can be appreciated by any reader.”—Library Journal,starred review"Deborah Landau . . . is both confessional and direct, like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. Her taut, elegant, highly controlled constructions meditate upon yearning and selfhood."—BooklistDeborah Landau's Uses of the Body presents the very specific challenges of womanhood. Her poems address what it means to be alive—right now—in a female body. She fills her poetry with compelling nouns: wine glasses, bridal gowns, and "books and teacups and ghosts." And what ghosts: underneath evocative images and poetic play, there's a moving, yearning mysticism.From "Mr and Mrs End of Suffering":The uses of the body are wake up.The uses of the body, illusion.The uses of the body. Rinse repeat.To make another body.September. Draw the blanket up.Lace your shoes.The major and minor passions. Sunlight. Hair.The basic pleasures. Tomatoes, Keats, meeting a smart man for a drink.The uses of the body.It is only a small house. It gets older.Its upper and lower.Its red and white trim.It's tempting to gloss over this part,so you won't really see me.Deborah Landau is the author of two books of poetry. She was educated at Stanford, Columbia, and Brown, where she earned her PhD. Currently she is the director of the NYU Creative Writing Program and lives in New York City.

    Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

    Everything that suffuses her well-loved prose is here: compassion, insight, lyrical precision, and the clear, minimalist eye that reveals how life can turn on a single moment. Musing on the undercurrents and interconnections between legacy, memory, motherhood and the natural world, the poems in the collection begin on the surface and then take us, gracefully and effortlessly, to a far more thought-provoking place.

    Big is the shocking true story of a murder investigation in Newfoundland and Labrador that forever changed the face of the Canadian justice system.On August 4, 2002, three-year-old twin girls Karen and Krista Hart drowned in Gander Lake. They had gone there with their father. He said it was an accident, but the police were convinced Nelson Hart had killed his daughters that day.With not enough evidence to make an arrest, the RCMP launched a $500,000 “Mr. Big” sting operation to try to get a confession. This book examines the dramatic events that unfolded over the four-month period when Nelson was flying back and forth across the country working in what he believed to be an organized crime syndicate.Central to this story is Jennifer Hicks, who reveals for the first time her life with her now ex-husband, Nelson Hart, and the events surrounding the deaths of her daughters. Together with television journalist Colleen Lewis, who closely followed Hart’s murder trial, Jennifer has reconstructed the tragic story of an abusive relationship and a mother’s worst nightmare.Finalist for the 2016 Arthur Ellis Awards, Best Nonfiction Book Category#10 on the Globe and Mail (Canadian Non-Fiction) Bestseller List (October 10, 2015)#6 on the Globe and Mail (Canadian Non-Fiction) Bestseller List (October 17, 2015)#6 on the Globe and Mail (Canadian Non-Fiction) Bestseller List (October 24, 2015)#10 on the Globe and Mail (Canadian Non-Fiction) Bestseller List (October 31, 2015)

    A tall, lean striker with the world at his feet, Ferguson seemed destined to develop into one of Scotland's most successful exports, but anger, and a number of injuries, hampered his progress. Ferguson has scored the most goals of any Scot in the Premiership but also shares the record for Premiership red cards. In 1995, he became the first professional footballer to be jailed for an offence committed on the pitch. It earned him a three-month sentence in Glasgow's infamous Barlinnie Prison and a twelve-match ban from the SFA. Bruised by the experience, he walked away from the Scotland team and blanked the media from then on. Featuring contributions from numerous top players, this explosive biography uncovers the real Duncan Ferguson. The author delves into Ferguson's personal and professional life and reveals that there is more to him than the media portrayal of a Scottish hard man.

    A collection of Native American poetry.