Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

Anvil Press

On the Count of None

By Allison Chisholm

On the Count of None is the first full-length poetry collection by Kingston poet Allison Chisholm. These are poems whose language looks both ways before licking the envelope.

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Outlasting the Weather: Selected & New Poems 1994-2020

By Patrick Friesen

Spanning a quarter century of Friesen’s work, the poems in Outlasting the Weather speak to what is meant by “a life lived in poetry.” The poems in this Selected are inseparable from the poet. To read them is to enter his thinking and ride his breath: to experience the art of making in as immediate a way as is humanly possible.

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Ox Lost, Snow Deep

By Alice Burdick

“I’m just going to break this, okay?” writes Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick in her sixth full-length poetry collection. The 14 long poems in Ox Lost, Snow Deep range from confessional narrative to collage to surrealism, exploring representations of history, both public and personal, and within that, they probe what is considered important and what is considered not important.

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Parade of Storms

By Evelyn Lau

In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather.

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Permission to Settle

By Holly Flauto

Permission to Settle fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration — the anxiety, and the bureaucracy of application, identity, foreignness, and inadequacy — all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler.

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Pineapple Express

By Evelyn Lau


Pineapple Express is Evelyn Lau’s eighth collection of poetry and marks an important contribution to the literature on depression.

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Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems

By Michael Turner

Modelled after the American folk music revival songbooks of the 1950s and 60s, Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introductions and ends with the songs — or in this instance, poems — to which they refer.

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Pools

By Martin West

“Anyone who wanted to be anybody in Vancouver had a pool by the summer of ’83.” Thus sets the scene for Pools, a novel that delves into themes of excess through the lens of the 1980s party culture.

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2019 Griffin Poetry Prize

Quarrels

By Eve Joseph

The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity.

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Queasy: a wannabe writer's bumpy journey through England in the '70s

By Madeline Sonik

The award-winning author of Afflictions & Departures turns her kaleidoscopic lens on England in the 1970s in Queasy, a series of linked memoirs. While still grieving her father’s death and the end of her first romantic relationship, Madeline Sonik moved with her mother from Windsor, Ontario to the seaside village of Ilfracombe in North Devon, England.

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