Books in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series series

Bitter in the Belly reckons with suicide's wreckage. After John Emil Vincent's best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. In his most personal book, Vincent moves from stark innocence through awful events and losses, to something like acceptance without wisdom.

In Earth Words, John Reibetanz breaks bread with three earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles, moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through the nineteenth century of Henry Thoreau and into the twentieth century with Emily Carr.

Unbecoming, Neil Surkan's sophomore collection, clings to hope while the world deteriorates, transforms, and grows less hospitable from moment to moment. Interplaying tenderness with dogged perseverance, these poems tumble through vignettes of degraded landscapes, ebbing spiritual communities, faltering men, and precarious friendships.

In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry.

Poems about confirmation bias: expect it to be true, it's true.

Inspired by mystical traditions, birdwatching, tree planting, ethics, neuropsychology, and quantum physics, Gabrielle McIntire's poems draw us in with their passionate attention to what it means to be human in a still-wondrous natural environment. Unbound stirs us to re-evaluate our place amidst the astonishing beauty and wisdom of an Earth facing the early stages of climate change.

"I've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawk Inspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide. The Tantramar Re-Vision charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thrives, ignorant of divinity, while the human psyche continues to search for answers as "life takes directions / away from" it. The Tantramar Marsh setting of John Thompson's Stilt Jack resonates with Irie's landscapes of birds, fish, plants, and wildlife, all still within reach yet part of a world where "wind carries sounds / it cannot hear." Insightful and meditative, The Tantramar Re-Vision is poetry of the inner self and the outside observer, a poetic testament to the ways literature creates its own landmarks and nature survives without knowing a word."--

In this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereabouts powerfully charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the polemics of self and other.

A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. The arc of this collection offers a r..

An exploration of the hinterland between the havens of faith and the rough terrain of doubt.

One woman. Two lovers. It's a complicated dance.

Some Dance is a meditation on stories, the intersection of stories, of things made up, of things imagined, and of things perhaps lived.

Vivid, haunting, and rhythmical, these poems illuminate the struggles of mental illness and uncover the sinister side of religion.

Poems based on witnessed and lived experience that bridge literary and activist worlds.

A humble admission that while we can't know it all, we keep asking.

A collection of unpublished poems by a distinguished poet and novelist.

A critical, poetic celebration of Alfred Hitchcock's life and work.

Evocative poems about art, illness, identity, and the paradoxes of authenticity.

Resonant poems that find beauty in intimate failures and regrets.

Poems on the hunt for something to believe in.

A dreamy yet haunting account of H.D.'s imagined conversations with Sigmund Freud during her sessions with him in the 1930s.

remember your body again / how cedar smells of god / and a Bach cantata / makes you almost / forgive / your hands.

Global migrations and music create a symphonic journey where nature ignites wildfires and love fully lived.

Warm-blooded, curious, and playful, these poems hunt for meaning in history, home, and family.

Poems that focus on our relationships with the places we inhabit and that inhabit us.

Poems that illustrate the stories that lie buried in landscapes and in human lives.

Intuitive environmentalism from the Canadian North is carried forth into creative global adventuring.

Subtle and surprising poems connecting the use of bells in wartime with shifts in the nature of affection.

This work provides a collection of Solway's poetry, focusing on the game of chess, and it is even accessible to one whose grasp of the game is primitive.