Books in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry series

Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, aboutness is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that refuses to stand still.

A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey - through cities and their outskirts, to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations.

These poems are inquisitive, desiring to evade the grasp of the normative, as endured by those institutionalized by, and through, the concept of normalcy. act normal invites readers to re-orient from the normative task of assuming the safety of consensual interpretation, while risking, cherishing, and performing non-indifference.

In a photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation and, for perhaps a singular moment, assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing.

Chatty Cathy, while not the first talking doll, was certainly the most widely known, and the only one elevated to idiom. The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire chronicles her later career and luridly illustrates the perils of reaching such linguistic heights with so very little to say.

In New Songs for Orpheus, John Reibetanz updates Ovid's poetry. His words showed him to be a person of deep empathy for natural, animal, and human worlds, and Reibetanz posits that Ovid would be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them in the past two thousand years.

Firmly rooted in frostbitten, fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington's first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness.

In Edward Carson's provocative new work, the poetic moving parts of movingparts confront and breathe new life into what's true and what's not in Aesop's fable The Fox and the Crow, as well as the shifting, often fragmentary ground between what's said and what's not about identity and intimacy in Sappho's lyrics.

Jean Van Loon's father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada's Cold War intelligence service. Rooted in memory and history, Loon carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and the material wealth that shaped the poet's childhood.

Rags of Night in Our Mouths is an exploration of human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability, and a vibrant hymn to the sustaining forces of wilderness, creativity, and compassion. Margo Wheaton constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty as she writes her own version of Maritime gothic.

This dream book of kaleidoscopic, holographic, mutagenic poems is haunted by the loops, aporias, and entanglements of time. With imagery both striking and nuanced, and language rich and strange, Brian Henderson presents mesmerizing poems that celebrate the strange and vertiginous musics of a kind of memory-ness invoked by the irretrievable.