Poetry Books from BC
Created by ABPBC on February 12, 2016
The World, I Guess
The World, I Guess is a substantial book, six sections that demonstrate a command of a broad poetic range, a catholic range of interests, and echoes of a lifetime of reading and learning from Pound, Williams, Stanley, and others. The centrepiece is "The Flood," a long, complex, discursive poem whose subject is poesis and whose interest is in the world around the writer. But the book ends with a suite of translations of the "modern" Canadian poetry canon, from Charles G.D. Roberts and Archibald L …
Acquired Community
Jane Byers' Acquired Community is both a collection of narrative poems about seminal moments in North American lesbian and gay history, mostly post-World War II, and a series of first person poems that act as a touchstone to compare the narrator's coming out experience within the larger context of the gay liberation movement.
The "parade" poems such as "Celebration Was a Side Effect, 1992" explores the important role parades have played in the queer movement and how they have transformed from act …
Eating Matters
Kara-lee MacDonald is a survivor. The poems in Eating Matters are sophisticated explorations of anorexia and bulimia, from within and in retrospect, as the semiautobiographical narrator faces and overcomes her complex drives and compulsions. Through a variety of poetic forms, she explores the deep structures of body images and societal pressures that create and promulgate eating disorders and the culture of shame surrounding them. The poems will strike a chord in those who have experience with t …
In Fine Form
In the decade since the publication of the first edition of In Fine Form, there has been a resurgence of Canadian poets writing in "form" - in sonnets and ghazals, triolets and ballads, villanelles and palindromes - and formal poetry has become more visible in books, literary journals and classrooms. The first edition of this anthology was called "groundbreaking," "a paradigm shift" and "a landmark text." Since then, it has gone through several printings and been widely used in classrooms at all …
All Good Children
It's the middle of the twenty-first century and the elite children of New Middletown are lined up to receive a treatment that turns them into obedient, well-mannered citizens.
Maxwell Connors, a fifteen-year-old prankster, misfit and graffiti artist, observes the changes with growing concern, especially when his younger sister, Ally, is targeted. Max and his best friend, Dallas, escape the treatment, but must pretend to be "zombies" while they watch their freedoms and hopes decay. When Max's fam …
The Days
It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life.
The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what’s to come, how to live? What is life, but ordinary and special days, time passing, humour, sex, death, and love (making it all bearable)? All these are repeated gestures that run …
The Days
It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life.
The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what’s to come, how to live? What is life, but ordinary and special days, time passing, humour, sex, death, and love (making it all bearable)? All these are repeated gestures that run …
