Poetry Books from BC

da Vinci Eye Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards. Escape from Wreck City is a debut collection of poetry from Calgary author John Creary.

There are poems about nature, poems about love and relationships, poems about living in the city, and poems about traveling the world. And all at once they capture the thrill of being fully engaged with the world, keenly observing each moment and event that constitutes being human. Whether it's following the "wounded insomniac" through the "desert lushness of sage an …

Leaving Mile End is Jon Paul Fiorentino's seventh collection of poetry and tenth book-a collection of poems that documents the daily din and clatter of cafés, galleries, and dive bars that make up Mile End in Montreal, perhaps the most artistically vibrant neighbourhood in the world. But this is no ordinary tour-we take a sharp turn and go online as Fiorentino mines the peculiar linguistic resources of a new world of doxxing, swatting, snarking, trolling, catfishing, and shaming. While addressi …

A Temporary Stranger is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. At the centre of A Temporary Stranger are the Fake Poems, so called because "There is no art on earth that can fully represent the exact and flowing experience of viewing stone within the flow …

What is family? Is it defined by blood and birth? Or can we invite whomever we want into that intimate embrace?

The Royal BC Museum's new book, The Language of Family: Stories of Bonds and Belonging, invites readers to pull up a guest chair at the family table.

Twenty contributors from across British Columbia – museum curators, cultural luminaries, writers and thinkers young and old, from First Nations, LGBTQ, Japanese Canadian and Punjabi communities, among others – share their vastly differe …

New poetry written by prize-winning BC poets, musicians, and artists such as Bruce Cockburn, Brian Brett and Lorna Crozier, anthologized by Victoria's city poet-laureate. While in the world of politics there are still climate change deniers, the poets watch the warming seas, the dying birds slicked in oil, the whales, the jellies, the sea otters and the octopus. They stand, as close to the shore as possible, watch the slow turning tide. In this collection of poems from the coast of B.C., Califor …

The Receiver is Sharon Thesen's thirteenth book, and the first from the three-time Governor-General's Award finalist since Oyama Pink Shale, six years ago.

More formally various than Thesen's recent books, The Receiver includes the short lyrics documenting the poet's witnessing that readers of her work will recognize, as well as various kinds of found poems, translations, prose poems, alongside some brief essays or memoirs.

Thesen's mother and father, friends, poets in her own life, their poems, m …

What is a neighbourhood? What holds it together? What tears it apart? Each has its own geography, relying on such social networks as schools, parks, libraries, community centres, and places of worship and commerce. Each is made up of neighbours: the families in the house across the lane or those over the road, open to view or behind a hedge. Neighbours is a book that affirms; we are all neighbours, wherever we live. Following YVR, with its exploration of Vancouver, W. H. New gives shape and soun …

In her seventh book of poetry, Evelyn Lau digs up her deepest fears to unearth the universal hope we all have — of a life that matters. Tumour's power lies in Lau's ability to talk about the things we don't like to talk about, the things we avoid with lotions and potions and self-medication. Tumour compels sober self-reflection and shining light into the corners of the mind. In the book's first part, Lau roots through the forces of life that shaped her — the family legacy, the cultural inher …