Howard White says, “Some poets try to capture rare butterflies in their writing. The things I go after are more like houseflies.” The comparison does him no favours but it is true inasmuch as his writing is notably unpretentious and concerned with common and everyday realities.

Naked in a Pyramid is an unconventional book by an original thinker, a former rabbi who owns ancient Torah scrolls, a yellow star from the concentration camps, and Pee-Wee Herman’s yellow bike. There is quite simply nobody like him. Yosef Wosk is a reclusive Lone Ranger who frequently helps others but remains a stranger. Here, for the first time, he has gathered a medley of observations to reveal his private world.

Infused with the spirit of Charles Bukowski, these down to earth poems take readers on a hard-scrabble journey, starting from Doyle’s early years as a runaway from foster homes, an incarcerated youth, a boxer, and a homeless wage-earner living in shelters and on the streets of Ottawa and Toronto.

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.

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.

“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.

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.


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

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.

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.