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.

The product of eleven years of conversations with playwright and author José Teodoro, undertaken in various locations in Mettler’s two home countries of Canada and Switzerland, Nothing But Time explores this extraordinary artist’s life and practice, which brims with tales of uncanny coincidence, dynamic collaborations with fellow artists such as Atom Egoyan, Jennifer Baichwal, and Jim O’Rourke, and countless encounters with visionaries from the worlds of science and spirituality. In Mettler’s story, the yearning for knowledge is balanced with the surrender to boundless mystery, until the tenets that guide his art and life dissolve and cohere in an uncommon commitment to cultivating our collective sense of wonder.

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.

In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather.

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.

“Anyone who wanted to be anybody in Vancouver had a pool by the summer of ’83.” Thus sets the scene for Pools, a novel that delves into themes of excess through the lens of the 1980s party culture.