Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial AwardEmergencies, faith, truancy, and poverty intersect in this wry debut that volunteers a transfusion of the unpredictable for those who yearn to transition beyond a muralized Olive Garden world. Stevie Howell's [Sharps] takes its cue from an Egyptian hieroglyph used interchangeably to represent "waters," the letter N, and all prepositions within a sentence. Similarly, [Sharps] alters its structure and functionality from page to page. The Queen launches an advertising campaign to procure our envy. The last unicorn crochets a sweater out of the sisal cords of the books. The falsity of Billy Joel's New York propaganda is grounds for libel. We discover the one thing you can do "With a sawed-off rifle, a low IQ, and curiosity/about human biology." From certain angles, [Sharps] embraces the possibilities of poetry — from others, it engages in a protracted street fight with language.

[Sharps]

Literature & Fiction

Howell, Stevie

Poetry

icehouse poetry

Angular unconformity: a discordant surface of contact between the deposits of two episodes of sedimentation in which the older, underlying strata have undergone folding, uplift, and erosion before the deposition of the younger sediments, so that the younger strata truncate the older. — Michael Allaby, ed., A Dictionary of Earth Sciences, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Angular Unconformity shows us a life's work in cross-section, a restless and humane intelligence, ever searching, ever shifting, finding meaning in our blink-of-an-eye existence against a backdrop of geological time unimaginable in its scale. In this volume, the first comprehensive collection of Don McKay's poetry, this pre-eminent Canadian poet displays his gift for thinking through metaphor, channelling a profound philosophical discourse through plain language and striking imagery. In his poetry, disciplined attention and contemplation break through the commonplace and illuminate an ecological understanding of the world as it is.

Angular Unconformity: Collected Poems 1970-2014

McKay, Don

"Polari," from the Italian "polare" ("to talk") is a coded language, originating in the UK and dating as far back as the 16th century. Overheard in outdoor markets, the theatre, fairgrounds, and circuses, it was appropriated by gay men to provide them with cover as well as with a way to assert personal and shared identities. It spread around the English-speaking world via the Royal Navy, the merchant marine, and cruise ships, adding and subverting many foreign-language words — like polari — along the way. While Polari does not employ this jargon or probe its success as a mode of connection between gay men, the language of Barton's poems may be viewed as an effective tool for communicating a sense of history, politics, and aesthetics. Think of Polari as a cross-sectional scan of a living tree that reveals ring after ring of Barton's experience of language, with the new buds at the tips of its branches adding colour, movement, and ornament. Most of these poems were written using set forms drawn from Robin Skelton's The Shapes of our Singing: A Comprehensive Guide of Verse Forms and Metres from Around the World (Spokane: Eastern Washington University Press, 2002). While the forms Barton has appropriated are not by themselves the vehicles of a particular sociolect or an anti-language, except, say, of poetry itself, he have nevertheless twisted them to follow the turns of his point of view and aesthetics. When it comes to time, geography, and subject, Polari covers a lot of ground: from child memories to the frailties and deaths of ageing parents; from Queen Victoria's coronation to the first ascent of Everest; from the October Crisis to the trial of Omar Khadr. The titles of nine poems are borrowed from the Diagram Prize, an award given out by the UK magazine, The Bookseller, for the oddest book title of the year. The titles chosen — an example is "Highlights in the History of Concrete" — may sound frivolous, even absurd, but the poems are less or more so. The serious nature of their themes being at odds with their titles gives them an engaging tension, and will be read as signature of his particular brand of polari.

Polari

BARTON, JOHN

Incisive and intensely felt, Stewart Cole's striking debut collection reminds us that we too live in an age of anxiety, disoriented by doubt, and up late, compelled to confront the unanswerable. Sirens draw us to the inevitable fact of human suffering, black-winged redbirds perch aloof above our daily commutes, sex denies and drives our hunger for fidelity, and the comet speaks before it strikes. In an unabashed celebration of intellect and a visceral engagement with our shadowy impulses, Cole's voice veers between the playful and the grave, pillow-talk and eulogy. And despite the odds, love — private, public, and free of false sentiment — emerges cloaked in a wit and intelligence at once elusive and warm. From the urbane and civil to the lustful and dark, the poems of Questions in Bed, in an impressive synthesis of content and contour, depict the heat-seeking of our driven days and insomniac nights.

Questions in Bed

Cole, Stewart

All the Gold Hurts My Mouth

Leyton, Katherine

Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) once wrote of a desire to leave behind "one poem, one story / that will tell what it was like / to be alive." In an abundance of memorable poems, he fulfilled this desire with candour and subtlety, emotion, and humour, sympathy and truth-telling. For many years, Nowlan has been one of Canada's most-read and -beloved poets, but only now is the true range of his poetic achievement finally available between two covers, with the publication of Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan.
Nowlan takes us from nightmarish precincts of fear and solitude to the embrace of friendship and family. Delving into experiences of violence and gentleness, of alienation and love, his poetry reveals our shared humanity as well as our perplexing and sometimes entertaining differences. Nowlan's childhood and adult years are colourfully reflected in his poetry. These autobiographical threads are interwoven with fantasies, an astute historical consciousness, and a keen awareness of the shiftings and transformations of selfhood.
Nowlan wrote with formal variety, visually shaping his poems with a dexterity that complicates impressions that he was primarily a "plainspoken" poet. His varied uses of the poetic line — his handling of line-lengths and -breaks, stanzas, and pauses — show him to be a writer who skilfully uses the page to suggest and embody the rhythms of speech. This long-awaited volume enables readers to experience his poetic genius in its fullness and uniqueness.

Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan

Nowlan, Alden

Winner, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Longlisted, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader's attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of British Columbia's coastal rainforest, these poems are full of life and decay; they carry the odours of salmon rivers and forests of fir; salal growing in the fog-bound mountain slopes. This astonishing debut, at once spare and lush, displays an exquisite lyricism built on musical lines and mature restraint. Nilsen turns over each idea carefully, letting nothing escape her attention and saying no more than must be said. Combining a scientist's precision and a poet's sensitivity, Otolith examines the ache of nostalgia in the relentless passage of time.

Otolith

Nilsen, Emily

Shortlisted, Trillium Book Award for Poetry and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award In this confessional debut collection, Matthew Walsh meanders through their childhood in rural Nova Scotia, later roaming across the prairies and through the railway cafés of Alberta to the love letters and graffiti of Vancouver. In this nomadic journey, Walsh explores queer identity set against an ever-changing landscape of what we want, and who we are, were, and came to be. Walsh is a storyteller in verse, his poems laced with catholic "sensibilities" and punctuated with Maritime vernacular. In These are not the potatoes of my youth, Walsh illuminates the complex choreography of family, the anxiety of individuality, and the ambiguous histories of stories erased, forgotten, or suppressed. Readers will find moments of humour, surprise, and a queer realization that all is not what it seems.

These are not the potatoes of my youth

Walsh, Matthew

From the author: I cannot let the story of Crow Gulch — the story of my family and, subsequently, my own story — go untold. This book is my attempt to resurrect dialogue and story, to honour who and where I come from, to remind Corner Brook of the glaring omission in its social history.
In his debut poetry collection, Douglas Walbourne-Gough reflects on the legacy of a community that sat on the shore of the Bay of Islands, less than two kilometres west of downtown Corner Brook.
Crow Gulch began as a temporary shack town to house migrant workers in the 1920s during the construction of the pulp and paper mill. After the mill was complete, some of the residents, many of Indigenous ancestry, settled there permanently — including the poet's great-grandmother Amelia Campbell and her daughter, Ella — and those the locals called the "jackytars," a derogatory epithet used to describe someone of mixed French and Mi'kmaq descent. Many remained there until the late 1970s, when the settlement was forcibly abandoned and largely forgotten.
Walbourne-Gough lyrically sifts through archival memory and family accounts, resurrecting story and conversation, to patch together a history of a people and place. Here he finds his own identity within the legacy of Crow Gulch and reminds those who have forgotten of a glaring omission in history.

Crow Gulch

Walbourne-Gough, Douglas

Watch out for those who have, seek, and hold onto power.So drinkAs the fanged stoat from the rabbit's napeAs though from a flagon of river waterShaken with ancestral ashAs if it isn't knowledge you seekBut some osmotic soul-foodTo be filled up with blursThat might later resolve themselvesInto memoriesTo return to where you really liveWith changes in your bloodLyrical yet shot through with experimental and political veins, the poems in Soft Power are engaged with both the here-and-now of a world on the brink and the hope of something better, a planet where "generations hence / Inactivists will bathe under a sun made safe / By the collapse of oil-can economics."Traversing badlands, sandhills, prairies, suburbia, Miami, London, Dublin, Paris, and beyond, Cole's voice revels in questions of travel while resonating with the unheimlich "Canadalienation" of his expatriate existence. Whether bog surfing, gallery hopping, bug hunting, or meditating on the "strange genre" of national anthems, the poems in Cole's long-awaited follow-up collection to his critically acclaimed Questions in Bed exist in a searching exchange with the world, both entering and being entered by it.

Soft Power

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