Canadian poetry—not really written successful maple syrup! Not wholly astir beavers! (Although I person surely written astir beavers.) Canada is simply a analyzable place, surviving successful the shadiness of the U.S., proudly multicultural but alert of its assimilationist history, reckoning with assemblage harms done to Indigenous peoples and called to the enactment of reconciliation. Canadian poesy is polyphonic, exploratory, and urgent.
Sharon Thesen, ed., The New Long Poem Anthology (2nd edition)
Is it cheating to commencement with an anthology? This 1 gives ample abstraction to brushwood literate luminaries similar Anne Carson, Robert Kroetsch, bpNichol, Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, and more.
rob mclennan, ed., Groundwork: The champion of the 3rd decennary of above/ground press: 2013-2023
Chapbooks are a captious furniture of the poesy ecosystem, wherever caller ideas percolate and germinate. The legendary above/ground property has produced hundreds implicit the past 30-some years, operating retired of a basement successful Ottawa.
Dany Laferrière, translated from the French by David Homel, The Return
Montréal-based writer Dany Laferrière returns his father’s assemblage to Haiti for burial. Madness ensues.
Kayla Czaga, Midway
Victoria-based writer Kayla Czaga mislaid some her parents, but she didn’t suffer her consciousness of humor. Canadian wit is weird, astatine times off-putting. Here it’s mixed with the purest grief.
Zane Koss, Country Music
Reaching backmost to his origins successful interior British Columbia, Zane Koss movingly captures the poesy successful the voices of agrarian and blue-collar oldtimers and bullshitters, and however it feels to person near that mode of life.
Wayde Compton, Performance Bond
Wayde Compton is simply a Vancouver-based writer of mixed Black and European heritage, moving a abstraction of brushwood and uncertainty. Plus this publication comes with a CD! I besides request to plug his prose measurement Toward an Anti-racist Poetics. It’s short, incisive, and essential.
Liz Howard, Letters successful a Bruised Cosmos
This wide-ranging postulation shines cosmic airy connected nonaccomplishment and resilience, done the dual lenses of European and Anishinaabe science.
Jaspreet Singh, Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock
Like each of us, Singh is surviving successful the Anthropocene. Unlike galore of us, helium finds delight successful its absurdities and solace successful its interconnections.
R. Kolewe, The Absence of Zero
Through a azygous book-length poem, Kolowe mines Misner, Thorne and Wheeler’s classical wide relativity textbook Gravitation alongside T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and years of his ain notebooks. The effect is fluid, meditative, and singular.
Karen Solie, Pigeon
There’s newer enactment from this Ontario-based, Saskatchewan-grown poet, but Pigeon was the archetypal 1 I work and it sets the barroom for brilliance. Karen Solie looks astatine the astir mundane details of the commercialized scenery and, with a fewer twists, turns them to gold.
