branta

The works of 90 poets from across the nation are collected in this 256-page book and help to tell the often never-heard stories of black Canadian experiences. The book represents a huge creative range in the work of more than 90 poets, from page-based approaches to dub and slam—from George Elliott Clarke to Lillian Allen and Prufrock Shadowrunner.
Craig Takeuchi/Straight.com

For many, year-end means a moment of reflection, and the appearance of lists, lists and more lists. I’ve received and picked up numerous poetry chapbooks, and thought it might be worth compiling a list of the Canadian titles that really stuck out, over the past calendar year.

I don’t mean to suggest that “Songs for little sleep,” is exclusively a “late night poems,” but one created out of stolen moments - early morning and later night - that circle other projects in an environment slightly foreign to my writing day: various reviews, essays, a creative non-fiction manuscript and one or more fictions. These poems were composed directly on the laptop, as opposed to sketched out longhand, as so much of my writing has always been. Notebooks fill my study, two-and-a-half decades worth.

Sometimes an audience is not three thousand. A friend of mine arrived at a hall to find that his listener was singular. They went out for a beer. I heard of another poet who showed up for a crowd of two. Gamefully, she did a full reading from the podium, and afterward descended to shake the hands of her crowd. One was dead.
Donald Hall/The New Yorker

For most readers, the fall book season celebrates many new publications-like the boom of firework. For me, these two books were more like a bloom, one I had been watching since spring, and it was exciting to be a part of the audience to hear them read for the first time.

Graham has won the Pulitzer prize for her poetry in the US, where the Poetry Foundation has called her “perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation”, but she is perhaps less well-known than some of her American contemporaries in the UK. The Forward judges expressed their hope that her win this evening for her 12th collection, Place, would find her “startling, powerful” poetry a wider readership in the UK.
Alison Flood/The Guardian

On the Goose Lane side of things there will be the proud unveiling of Icehouse Poetry, a brand new imprint edited by Ross Leckie, Ian LeTourneau, Katia Grubisic, David Seymour and James Langer. The first two books to come out of the cold are Perfection by Patrick Warner and Questions in Bed by Stewart Cole.

“Whatever Else.” In recognition of the centenary of his birth, the University of Ottawa’s English Department invites paper proposals on any aspect of the work and life of Irving Layton.