Best Canadian Poetry 2026 selected by Mary Dalton

The Best Canadian Poetry is an annual treat. I love the cream-skimmed aspect, the cross-section of what people are thinking about and how they are expressing it. It’s a sort of snapshot of the Canadian poetic zeitgeist. As a bonus is the index of what magazines are publishing top of their game. I admire the amount of poetry that has to get read to get to the long list. I like how those names are listed in the back. The notable poems, poets and issues where they were published.

I admit I don’t read each issue, and this is issue 17, Best Canadian Poetry 2026 edited by Mary Dalton (Blblioasis, 2025) In the best years, there is a lack of uniformity in poetic styles and moods. This is a good year. Most of the names are familiar with a few poets new to me.

It contains plausibly the Best Poem Title Ever: “That’s not a piñata, that’s a hornet’s nest,” by Darrell Epp. It follows through on its promise with a solid alert poem with each line having surprising turns and not pivoting for the sake of pivot but with a impassioned argument.

Another striking poem, from someone also not on my radar, is “Fancy University Boy,” by Conor Kerr. Beyond the scope of the story of the poem is the choices made to capitalize each line, and to choose a weighty word for each line, so the line seems a sheet pegged at both ends. Not a line start is wasted but acts like an emphasized intonation and weight. It all tumbles forward, hooking ahead which makes it hard to cleave out a steak.

         "[...]Last fall. Auntie Prof is happy because she gives it out to 
	All the students who need something to eat and there's a 
	Lot of them. Fancy university boy wants to do something 
	Like that but he doesn't know jack shit about talking to 
	People and he doesn't know jack shit about how to be a 
	White guy and he doesn't know jack shit about how to do 
	Good in school. He used to get the highest grades back in 
	The town school, but that was just because he could read"

It touches something universal for a generation that is the first wave from rural to town, the first generation to finish high school, the first to go to a university. And it catches the sense of that cadence and register of country talk as a fish out of water. I could feel for the speaker.

It’s also beautiful to see the truthiness possible in a surreal poem make the cut. John O’Neill’s The News is nothing short of beautifully implemented. Hyperbole is sometimes the most accurate way to communicate the world news as with the same language it speaks its blow-horn.

Sometimes the context gives an attention that fittingly spotlights a poem. It isn’t my first coming-across of Susan Glickman’s “What I learned from Living Abroad,” but this time it landed perfectly well. The humour tickles.

Poetry gets a deserved reputation for being mopey. This poems show you can balance levity and complex experience.

Erin Wilson does a list poem of blessings but exceedingly well in “Ode to Joy”. It starts:

"If one can escape
the fate of the news, 
escape reality 
                 to enter reality,
one might live one's life
in the most radiant splendour.

Sink, I love you.

Water, dish rack, refrigerator, drain, 
measuring cups."

and so on without feeling syrupy schmaltz. A wonder of a poem.

I’m regretting not buying more of these. I’m overly conscious of shelf inches. And not thrifty enough; books exceed the shelves. The Best Canadian Poetry 2026 looks a little intimidatingly chunky at 183 pages but only 52% are the poems, the rest support them with prefaces, table of context, index, and mostly bios, before the shortlisted titles and magazines they sourced. It serves as a resource, a menu, of Canadian magazines, print and online on top of a good couple days of reading. Increasingly, I read digitally which stores small and allows word searches but there’s still something wholesome about the good palpable poem on a rainy morning.

Mary Dalton is the author of six books of poetry, among them Merrybegot, Red Ledger, Hooking, and Interrobang, as well as a prose miscellany, Edge: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. The book version of her 2020 Pratt Lecture, The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry, was released by Breakwater in 2022. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Publisher: Biblioasis (November 18, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 200 pages
ISBN: 9781771966764

Pearl Pirie

Website

Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet