a disobedient gathering: poems for plants who can’t stay put by Katherine Barrett
The poems have a casual swagger and impish play with their subjects.
Chapbook
Nightstand: Leafing through a little darkness by Berdene Owen
Nightstand is a quirky chapbook, but one that works very well, The irreverence sheds light on the darkness Owen is exploring.
Poems for Burning by Spencer Folkins
As children, we’ve all been told not to play with matches, but Spencer Folkins can’t seem to resist the lure of starting little fires in his debut chapbook.
Girl Dinner by Jamie Kitts
There’s something just so nice about a new chapbook with a fun cover. Girl Dinner by Jamie Kitts, a collection of poems largely focused on food and the ways it connects to different ways of being and experiences, has a cover illustrated by New Brunswick artist Dawn Mockler.
Busy Secret by Micah Ballard
Micah Ballard’s latest chapbook Busy Secret is a quippy, somewhat resigned meditation on the liminal spaces between life and death, and wealth and work.
Permutations by Paula Turcotte
Permutations by Paula Turcotte is a high energy chapbook of the urban depressed and stressed. It is fresh and punchy as well as comic at times.
Fifty-Two Lines About Henry by Cary Fagan
Although Henry contemplates dancing to calm an enraged bear, orders enough sardines to fill two bedrooms – I hope they’re canned – and writes an 861-page chapter to a novel, his unlikely battles remain rooted in a world well-recognized where neighbours are suspicious, dinner parties are taxing, and things learned at school are revealed to be alternately fateful (the sousaphone, surprisingly) and superfluous (trigonometry).
Groping in the Daylight: poems by Augusta Wynde
The language is striking and fresh in reach without being self-important, adding humour to the poetic palette such as in “Bout” (p. 8) which you’ll have to buy to see— no spoilers on that.
Stranger in a Strange Land: I Imagine My Brother as an Island by Morris Bailey
A shimmer of vulnerability permeates the poems in Montreal poet Morris Bailey’s debut chapbook I Imagine My Brother as an Island.
Wild Kin by Marlene Grand Maître
Running through many of the poems is a longing for connection with our “wild kin” of the title . . . At the same time, there is acknowledgement of a certain distance between humans and the fauna and flora surrounding us.
Of Mothers & Madonnas by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi
Of Mothers & Madonnas by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi is a small collection, a bilingual chapbook, part of The Polyglot Chapbook Series.
Green Islands: Poems from the Great Bear Rainforest, by Ian Thomas
Rich in metaphor and figurative language, the 26 poems in this chapbook evoke the flora, fauna, and atmosphere of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest with evocative vividness.
Bodies Like Gardens by Salena Wiener
bodies like gardens by Salena Wiener defines itself as a “collection [that] explores the relationship between bodies and nature, and how these intersect with themes of femininity, motherhood, religion, and trauma”.
