Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the Twenty-first Century by Derek Beaulieu
Beaulieu asks, why are we writing?
Poetry
Best Canadian Poetry 2026 selected by Mary Dalton
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.
Horses by Jake Skeets
Here, Skeet’s invasion of white space picks up where Eyes Bottle Dark left off and begins with the haunting image of a herd of 191 free-roaming horses found dead, thigh and neck-deep at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation, evaporated through extreme drought caused by “decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate”.
Crowd Source by Cecily Nicholson
In Crowd Source, Cecily Nicholson’s latest collection of poetry, she uses a flock of crows as her framing device, linking meditations on a wide variety of topics with the movement of crows.
We Survived Until We Could Live by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike
He describes We Survived Until We Could Live, his latest collection of poetry as an “attempt to portray a glimpse of war’s horrific aftermath on the family.” In his “attempt to converse with the past,” he believes it is with poetry that he “can document the untold stories of suffering, invite readers into this world, and sharpen their empathy for fellow human beings in pain.”
The Beauty of Vultures, poems by Wendy McGrath, photos by Danny Miles
This collection contains 31 poems arranged in three acts. Miles’s compelling photos—mostly black-and-whites with a few exceptions—appear on facing pages.
Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies by Dani Netherclift
I was very intrigued by Vessel, Dani Netherclift’s work on the drowning deaths of her father and brother.
Child of War, a Graphic Poem by Gregory Sass
A “Child of War” could not be more timely and necessary, an urgent SOS message in a time capsule coming to warn us about the horrors that inevitably and sadly repeat themselves as history.
Nothing at All by Olivia Tapiero, translated by Kit Schluter
Nothing at All, Olivia Tapiero’s collection of vignettes exploring loss, illness, desire, and pain was translated from French by Kit Schluter for this edition.
“The Whole School Is in Me”: A Review of Ronna Bloom’s In a Riptide
Bloom opens this collection—her eighth, out now with Brick Books—with “Immeasurable,” a poem about a fleeting connection with a woman on the street
Throwback: Excerpts from a Burned Letter by Joelle Barron
Within a faith tradition that sees only two genders, and from the purview of a small northern community, what can a young person know about themselves and their possibilities?
Throwback: you by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erin Mouré
Whose love story is this? In English, `you’ is many-gendered, can denote singularity, plurality, a finger-pointed other, a reflective self.
The Time of Falling Apart by Wendy Donawa
As with movies that start gritty and move to hope or start sunlit and move to grim, this book has an arc starting quiet and small and becoming more vivid and joyful as it progresses, as if affirming to live every day.
Throwback: Everyday Light by John Reibetanz
What Reibetanz uncovers for readers and viewers, who should interpret the poems and the art in a dual fashion, is how the Dutch painters “specialize in what’s unseen” – how they “peel layers of misogynistic myth from [the] domestic scene.”
“Beauty in Filth, Rot in Divinity:” Stigmata by Scott Jackshaw
Their debut poetry collection, Stigmata, illustrates their prowess in queer theory, apophatic theology and poststructuralism that not only examines the tension between sexual deviancy and religion and how these two subject matters can have their own version of the profane,but also their thoughts and trying to make sense of their own being.
