A finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and winner of the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, Ignite is a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man’s lifelong struggle with schizophrenia.

il virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto.

Mark Laba’s second full-length poetry collection—and his first in seventeen years—brings to life the old variety shows he watched on TV as a child, shows forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. In The Inflatable Life, the reader will find a little singing, a little dancing, a little drama, a little comedy, a little experimentation.

Intensive Care isn’t a medical survival story; it’s a yearlong reflection on how the imminence of death can enhance life. The grass gets greener. Confirmation that one is loved is exhilarating, more powerful than any drug.

With its accessible style, this collection should appeal to a broad readership. Anyone who’s tried to write a poem about an object will be able to relate to the impossibility (and undesirability) of evoking a ‘thing’ outside of their own subjective relation to it. Inventory will be of particular interest to those who are familiar with the long and broad history of object poetry, including works by Francis Ponge, Robert Bly, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jorge Luis Borges.

B.C. Book Prize Finalist

Ivanhoe Station is the début collection from Vancouver poet Lyle Neff.

Kevin Spenst’s much-anticipated debut collection of poetry opens as a coming-of-age narrative of lower-middle class life in Vancouver’s suburb of Surrey, embroidered within a myriad of pop- and “post-Mennonite” culture.

The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings is a generous gathering of Venright’s most enduring and extraordinary poems, including the revised and expanded “Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of the Spooner”— the most outlandish and hilarious seafaring tale since Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. This volume also features an in-depth examination of Venright’s work by scholar Alessandro Porco.

Leaving Mile End is Jon Paul Fiorentino’s seventh collection of poetry and tenth book—a collection of poems that documents the daily din and clatter of cafés, galleries, and dive bars that make up Mile End in Montreal, perhaps the most artistically vibrant neighbourhood in the world.

Lonesome Monsters is a collection of prose and poetry from Vancouver writer Bud Osborn.