Scofflaw is a long poem, a playful exploration of Indigenous-Settler relations amid globalized pressures.

Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control, and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response.

In this debut collection, Ontario poet Vera Hadzic explores themes of anxiety, eating, excretion, compulsion, and change. Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery follows the construction and deconstruction of the body, both human and animal.

Heather Haley’s poetry is tough, irreverent, and in-your-face. She asks all the questions that a nice girl’s not supposed to ask. Down back roads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers—and potential violence—hover like heat on the horizon.

Signs of the Times reunites the poetry of Bud Osborn and the woodprints of Vancouver printmaker and painter Richard Tetrault. As with their first collaboration, Oppenheimer Park, Signs of the Times is both an unflinching look at Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and a beautiful object in its own right.

Singer, An Elegy is a long poem memorializing the author’s father and, equally, the now-obsolete industrial culture that shaped him.

From the distinctly urban to the emotionally uncompromising, these three women express, each in her own voice, a cry, a laugh, a scream—the hybrid of which culminates in the call for imprint: A Siren Tattoo.

Powered by lush imagery and lyricism, the poems in The Sleep of Four Cities use the city as a metaphor for the complexity of self. This book invites the reader to take a journey through multiple cities—cities of memory, of desire, of imagination, of discovery, of loss—with only the map of language as a guide.

In this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways.

Snatch is a hilarious and creepy collection of poems that may not even be poetry at all. Like a comic novel from an alternate universe, or a fragmented hoax of an autobiography, Snatch picks at the vacuous horror of suburbia and exposes a world of small beauty and perfect moments amid TV-induced nostalgia and impending violence.