Icehouse Poetry imprint: 12 books

Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) once wrote of a desire to leave behind "one poem, one story / that will tell what it was like / to be alive." In an abundance of memorable poems, he fulfilled this desire with candour and subtlety, emotion, and humour, sympathy and truth-telling. For many years,...

Allison LaSorda's Stray shows the formation of a considerable poetic talent. These poems are sun-bleached, at once gritty, raw, and playful. LaSorda can conjure childhood memories of beaches and ice cream, ponder the elemental force of the ocean, and plumb the depth of loss in a coal mine disaster....

Winner, New Brunswick Book Award for Poetry A Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year Like the novella in fiction, the long poem is an oft-neglected form. Too long for publication in most literary journals and anthologies, too short to merit book-length publication, the long poem occupies...

At one moment, a pure abstraction; at the next, an incontrovertible presence of hooves, antlers, and fur. The beating heart of this assured début by Richard Kelly Kemick is the Porcupine caribou herd of the western Arctic. In Caribou Run, Richard Kelly Kemick orchestrates a suite of poems both encyclopedic...

In Fauxccasional Poems, Daniel Scott Tysdal imagines himself into poetic voices not his own, writing to commemorate events that never occurred, for the posterity of alternative universes — and the delight of our own. From the reign of the first philosopher king once envisioned by Plato, to the twelfth-century...

Winner, 2017 ReLit Award Katherine Leyton's fresh and vibrant debut collection takes on the sexual politics of the twenty-first century, boldly holding up a mirror to the male gaze and interrogating the nature of images and illusions. Confronting the forces of mass communication —...

Winner, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Longlisted, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial Award Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry:...

Shortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize Part roving eye, part devotion, you wander hotel corridors, entering rooms not quite yours, trying on clothes, blankets, skins. Arguing with the body's limits and its trickery, you are always in disguise. Sometimes you're Leda; sometimes the swan. The...

Stately and majestic, yet scuffed with wear and disillusion, the poems of Smaller Hours mount the sky like columns and fora of some archaic ruin. Through these ancient halls, Kevin Shaw tracks Eros, clearing away the rubble and polishing the marble, along the way exploring queer ways of keeping time....

On "A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould": "The poem sits up at its greasy-spoon counter and recounts its tale, a kind of cryptic plain-speech, an inverted code, all the more puzzling for what it plainly says: 'Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t...

First published in 1974, Mourir à Scoudouc emerged out of a period of cultural awakening. Chiasson's poems denounced the narrow limitations of the past and traced the lines of a fresh collective vision. The poems were lyrical, referentially modern, and steeped in the rhythms and forms that had emerged...

Is this life a route or a destination? Alyda Faber's assured début examines the ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth we inhabit, and asks the question, What is left of us when we are gone? In the quiet and unsettling poems of Dust or Fire, Faber speaks from the grief following death...