Brick Books: 207 books

Introduction to the Introduction to the Introduction by Andre Alexis For me, reading the Introduction was like being caught in a spring shower while waiting for the 41, and running into a library to get out of the rain and, because the rain lasts, wandering the aisles on the fifth floor, taking books...

Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré's second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers....

Heaven's Thieves is a collection engaged with the big questions -- What are bodies for? What does it mean to be alive? What is beauty and why does it have such power over us? What is the point of art? -- and the urgent ones -- how to live in a shattered ecology, what to do about grief, illness, betrayal....

In Nora Gould’s one-of-a-kind debut, the Prairie itself is a central character: muse, mythic persona, the place of deepest solace and of deepest questioning. The poems focus with great firmness and technical command on the facts of daily life on the farm: impregnating cows, the neighbour kid picking...

Poems that occupy the difficult territory of contemporary crisis with great candour and trenchant wit. Steve McOrmond’s unflinching take on contemporary life, with its saturnine candour and ironic focus, may remind readers of the anti-poetry of Europeans like Zbigniew Herbert: intense, humanistic...

Marilyn Dumont's Metis heritage offers her challenges that few of us welcome. Here she turns them to opportunities: in a voice that is fierce, direct, and true, she explores and transcends the multiple boundaries imposed by society on the self. She mocks, with exasperation and sly humour, the banal...

Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster's fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck--the "three-leaf clovers" so much...

Glenn's new collection confronts the deaths of dear friends and family members, returns to her prairie childhood and youth, and engages hard, hard questions of mortality, and of existence in a world fraught with suffering and violence (both global and domestic). Central is the poetic sequence “A...

The poems in Bearings are arranged in the stressful rhythm of alternation between the intense states of being in love and/or with someone or being alone. Loss refines the vision. For Rhonda Batchelor's poetry that means a gain which shows, for example, in occasional tender lyrics about experiences...

Winner of the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize and of the 2003 CAA Jack Chalmers Poetry Award and Globe 100 book for 2003 In Margaret Avison's new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones. Her slightest subjects -- beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids,...

A prose/poetry sequence concerning the hanged man of London, Ontario, by the award-winning author of Birding, or Desire; Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night; Night Field; Apparatus and Another Gravity.

Winner of the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, a Globe 100 Book for 2012, shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award and CAA Award for Poetry 2013. Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us what is sufficient, what will suffice? … a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad...

Reading Julie Berry's poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. "like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this," Berry writes in "Touching Ground."...

Nominated for the 1999 Governor General's Award for Poetry, the 1999 Pat Lowther Award and the 1999 Gerald Lampert Award and Globe 100 book for 1999 The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen...