Brick Books: 207 books

This extraordinary sequence of prose and free verse poems explores the postures, styles, and rhetorics of our culture and its history -- not with the predictable aim of criticism and rejection, or the fashionable aim of recombinant word-play, but in the service of an unflinching, and thereby real, passion. This is humane vision of great breadth, depth, and particularity.

Songs for Relinquishing the Earth contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperilled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky’s experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario.

Under the sugar maples of Montreal, family life is given mythic dimensions in this sweeping novella-in-verse. If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L’Orfeo?...

Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on. E. Alex Pierce's voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It's not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details...

Verve, energy, wit, piquance and pure linguistic excitement: Mia Anderson's poetry is a whole cookbook of poetic experiences. Anderson is always ready to take big risks, and her work shows her love of life in its manyness and accident, as well as a delight in the intricate prism of language. Appetite...

A book of lyrics, fragmented, extended, and recovered, which read as a single long poem. The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists...

Frances Itani's third book of poetry consists of two deeply moving elegiac sequences commemorating the deaths of a sister and friend. In chaste and determinedly unsentimental language, Itani takes us through the crises all must face, ignoring none of their turbulence or anguish, yet leaving us with...

Shortlisted for the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region) Brenda Leifso’s first volume of poetry is a stunning debut: haunting, disturbing but resolutely beautiful. With an unflinching eye, Leifso explores the uncertainty of memory, the legacy of place,...

In these passionate poems, this long poem, there is a story (there are stories) which a reader mines out of a landscape of language moulded under great pressure and eloquent of the stresses that formed it. This is non-representational work of great concentration and beauty.

Both “grave and brave, serious and hilarious”—new poems from a Governor General’s Award–winning poet. How to Avoid Huge Ships, Julie Bruck’s fourth collection of poetry, is a book of arguments and spells against the ambushes of time. Parents grow down, children up, and it’s from the...

In her third collection of poems, Sue Wheeler writes of the ephemeral with an eye trained on the eternal questions. "Who are you?" she asks at the outset of her search for fresh and more telling names for the human in the lush natural landscape of her West Coast island home. The answers she gives us...

Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments is a collection of poems that zooms in and out of places and states of mind, from a lit bicycle shed in the back yard to a root canal in November, from a typhoon in Hong Kong to instincts astray in various Copenhagen neigborhoods. Elegantly translated...

A sequence exploring the bittersweet corners of motherhood.

Astatine is an Italian girl, who like Dante's Beatrice, haunts the narrator of Michael Kenyon's incandescent fourth book of poetry. Named after a radioactive element whose isotopes endure half-lives of mere seconds, she is simultaneously a disappearing and abiding presence who cajoles and comforts, who...