Brick Books: 207 books

Granddaughters, asters, Medea cakes, para pom tandle, Mrs. Roker raking, Caraquet, angelic recurrence, Neruda, zupzupzup, the high bush cranberries, the Somme, a waterfall in Iceland that cries by the thousandsful, the Strawberry Shaman and the Japonica Bushelful Bountiful Lady: you would never mistake...

“Do we want love / each and every day of our lives?” Jan Conn asks in a poem called “Michoacán.” “You bet your ass,” she answers. The poems of Botero’s Beautiful Horses are charged with otherness, bright with the exhilaration and danger of transformation. Many are descriptions of surrealist...

A. F. Moritz's poems integrate nature and enduring myth with our inner life so movingly, so convincingly, that they almost seem to be our own thoughts. His direct and intimate tone, and the power, calm, and clarity of his expression, are solid foundations for an exhilarating breadth and range of imagination.

Longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards Carla Hartsfield sings praises to the unusual: a rose blooming in December; an angel dancing on a cardiologist's scanner; Glenn Gould playing Brahms at Angelo's Garage. But these are common occurrences in Your Last Day on Earth, the everyday world and the metaphysical...

Water, wood, metal, stone, salt, cotton -- these are some of the everyday talismans that Maureen Hynes encounters on her journey through Harm's Way. A soldier's gold fountain pen, like the war itself, lies buried for decades; the corrugated metal and glass shattered across the Australian outback teach...

Winner of the 2006 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the McAuslan First Book Prize (Quebec Writers' Federation). Shortlisted for the 2007 Pat Lowther Award and the 2007 ReLit Awards. Poems that reach towards the lost or the might have been. In her debut collection, Susan Elmslie delves...

Winner of the 2001 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2001 Regina Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards). Shortlisted for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards. A wide-ranging reckless intelligence, verbal audacity and irrepressible humour -- all...

Reading John Reibetanz, one is struck with the way language, closely attended to, kept oiled and sharp, can give experience back its bite. And conversely, how experience can be the whetstone for language, chastening its presumptions and requiring from it fresh exactitudes of music and insight. Whether...

Shortlisted for the 2001 ReLit Awards John Reibetanz is good on grief: "You, mother,/ dying, left what was hard first:/ bones weeping into/ / your veins like flutes, teeth/ vanished on some hospital/ lunch tray" This conjunction of a profound sense of loss with the clearest-eyed observation and acceptance...

The Way to Come Home is Carolyn Smart's fourth book of poems. It is a collection that ranges from celebrating the rural landscape north of Kingston, Ontario to re-creating the painful last phase of her friend Bronwen Wallace's life in a moving sequence titled "The Sound of the Birds." The...

Year Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along songlines as though following passages of Koto music. In Brian Henderson's poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed...

Winner, Lesbian Poetry at the 2008 GCLS Literary Awards (Golden Crown Literary Awards) and nominated for LGBT Poetry at the Lambda Literary Awards Shortlisted for the 2007 Anne Szumigalsi Award for Poetry and the 2007 Saskatoon Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards...

Shortlisted for the 2003 Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book (Writers Guild of Alberta Award) In Cartography and Walking, Adam Dickinson charts his own listening -- an acute listening of eye and ear, a listening with both body and mind. "Cartography" is more than a metaphor for him, it's a way of...

Poised and buoyant, musing among ironies; alive to the psychologies of weather, night noises, mowing the lawn and putting it off; knowing the many mindscapes of neighbourhood, detecting the places where myth surfaces into a backyard or long weekend, where a situation teeters on the brink of art and "imagined...