Brick Books: 207 books

Shortlisted for the 2000 Governor General's Award for Poetry From the outskirts of the fevered empire, and the embers that were its heart, Moritz sings us to our selves -- our failures, our cruelties, our stupidities, and beauty which even now astonishes and leaves us breathless. Genuine political...

These astute, generous poems give us contemporary Beirut in all its ravaged and incongruent beauty. This arresting first collection is, in part, a delicately balanced look at Beirut from the perspective of a Westerner who lives and works in that remarkable city. Whether writing about the Middle...

Immigrant Blues, an extension and deepening of the famous poems of the siege of Sarajevo translated in Simic's Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford, 1997), explores the personal and the public devastations of war, especially its effects on the emotions, thoughts and memories of exiled survivors. Simic's...

Few artists (one thinks of Rilke and Hopkins) have presumed to evoke the spirit of embodied Nature. A. F. Moritz not only succeeds in thus animating a living world, but he deals with our human presence and assault on it with sympathy and a larger vision than the misanthropy such injuries easily summon....

A hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies. "Denied the leap and dash up the ice,what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monkand cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhereas...

A meditative and piercing collection that explores traumas both ordinary and out of the ordinary. Museum of Kindness, Montreal poet Susan Elmslie’s searching second collection of poetry, is a book that bravely examines “genres” familiar and hard to fathom: the school shooting, PTSD, raising...

Shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award Poems of disturbing beauty, examining personal and collective loss. This is Michael Kenyon’s third full-length collection of poems. His poetry and fiction have always been alert to the underside, the angularity of the outcast, those forced by temperament or predilection...

Shortlisted for the 2005 Atlantic Poetry Prize, the 2005 Dartmouth Book Award and the 2005 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry Undone is a cornucopia of passionate poems arranged into three sections. "Forgotten" has mostly to do with the aftermath of a heart-rending breakup; "Kindred"...

In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.

Maureen Harris’s first volume of poetry evokes “a possible landscape,” where the stories that subtly shape us blend with the moments that we are. Here is an Eden where Eve longs for the serpent’s “green quiver,” his “sibilant caress,” where a snake tires of his lover “wearing/the...

In Hard Light, Michael Crummey retells and reinvents his father's stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half century ago. Speaking through generations of storytellers, he conjures a world of hard toil and heavy weather, shot through with stoicism, grim humour, endurance, and...

Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s poems welcome the reader into a place where the strange is made familiar and the familiar reveals its own magic. Here the combustible materials of childhood and old age are always potentially present, and the attention paid them multi-dimensional. Her poems engage their subjects...

At the time of writing this book, William Robertson was a homemaker. His poems bring a new passion to the ancient domestic scene, and to everything else he looks at out of that often-turbulent centre. He ventures with care "into a swelling sea/ of silted meanings" equipped with his own elegant...

Tuning a fine ear to Lawrence’s letters from 1906 until his death in 1930, Barry Dempster’s poems uncover the man within the myth and give voice to Lawrence’s passionate mortality. Dempster’s act is one of imagination and homage, a kind of lyrical readership which traces the life-and-death...