Brick Books: 207 books

Jaguar Rain is a rare text: at once a book of stand-alone poems and a work of scholarship, with textual notes and bibliography. Written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988), the poems are infused with wonder at a discovered...

In his fifth book of poetry, Douglas Burnet Smith tunes his eye and ear closely to the world, conscious of those points where the everyday blossoms into fierce magic. The title sequence is a deftly-rendered homage to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Shortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award, the 2008 Lampman Scott Award and the 2008 ReLit Awards Imagining the lives of nineteenth-century women asylum patients, Nadine McInnis charts her descent into, and recovery from, depression. In the afterword to Two Hemispheres, McInnis describes...

A powerful grief book--poems that are not so much elegiac as visionary. Stomata, Genevieve Lehr’s second collection, asks that language shoulder loss, that it reach out centrifugally, at full metaphorical stretch, calling upon all its narrative and lyric resources to be adequate to human tragedy. These...

Winner of the 2007 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and the 2007 City of Saskatoon Prize and nominated for Book of the Year (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards Fierce and delicate poems from a young poet reminiscent of Jane Hirshfield and Jan Zwicky Rapt, musical,...

A long poem that limns the incremental mourning of living with a person who has frontotemporal dementia. Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk -- to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould's second...

In Ordinary Hours, the follow-up to Karen Enns' Gerald Lampert Award-nominated first collection, That Other Beauty, we revisit Enns' rural Mennonite childhood, replete with the sensuousness of "diesel fuel" and "hot peaches." Enns also explores the Mennonite exodus from Russia,...

Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question “what if?” What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What...

A Sudden Sky is a book of northern poems with crystalline images and lines, fragile graceful poems that speak of fragments, of the moment between open and closed eyes, of the human need for embrace. These poems note the spaces between things -- always a gap, a failed connection, like radio waves caught...

A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award–winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring,...

J.A. Hamilton distinguished herself with Body Rain (1991) a tough, passionate lyrical book written out of a woman's anger and a woman’s love. Steam-Cleaning Love, Hamilton’s second book of poetry, is "ginger root tough and jelly edgy" -- spicy, sweet, biting; it overwhelms, inundates,...

Shortlisted for the 1991 Pat Lowther Award In J.A. Hamilton's poems blood is red, black hearts are black. There is no flinching from things as bad as they can be, especially but not only for women. And yet, this passionate powerful writing radiates affirmation. "his good o, good old world" is livable still in acts of pure verbal magic.

Riffs is the story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style -- with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs. We hear Bach, Bo Diddley, Bird; the news is heartache and being. Celebratory, catastrophic, the poem tracks ways in which eros and our lives are made mutually accountable....

Near the centre of Marrying the Animals, Cornelia Hoogland's new book of poetry, is the sequence "In the Meantime: Elizabeth Smart Poems" Hoogland's exploration of Smart's obsession with the poet George Barker is an apt heart for this volume, for its abiding spirit is passion. With feather touch and...