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The water belongs to itself. undercurrent reflects on the power and sacredness of water—largely underappreciated by too many—whether it be in the form of ocean currents, the headwaters of the Fraser River or fluids in the womb. Exploring a variety of poetic forms, anecdote, allusion and visual elements, this collection reminds humanity that we are water bodies, and we need and deserve better ways of honouring this.Poet Rita Wong approaches water through personal, cultural and political lenses. She humbles herself to water both physically and spiritually: “i will apprentice myself to creeks & tributaries, groundwater & glaciers / listen for the salty pulse within, the blood that recognizes marine ancestry.” She witnesses the contamination of First Nations homelands and sites, such as Gregoire Lake near Fort McMurray, AB: “though you look placid, peaceful dibenzothiophenes / you hold bitter, bitumized depths.” Wong points out that though capitalism and industry are supposed to improve our quality of life, they’re destroying the very things that give us life in the first place. Listening to and learning from water is key to a future of peace and creative potential.undercurrent emerges from the Downstream project, a multifaceted, creative collaboration that highlights the importance of art in understanding and addressing the cultural and political issues related to water. The project encourages public imagination to respect and value water, ecology and sustainability. Visit downstream.ecuad.ca.

2006 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD NOMINEE & NATIONAL BESTSELLER"A deeply humane, deeply human book."- Michael Crummey"Moving, funny, full of hard truths."- Jim Bartley, The Globe and MailWhat's left of us when we're gone? In When I Was Young and In My Prime, a young woman watches her grandparents begin to decline. As she sorts through the couple's belongings, she reflects on the untold stories and unsung bonds that make up our lives. Meanwhile, modern urban life places strains on her own marriage and on her sense of what, ultimately, we owe each other.Weaving together voices, diary entries, poems, conversations and lists, When I Was Young and In My Prime cuts to the heart of our search for intimacy and family, for what makes life meaningful and love real. The result is a smart, moving novel about personal and cultural decline, dignity and work, the urban and the rural, the old and the new, and the search for something ageless.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2006 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD"Elizabeth Bachinsky is one of those rare poets capable of negotiating poetic forms with rigour and testing their limits, while never losing sight of the strange, dark music of what it means to be human. We should expect great things from her." --The Globe and MailHome of Sudden Service is a sad and scary book of punk rock villanelles and sonnets about delinquency.Set in Anyvalley, North America, Home of Sudden Service centres around the experiences of young people growing up in the suburbs. The contrast of elegant poetic forms with the colloquial, often harsh language of suburban teens makes for a compelling and engaging achievement.Bachinsky creates a gothic landscape that will be familiar to anyone who's visited the suburbs. Here, young Brownies dance, learn to sew and get badges in a series of eerie rituals, and smalltown girls settle down early. Murder, lust, teen pregnancy and a young man's disappearance are all discussed with a matter-of-fact, dispassionate voice.But this world is not without humour and hope. Home of Sudden Service concludes with "Drive," a series of fifteen sonnets about the poet's trip across Canada with her sister -- and out of the setting of their youth.

Winner of the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book PrizeIn her debut collection of poems, Birch Split Bark, Diane Guichon uses a quintessentially Canadian image -- a birch bark canoe -- to speak of those private waters that make us universally human. By writing in the first person of a father, a mother, a son and a daughter, she bridges age to gender, myth to memory and hatred to reconciliation. These poems are brave and brilliantly voiced and her descriptions are as haunting as a loon's concerto on a silent summer lake. Guichon's characters speak to the plurality of Canadian identity; in four distinct voices, Guichon pulls apart the myths that have created us and continue to dictate who we must be. Birch Split Bark proves that canoes will always write history upon their waters just as poets will write humanity upon the page.

"Living Things thrives." -George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-HeraldWritten in the year after the birth of Matt Rader's first daughter, Living Things honestly introduces the contradictions of the modern world: "how what we see in daylight is less than whole / and also more so." Using words in lieu of sonar, these poems bounce off the ecology of "shabby saturated grasses" and "panther-eyed armies of salal," and locate both author and reader within a literary genealogy. Matt Rader's poetry brings subtle slowness to a chaotic, fast-paced environment. It is both celebration and documentation of this world and its relationship to all living things.

The first anthology of urban Aboriginal songs by Gregory Scofield is a retrospective of the award-winning poet's pivotal work to date. The word kipocihkan is Cree slang for someone who is mute or unable to speak, and charted in this book is Scofield's journey out of that silence to become one of the most powerful voices of our time."I make offerings to my Grandmothers and Grandfathers when I write. I ask them to come and sit with me, to give me courage and strength. I ask them to help me be honest, reflective of the ceremony that I am about to begin. I ask them to guide me, to help me touch people. I ask to make good medicine, even out of something bad. When people read my work it's not just the book that they read, it's the medicine behind the words. That's where the power comes from. That's where the healing comes from."--Scofield in January Magazine

Shortlisted for the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Atlantic Poetry PrizeGeorge Murray proves once again he is one of his generation's most accomplished poets with The Rush to Here. Diverging from the excess and declamation of his highly praised previous collection, The Hunter, Murray breaks new poetic ground in poems that are dangerous, sharp and glistening in both language and style.Combining what the poet calls "thought-rhyme" with the structured sonnet form, Murray's philosophical curiosity and hardnosed intelligence emerge to create an off-kilter eye that somehow manages to be dead on target. As though looking out a window by which the entire world is passing, The Rush to Here darts through the absurdity of daily life to organize the mess and contradictions of modern society.Relentlessly honest, elegant in form and language, The Rush to Here is an intimidating, eerie, but ultimately hopeful collection that sets George Murray apart as a voice for our time.

In this collection, husbands and wives stumble into each other at the end of days, children find the wild edges of suburbs, new mothers try to navigate through a map-less terrain, and a relentless epidemic of bugs eats away at the forest. The collection explores new territory, both physically and emotionally--relocation, the north, new marriage and motherhood--in a way that is honest, raw and insightful."In two years, I went from being a single girl living in a studio downtown Vancouver to being a married mother in the suburbs of a northern town. We arrived in the north in the middle of an epidemic of pine beetles that was literally eating away the forest around us, leaving the landscape exposed and raw. I wanted to write about people doing this in their own lives--entering into new territory, stumbling and blundering, but also opening themselves up for change and transformation, for new life."--Laisha Rosnau

"Red Nest is a deeply political book without the cant. This first book argues passionately for the interconnectedness of all our everyday actions with the larger, political and cosmic forces shaping the destiny of our species. It's got the scope of Whitman, the sensuality of Keats, the ferocity of Kathy Acker and Sylvia Plath."--Suzanne BuffamEnter the surreal adventure that is Gillian Jerome's debut collection of domestic, urban and intergalactic eclogues. Just when you've been ambushed by gods and stars, you're catapulted back into a wild sprawling city filled with cordless phones, coyotes and the hairdos of dandelions. The brave and rambunctious creatures in this book nest in the humour and horror of the 21st-century.

Windstorm is a passport to the place where chaos and form meet; Denham's timeless ethereal gaze is rooted in the mastery of poetic forms such as the sonnet and Dante's terza rima. These quiet, forceful poems explore heaven, earth and sea with arresting images, ideas and words. Like the wind, Denham's poetry has the power to move.in the windsong. This is no translation,this long-line tow trawling the abyssal silt, oceanic-soul, in the low opalinelight sifting down through fire's alburnum.--excerpt, Windstorm

Patternicity contains a suite of poems that won a 2008 CBC Literary Award and follows the author's debut book of poems, The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008). As a physiologist currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, Johnstone's work is informed by a scientific approach, his own corporeal environment and an exploration of "the unreliability of language, regardless of how it's relayed."

In Triny Finlay's second collection of poetry, she asks what it means to let in the ghosts of the past. Will memories loosen the frame of a life? Will subtle fears take over? Finlay plumbs the depths of family life as she negotiates the territories of ancestry, love, and new motherhood: a great-grandmother who went to bed for seventeen years; a lover caught with somebody else; a son's critical illness -- things that "encroach, they devastate, so that you must decide: you are an anchor or you are not." Whether she is contemplating the politics of drought in Eritrea or a safari in South Africa, Finlay does not let us forget the potency of our personal and collective histories. She also explores the expansive landscape of her experience, layering a vision of her world with that of her young son, and exposing the ache of obssession, of doubt, ofsuffering. This is a fragile world, in which rivers overflow and fear can become paralysing. But there is hope here, too, for the "lusty aria" of the newborn child, for "a look we might have missed, in a different room," for the falling leaves that return to the ground, that recover us.

Kevin McNeilly's debut poetry collection, Embouchure, compiles the intertwined lineages of trumpet players who came to prominence in the States during the "pre-bop" era, loosely defined as the period between 1890 and 1939. This series of vignettes betrays a broad and detailed knowledge of the players' lives and work, yet reads like a collection of conversational anecdotes shared between the musicians and those around them. Rather than focusing on the solid facts of their lives, McNeilly brings to life the characters they inhabited and stories that surrounded them, all in a vibrant, slangy dialect that adeptly reproduces the feel of the period.Within the course of Embouchure's thirty-seven portraits, Buddy, Satch, Bix, Jabbo, Cootie, Cat and the rest are resurrected in their smoky, brassy, sepia-toned glory as figures deeply steeped in their own mythos. Despite embracing the fictional aspects of their lives, however, McNeilly styles these remarkable men and women with pure love and admiration, not only for their shared history and contribution to the evolution of jazz, but also for the pure, loud, messy beauty of the music itself. In this stunning and highly readable debut, McNeilly boasts finely honed poetic chops, proving that heart remains the first and finest ingredient in any truly virtuosic solo.

"I grew up in a blue-collar town ten minutes down the road from a white-collar town. And I've spent most of my life uncomfortable in both places."With these opening words, accomplished poet Tim Bowling outlines the central tension that acts as a vital force in his newest book, Tenderman--the dichotomy between the sensitive poetic observer and the tough, working-class subject. Bowling returns again to the shores of his BC hometown that exert such a strong hold on his imagination, but through his focus on the tenderman figure, he also demonstrates wry self-awareness in doing so. The tenderman (a crewman on a salmon packing boat), who represents a fiercely independent everyman, acts as unintentional muse to the collection; its poems are often delivered through dialogues between poet and fisherman, reminiscences of their shared childhoods, or narratives delivered by the tenderman himself.As always, Bowling's verse is stunning in its haunting portrayal of West Coast imagery, depicting both natural beauty ("the Spanish silhouette/ crouched in warm salt dark") and the grim realities of fishing ("The kicks and slaps of a hold of dying fish--/ hands in an auditorium") with effortless grace.

Earworm, the second book from acclaimed poet Nick Thran, expertly combines wicked cleverness, adept craftsmanship and a uniquely insightful perspective in an entertaining yet substantial tour de force. Building on the success of his debut, Thran has enhanced his compelling pop culture rhythms and distinctive voice with bolder formal experimentation and greater poetic maturity. This eclectic collection takes in topics ranging from cartoons to Caravaggio to cicadas, expressed in a comparable variety of poetic forms. Despite this diversity, the book is unified by its perfectly balanced blend of thoughtful observation laced with Thran's characteristically whimsical sense of humour. Earworm is also interspersed with several poems inspired by works of art in a variety of media. Whether he's reinterpreting Picasso's Blue Period, encapsulating a moment from The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, or lending a narrative to one of Dennis Oppenheim's conceptual sculptures, Thran is able to distill the essence of the original while adding a fresh twist.

Few figures in Canadian history have attained such an iconic status as Louis Riel. Celebrated Metis poet Gregory Scofield takes a fresh look at Riel in his new collection, Louis: The Heretic Poems, challenging traditional conceptions of Riel as simply a folk hero and martyr. By juxtaposing historical events and quotes with the poetic narrative, Scofield draws attention to the side of the Metis leader that most Canadians have never contemplated: that of husband, father, friend and lover, poet and visionary.Scofield also uses the collection to raise attention about the more crucial historical events of Riel's lifetime--such as the Manitoba Resistance and the Northwest Resistance at Batoche--in order to illuminate the history of western Canadian Metis people and their struggles toward recognition. Scofield also examines Riel's own poetry, most of which was devoted to exploring religious themes. Accordingly, religious imagery features strongly in the collection, complemented by a poetic voice that is rhythmic, repetitious, and lush with potent symbolism and simple, powerful images.

Dirt of Ages is the highly anticipated second book of poetry by Gillian Wigmore, whose debut collection soft geography (2007) captured the ReLit Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize.

In Dirt of Ages, everything meets in "the perfect v" of the valley: where rivers meet in an "exchange between sky and water," where rural runs into urban,"where art and work meet,""the rush and rattle," where fog and smog converge as "foetid fall inversions," and where "two chafe so close together."

Wigmore expands both her curiosity and command as a poet from personal observations and relationships with wilderness to a universal, societal energy that flows through time, place and every one of us."Notions of deeper rivers" do not reveal a romanticized "true north" but rather a meth dealer accidentally entreating a mother with child on the streets of a pulp-mill town, and "burnedout buildings that are a calling card of the heart's."

Among so many other interstices, human interaction with our natural environment is expressed as "rotten lumber stacked and waiting in the woodlot floodplain" and "our wallets open, hoping wealth / will rain down after winter," while the "the earthen hum of bugs at work" goes on: the dirt of ages.

The poems in Chris Jennings's long-awaited debut poetry collection are linked at their core by a preoccupation with the ways objects or moments become charged with meaning. Narrative occupies the territory of memory, making the most ordinary things--a classified ad, the odds and ends of an estate auction, graffiti, an antique lancet, a vegetable stand--touchstones and reliquaries of other lives. Sometimes reserved, sometimes exploring what a poet can do with excess, Jennings moves fluidly between objective detachment, quiet intimacy and the tone of a cynic in a sentimental mood.

In his third poetry collection, A Brief History of the Short-Lived, Chris Hutchinson brings the full force of his linguistic dexterity to bear on the elusive subject of literature itself. With his restless intellectual curiosity tempered by a dash of witty self-deprecation, Hutchinson deftly manoeuvres through hallowed halls of academia with humour and grace.

Three stylistically distinct sections,"Imago,""A Brief History of the Short-Lived," and "Serialist" are interwoven throughout the collection, showcasing the range of Hutchinson's poetic ability. The "Brief History" poems explode from the page in densely allusive bursts of energy, clusters of images fired off at a rapid pace: "He is wearing a green felt / Fedora with an ostrich plume which bursts into flame the moment I drop / A three-sided coin into his outstretched flipper." By contrast, the "Imago" and "Serialist" sections are quieter and more meditative, though no less inventive or rich in imagery: "Rhetoric is big business / as byzantine networks / replace its circle of friends."

By turns gleefully irreverent, thoughtful and too clever for its own good, A Brief History of the Short-Lived defies description--it must be read to be believed.