Crow Said Poetry – serie

In her debut collection, Canadian National Slam Champion Nisha Patel commands her formidable insight and youthful, engaged voice to relay experiences of racism, sexuality, empowerment, grief, and love. These are vitally political, feminist poems for young women of colour, with bold portrayals of confession, hurt, and healing.

Coconut rises fiercely like the sun. These poems bestow light and warmth and the ability to witness the world, but they ask for more than basking; they ask readers to grow and warn that they can be burnt. Above all, Nisha Patel’s work questions and challenges propriety and what it means to be a good woman, second-generation immigrant, daughter, consumer, and lover.

How do we scale up our imagination of the human? How does one live one’s life in the Anthropocene?

How to Hold a Pebble—Jaspreet Singh’s second collection of poems—locates humans in the Anthropocene, while also warning against the danger of a single story. These pages present intimate engagements with memory, place, language, migration; with enchantment, uncanniness, uneven climate change and everyday decolonization; with entangled human/non-human relationships and deep anxieties about essential/non-essential economic activities. The poems explore strategies for survival and action by way of a playful return to the quotidian and its manifold interactions with the global and planetary. Of loss no scale remains no seawall… Between one’s despairs / they will brighten / Hope’s in-built traces.

In his second book of poems, David Martin digs deep into an examination of the world using the lens of geology. With lyrically experimental poems expanding and retracting, this collection finds sonic and conceptual energy from the perspective of deep time and the geological forces that have shaped and continue to shape the Earth. Enacting seismic shifts, catastrophes, and erosions throughout the natural and cultural worlds, Martin’s poetic practice pushes forward to contend with the contemporary environmental changes and the structure of the Anthropocene that affect how we live in the twenty-first century. The collection veers from the Rocky Mountains and explorations of “fossilized” towns to family histories and myth-soaked theories, all while seeking a balance between disruptive poetic techniques and the centred lyrical voice.

—Deep time is time / that can not be erased“With empathy and playfulness, with startle and delight, Jaspreet Singh explores the fragility, beauty, and sorrow of the dreaming and waking worlds… a work of remarkable intellect,” wrote the poet Donna Kane about How to Hold a Pebble. In Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock, Singh deepens his exploration of climate, language, migration, decolonization, and the Anthropocene with an energy both acrobatic and intimate. Interweaving the personal, local, global, and geologic with hidden histories, these poems invite possibilities and defy neat closures, leaving readers with an indelible view of deep time. An ancestor’s words in a diary, a child’s chalk drawing, solar panels that smile like an ancient god, the Great Oxygenation Event: the gaze of these poems is vast, eclectic, and awestruck, while also remaining clear-eyed about the futures that await our planet. Her unironed face / smiling on behalf of the earth… You don’t have such words in your language / You don’t have such words in your language

A captivating search through one family’s history, All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain is a stunning examination of intergenerational trauma and its effect on Indigenous voices. Aftershocks and fragmented memories ricochet through this collection, bringing with them strength, intensity and uninhibited beauty. Recalling pivotal work by Billy-Ray Belcourt, jaye simpson, Joshua Whitehead and Emily Riddle, Sarain Frank Soonias makes his poetic debut with a splash that ripples far outside his own work, and marks the entrance of a new, important voice in contemporary poetry.

still around / astonished

The Time of the Earth is the last in Jaspreet Singh’s “Still Astonished” trilogy, following How to Hold a Pebble and Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock.

Investigating the emotional and existential registers of inner life in this epoch informally named the anthropocene, The Time of the Earth writes alongside air, water, language, and memory: inseparable ecologies that humanity attempts to segregate at its peril. In our bones and our unconscious lurk atmospheric, hydrospheric, lithospheric, and biospheric entanglements, our “nature” commingling with the “natures” of other species, and the poems in this book see and sing these relationships with a clarity at once reflective and urgent, grieving and playful. Jaspreet Singh’s The Time of the Earth is a meditation on wonder as a method of survival, grounded in deepening awareness of the Earth’s system.

From the kitchens of mother, grandmother, and self, Kathryn Lennon’s debut collection Duckweed 浮萍,/i> is the culmination of years of reading, writing, publishing, and performing.

Duckweed 浮萍 gets it’s title from a Chinese proverb describing wanderers, people with little or no roots. The poems in this collection explore the process of wayfinding: acting as signposts through landscapes of time and space as the poet works to locate herself in language, race, gender, place, culture, migration, and a collective and family history. Problematizing orientalist tropes, these poems wander between English and Chinese, at times keeping the languages separate, at times interweaving them. They wander between the personal, the historical, the systemic; between Edmonton’s and Vancouver’s Chinatowns; between the kitchens of mother, grandmother, and self.

Kathryn Lennon’s debut collection is the culmination of years of reading, writing, publishing, and performing her poetry throughout Canada. Recalling the work of Christine Wu and D.M. Bradford, Lennon is a poet engaged in the practice of elevating everyday lived experience towards the sublime. Kathryn Lennon is a poignant new voice in Canadian poetry.

In the early 1900s, Black speculators from the rural United States began moving towards the safe haven of the Canadian prairie provinces—they were in search of a place to raise their families, nurture their communities, and tend to the land. Many came from the American South, but mostly they came from what were once the Oklahoma and Indian Twin Territories from which many had fled in 1907 during the formation of the state of Oklahoma and the inhumane segregation laws that followed and attacked them. They made new homes in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as homesteaders, farmers, and whatever else they could find. They became Canadian, despite being, in the parlance of the day, “colored”.

Their communities have largely disappeared now, but they remain a crucial historical touchpoint in the identity of Black writers on the Prairies. The figure of this “colored Canadian” looms large in the Black past of so many writers and thinkers.

Frank Oliver Dreams of Amiskwacîwâskahikan is the debut collection from Edmonton-based poet Daniel Poitras. Sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes brazenly satirical, these poems bring together dark humour and blunt truths about colonialism, racism, and intergenerational trauma with an unmistakable tenderness underlaying them all.

A member of the Paul First Nation, Daniel Poitras shines in this debut collection.

A brilliant debut from a young Iranian Canadian poet asking questions of self-harm, the role of Brown womanhood in Canadian and Iranian society, the protests and upheaval overtaking Iran. As personal as it is political, it is the journey of one young woman fighting to find herself in the world.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award!Finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!Tar Swan is a multi-voiced reckoning that surveys the mythos of the Alberta oil sands with an approach that is both lyrical and experimental. The poems feature four voices: an oil sands developer, his plant mechanic, an archaeologist excavating the remains of the operation in the present day, and a mythical swan. David Martin’s debut collection is comprised of expansive and richly written poems, built on a lore-laden language, which explore the human and environmental cost of drawing too much from the land. As the three humans come into contact with the otherworldly swan, the voices bubble and churn together, and what is distilled is a psychological breakdown paralleling the toll taken on the earth.

Finalist for The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize at the New Brunswick Book Awards!Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers. These masterfully crafted poems challenge perpetuating colonial and class relations, as well as the hedonistic lifestyle attributed to the employees of these floating resorts. Kayla Geitzler’s debut collection interprets isolation, alienation, racism and assimilation into the margins as inevitable consequences for the seafaring workforce of the most profitable sector of the tourism industry.

Exploring the liminal space between labour and leisure, the poems in That Light Feeling Under Your Feet are at once buoyant and weighty, with language that cuts like a keel through the sea.

Long-listed for the 2021 Raymond Souster Award!Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2021 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

Meredith Quartermain’s Lullabies in the Real World is a sequence of poems about a train journey from West Coast to East Coast that invokes a patchwork of regions, voices and histories. Her language zings with train rhythms as she unfolds a complex conversation with poets such as bpNichol and Robin Blaser.

This collection reflects and refracts Canada from diverse angles, and challenges colonizing literatures such as the Odyssey and various canonical British and US voices. As it moves from west to east, the book journeys back in time to interrogate historical events such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the exclusion of Acadians. It ends by imagining a time before or outside colonization.

Rich, playful and confrontational, Lullabies in the Real World widens the poetic lens of poetry to investigate the place of a colonial nation in history, and the place of a poet vis-à-vis the voices of other poets.

Winner of the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award!Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for PoetryWinner of a 2021 High Plains Book Award for First Book!Finalist for the 2020 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!A 2020 CBC Poetry Book of the Year!Finalist for a 2021 High Plains Book Award for PoetryBertrand Bickersteth’s debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province’s character and provides personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here on this paradoxical land, too.