Oskana Poetry & Poetics – serie

Louis Riel prophesied that a polyglot Métis nation would rise on the prairies five hundred years after his death, and that it would be called by the "joyous name" of the House of Charlemagne. This new polity would be built on the principles of Riel's Massinahican , a radical philosophical system which now survives only in fragments. Its hallmarks would be justice, ontological accord, and the blurring of all separations dividing women and men, the earth and human beings. The House of Charlemagne tracks the birth of this ideal nation in the burning imagination of the young settler Henry Jackson, who took the name Honoré Jaxon after his encounter with Riel's vision. Commissioned by Edward Poitras as a text for dancers, Tim Lilburn's poem gives voice and body to Riel's prescient metaphysics. As the Jury citation said of his Governor General's Award winning Kill-Site, "Lilburn's work is richly figurative, but firmly rooted in colloquial speech. He is not only a virtuoso at the linguistic level, taking risks with metaphor and line, but also steeped in a metaphysics of place."

An exquisite series of meditations on memory, evanescence and the land. Randy Lundy draws deeply from his Cree heritage and equally from European and Asian traditions. Readers will be reminded by turns of Simon Ortiz, PÓr Lagerkvist, and Jane Hirshfield. This is the mind of prayer, a seeing and re-seeing of the immense cyclic beauty of the earth. "Lundy has entered the place where the masters reside. His poems join the shades that walk among them. There aren't many people who get to that place and sometimes it can feel very lonely there, but the masters are saved by the brilliant and humble work they have done, their poems the crevices in our lives where the light shines through." -- Patrick Lane, author of Washita "Randy Lundy's poems bring forward the spirit of his Cree ancestry, and place our species humbly among the creatures of Earth—who are all observed with deep reverence and perceptive care." -- Don McKay, author of Strike/Slip "This is the book of poems I've been waiting for … His poems burn us, feed us, and make us feel beloved even if we have been broken. Language, as he uses it, holds us and leads us to a place where we can mourn and pray and wonder." -- Lorna Crozier, author of What the Soul Doesn't Want

In this series of elegant and wide-ranging meditations on language, wilderness, poetry, and technocracy, John Steffler takes us on a guided tour of one poet's mental workshop. His focus is vividly personal, shaped by his interests and experience, and at the same time universal. What is it to be human? Steffler is not afraid to be provocative, but he is also compassionately alert to moral, political, and cultural complexity. This is a book that will convince you that poetry can indeed make a great deal happen.

Field Notes for the Self is a series of dark meditations: spiritual exercises in which the poem becomes a forensics of the soul. The poems converse with Patrick Lane, John Thompson, and Charles Wright, but their closest cousins may be Arvo Pärt's tintinnabulations—overlapping structures in which notes or images are rung slowly and repeatedly like bells. The goal is freedom from illusion, freedom from memory, from "the same old stories" of Lundy's violent past; and freedom, too, from the unreachable memories of the violence done to his Indigenous ancestors, which, Lundy tells us, seem to haunt his cellular biology. Rooted in exquisitely modulated observations of the natural world, the singular achievement of these poems is mind itself, suspended before interior vision like a bit of crystal twisting in the light. "Dispassionate yet impassioned, stark yet bristling with images, the poems encompass contradiction and expansion." — Arc Poetry Magazine Praise for Randy Lundy: "Here is a poet of whom one can say—quietly, simply, with gratitude—that highest of praises: the real thing." — Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty "Randy Lundy has entered the place where the masters reside…" — Patrick Lane, author of Washita

Burden is a poetry collection that tells the story of a seventeen-year-old British soldier, Private Herbert Burden, who was shot for desertion during World War I. He was one of hundreds so executed. It is now understood that many had committed no crime, but were suffering from PTSD. Burden's story is told in the voice of Lance Corporal Reginald Smith, the author's uncle. The author discovered years later in a box of papers that his uncle, Lance Corporal Smith, had befriended Private Burden but then was ultimately commanded to join in the firing squad that killed his friend. This slim book reaches below standard indictments of war—it shows us that "terrifying," "senseless," "horrific" don't go deep enough. To utter them, the eye must already be closing over. Smith's account is an object lesson in why poetry matters. It takes us to places even the best journalism can't reach.

A visceral new collection from esteemed poet Stephan Torre, grappling with the strength and complexities of life in the northwest wild lands. Drawing from a life lived well, amidst hard work and time for reflection in the northwest wild lands of the Canadian and American Wests, Stephan Torre returns to the literary world with his usual descriptive and lyric intensity. Comprised of new and selected poems, Red Obsidian explores the necessary tensions that arise between genders and the pain and grief of environmental loss. Inspired and influenced by a diverse array of literary influences—Indigenous oral poets and English pastoral poets, T'ang Dynasty Chinese poets and Latin American poets, American Imagists and poets Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and W.S. Merwin—Torre's book is a poetic journal of a man passionately engaged at once with the marvel of wilderness and the rural labours of family homesteading, construction, and the logging of that wilderness. "When there's more joy or grief or hunger for knowing than I could express or explore elsewhere, I'm afflicted with the need to squeeze language from my fists. One can only hold so much inside," admits Torre. Readers will feel the torque, squeeze, and pull in these poems.

"We began to dig ourselves deeper than we dreamed when we began to see metal as other than medicine, our bodies, more than mineral". From an emerging environmental voice comes an evocative, multi-layered poetry collection about extraction, destruction, and the erasure of Indigenous people. At Rabbit Lake in Northern Saskatchewan lies the second largest uranium mine in the western world. For decades, uranium ore and its poisonous by-product -- pitchblende, a highly radioactive rock -- were removed, transported, and scattered across the land, forever altering the lives of plants, animals, and people who live there. Elise Marcella Godfrey's PITCHBLENDE is a powerful, political collection that challenges us to urgently rethink our responsibilities to the land, water, and air that sustains all species, and our responsibilities to one another. Inspired by and adapted from testimonies given at the public hearings about the Rabbit Lake mine, which prioritised the voices of industrial interests, Godfrey gathers voices from the found texts, and adds others, in defence of the natural world. Interconnected, Godfrey's poems are a choral and visual, literal representation of how industry, capitalism, and colonialism seek to erase affected peoples and their voices.

A satiric and searing collection of poetry obsessed with television, oceans, Jewish history, and time. Nature isn't dying it's simply revising its target audience In Shifting Baseline Syndrome , Aaron Kreuter asks the hard questions: will the Anthropocene have a laugh track? Is it okay to marry your eighteenth cousin? How different would the world look from outside the life-frame of the human? What is it like to have an acid trip in a portapotty? Is it the end . . . of Earth? Of capitalism? Of television? Throughout Kreuter's sophomore collection, the TV remote is never far. Shifting Baseline Syndrome is both searching and searing, veering between satire and sincerity, history and prophecy, and human and non-human worlds. As these clash ecstatically with loathing—and with the end looming—Kreuter demonstrates why we'll keep doing what we've always done: hoping, for once, that the series finale will be good.

An award-winning poet attempts to map the brain's neural connections, raising fundamental questions about identity and interiority. This intricate, yearning work from award-winning poet Alison Calder asks us to think about the way we perceive and the ways in which we seek to know ourselves and others. In Synaptic, each section explores key themes in science, neurology, and perception. The first, Connectomics, riffs on scientific language to work with and against that language's intentions. Attempting to map the brain's neural connections, it raises fundamental questions about interiority and the self. The lyric considerations in these poems are juxtaposed against the scientific-like footnotes which, in turn, invoke questions undermining authority and power. The second section, Other Disasters, explores ways of seeing or and being seen, from considerations of folklore to modern art to daily life. The speakers in these poems are searching for knowledge. Everyone is looking for a miracle.

A vivid, sensory collection of poems from an award-winning author. Exploring what it means to be alive in this increasingly contradictory, unjust, and frightening era in human history, award-winning poet Michael Trussler grapples with the beauty and violence of the present in his new collection, The History Forest. Trussler's vivid, sensory, surreal writing explores the myriad ways that wonder can exist alongside suffering. He ruminates on nuclear war, school shootings, and ecological destruction, alongside his own experiences with mental health, aging, and loss.

In all these poems I'm partly somewhere else. With you, without you, walking toward you or away, but you are there, your small face watching from the shadow of a doorway or a set of stairs, from behind a curtain or a table. Sometimes I see you at the piano. You stop playing, turn to me, and in that pause, tell me something necessary. Poet Karen Enns takes the reader on a lyrical journey, wrapped in the vicissitudes of seasons and weather while observing human and other-than-human lives. Enns invites us to peer and is concerned always with the locations and dislocations perspective implies and creates.

The powerful debut from author and poet M.W. Jaeggle.Like the coastal zone where high tides deposit organic materials and other debris, M.W. Jaeggle’s Wrack Line traces loss, guilt, and subsequent loneliness, while exploring regenerative possibilities of language, memory, and land, taking readers on a journey that will leave them like “A black horse...winded at the gate” of some new grace.

A dreamlike collection of poetry that intertwines an embodied experience of the natural world with mythology, memory, and the creative processWoven together from fragments collected in notebooks and dream journals over two decades of introspection, Dog and Moon inhabits a space of sleeplessness, enveloped in the darkness of night. Kelly Shepherd draws inspiration from the free-verse ghazal but takes the form and bends it, introducing couplets that recur and echo across his poems. They are a series of juxtapositions: nature writing placed in conversation with the language of poetry workshops, mythology and childhood memories, and sensorial encounters with the natural world colliding with images of home and belonging. My ribs, the mattress’s ribs—I can’t sleep. This is a war,says the newscaster reporting on the winter storm.A war with Mother Nature.When a metaphor is taken too far it becomes a projectile.Try to talk to someone when they’re snoring:their responses are all the same. The mind races.Happiness is only a purchase away,but what happens when the box store runs out of boxes?Time moves differently depending on your bedsprings.From a net of clouds, the moon:so much of writing is trying to rememberyour thoughts from other states of consciousness.An inexplicable need to followthe pathways of unseeable sparks and insects in the blankets.

ONE OF CBC's BEST CANADIAN POETRY BOOKS OF 2025Something for the Dark centres Indigenous knowledge to probe the limits of what we know, confront the unknown, and reckon with our place in the world.Randy Lundy’s newest collection of poetry—the final in a trilogy that began with Blackbird Song and continued with Field Notes for the Self—turns the poem to our relationships with the land, animals, and people, showing how our failures to see and live by the personhood of all other beings in the world, human and non-, leads inevitably to heartbreak.  As Lundy’s poems accumulate like snow on cedar, his recounting of experiences that transcend language invites the reader to bend their understanding and notice what was once unseen—how a red-winged blackbird clings to a swaying reed, how mist rises after rainfall, how dogs keen and howl, how fingers taste bitter after lighting sage, how hunger smarts, how liquor burns, and how the pain survivors carry is not merely their own.

Part autotheory, part activist manifesto, and part ode to the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen, this book about making poems in an age of ecological desperation is both heartbreaking and beautiful.Blue thinks itself within me chronicles the poet Kim Trainor’s experiences as an activist at the Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek blockade to prevent logging of Vancouver Island old growth forests, where she woke at 4:00 a.m. to boil water on a camp stove and wait for the police to arrive at the standoff. The two-year blockade on logging roads and in tree-sits became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history—this multi-genre work brings the reader to the front lines of the fight for human and non-human survival in a climate catastrophe.Trainor asks what, if anything, ecopoetry can do in the face of intensifying extraction of ecological capital. Can poems incorporate non-human species, like the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen that thrives in Fairy Creek, into their very form? How can poetry resist the urge to “capture” the non-human object and instead approach nature with sympathetic care? How might a poem offer an opportunity, like sunlight penetrating a clearing in the forest, to think about nature, to approach, and to be approached by the nonhuman? How might poetry contribute to a co-making of the world with more-than-human-species?