Catkin Press | 76 pages Review by kjmunro — Renku is a form of collaborative linked verse poetry, with the emphasis on collaboration. Fifteen from renku master Marshall Hryciuk are included here. What was the selection process for this book? How were these poems chosen? How many more poems are there? Based on the quality…

Wave Books | September 2016 | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by Cam Scott — Opaquely personal, spare but social, Hoa Nguyen’s writing more than most fulfills Louis Zukofsky’s mandate of a poetry arranging “minor units of sincerity” into shaped apprehension. Nguyen’s verse flits and fidgets by the phrase, conveying something of the poem’s occasion…

Leaf Press | 2014 | 51 pages | $12.00 | Purchase online Review by kjmunro — Another success from Leaf Press – from the cover photo of the Dancing Fountain & the bright orange endpapers to the signature emblem framing the poems on each small page – Hue: a Day at Butchart Gardens is beautifully…

Press Here | 2015 | $9.00 | See more Review by kjmunro — On the first page of Becoming a Haiku Poet, author Michael Dylan Welch states, “While too much information can also impede the poetic impulse, with haiku, as with other genres of poetry, it’s worthwhile to move beyond superficialities…”. This book does that.…

Inanna Publications | September 2017 | 384 pages | $22.95 | Purchase online Review by J.S. Porter —  For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things. You must know the animals, you must feel how the birds fly …. You must be able to think back to…

McClelland & Stewart | April 2017 | 160 pages | $16.95 | Purchase online Review by Cam Scott — Aisha Sasha’s John’s third full-length book of poems begins at the beginning, as it were, with a salutation: The first knowledge is of our ignorance. Hi. (3) What follows is a lean-lined phenomenology, or daybook of…

Frontenac House | 2016 | 116 page | $15.95 | Purchase online Review by Sue Bracken — silent sister: the mastectomy poems is a poetic journal of one woman’s particular detour in life, and it is an act of bravery in the telling. True to her moniker, Beth Everest has scaled the heights, breathed deeply…

Interactive Press | 2016 | 78 pages | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by Sarah-Jean Krahn — Glimpsing the Face of the Poet through The Face of the Other As a scholar in post-colonial theory and literature, Clara A. B. Joseph is fiercely aware of the forced foreignness of the Other at a global or…

Quattro Books | October 2016 | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by Kate Rogers — The title of Penn Kemp’s most recent poetry collection reflects her urgent activist response to government announcements she thought could undermine Canadian diversity.  As they campaigned to hold onto power in 2015, the Harper Conservatives vowed to create an RCMP…

Black Moss Press | 84 pages | $17.00 | October 2016 | Purchase online Review by Kim Fahner — D.A. Lockhart’s first collection of poems, published under the umbrella of Black Moss’s “First Lines” poetry series, evokes a sense of place and history that reflects the landscape of southwestern Ontario. References to Windsor, Detroit, and…