National Poetry Month
Enjoy Canadian poetry with us.
(Re)Generation : the poetry of Katerie Akewenzie-Damm
Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri, 1965- author
2021
(Re)Generation contains selected poetry by Anishinaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm that deals with a range of issues: from violence against Indigenous women and lands to Indigenous erotica and the joyous intimate encounters between bodies. Her creative work is formative, and she is responsible for the release of other influential works in the field of Indigenous literary studies through her publishing house, Kegedonce Press. Akiwenzie-Damm is proof positive that if Indigenous peoples are going to resist the violent processes of ongoing colonialism, then they're going to have to do it together. Akiwenzie-Damm's afterword speaks to the relations and obligations Indigenous peoples have to one another and their other-than-human kin, as she reflects on the resilient work that Indigenous creative work has done and continues to do in spite of colonial violence. Her afterword stakes a claim for the necessity of poetry in the face of ongoing colonialism, not only in the present but in the future and for the generations to come. The introduction by Dallas Hunt locates Akiwenzie-Damm within the field of Indigenous literature and meditates on her influence on the field of Indigenous erotica.
From the Lost and Found Department
Kogawa, Joy
2023
A career-spanning volume that brings together new and selected works by an iconic voice in Canadian literature. From the Lost and Found Department, by the trailblazing Joy Kogawa, is a profound work of spare, trenchant, and haunting poems that lets us stay with the quietest qualities of beauty and the sublime. This essential volume brings together thrilling new work with selected poems from The Splintered Moon (1967), A Choice of Dreams (1974), Jericho Road (1977), Woman In the Woods (1985), and A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems (2003). Kogawa’s poems here are evidence that our every vulnerability can open into vast channels of grace.
On/me
Cunningham, Francine, 1984- author.
2019
"Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesn't fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection On/Me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margins. Cunningham does not hold back: she holds a lens to residential schools, intergenerational trauma, Indigenous Peoples forcibly sent to sanatoriums, systemic racism and mental illness, and translates these topics into lived experiences that are nuanced, emotional, funny and heartbreaking all at once. On/Me is an encyclopedia of Cunningham, who shares some of her most sacred moments with the hope to spark a conversation that needs to be had."-- Provided by publisher.
Radiant shards : Hoda's North End poems
Panofsky, Ruth, author
2020
This long, narrative poem, Radiant Shards: Hoda's North End Poems, traces the sacrifice and suffering of devoted but destitute parents, Russian immigrants who are acutely affected by the Depression and struggle relentlessly to survive in Winnipeg. More importantly, with its focus on the life experience and inner world of their tenacious daughter - and as the first poetic project to give voice to a Jewish sex worker, a figure that has been all but erased from literary history - Radiant Shards is a compassionate and humanizing work. The poem invokes Adele Wiseman's 1974 novel Crackpot, described by Jewish Studies scholars Ruth Wisse as a foundational twentieth-century literary text and by Josh Lambert as a radically feminist work. This book imagines the interior life of the novel's protagonist, an obese Jewish sex worker named Hoda, who services the boys and men of North End Winnipeg during the first half of the twentieth century. In Radiant Shards, Hoda reflects personally and knowingly on the experiences of her complicated life. Against the structural arc of novelistic events that shape her worldview, she plumbs the depths of her suffering and the triumph of her will from a poetically imagined position of maturity and self-awareness. This creative project also incorporates archival/historical photographs housed in the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada and the Archives of Manitoba. These images ground the poet's lyric presentation of Hoda and deepen the resonant voice of a character that originally was modelled on an actual North End resident.
A relationship with truth : poem and verse born in the Canadian oil patch
Parkin, Naden, author
2014
Voodoo hypothesis : poems
Lubrin, Canisia, 1984- author
2017
"Voodoo Hypothesis is a subversion of the imperial construct of 'blackness' and a rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint black people as inferior, through constant parallel representations of 'evil' and 'savagery.' Pulling from pop culture, science, pseudo-science and contemporary news stories about race, Lubrin asks: What happens if the systems of belief that give science, religion and culture their importance were actually applied to the contemporary 'black experience'? With its irreverence toward colonialism, and the related obsession with post-colonialism and anti-colonialism, and her wide-ranging lines, deftly touched with an intermingling of Caribbean Creole, English patois and baroque language, Lubrin has created a book that holds up a torch to the narratives of the ruling class, and shows us the restorative possibilities that exist in language itself." -- Provided by publisher.