"from this sea I am fished, / gutted and stripped, / bled and bound, / on your ship I sail, / or go down." A Lovely Gutting echoes with the music of traditional nature poetry, but its romantic style is ripped by rawness. These poems - enraged and erotic, tormented and tender - swirl around the pain of personal loss, ebbing and surging like the North Atlantic. Durnford pictures a Newfoundland not found in postcards. Her verse roams an island only half-wild, a ramshackle world of crumbling outports and post-industrial landscapes. In one town, the site of a former US Air Force base, stands a crumbling theatre of "piss-stained crushed velvet seats," the ghost of Mae West still lingering. The ocean no longer spits up cod but the view is strangely sublime. A startling collection from a talented new voice in Canadian poetry, A Lovely Gutting splits open the guts of grief. It is an unflinching meditation on the loss of a culture and a father and on the struggle to preserve and honour what remains.

From the "rubble [that] is the order of the day" in the opening poem to the longing for a "radiant happy ending" in the book's final line, Tablature is a book of poems that traverses a great swath of the heart's experience in compelling and lucid poetic language. Bruce Whiteman's first book of poems in traditional lined form in thirty years is by turns learned and allusive, and emotionally expressive and despairing. These poems engage three large and powerful subjects: the landscapes we see and abide in, music that is comforting and a guide to hearing the poem's compulsions, and love - erotic, domestic, and enduring. Whiteman is keenly observant of the natural world of birds and trees, of rocks and water, alive to the pressures and hurts of daily life, and above all to the ways in which music rescues us from dependency and pulls us back from a "cultivated hysteria." If there is an "intimate / apocalypse," there is also "radiant hope." The poems in Tablature capture readers with their singular music and their bright and unblinking takes on the quotidian challenges of living a life. These are poems of a highly tuned sensibility matched by a sweetness of language.

Holmes entered the cabinet / of the respectable reverend / (who was in fact a closet naturalist) / and found so many Victorian things. In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry. Vlarf pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since the advent of modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques that include erasure, bout-rimé, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love. Erasures of massive volumes of prose by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin become concise poems of condensed sadness; a reboot of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy with an imaginary albatross pal; recovered fragments from an apocryphal book of Victorian nonsense verse are pieced together; a Leonard Cohen song about Queen Victoria is offered in a steampunk rendering; and a meditative guinea pig delivers a dramatic monologue in the vein of Robert Browning. Camlot moves through Victorian literature as a collector in a curiosity shop, seeking the oddest forms of feeling in language to shape them into peculiarly affective poems.

Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty / the measure of our pain? and I will answer. To be ill is to be a body bursting with strangers. A curiosity. A narrative to interpret. Dominik Parisien's debut collection is a poignant celebration of the complicated lived experience of disability, a challenge to the societal gaze, and a bold reconfiguration of the language of pain. A powerful contribution to the field of disability poetics, Side Effects May Include Strangers is an affecting look at the multitude of ways a body is both boundary and boundless. Parisien takes bpNichol's claim that "what is a poem is inside of your body" and localizes the inner and outer lives of disabled, queer, and aging bodies as points of meaning for issues of autonomy, disability, sexuality, and language. Balancing hope and uncertainty, anger and gratitude, these poems shift from medical practice to myth, from trauma to intergenerational friendship, in an unflinching exploration of the beauty and complexity of othered bodies.

Thyme clings, high / and away from the grazing and scents / the air. Island reality is interconnected with live-retrieved memories in which a nurse follows a violent patient into the northern Canadian bush, a migrant mother faces her new job as the village butcher, an Ojibway man is forced to walk a dangerous route home alone, teenagers loot the local dump to build their mother's wheelchair, and an electrician watches a woman play a grand piano on a ballfield. A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier's fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives. The arc of this collection offers a rejuvenating meditation on the meaning of loss and love, highlighted by the lyric beauty of the writing.

The past grabs back / what it lets us handle Bitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. Vincent sorts through and tries to arrange cosmologies, eloquence, narrative, insight, only to find fatal limitations. He tries to trick tragedy into revealing itself by means of costume, comedy, thought experiment, theatre of the absurd, and Punch and Judy. The poems progress steadily from the erotic and mythic to the lapidary and biblical, relentlessly constructing images, finding any way to bring the world into the light – what there is of light, when the light is on. In his most personal book, Vincent moves from stark innocence through awful events and losses, to something like acceptance without wisdom – Jonah spit back onto the sand with little to report but that he’s home.

"This is poet's poetry, written with keen attention to inner harmonies and the see-saw of words. In an era of Instagram-driven micro-poetry, aka 'Like Poems,' all flimsy and whimsy, The Danger Model is an actual book crammed with actual poems. A vivid, fearless re-visiting of beloved free verse tropes, from dense, manic prose poems to singing, call-and-response, otherworldly hymns. A generous book, The Danger Model hardly feels like a first book. Rather the opposite – a collected works by a senior poet." Quebec Writers' Federation Concordia University First Book Prize jury

At night we swim / following the fence: / diverted / we enter the net / shaped like a heart / and in the heart the hook / guides us to the back A stunning unfolding of memory, Wavelengths of Your Song juxtaposes a childhood in the northern Canadian wilderness with the adventures of an international creative life. Genuine environmentalism is at the heart of this collection. Migrations of birds and humans lend their songs to the vivid writing and a tangible, sensory reality emerges from their sounds. Music by Beethoven and Rzewski, paintings by Norval Morrisseau and Kandinsky, and writing by Kafka and Celan, inspire Eleonore Schönmaier's poetry. She takes the reader on unexpected journeys skiing across frozen lakes, cycling along Dutch canals, or hiking in Malta and New Zealand. With surprising, at times breathtaking connections, she illuminates hot air ballooning, canoe camping, planting trees on Vienna rooftops, and the bathing of a black horse in the North Sea. In poems that travel extensively around the globe, in lists for living well, and in love letters, Eleonore Schönmaier takes the reader on a journey along the wavelengths of the ocean, sound, and the physics of light.

"we, the living, collect the dead. / Fallen autumn leaves, crushed flowers between / the pages of books, photographs of moments / that can never be fully recovered or even / remembered" What have you forgotten and what have you lost? The Little Yellow House investigates recollection - searching for people and the objects that bind them to memory - to uncover the story or the small moment between people and things. Heather Simeney MacLeod explores masterpieces, biblical stories, scientific theories, notions of reincarnation, and engages them with the plain, the lucid, and yet vibrant characters that resound with significance and vigor. Her verse reveals the secrets we have always known but somehow misplaced, whispering, "And we waste, we squander / we misplace, we misremember, and we forget." Poised between incident and memory, MacLeod's poetry considers the stillness between reflection and forgetting. A spirited and remarkable collection, The Little Yellow House joins together everyday and extraordinary occasions to suggest that we remember and misremember more than we suppose.

The leaves of paper / butterfly-wing thin / let light stream through / only one side of each. If “poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead,” as Seamus Heaney put it, Earth Words breaks bread with three earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles, moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through the nineteenth century of Henry Thoreau and into the twentieth century with Emily Carr. Though the environmental and political problems of the twenty-first century feel unique, the figures in this book are met with similar challenges. Wang’s writings embody an ideal relationship between self and nature, preserving a sense of rootedness in times resembling the upheavals of the Trump era. This relationship is confirmed in conversations with Thoreau, whose closeness to nature provides an antidote to our age’s dependence on digital forms of communication. He also grapples with slavery and the failure to respect the full humanity of Indigenous peoples, struggles that ripple out into the present. Carr’s writings and art enter into Indigenous cultures and witness the enduring value of their way of looking at nature. She realizes that the impulse to creatively express one’s being runs through the entire natural world. Culminating in this realization, the concentric circles of Earth Words broaden out to include its twenty-first-century readers as well as its writers in a vision of creative growth.