Naomi Guttman's new poetry collection was inspired by the role of nursing in human evolution and culture. The first cycle of poems, "Wet Apples, White Blood," offers lyric glimpses into archetypes of breastfeeding women in history and myth. The dramatic action in the second cycle, "Galactopoesis," centers around the experience of a mother whose young child is hospitalized. Galactopoesis is the medical term for the continued secretion and production of milk. It derives from the Greek radicals for 'milk' (galacto) and 'making' (poesis), which is also 'poetry.' In Wet Apples, White Blood, nursing, as a constant creative act dependent on the baby's demand, is a trope for the creative process and for questions of biology, psychology, and spirituality.

Shiver. Swift whip of wind. / Fangs of the low front / stinging fierce as forest fires. / Frost thickening the stoop. In his debut collection, Short Histories of Light, Aidan Chafe recounts his Catholic upbringing in a household dealing with the common but too often taboo subject of mental illness. In unflinching fashion, Chafe reveals the unintended disasters that follow those who struggle with depression and the frustration of loved ones left to pick up the pieces. Other sections of the book shine a light on the wounds inflicted by systems of patriarchy, particularly organized religion, and the caustic nature of humanity. Imagery and metaphor illuminate Chafe’s writing in a range of poetic forms, both modern and traditional. A boy stares helplessly through the walls of the family home, watches “filaments in glass skulls buzzing.” A father’s birthmark is described as a “scarlet letter.” Grandma is portrayed as a “forgotten girl on a Ferris wheel of feelings.” Vivid and haunting, at once tender and terse, Short Histories of Light captures what it feels like to be a short circuit in a world of darkness.

"My best actions are a parrot's / bright feathers in the dark jungle / trying to catch your eye / with the colour and flight / which says, I am here / and trying to do what’s right." Do we make the universe, or does it make us? In Outside, Inside, Michael Penny positions each of us at the centre of this mystery, but lightens this presumption with irony and word-play that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. The three hundred short, linked poems in this collection begin with a complaint about the unknowability of what's outside and what's inside, but then shift to an engagement with the very nature of this outside/inside dichotomy. Penny then explores the many ways the question arises for us: through travel, wind, rain, signs, ladders, landscape, the sun, the moon, even parrot feathers, and, of course, in how we use words and find meaning in them. Ultimately, the poems ask whether we construct what's outside, or whether what's outside constructs us.

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.

In her debut poetry collection, Deborah-Anne Tunney delves into the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most influential film directors, Alfred Hitchcock. Just as Hitchcock's work looks unflinchingly at some of the darkest elements of human nature, A Different Wolf turns a lens on the director himself, revealing the interplay between the social mores of his time and Hitchcock's distinctive psychological makeup. A Different Wolf views the iconic director's cinematic masterpieces through the optics of the poet's personal quest for meaning. Tunney reveals how guilt and innocence, universal and timeless subjects, work to define character and motivate plot. Other poems illustrate Hitchcock's presentation of women as a sign of his fixations, but also as a product of his era. His desire to expose the qualities of time - how film can slow it down or speed it up, qualities he considered filmmaking's most important tool - points to the deep resonance of his work. Providing a sharp-eyed analysis of Hitchcock's life and art, A Different Wolf offers a unique take on the filmmaker's enduring relevance.

I've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawk Inspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide. The Tantramar Re-Vision charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thrives, ignorant of divinity, while the human psyche continues to search for answers as "life takes directions / away from" it. The Tantramar Marsh setting of John Thompson's Stilt Jack resonates with Irie's landscapes of birds, fish, plants, and wildlife, all still within reach yet part of a world where "wind carries sounds / it cannot hear." Insightful and meditative, The Tantramar Re-Vision is poetry of the inner self and the outside observer, a poetic testament to the ways literature creates its own landmarks and nature survives without knowing a word.

Salvaging beauty from grief's wreckage in the towns and wilds of post-cod Newfoundland.

From "Anna's Lovers" Our houses glow both from within and on the outside: their night lights and an almost perfect and wintry moon. The phrase "but for now" means among other things "making do," as if we had to settle for the bare minimum. In But for Now, Gordon Johnston presents poems where the mortal world is more than enough because there is more to it than the merely mortal and where it is possible to hear beyond the outmoded clanking of inherited religious vocabularies. These poems find moments of grace in chance occurrences and through a wide range of styles and methods, they choreograph the random casual events of our existence. Northrop Frye famously asked, "Where is here?" These poems instead ask, "When is now?" Engaged with worlds of waiting and of doing, with enduring and healing, But for Now celebrates music and noise, speech and silence, and asserts that for all the darkness at the edges, there is something shining at the centre of the painting.

"There's a gap between where / an electron is and where it might be / and that's the only real work-place. / You occupy that office of possibility." Where are you in that space between the electron and the galaxy, and how do you find yourself there? Particles asks this question and answers it by asking more questions, conveying both the mystery and the uncertainty of the universe.

fire / and water surging on the screen - / since children, metros, planets, beds, and lovers are / so lightly swept away - I must not even breathe. Danielle Janess's debut poetry collection resists the erasing effects of war, nationalism, and forced migration. Following the speaker's arduous relocation to a twenty-first-century Europe still etched with the wounds of the past, the poems take on daring forms and language, becoming theatre, film clips, photographs, and dance, all embodied by a cast of characters marked by the violence of the last century. Arrested in Warsaw within the first twenty days of the Second World War, Janess's maternal grandfather was sent to a Soviet gulag where he survived for three years before joining the Free Polish Army in Russia and later the battle of Monte Cassino in the Italian Campaign. Many of the poems in The Milk of Amnesia grow from the soil of Warsaw and Berlin, where the poet-speaker catapults herself and her young child in an effort to locate and unearth their family inheritance. Drawing from the tradition of poetry of witness, The Milk of Amnesia performs a visionary resistance, lit with signposts in a charged atmosphere. An address to our ongoing struggles with historical memory, these poems act as both artifact of and antidote to our time.