Eight New Canadian Poetry Collections to Celebrate National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month, and there’s no better way to celebrate than with an exciting new (or new-to-you) collection of poetry from a Canadian independent publisher. These eight collections from debut and veteran writers tackle themes as wide-ranging as grief, disability, war, colonialism, labour and motherhood.

Discover or rediscover poetry this April, and happy National Poetry Month!

A powerful, elegiac new collection by an acclaimed poet and disability activist

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other
By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press)

This is the latest poetry book by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, the disability activist and author of such seminal disability studies books as Care Work and The Future Is Disabled. The Way Disabled People Love Each Other honours the crip community by articulating its complexities, ambitions and utter humanity. It's a road map for survivors looking for something that's neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale — not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway. Brimming with odes, elegies and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief and memory.

A major achievement rich with searing wisdom, complicated grace and magisterial craft

Cannibal Rats
By Richard Greene (Véhicule Press)

Reporting from locales as disparate as the Civil War battlefields of America and the storm-worn shores of Newfoundland, “where, as almost nowhere else, you can hold / in hand the inner substance of the world,” Governor General’s Award winner Richard Greene bears witness to historical injustices, meditates on how “art and memory unravel” under the auspices of mortality, and wrestles with the loss of a beloved mother. “There’s a limit to what the heart can learn / without pause and repair,” he writes in the stunning travelogue that ends the book, “but I should return / to this place of bayonets and canon, / small gesture of one still living to what is gone.” Cannibal Rats is a major achievement from one of Canada’s most accomplished poets.

A lyric meditation on the migrations of the Lenape people in the US Midwest and southern Canada

Commonwealth
By D.A. Lockhart (Kegedonce Press)

In Commonwealth, D.A. Lockhart tackles the multiple meanings of home for the Lenape in the wake of the colonial enterprise: home as a people, home as an idea, home as an ideal and, ultimately, home as a place just over the horizon that seems to retreat the closer you get. Lockhart tackles these various meanings unflinchingly and honestly, yet with exquisite tenderness and a lyric sensibility that contrasts with the Rust Belt grit of contemporary Lenape territory. He never lets you forget that the industrial heartland of latter-day North America is one of the most traumatized parts of Turtle Island, yet there is so much opportunity for joy and celebration, for its trees will always stand, its birds sing and its spirits inhabit every cubic inch of space.

A Canadian literary icon sharply observes humanity, nature and aging

First Light, Last Light
By Glen Sorestad (Shadowpaw Press)

Glen Sorestad became the country’s first provincial poet laureate in 2000, and since then he has continued crafting poems full of warmth and humanity. In First Light, Last Light, his 17th collection and his first in six years, he writes sensitively about the present and the past, friends and family, and the power of nature. Loss and grief are balanced with wonder and joy. These are poems that range widely in time and space but are always grounded in the details of daily life: a fox in the backyard, a snowy owl that causes a traffic jam in an urban mall’s entrance, a visit to a familiar place turned unfamiliar by time, even the dreaded annual medical examination. Once again, Glen Sorestad has penned poems that will delight readers.

A fierce hybrid of poetry and prose interrogating wellness culture, disability politics, Métis identity and intergenerational healing

Save Your Prayers — Send Money
By Jónína Kirton (Talonbooks)

Save Your Prayers — Send Money boldly takes on the wellness industry. Kirton delves into disability politics through the lived experience of a 70-year-old Métis woman and recovering New Ager. A hybrid collection that moves fluidly between prose and poetry, Save Your Prayers — Send Money weaves intergenerational trauma and its impact on health through the daily realities of chronic pain and illness. These poems explore where healing might lie and how a peace might be found whether we heal or not. The weft supporting them all is the importance of belonging, of blood memory and cellular memory reaching back to our earliest ancestors.

Fierce, exquisite poems that reimagine the monsters of western literary canon to assemble a new mythology of the maternal

Chimeras
By Tegan Zimmerman (Inanna Publications)

Tegan Zimmerman's startling debut recuperates the mythical figure of the chimera to explore maternity, monstrosity, labour and reproduction. In the age of AI, in the face of degradation and catastrophe, she asks: What is to become of the worker, mother, labourer? The answer that Chimeras offers is a turn back to slippery reproduction as a way to press reset, offering cyclical time to undermine the straight line of history. The chimera dies at the end of one section, only to be reborn in the next. She transforms as she narrates, I becoming you becoming she, subject becoming object, imploding the fragility of identity categories. “Chimeras is sky bound and on all fours pulling language through the temporal long haul,” says Sue Goyette, author of Monoculture. “Here's matriarchal transformation in flux.”

What it means to know the world through poetry: Tremors and fragments riding on the movement of thinking

Sightings
By Patrick Friesen (CMU Press)

Poet Karen Enns calls the work in Patrick Friesen’s new book Sightings “haunting poems of reflection and shadow, reminding us that absence and presence intermingle in our dreams, our stories, and our histories.” Friesen’s influences include music of all kinds: the sparse approach of Arvo Pärt, Bob Dylan’s imagery, jazz pianist Bill Evans and his long musical lines. Here also are poems of homage to other artists like Dickinson, Neil Young, Rilke, Margie Gillis and Joe Rosenblatt.

Friesen says that in over 50 years of writing poetry, he’s “learned how to edit my own work without destroying the music, the immediate feel.” He continues, “Poetry isn’t evidence of anything other than the process of trying to understand and express, knowing nothing is truly finished or absolute.”

A frank, raw, honest collection that’s ‘as street as they come’

Only the Scent of You Remained
By Duncan Mercredi (At Bay Press)

In this collection that writer Katherena Vermette calls “as smooth as Leonard Cohen, as heartbreaking as Rita Joe, as street as they come,” former Winnipeg poet laureate Duncan Mercredi chases down the river of who he is. Each bend, each stone, every waterfall, a sharing of self. Then the writings can be rolled up, and when the time comes, the time that he leaves the place he calls home, they will be placed on the sacred fire. To return to where they came from.

You are invited to walk with the author during intimate reflection and pause to remember the people who have been a part of his life and journey, the ones who influenced him, both good and bad. The paths taken and the roads travelled that led him to this city. As the wick burns the last of its wax, we recognize its existence as the scent of smoke that still remains long after the light goes out.

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If one or more of these collections has found its way onto your reading list, consider buying directly from these links or from your local independent bookstore.

Happy National Poetry Month from your friends at the Literary Press Group of Canada.