Selected from Ricardo Sternberg’s four collections, along with astonishing new poems, One River is a major event. A poet who, according to one reviewer, “has divined the secret connections between the words,” Sternberg's voice is unlike any other: witty, earthy, exuberant, inventive. His poems also forgo conventional subjects. Alchemists, mermaids, angels, and “jongleur” grasshoppers share space with all manner of eccentrics: a trapeze artist, a pilot who navigates by smell, a millionaire who sneaks into heaven disguised as a camel. At the heart of Sternberg’s practice is prestidigitation: the sleight of hand that inheres in effortless turns of phrase, brisk syntax, and bold forms. “Leave it to me,” he says to his muse, “to come up with something / that while not highfalutin, /carries a whiff of the sublime.” Charismatic and original, Sternberg’s enduring work is captured in all of its extraordinary range in this new book.
The spirit of the interrobang, a punctuation mark merging the questioning and the exclamatory, informs Mary Dalton’s compelling investigations of home and identity in this, her sixth poetry collection—in extraordinary poems of aging; of despised plants once revered; of rites and sites of community abandoned. The “flared mouth” of Dalton’s acclaimed musicality gives voice to lost souls and a lost sense of the earth. The collection’s unique mix of bleakness and beauty is also reflected in various riddle and riddle-like series with their ambiguity, open-endedness, playfulness, and unexpected linguistic shifts. Interrobang movingly fuses notions of exploration —of glancing at things slant—with an emotional range that feels new and visionary. This is a steely, brilliant book from a major Canadian poet.
“The elegiac is the core energy of every essential lyric and Rhea Tregebov is a powerful tear-catcher in Talking to Strangers. A small book of pained songs, this text is the perfect accompaniment to weariness, sighs, to a grief of centuries or hours.” -Catherine Owen, Marrow Reviews
“Rhea Tregebov sculpts sound in her latest collection of poetry…What is strange becomes familiar, and what is familiar becomes strange through slight shifts in syntax, mood, and shape. So many of these poems work through loss, and residual memory restores some meaning to those losses. -Michael Greenstein, British Columbia Review
“National Animal does what all great poetry is supposed to; it converts everyday superabundant materials, whether holy or common, into a tangible picture, one that resonates at the heart of what it means to be a Canadian.” -Samuel Wise, Montreal Guardian
"Derek Webster's second collection contains a panoramic meditation on the spell of nationhood and its grip on our lives." – Martin Breul, Montreal Review of Books
"Yoyo Comay's States of Emergency strikes as playful and precise; a lyrically-dense debut of hush and urgency, screeching calm across such restless, incredible silence."—rob mclennan
"For Yoyo Comay, poetry is an emergency room where the body of the human being and the world, torn apart, riddled with fear, can seek respite, kind hands, perhaps even healing. States of Emergency shivers with the voice of a unique new poet of relentlessly clear, if violent, vision."—A.F. Mortiz
"Yoyo Comay's States of Emergency is a soul-cry whittled into a dagger: this long form poem, visceral to its core, gives off the heat of an open wound. A descent into a controlled madness where 'harmonies of disaster/thaw and hatch.' A most assured debut."—Michael Redhill
“Yoyo Comay’s power to turn a phrase, however enigmatic, is startling. Reading States of Emergency, I feel like an oboe player encountering Jimi Hendrix.”—Richard Greene
