Celebrating Forty Years of Poetry: Part Three

The years from 2003 to 2012 were a time of change for the press. I joined in 2002 as the publisher’s assistant to Marja Jacobs, and soon became the assistant publisher. In 2006 the press moved from Toronto to Hamilton, and that same year I became publisher as Maria Jacobs retired from the day-to-day running of the press, though she continued to acquire and edit poetry until 2008. We started to experiment a bit more with style and form, including full-colour paintings in Stan Rogal’s ( sub rosa ) and including a book within a book and visual poetry in Oana Avasilichioaei’s award-winning We, Beasts. As the press settled into a new city and learnt about the warm literary community and the storied past of Hamilton, we also began to work with Hamilton poets such as Chris Pannell, bringing out his collection Drive. With Jeanette Lynes’s second collection, Left Fields, and Rhea Tregebov’s (alive) we continued to work with poets who had already published with the press, while welcoming new voices such as Moez Surani and Ian Williams with their debut collections, Reticent Bodies and You Know Who You Are. Rich, storytelling poetry also found a home with Micheline Maylor’s Full Depth and Cornelia Hoogland’s Woods Wolf Girl. In 2007 Glen Downie won the Toronto Book Award for Loyalty Management, one of the very few times it has been given to a collection of poetry.

2003, Left Fields, Jeanette Lynes

2003, ( sub rosa ), Stan Rogal

2004, (alive): Selected and new poems, Rhea Tregebov

2007, Loyalty Management, Glen Downie

2007, Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems, Micheline Maylor

2009, Drive, Chris Pannell

2009, Reticent Bodies, Moez Surani

2010, You Know Who You Are, Ian Williams

2011, Woods Wolf Girl, Cornelia Hoogland

2012, We, Beasts, Oana Avasilichioaei