Eight Poetry Collections from Canadian Presses You May Have Missed in 2023 and 2024
Jonathan Farmer, on his insightful poetry blog, The Millions, recently posted an essay in which he decries the reductive way we talk about poetry in North America. For instance, relating to the increasing ubiquity of poetry prizes (and more so, poetry award culture or what I’ve called our “gold star society”), Farmer states: “we’d be much better off if we could remember that winning means very little beyond the material and professional rewards it provides, and that even in an ideal world, all of these honours would mean no more than the fact that a single person or a small panel of people like this work better than something else.” If you watch cooking competitions, you realize quite quickly that one person’s taste buds interpret the deliciousness of trout in a bearnaise sauce vastly differently from someone else’s and that even if a chef wins one year, the next year they could be at the bottom of the heap again with no overt loss to their reputations. Taste is seen more often as subjective and not as a total determinant. Of course, awards are most certainly a necessary mode of winnowing in a production-heavy culture. Not a bookish culture, no (one that values reading and conversation about texts and plumbingly critical reviews), but a world of things often published to show that the MFA degree was worth it, that a job will be obtained, that we are justified in calling ourselves writers. I think poetry as an ancient art form deserves a greater depth of creation and reception. And thus, I offer you, as a small gesture towards reading beyond the gold stars, eight collections released in 2023–2024 from eight different Canadian presses, that are worth diving into for the beauty and intensity of their poems, and no other external reason.
Hey Trouble and Other Poems
by Sharon McCartney (Baseline Press, 2023)
Let’s begin with a chapbook, those underestimated texts that are often too slender to shelf and that rarely get nominated for much in this country. Baseline Press from London, Ontario puts out lovely textured folios of poems and this one is delicious. The central poem, “Hey Trouble,” is both shimmeringly funny and deeply depressive, with images veering from bipolar disorder, drinking, and the “wrecking yard” of Edmontonian streets to the sound play of t-words repeated as a goofily haunting refrain: “Hey trinity, hey tribulation, hey trifle.” Other punchy lyrics follow, providing an entrée to McCartney’s unforgettable intensities.
Signal Infinities: A Poem
by Melanie Siebert (McClelland and Stewart, 2024)
A follow-up to the superb Deep Water Vee (which was nominated for a GG in 2010), this collection hasn’t (thus far) received equivalent attention. Signal Infinities is a lengthy poem in five parts (seeming more like a theatrical chorus than a singular piece), attendant on a lake and a much more complex engagement, enacted through a therapeutic relationship and its entangled yet clarifying discourses. When Siebert is at her most powerful, her pieces evoke a melange of Denise Levertov’s eye and Sylvia Legris’s lexicon, her cadence a flux of molecular comprehensions.
Whiny Baby
by Julie Paul (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024)
This unabashedly middle-aged collection contains strong poems about identity like the Jane Kenyon-haunted “Today, at least,” with the delightful image of a woman’s “thighs that still touch each other / like they’re in love,” and a piece called “Pondering Desire in Middle Age” where one’s joints creak “like old-growth / in yet another storm.” Paul leaps into the melee of aging and its attendant joys and pains with this book of quirky poems. Doing so with a willingness to be a bit messy, random and, even, unlike too many Canadian poets, funny!
Kink Bands
by David Martin (NeWest Press 2023)
In Kink Bands, Martin twists textual and field research into aurally and at times, visually articulate fossil acts. Experimentation predominates, from the 850 word constraints of “Basic English” to a crystalline structure, or a cellular construction as in “Bedrock of Life.” Most moving, however, are the fusions of feeling and science, like “Sinter” where his daughter claps, “two mitts/of snow, amalgamating hand-bergs” as the speaker meditates on global warming, a “witness ablation.” Poetic range, facility with sound, a sense of humour and intellectual rangings, it’s all here.
Invisible Lives
by Cristalle Smith (University of Calgary Press, 2024)
Akin to the work of Beth Goobie, Smith can sketch a scene’s mood fast, scarring the reader with place, sexuality, the relentlessly unheimlich quotidian such as the sonorous “ruffles filled with noodles” or “the vellus hair.” There are pages crammed with text and others that liftoff with white space to give absorptive balance. Chunky prose paragraphs alternate with hewn triplet lyrics. Experimental, innovative and stark, Invisible Lives is an unforgettable first book.
In the Capital City of Autumn
by Tim Bowling (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024)
Tim Bowling’s oeuvre holds the distinction of being both diverse and consistent and his latest book is no exception, showcasing new territories, such as poems voiced by the minor characters in The Great Gatsby, along with his alliance to the essential nostalgic in his elegies for family, salmon fishing and a deceased dog. The melancholic tone of mid-life permeates Bowling’s collection as the “first girl” he loved drifts through, children grow; and he sees other’s faces “as old as mine.” You simply can’t go wrong with a Bowling and we certainly haven’t sufficiently celebrated his body of work in this country.
Jesus is a Voyeur
by Bret Crowle (Frontenac House, 2024)
In Bret Crowle’s debut, she draws many of the threads together that inform a female-shaped psyche: familial and religious expectations, fraught attractions, recurrent depressions and pervasive bodily experiences. The connections repeat, a weaving of anaphora and punctum, echo and haunting. Crowle adapts villanelles, haibuns, pantoums, and ghazals to this essential yearning, to return to words that pinpoint, inhabit, articulate, ghost. A stirring queer fugue.
Talking to Strangers
by Rhea Tregebov (Signal Editions 2024)
The elegiac is the core energy of every essential lyric and Rhea Tregebov is a powerful tear-catcher in Talking to Strangers. She is also a list master and her pieces that divulge details of objects are truly potent. Witness the “vacant jewel cases” and the flute’s “lonesome tones” of “Second Generation” or the gorgeous banalities surrounding a subtle death in “Sunday”: “Mike came in, an aspirin for her headache,/cup of tea, sugar, no milk.” Poetry of older life is necessary and this is a small book of pained songs, Neruda-style mystery, an investment in the feelings of the entire universe.
Catherine Owen, a Vancouverite-Edmontonian, is the author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose. Her most recent book is Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024).
