10 Canadian poetry books to expand your mind.
Canadian poetry—not actually written in maple syrup! Not entirely about beavers! (Although I have certainly written about beavers.) Canada is a complicated place, living in the shadow of the U.S., proudly multicultural but aware of its assimilationist history, reckoning with colonial harms done to Indigenous peoples and called to the work of reconciliation. Canadian poetry is polyphonic, exploratory, and urgent.
Sharon Thesen, ed., The New Long Poem Anthology (2nd edition)
Is it cheating to start with an anthology? This one gives ample space to encounter literary luminaries like Anne Carson, Robert Kroetsch, bpNichol, Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, and more.
rob mclennan, ed., Groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013-2023
Chapbooks are a vital layer of the poetry ecosystem, where fresh ideas percolate and germinate. The legendary above/ground press has produced hundreds over the past 30-some years, operating out of a basement in Ottawa.
Dany Laferrière, translated from the French by David Homel, The Return
Montréal-based poet Dany Laferrière returns his father’s body to Haiti for burial. Madness ensues.
Kayla Czaga, Midway
Victoria-based poet Kayla Czaga lost both her parents, but she didn’t lose her sense of humor. Canadian humor is weird, at times off-putting. Here it’s mixed with the purest grief.
Zane Koss, Country Music
Reaching back to his origins in interior British Columbia, Zane Koss movingly captures the poetry in the voices of rural and blue-collar oldtimers and bullshitters, and how it feels to have left that way of life.
Wayde Compton, Performance Bond
Wayde Compton is a Vancouver-based poet of mixed Black and European heritage, working a space of encounter and uncertainty. Plus this book comes with a CD! I also need to plug his prose volume Toward an Anti-racist Poetics. It’s short, incisive, and essential.
Liz Howard, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos
This wide-ranging collection shines cosmic light on loss and resilience, through the dual lenses of European and Anishinaabe science.
Jaspreet Singh, Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock
Like all of us, Singh is living in the Anthropocene. Unlike many of us, he finds delight in its absurdities and solace in its interconnections.
R. Kolewe, The Absence of Zero
Through a single book-length poem, Kolowe mines Misner, Thorne and Wheeler’s classic general relativity textbook Gravitation alongside T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and years of his own notebooks. The result is fluid, meditative, and singular.
Karen Solie, Pigeon
There’s newer work from this Ontario-based, Saskatchewan-grown poet, but Pigeon was the first one I read and it sets the bar for brilliance. Karen Solie looks at the most mundane details of the commercialized landscape and, with a few twists, turns them to gold.
