Deluxe redesign of the two-time Griffin Award winner's first poetry collection. Includes new material.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the first of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of Short Talks features a foreword by the poet Margaret Christakos, a Short Talk on Afterwords by Carson herself, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

First issued in 1992, this is Carson's first and only collection of poems published with an independent Canadian press. It announced the arrival of a profound, elegiac and biting new voice. Short Talks can comfortably stand alongside Carson's other bestselling and award-winning works.

The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare. - Short Talk on the Youth at Night

Praise for Short Talks: Short Talks is a unique form of slag-like poetic address that arises from the full formative force of Carson's young embodiment of a northern Ontario mining-town winter of mind. - Margaret Christakos, from the Introduction.

Interviewed on CBC Books

CBC Best Poetry Book 2024

Relentlessly inventive poetry that proclaims a diasporic, queer, and disabled self-hood.

In Jane Shi's echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one's chosen family, love and justice.

Shi extends her poetics in all directions with silky skill. Language flourishes in the realm of a poet like this.
- T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice and Obits.

Shortlisted 2024 Governor General's Literary Award* Winner 2024 Raymond Souster Award* Longlisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award* Winner 2023 Alcuin Award* CBC Best Poetry Book 2024*

Poems for and about the incarcerated.

Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters' debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters' own days caught between the past and nothing and to the structures that sentence so many to lose. Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace.

Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.

Featured on Quill & Quire's Fall Preview

If you reloop trauma enough, does it make a danceable rhythm? If you get lost in physical sensation enough, does that make you free?

DADDY is a powerful look at patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and queer desire that seeks an unravelling of systems of control to reclaim vulnerability. At once confessional, playful, and sonically meticulous, Byrne's poems seek conversation with a voice in the mind that won't quiet. Cruel father figures dissolve into leather-clad muscle daddies on popper-scented dancefloors; the pain of the past sows the seeds of a joyful exploration of queer desire.

Before his tragic death in 1992, Greg Curnoe had submitted to Brick Books a manuscript based on extraordinarily detailed research into the history of 38 Weston, his address in London, Ontario. The result is a journal/collage that traces the occupancy of that one small plot of land hundreds of years back into aboriginal times when land in this country was not plotted according to the laws of geometry. Deeds/Abstracts is an intensely concentrated and particular cross-section of Canadian history, layer upon layer upon layer. Brick Books is proud to offer this exemplary work-in-progress (a 500-year diary can never be complete) assembled by a much-loved and keenly-lamented Canadian artist of the first importance. Greg Curnoe was born in London in 1936. He was a founder of the Nihilist Spasm Band, the Forest City Gallery, and Region magazine.

Front and back covers are after paintings by Greg Curnoe. The text includes 12 colour plates of photographs and Curnoe paintings.

Winner 2023 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart.

Erin Robinsong's Wet Dream is an erotic epistemology of humors, the vital fluids linking bodies to cosmos. What does liquidity know? - Lisa Robertson

Wet Dream is brain lube for an insurgent language - creaturely poems that remake your body and relation to the world. I want to smear them all over. - Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology

An altar is a door; wonder is the key.

What losses and intimacies bring you to this threshold? Tabako on the Windowsill contends tenderly with such questions, initiating through them the work of transformation.

To shape an entire book around portals and thresholds is to search for living myth. Hari Alluri's poems build from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. Following an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, Alluri offers multiple lived and ancestral spaces in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, the U.S., and Canada. Guided by a burning attention - to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings - Alluri creates moments where we can expand through the personhood of perception into wider, overlapping worlds of perspective and possibility.

Featured on CBC Books

Where fear collides with the little shield of love.

Manahil Bandukwala's second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower's growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover's growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love's Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together.

Intergalactic yet deeply earthly, intertextual yet wonderfully original...

- Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You

Poems that show us a world in which precedent for gender transition is everywhere if you know how to look.

I delete my history / badly, writes Estlin McPhee in this searing, witty, lyrical, and elegiac debut collection of poems about intersections of trans identity, magic, myth, family, and religion. The line refers at once to a young person's browser data that reveals an interest in gender transition; an adult's efforts to reconcile complicated relationships; a culture's campaign to erase queerness and transness from the historical record; and a religion's attempt to pretend that its own particular brand of miraculous transformation is distinct from the kind found in folktales or real life. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.

CBC Best Poetry Book 2024

A nuanced, relational, and community-minded new book from one of Canada's preeminent poets.

South Side of a Kinless River wrestles with concepts of Métis identity in a nation and territory that would rather erase it. Métis identity, land loss, sexual relationships between Indigenous women and European men, and midwifery by Indigenous women of the nascent settler communities figure into these poems. They add up to a Métis woman's prairie history, one that helps us feel the violence in how those contributions and wisdoms have been suppressed and denied.

Each poem is an anthem, every page showcasing the talent and necessity of this incredible poetic voice. Dumont brings the Métis tone, cadence and intricate stitch-work into all she creates.
- Cherie Dimaline, author of The Marrow Thieves and Empire of the Wild

The voice of this Métis woman is as loving, tender and humane, as it is powerful, satirical and political...
- Rita Bouvier, author of a beautiful rebellion

A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so-called care under carceral capitalism.

Borrowing and disrupting the forms of patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents, Jody Chan's impact statement traces a history of psychiatric institutions within a settler colonial state. These poems bring the reader into the present moment of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, capitalism and money models of madness, and wellness checks. Forming a ghost chorus, they sing an impact statement on migration and intergenerational trauma, gentrification, and police neglect of racialized violence against queer communities in Toronto--and how the wrong kinds of desire, be it across class, race, or gender lines, or towards other worlds, are often punished or disappeared. And yet, these poems also make space for what can take root, despite the impacts--care teams, collective grief rituals, dinners around a table with too many friends to fit. impact statement imagines, and re-imagines, and re-imagines again, a queer, disabled, abolitionist revolution towards our communal flourishing.

An elegant debut collection that illuminates the contours of un/belonging.

Dayo: a Tagalog word referring to someone who exists in a place not their own. A wanderer, migrant worker, exile or simply a stranger. At its core, the poems in Dayo interrogate whether belonging can exist in a society suffused with violence. Here, the poet, as a stranger, confronts the politics of recognition by offering his vision. Reflexive and lyrical, this collection embodies the true curiosity and tenacious spirit of a dayo seeking a place to replant, tend, and grow delicate roots.

Great poetry re-creates the world, and Perez's world is here, built from the fleeting moments you don't always notice, built beautifully, built to last.
- Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour and The Blue Road: A Fable of Migration

By the end of all the belovedness catalogued in this book, you too will be heavier with the weight of all that is most gorgeous about this world.
- Ed Bok Lee, author of Mithocondrial Night and Whorled

One of the things that most impresses me about this lush, lyrical and soulful collection is its ability to hold hope alongside melancholy and despair...With incredible empathy and insight, he writes for the fragments of ourselves, pieced together by grief.
- Jen Currin, author of Trinity Street

At once cinematic and elegiac, this book is an unforgettable contribution and a remarkable achievement.
- Adrian De Leon, author of barangay: an offshore poem

2nd Place 2023 Alcuin Award * 2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist

MONUMENT is a conversation with Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, which moves her legacy beyond the Taj Mahal.

MONUMENT upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mumtaz Mahal's story. The collection layers linear time and geographical space to chart the continuing presence of historical legacies. It considers what alternate futures could have been possible. Who are we when we continue to make the same mistakes? Beyond distance, time, and boundaries, what do we still carry?

A profound evocation of unbelonging. - Bhanu Kapil

Bandukwala is a lyric truth-teller. - Farzana Doctor

A sensitive, urgent, astonishing, masterful, and necessary debut. - Doyali Islam

2023 Governor General's Award for Poetry Finalist* Longlisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award* Longlist 2025 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry*

God is personal, the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby.

Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death -- how everything is constantly, painfully remade -- offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.

Shortlist 2024 JM Abraham Poetry Award* Longlisted for the 2023 BMO Winterset Award*

Poems using fervent whimsy and wordplay to examine photography and seeing.

Peering inside eyeballs, pondering the paradox of absent stars, and meditating on street scenes by André Kertész, these poems squint sidelong at our ways of seeing the world. Through playful poems about photography and visual perception, Hollett dissects auroras and quarks, atmospheric phenomena, potatoes, bomb craters and peat bog cadavers. This darkly comic collection is shadowed by entoptic paparazzi, haunted by peripheral visions. Born of attentive walking and looking, of footsteps and snapshots, it bears witness to art history and alluvial light, portable keyholes, the pandemic, climate change, and the sheer strangeness of seeing everyday things with ecstatic eyes.

New and revised edition of an early work by the Governor General's Award?winning poet.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the last of our six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Wittgenstein Elegies features an expansive Introduction by Sue Sinclair, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

First published in 1986, Wittgenstein Elegies is a polyphonic poem in five parts. It establishes the parameters of a long conversation between logic and the lyre that has continued over multiple books and in multiple genres. Long out of print, this revised edition is both a must-have for Zwicky's readers and a perfect introduction to her work.

Here was the one guy in recent history who appeared to have got it right and he was being taught all wrong. I wrote Wittgenstein Elegies in an attempt to respond to this state of affairs. I wanted to draw attention to the unity of Wittgenstein's life and work. I hoped to show how profoundly he experienced the moral dimensions of language's relation to the world. - Jan Zwicky, from the Afterword

Zwicky shows us that there is a way of speaking that leaves room for what cannot be spoken. - Sue Sinclair, from the Introduction

Evade your eye. Try to see as others do
what is desired or refused. What went wrong.
Or right, then wrong. Objectively, what hangs.
Pull yourself together. Years are neither kind
nor cruel. You drag on. The girl is gone.
Consider that it might be time to call in
a professional. Blood is fearless, runs
to meet a touch, indiscriminate, remembering
the first time it fell in love with the world, unaware
that now you are alone.

From Mirror

In Modern and Normal, Karen Solie takes her on-the-road fascination with being between places to a new level, exploring conceptual and perceptual states of in-betweenness - for example, between what is perceived and what is actually there, or between and among the patterns the world repeats from the cell to the structure of the universe - to find points of intersection. Solie finds a middle ground between the discourses of the hard sciences and the intuitive, a realm of weird overlap wherein lie questions of probability, fate, determinism, chance, luck, and faith. She writes about fractals and physics, but also about bar bands, broken hearts, and the trappings of desire. Some splendid landscape poems celebrate nature while mourning the way in which it's often exploited and used. Once again Karen Solie offers readers her lovely dexterity and skill in poems which entertain as they move.

Winner of the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes)
Shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize
The 2002 Gerald Lampert Award for first book
Longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards.

Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it's hard to believe this is a first book.

Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There's a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.

from Signs Taken for Wonders
...Too delicate for these dog-days, small, clover-blonde, my sister sews indoors. I ask her to fashion me into something nice, ivory silk. I am a big girl, sunburnt skin like raw meat, sweating two pews in front of the Blessed Virgin...

A new edition of a hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the intense, moody, contradictory character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.

In compact, conversational poems, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate upper-body equipment and no player representation. But no summary touches the searching intensity of Maggs's poems. They range from meditations on ancient/modern heroism to dramatic capsules of actual games, in which the mystery of character meets the mystery of transcendent physical performance. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is illustrated with photographs mirroring the text, depicting key moments in the career of Terry Sawchuk, his exploits and his agony.

This 10th anniversary edition of the book marks both the 50th anniversary of the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup and the 100th anniversary of the Leafs as a team. With rich reflections on the book by novelist Angie Abdou and Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean, as well as excerpts from scores of reviews by the likes of Gord Downie and Dave Bidini, this new edition of Night Work is a must-have for lovers of hockey and poetry alike.

Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it's their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves.
- from One of You

15 Books to Read for Lunar New Year by AllLitUp

Poems that reckon with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food.

Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs - the reader's appetite is satiated with these poems' complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.