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The Bibliophile: Small (or Large) Machines

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Introducing Best Canadian Poetry 2025

It’s been a few years since it fell to me to send the acceptances for the three Best Canadian anthologies: Ashley Van Elswyk, our editorial assistant, has lately managed this massive and potentially unwieldy task with her usual good humour and organizational grace. But as I recall, the poets’ responses tended to be the most entertaining. These ranged from effusive thanks directed to the messenger, who truly deserved none—all credit to series editor Anita Lahey and our guest editors, who annually make the selections, buoyed by seemingly bottomless stores of enthusiasm and curiosity—to what amounted to gentle phishing accusations, so surprised are some writers to learn they’ve made the year’s list. I have certainly felt the same way on the receiving end of one of those magical emails dispatched from the mysterious island of editors: Who are you, really, and why are you subjecting me to such a cruel joke? Writing is failure, as a wise soul reminds us, but every now and then—annually, for at least fifty Canadian poets—maybe it isn’t, and readers of Best Canadian Poetry are the rich recipients of these successes.

Photo: A stack of the new Best Canadian Poetry 2025 selected by Aislinn Hunter, with longtime series editor Anita Lahey.

Occasionally a writer would ask me what it was we meant by “best,” or by “Canadian,” though I can’t remember a poet asking what we meant by “poetry.” I doubt this is because we each have an answer ready. It’s far more likely that we are glancing sideways at each other and hoping not to be asked, either because we haven’t a clue at the moment, or because we know precisely and with a fierce certainty we’d either be embarrassed to assert or afraid to argue for and fail to defend. On my brighter days I believe and happily insist that what poetry is is an attempt to understand what poetry is, and on my darker ones I lament the same. On my pedantic days, of which one is Friday, November 22, I am partial to the offerings of William Carlos Williams—“A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words”—and Robert Frost: “a momentary stay against confusion.” I like the Williams for the veneer of exactitude it undercuts at the same time it declares itself, how its metaphor invites extending. Small like a pencil sharpener, or like a really big humidifier? Large like Linotype, or like a particle accelerator? Yes, and yes, and yes and yes. Frost, of course, is Frostier: as the key turns in the sonnet’s lock, for at least that instant, something has tumbled into place.

Inevitably our BCP editors must face this question and its endless answers again and again as they compile their initial list of one hundred poems and meet over a period of months to discuss and refine that selection to just fifty. I don’t envy them their task—every poem, and every acknowledged answer, means another crossed off the list—yet those decisions yield yet another entryway, another place to stand. Having completed her selection for BCP25, Aislinn Hunter, this year’s guest editor, writes in her introduction:

I believe that poems behave like living things. They open and close, they shift and grow. Poetry’s essential elements move into us—letter and word shapes swimming past retinal neurons and along phonological and lexical routes, eventually meeting neurons and synapses that light up the forest / the temple / the mess hall of our brains. Language—poetry’s essence—changes our physiology, which is to say that a poem’s doing to us is as real as rain on skin. Of course, the power of the art we’re meeting matters, as does the state of alertness we’re in.

In our disembodied age, in which we are increasingly more likely to encounter one another as pixels than as people, what a beautifully embodied understanding of the ways that poems can do their work on us, can remind us how to slow and even stop, if only for a momentary stay.

And so, Dear Reader, I leave you with three of my favourites from this year’s edition: Molly Peacock’s “Honey Crisp,” Bertrand Bickersteth’s “A Poem about Black Boy’s Horse,” and “He/him” by Y.S. Lee. Each is accompanied by the poet’s biography and their comments on the making of the poem, a favourite feature among BCP readers old and new. I hope they’ll find you, wherever you are, and leave you feeling a little bit more real, open to yourself and to the world we share.

p.s. Books, I’m told, make great holiday gifts, especially ones that come price-bundled and beautifully wrapped in Ingrid Paulson’s superb Best Canadian Series design.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

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Honey Crisp

Molly Peacock

Hello wizenface, hello apple,
understudy in the fridge
since March (it’s September).
Hello wrinkly red cheeks,
I’ll bet you’re almost a year old,
born last autumn,
kept in the fruit storage built
half-underground on the farm,
then, in the snow, sold to me.
Hello my honey crisp (well,
my honey, no longer crisp . . .),
are you asking why you
haven’t been eaten by now?

Because that man hewed to his routines:
an apple for lunch every day,
the same red punctuation.
You were earmarked for the date
he slipped from my arms & we both
slid to the floor, red angel, are you
listening? 911, hospital, hospice,
and ten days later (you were
about six months old then),
he died and was carried
to a cold shelf.

Hello smiley-stem, hello days
moving you from spot to spot.
Hello week where I forgot
and left you at the back and
went about my new life.
Greetings new groceries!
Their jumble causes a re-
arrangement of your bin,
so I have to pick you up
—would you rather
have been eaten and
lived on as energy?
Not yet, not yet, my pomme.
Hello soft wrinkled
face in my palms.

—from The Walrus

Molly Peacock lives in Toronto and has published eight books of poems, including The Widow’s Crayon Box (W. W. Norton, 2024). She inaugurated The Best Canadian Poetry series in 2008 with Tightrope Books, editing it until 2017, and is delighted to return as a contributor. Peacock is also the author of two biographies of women artists, The Paper Garden (Emblem Editions, 2011) and Flower Diary (ECW Press, 2021), and the memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece (Riverhead, 1998).

Of “Honey Crisp,” Peacock writes, “After my husband died, I cried for twenty-eight days straight. On the twenty-ninth day, I woke without tears, picked up a blue mechanical pencil, and began to write the poems that would become The Widow’s Crayon Box. ‘Honey Crisp’ literally began when I walked to the refrigerator. There was my husband’s last apple—I couldn’t throw it out. In the back of my mind was William Blake, who spoke to a Tyger. Could I write a poem where I spoke to the apple, telling it what happened to my husband, reminding it of its origins, how I bought it, and why it would never be eaten? That idea could go very, very wrong! But widowhood made me fearless. I pulled out a purple pad (what other colour do widows use?) and drafted the poem. It amazed me that if I was simple and direct, like a seventeenth-century poet talking to an animal, I could infuse the poem with all I felt. P.S. The apple stayed in the fridge after the poem. I painted a watercolour of it. Then put it back. A long time after that, I buried the almost-dried apple with the geraniums in my balcony garden.”

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A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse

Bertrand Bickersteth

Boy’s horse stepped in a badger’s hole, lost her footing
and fell. Boy was flipped

in the air. His foot caught in the stirrup. He felt a pain
shoot through his ankle,

felt the inertia of his flight take over the topography, twist
westerly, still tilting to the east.

His body was a loose spigot pivoting around the fulcrum
of a meaningless ankle.

He felt his fingers slipping through her withers, felt the fear
of the horse rushing to the ground

above him. He couldn’t stop any of it. Couldn’t stop himself
from imagining the unknowable

impact or the whistle of weight to follow. He knew what was
coming. He knew the soil

he was headed for. Knew its knowledge. The chemistry of
its creativity: mildly gleysolic

chernozem, churning life and his livelihood as he knew it.
Knew it, too, as foreign, as far

from familiar as he was from family. He tried to imagine a family
but their image burst into the falling

air before him, before fading, as always, into the darkness
of dirt. Then came the weight

of sadness and the piercing pain of the forgone, unmentioned,
unmurmured, like that flash of green,

that patch of wild timothy whose individual blades know nothing
of their shared past,

know nothing of their sibling entanglement, nothing at all
of their intertwined roots

whose domain is the catacombs beneath the crust, whose action
is downward groping, like fingers of ancestry,

a blind quest in the sorrow of soil, forever fumbling, forever finicking
for the unknowable mother of darkness.

—from The Fiddlehead

Bertrand Bickersteth lives in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary) in Treaty Seven. He is the author of The Response of Weeds (NeWest Press, 2020), which was the recipient of multiple awards, including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. He currently teaches at Olds College and is writing a collection of poems on Black cowboys.

Of “A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse,” Bickersteth writes, “After suffering from a year-long bout of writer’s block—brought on by the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020—I eventually found my way back to writing through the topic of Black cowboys. I was struck by how iconic cowboys are to the west and yet how unknown the existence of Black cowboys is (yes, Black cowboys here in Canada). I began writing a series of poems fleshing out their histories and, for some reason, I became obsessed with the moment of death in one of their lives. John Ware, the most famous/unknown cowboy in Canada, died tragically, ironically, when his horse tripped and fell on top of him. I was compelled to write poems that repeated this moment from different vantages. I think knowing that our national awareness of Black cowboys was doomed to die, I wanted to hold on to him as long as I could, stubbornly pause everything in the moment before the end, desperately cling to that moment when his Black life still mattered.”

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He / him

Y. S. Lee

At seventeen, you almost crashed the Firebird
on a road whose name we’ve long forgotten.
Flare of yellow in the headlights, then
you stood on the spongy brakes,
wrenched the wheel hard right. We lurched
into stillness, just shy of the ditch

In the minute afterward
engine ticking
cicadas silenced
you asked, Does life feel real to you now?
I think I laughed. I definitely thought
No

When you tell me your big news
it’s like that moment when the optometrist
flicks one final lever and the soggy letters
suddenly surface, bold and sleek
against a field of light. Oh,
there you are.

—from Grain

Y. S. Lee lives in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Exit Permit (Anstruther Press, 2023), and a winner of Contemporary Verse 2’s Foster Poetry Prize. Her fiction includes the award-winning YA mystery series The Agency (Candlewick Press) and a forthcoming picture book, Mrs. Nobody (Groundwood Books).

Lee writes, “I wrote ‘He/him’ for my high-school bestie when he came out as a trans man. I was thrilled for him and wanted to celebrate his identity. Gender transition is sometimes seen as slow and arduous, but I also want to keep sight of what a triumph it is. Plus, he and I did our share of impulsive stuff as teens and I’m interested in how even dumbass near-disasters can offer moments of insight, if we pay attention.”

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Interabang

The second independent bookstore we’re celebrating as part of our “20 stores for 20 years” anniversary project is Interabang Books, located in Dallas, Texas. Lori Feathers, bookseller extraordinaire, chose the genre bending memoir A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa as her favorite Biblioasis pick, and our publisher Dan shared why he knew Lori would be an amazing advocate for our books from their first meeting.

Photo: The eye-catching front entrance of Interabang Books invites all to come in and browse for their next read.

Dan first met Lori at  the 2019 Winter Institute where she quickly became a vocal champion for Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport—and went on to champion many more of our books. Dan says, “I’ve met few other people as committed to the vocation of bookselling, and to independent publishing and literature in translation, as Lori. She’s fearless as a bookseller and literary critic; and as a champion of exceptional books, her enthusiasm and commitment knows no bounds and has resulted in some of my favourite literary things, including her podcast (with Sam Jordison) Across the Pond and her North American edition of The Republic of Consciousness Prize. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she’s also a dancer: she’s as nimble and elegant as they come.”

And here’s why Lori chose A Ghost in the Throat as her favorite Biblioasis book: “More than almost any other book that I’ve read in the past few years, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s beautifully bewitching A Ghost in the Throat has stayed with me. In it a young, stay-at-home mother becomes obsessed with another woman, long deceased. Her muse is Eibhlín Dubh who, as a young mother herself, composed a legendary, 18th-century lament for her murdered husband, The Keen for Art O’Laoghaire. Although centuries and social class separate the two women, the narrator is irresistibly drawn to Dubh’s Keen. Ghost depicts the narrator’s quest to uncover the essence of Eibhlín Dubh from a history in which she has been silenced. This extraordinary book reclaims Dubh for posterity, reanimating her via Ní Ghríofa’s extraordinary and resonant writing.”

Photo: Lori Feathers posing with her Biblioasis pick, A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Goran Simić, 1952–2024

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Goran Simić: 1952–2024

Photo: Goran Simić reading at The Windsor Festival of the Book, November 2003, the day he and publisher Dan Wells first met.

This past weekend I spent the better part of forty hours digging through old boxes dating to the earliest days of Biblioasis. A couple of archivists were coming to town on Monday and Tuesday to assess a potential acquisition and I wanted to make sure that the press archives were in presentable condition. It’s been a long-running joke at the office that I don’t recycle, I archive, which also explains the shape of some of the boxes I sorted through: photographs alongside event posters alongside production files alongside edited manuscripts and other press and literary ephemera. It made me nostalgic—which is, admittedly, not very hard to do—but this state was aggravated by the fact that in less than a week it will be the twentieth anniversary of the publication of our first book, Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor & Other Poems. At one point we intended to mark this anniversary with some celebrations, but publishing continues to be hard, so outside of a few notes and posts in places like this, we’ll be focusing our energies on more essential things, like celebrating our authors and their books.

I got lucky early in my delvings, unearthing a range of photographs, documents, and ephemera from 2004–2006, when Biblioasis began to take shape as a press. And items even older than those. In a very real way, Biblioasis Press was conceived as a result of my work running The Windsor Festival of the Book, which began in 2002. I discovered copies of festival programs, posters, and photographs from the first couple of years, including many writers who would become central to Biblioasis as it developed: Caroline Adderson, Mark Kingwell, John Metcalf, Judith McCormack, and Leon Rooke, among others. And Goran Simić.

Photo: Hardcover and paperback editions of From Sarajevo, With Sorrow (Biblioasis) and Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford) by Goran Simić.

In my second year running the festival, we partnered with PEN Canada, who put together a panel of Paulo da Costa, Rishma Dunlop, Goran Simić, and a couple of other writers. I was determined to read at least one book by everyone who participated in our festival: Goran Simić had two titles available in English, Immigrant Blues, recently published by Brick Books, and Sprinting from the Graveyard, a gathering, by David Harsent, of English “versions” of Goran’s poetry dealing with the Serbo–Croatian war, published by Oxford but at that point already out of print. I found copies of both and read them, but it was the latter that especially quickened my pulse. Not yet knowing enough about publishing, I urged Goran to get it again into print; he drew hard on his pipe and did something with his body that, though not a shrug, made it clear that it was out of his hands. (His inscription in my copy: November, cold day 2003 / For Daniel, who surprised me with this book.) Later that evening, at the festival afterparty, I sat down with Kitty Lewis, the long-time managing editor of Brick Books, and enthused about Sprinting and how someone needed to bring it back. Between alcohol and enthusiasm I came on too strong, an occupational hazard, and at some point, exacerbated, she threw her hands above her head to be rid of me and said that if I thought it should be back in print so badly then why didn’t I do it?

That question lingered for months. The main answer was that it seemed an ultimate hubris. I wasn’t a real publisher, and certainly not the kind Goran Simić needed or should expect. We were planning a short fiction chapbook series and our first trade book, but I’d not yet even published anything. I wanted to do more, but had no way of attracting better manuscripts: the few I’d managed to solicit were terrible. So, one afternoon in the early summer of 2004, faking courage (the title of my publishing memoir), I wrote to Goran and told him that Kitty’s challenge had been weighing on me: would he let Biblioasis publish him? The answer came in the mail with not one but two manuscripts, what would become Biblioasis’s second and third trade books: the poetry collections From Sarajevo, With Sorrow, and the story collection Yesterday’s People.

Photo: Yesterday’s People and Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman by Goran Simić.

It had originally been my intent to simply republish Sprinting from the Graveyard as it was, but I knew nothing of copyright then and did not know that Goran did not control these poems: they belonged to Harsent. This, in my ignorance, seemed an injustice. Further, after other conversations with Goran, I learned that he had grave misgivings about Harsent’s “versions” as a result of liberties taken with his original poems: Harsent’s were scrubbed of the raw immediacy of the war. So after discussions with his ex-wife, Amela Marin, we decided to retranslate the collection, and Amela got to work, finishing a draft later that year for a planned Spring 2005 publication. We worked on it via email through the fall, but decided to do the final editing in person.

Over this period, we published Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and the first volumes in the Biblioasis short fiction series, including Leon Rooke’s novella Balduchi’s Who’s Who. Goran owned a building with his new partner at 226 Carlton in Toronto’s Cabbagetown, where he had a restaurant called Octopus’ Garden (and later Fellini’s Shoe), and suggested that we launch the press there. We did so on January 29, 2005, with Sal Ala, Rishma Dunlop, Leon Rooke, and Goran. The evening was so exhilarating that I suffered an adrenaline and dopamine hit from which I’ve not yet recovered. That date might mark the moment that the press was born as more than a sideline hustle of an unpractical used book dealer. It seemed, after the struggles of attracting audiences of any size in Windsor, almost too easy. (Later experiences taught me that night was an aberration.) More than a hundred people showed up at Goran’s small bar; it was so crowded that Thomas King offered to be my bookseller for the night just to have a place to sit. The applause was loudest and longest for Goran Simić. And the next day, while Goran helped us nurse our hangovers with a bottle of cognac from behind the bar, Sal and I worked with Amela at the front table in the Octopus’ Garden to make the final edits on the book that became From Sarajevo, With Sorrow. I remember the grey January light smudging through the Victorian front window of his Carlton restaurant, the dust glinting in the dim air, like us, still a little unsettled from the previous night. By the time Sal and I packed up to head home down the 401—a trip I’ve since made hundreds of times over the last twenty years—Biblioasis’s second book was ready for the press.

LEFT: Poster for ‘Not Just Another Reading Series…’ with Goran Simić and Zach Wells, February 13th 2006, presented by Biblioasis and the Flying Monkey Cafe & Juice Bar. RIGHT: Menu for Fellini’s Shoe.

I would work with Goran on two other books: the short story collection Yesterday’s People, published later that same year and also dealing with his war experiences, and 2010’s Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, Goran’s first (and perhaps only) book written in English. His place at 226 Carton, in various incarnations, became Biblioasis’s Toronto home for launches and other events for several years, his spare bedroom often the place I laid my head. A tour this week through the internet’s scattered memory reminded me that we’d planned a selected poems, taken from his untranslated Serbian books. “I have joined the ranks,” he’d written in the introduction to From Sarajevo, With Sorrow, “of those poets who have lost their own tribal language and country, and then gone on to a place where the weight of previously published books is worth almost nothing.” It had been our hope, at the time, to change that, but the manuscript never materialized. I’ve been alerted too often of late of what we forget.

What I remember: the sharp, appealing funk of pipe and garlic; his laugh—he was always laughing—and the gravelly intonation of his English; his eyes sparking, an early warning of a gentle jibe; joking and flirting with anyone with whom he came into contact. (“X reminds me of a big hamburger.” A considered pause. “And I like hamburgers.”) Drinking cognac at Carlton into the evening as a kind of medicinal remedy as he gave me publishing advice and urged me to be more serious. I envied most of all his apparent ease in all things, especially as a person for whom nothing ever seems particularly easy.

I remember him playing soccer with my at-the-time very young son with an empty water bottle in our front yard in Windsor, the sound of glee and childish laughter as they booted around this increasingly crumpled bit of plastic, and not being sure who was laughing hardest or having more fun. I loved him for this, and even after our relationship soured and failed—two supremely impractical men increasingly alienated over necessarily practical matters—I would occasionally remember that crumpled plastic, that laughter, the sparkle, and love him again.

I thought about all this on Friday and Saturday and Sunday as I sorted through some of these earliest records. Grateful all over again for Goran, how his books and the work we did on them in 2004 and 2005 helped to give the press an initial direction and identity, and again saddened at our alienation. I thought, for the first time in many years, of reaching out to him. So when Amela’s message came via Facebook this Tuesday that he’d died on September 29, perhaps at the moment that I was sorting through the posters and restaurant menus and galleys, my sadness deepened. In place of reaching out to him, I’ve now written this.

Photo: Goran Simić reading at The Windsor Festival of the Book, November 2003.

In the introduction to From Sarajevo, With Sorrow he asks “for whom were these poems written under candlelight, between 1992 and 1995?” His answer is worth reading in full, but I’ll give another small bit of it here:

The lines I wrote were written in the belief that, when compared with the cold newspaper reports which would be forgotten with the start of a new war elsewhere, only poetry can be a true and decent witness to war. I remain uncertain whether this is because the history of horror is a bad teacher or we are bad pupils. I simply wrote what I saw. Perhaps I wrote them to explain to myself the fear in my children’s eyes when they walked along streets covered in blood. Or to comfort myself with the fact that I went to so many funerals, but nobody went to mine. New wars have indeed replaced old wars, and it’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since my own war ended, ten years since I wrote these poems as a poet, a witness, and a survivor.

And it’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since I last spoke with Goran, and that in this time where new wars have replaced old wars he isn’t here, as poet, as witness.

Facebook is a useful tool for a flagellant, but it can give some relief as well: to see Goran akilter with his pipe and his dog and his smile. It’s okay: I can still hear his laugh.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

Goran Simić crosses the Mitjacka River on a water run. Frontispiece, From Sarajevo, With Sorrow. Photo Credit: Gilles Peress.

THE FACE OF SORROW

I have seen the face of sorrow. It is the face of
the Sarajevo wind leafing through newspapers
glued to the street by a puddle of blood as I
pass with a loaf of bread under my arm.

As I run across the bridge, full water canisters
in hand, it is the face of the river carrying the
corpse of a woman on whose wrist I notice
a watch.

I saw that face again in the gesture of a hand
shoving a child’s shoe into a December furnace.

It is the face I find in inscriptions on the back of
family photographs fallen from a garbage truck.

It is the face which resists the pencil, incapable of
inventing the vocabulary of sorrow, the face with
which I wake to watch my neighbor standing
by the window, night after night, staring into
the dark.

—Goran Simić, From Saravejo, With Sorrow

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In good publicity news:

Biblioasis: Poetry Submissions Now Closed!

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Biblioasis is now closed for submissions of poetry manuscripts as of Friday, May 31st. We aim to reopen again in Fall 2024.

Poetry submission guidelines:

  • We can only consider unpublished work. Individual poems in the manuscript may have appeared in journals or anthologies, but the collection as a whole must not have appeared in either print or digital editions.
  • Manuscripts should range between 48 and 100 pages in length.
  • Only one submission per writer will be reviewed. Multiple submissions will be deleted unread.
  • Only electronic submissions will be accepted. To submit, please email your manuscript as an attachment to submissions@biblioasis.com. PDF, .doc, .docx, and .rtf files are accepted. We will send confirmation that your submission has been received. Please send your manuscript only once: revised and updated versions will not be read, so make sure you’re happy with your text before sending.
  • Please include a cover letter outlining your previous publications and relevant experience. Include your cover letter as the first page of your manuscript.
  • Simultaneous submissions are fine! If your manuscript is accepted by another publisher, kindly reply to your submission email to let us know your good news so that we can withdraw it from our consideration.

This is not a contest and we do not guarantee that any manuscripts will be accepted for publication. If your manuscript isn’t quite ready for this reading period, we encourage you to continue working on it and submit it during our next period: we want to see your best work.

Biblioasis: Poetry Submissions Opening May 1-May 31!

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Poets, get your collections ready! Biblioasis will be opening for submissions of poetry manuscripts on Wednesday, May 1st, and will remain open until Friday, May 31st, or we reach two hundred submissions—whichever comes first.

Updated poetry submission guidelines:

  • We can only consider unpublished work. Individual poems in the manuscript may have appeared in journals or anthologies, but the collection as a whole must not have appeared in either print or digital editions.
  • Manuscripts should range between 48 and 100 pages in length.
  • Only one submission per writer will be reviewed. Multiple submissions will be deleted unread.
  • Only electronic submissions will be accepted. To submit, please email your manuscript as an attachment to submissions@biblioasis.com. PDF, .doc, .docx, and .rtf files are accepted. We will send confirmation that your submission has been received. Please send your manuscript only once: revised and updated versions will not be read, so make sure you’re happy with your text before sending.
  • Please include a cover letter outlining your previous publications and relevant experience. Include your cover letter as the first page of your manuscript.
  • Simultaneous submissions are fine! If your manuscript is accepted by another publisher, kindly reply to your submission email to let us know your good news so that we can withdraw it from our consideration.

This is not a contest and we do not guarantee that any manuscripts will be accepted for publication. If your manuscript isn’t quite ready for this reading period, we encourage you to continue working on it and submit it during our next period: we want to see your best work.

THE DAY-BREAKERS longlisted for the 2023 OCM BOCAS PRIZE!

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We’re excited to share that The Day-Breakers by Michael Fraser (April 4, 2022) has been longlisted for the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize!

The judges describe The Day-Breakers by Grenada-born, Canada-based Michael Fraser as “breathtakingly assured. […] Fraser’s poems unearth a new and untold world of Black experience from a very familiar arc of history with a rich linguistic curiosity…. The poet’s use of language illumines this collection in a way that conjoins Fraser to that broad stem of the diaspora represented by the finest Caribbean Canadian poets.”

The OCM Bocas Prize is considered the most coveted award dedicated to Caribbean writing. It recognises books in three genre categories—poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction—published by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship in the preceding year.

In the next stage of judging for the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize, the judges will announce the winners in the three genre categories on Sunday 2 April. These will go on to compete for the overall Prize of US$10,000, to be announced on Saturday 29 April, during the 13th annual NGC Bocas Lit Fest.

Congratulations to Michael from all of us!

Grab your copy of The Day-Breakers here!

ABOUT THE DAY-BREAKERS

Longlisted for the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022

Saturated with locutions lifted from the late 19th century, The Day-Breakers deeply conceives of what African Canadian soldiers experienced before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War.

“It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the selflessness of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War, of whom hundreds were African-Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their brethren and the dawning of a new day. Brilliantly capturing the rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is an homage to their sacrifice and an unforgettable act of reclamation: the restoration of a language, and a powerful new perspective on Black history and experience.

ABOUT MICHAEL FRASER

Michael Fraser is published in various national and international journals and anthologies. He is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2018 Gwendolyn Macewen Poetry Competition. The Day-Breakers is his third book of poems.

Reviews, Awards, and Interviews: CASE STUDY, ORDINARY WONDER TALES, CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

CASE STUDY

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (November 1, 2022) has been reviewed by Christian Lorentzen in the New York Times! The review was published online on November 1, 2022. Read the full NYT review here.

Lorentzen writes,

“Case Study has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have. … Case Study is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades.”

Case Study has been featured on Lit Hub as one of “18 new books to kick your November reading into gear.” The list was posted on November 1, 2022 and can be read here.

Case Study was reviewed by Jessica Brockmole for The Historical Novel Society. The review was published online on November 1, 2022. Read the full review here.

Brockmole writes,

“Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement … wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period, with ‘Rebecca’s’ word choices and the details she includes saying as much about 1960s British society as they do about her place in it. ‘Rebecca’ is deliciously unreliable as a narrator.”

Graeme Macrae Burnet has been interviewed by Lily Meyer for Crime Reads. The interview was posted online on November 3, 2022 an can be read here.

Meyer writes,

“Burnet propels readers through the novel with his fierce, hilarious intelligence.”

Case Study has also been excerpted in Lit Hub and featured by Vol 1. Brooklyn as part of their “November 2022 Book Preview.” The excerpt, and preview were published online on November 3, 2022. Read the Lit Hub here, and Vol 1. Brooklyn here.

Grab your copy of Case Study here!

ORDINARY WONDER TALES

Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales (November 1, 2022), was interviewed by Lisa Godfrey on CBC Ideas! The episode on hauntings aired on October 25, 2022. Emily’s segment begins at 25:00 mins. Listen to the full episode here.

Ordinary Wonder Tales has been reviewed by Kathleen Rooney in LIBER: A Feminist Review. The review will be published in print in their Winter 2022 issue. Read the full review here.

Kathleen writes,

“In Ordinary Wonder Tales, Urquhart stylishly combines her personal experiences with her academic expertise, leading to a reading experience that feels entertaining and casual yet also edifying … It’s a testament to Urquhart’s own formidable storytelling skill that each of her essays inspires a quiet awe.”

Ordinary Wonder Tales was been listed in CBC Books and Toronto Life!

The CBC Books list, “20 Canadian books we can’t wait to read in November” was published on November 2, 2022. You can check it out here.

The Toronto Life list, “Sixteen things to see, do, read and hear in Toronto this November” was published on October 28, 2022. You can read the full list here.

Order your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!

THE AFFIRMATIONS

Luke Hathaway‘s poem “As the part hanteth after the water brooks” from The Affirmations (April 5, 2022), won the Confederation Poets Prize by Arc Poetry. The prize winner was announced on October 27, 2022. You can read the full announcement here.

This year’s judge, Brecken Hancock, had this to say about the winning poem:

“In 12 incredibly short lines, Luke Hathaway has captured how we survive and thrive by chance, by lucky accident. These spare lines take the reader on a profound journey with the speaker who has gone “uphill to the well / where I went, as I thought // for my water” only to find an utterly new form of thirst and its remedy waiting there instead. A previously unrecognized, but life-threatening, form of dehydration is alleviated (in what feels like the nick of time) by the startling discovery of a source to quench it. Rather than dwell on what had previously been missing, a sorrowful lack, the poem ends in affirmation—communicating a resonant relief, and, beyond that, the joy and ecstasy that can finally be embodied and expressed when our deepest needs are recognized and met.”

Get your copy of The Affirmations here!

CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH

Confessions with Keith by Pauline Holdstock (October 25, 2022), has been reviewed at Focus on Victoria on October 31, 2022. Read the whole review here.

Reviewer Amy Reiswig writes,

“Confessions with Keith reminds us that life is a raw, radiant, and ridiculous story unfolding moment by moment for everyone in their separate subjectivities. It deserves laughter. It deserves tears. It is made more bearable by books like this, the literary equivalent of uncensored midnight conversation over cups of tea or glasses—plural—of wine. What Vita observes of festival street performers could well be said of reading Holdstock’s newest creation: ‘It was a shared experience of human life, a little bit of eternity together.'”

Confessions With Keith has also been reviewed at the BC Review. Read the whole review here.

Reviewer Candace Fertile writes,

“Things going wrong on many levels is the focus of the novel, but Vita’s ability to plough through the problems and often see the humour even when exhausted is refreshing … Confessions with Keith deals with real life issues in a frenetic and funny manner.”

Get your copy of Confessions with Keith here!

THIS TIME, THAT PLACE

This Time, That Place: Selected Stories by Clark Blaise (October 18, 2022) has been excerpted at Open Book. The excerpt is from the story “Translation” and was published Nov 1, 2022. You can read it here.

This Time, That Place also received a starred review at Quill & Quire. The review was published on November 2, 2022. Check out the whole review here.

Reviewer Steven W. Beattie writes,

“Blaise is … almost preternaturally adept at noticing things … sublime technique and linguistic finesse [are] showcased in these inestimable short works.”

Pick up your copy of This Time, That Place here!

TRY NOT TO BE STRANGE

Michael Hingston, author of Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda (September 13, 2022), has been reviewed by MA Orthofer in The Complete Review. The article was published on October 30, 2022. You can read the full review here.

Orthofer writes,

“Try Not to be Strange is an enjoyable account of a bizarre not-quite-real place, with a rich cast of characters—not least Hingston himself, who amusingly tracks his own obsessiveness.”

Michael Hingston has also been interviewed on Across the Pond podcast and New & Used podcast! Both episodes were published on November 1, 2022. You can listen to Across the Pond here, and New & Used here.

Get your copy of Try Not to Be Strange here!

Spotlight On: SHORT TAKES ON THE APOCALYPSE by PATRICIA YOUNG

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With a change in seasons comes a new featured title in the Biblioasis Spotlight Series! For October, our pick is Patricia Young‘s observant and beautifully responsive poetry collection, Short Takes on the Apocalypse (October 18, 2016). Read on for a short note from the author, and keep an eye out for an excerpt from the collection in our newsletter later this month.

SHORT TAKES ON THE APOCALYPSE

“With her sure hand wielding the knife of understanding, Young cuts not just to the bone, but well beyond into realms that transcend the here, the now and the merely personal.”—Monday Magazine

This twelfth collection from Governor General’s Award nominee Patricia Young features poems built entirely upon the words of others. Originating as a response to Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing,” and expanding to include poetic responses to quotations about writing from other sources—from Leonardo da Vinci to Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood to Jimmy Kimmel—the resulting pieces traverse a myriad of themes. Playfully exploring subjects as wide-ranging as veganism, gun violence, sex, parenting, feminism, death, and Coachella, Young bounces off the selected epigraphs with a vital energy and crackling wit.

Patricia Young is the author of twelve books of poetry, four chapbooks and one book of short fiction, Airstream (Biblioasis, 2006). A two-time Governor General’s Award nominee, she has also won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the CBC Literary Competition, the British Columbia Book Prize for Poetry and the League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection of poems is Amateurs at Love (Goose Lane Editions, 2018). She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Pick up your copy of Short Takes on the Apocalypse here!

Check out Patricia Young’s other works here!

A WORD FROM PATRICIA YOUNG

Conversations Across Poems

I remember coming across Elmore Leonard’s ten rules for good writing and thinking how sensible and funny they were. One of his rules is never to begin with the weather. Another is never to use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”. Around the same time, I read a Billy Collins poem in which he uses the word “suddenly” many times, playing off the idea that the word is forbidden, writing against the rule, doing the opposite. His poem is riddled with “suddenlys”. This led to reading interviews of writers in which they often listed their own rules for writing or talked about writing generally. All of this interested me, so I wrote a few poems that spun off Elmore Leonard’s rules and then kept going, more often searching for an appropriate quote after the fact. In this sense, the poems weren’t exercises; they were simply poems I’d written and the attached quotation fit in some loose way. Sometimes the connection between the epigraph and the poem is clear and sometimes it’s oblique. For example, when I was bitten by a beautiful (but frightened) dog I wrote a palindrome. The epigraph for this poem is by Dorothy Hinshaw Paten: “Even the tiniest Poodle or Chihuahua is a wolf at heart.” The poem and the quotation aren’t directly related but they do speak to each other. At least to my mind they do. Another example: Pat Conroy says, “One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family”. I liked this quote, the truth of it, so paired it with a poem I’d written in three parts: “Drinkers”, “Suicides” and “Insomniacs”. I enjoyed the process of seeking out epigraphs for the poems in this book. I felt I was connecting with and responding to other writers, both dead and contemporary.

A Farewell to Richard Sanger

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It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Richard Sanger, Biblioasis poet, friend and bon vivant. We knew that this moment was approaching: Richard had been working the last few months with his editor, Vanessa Stauffer, to prepare the manuscript of his final collection of poems, Way to Go, delivering it only last week. He remained himself to the very end: playful, enthusiastic, devilish. At one point, after making yet another death joke, he stopped and asked us if he was making us uncomfortable: he couldn’t help it, he told us, he found his own impending demise somewhat ridiculous. He kept laughing, and making others laugh, right to the end. We will miss that spirit, and his kindness, generosity and sharp-edged intelligence. And we will miss celebrating the launch of Way to Go in his person, raising a glass or three, though we take some solace in knowing that this book exists and he was able to get it where he wanted it to be, and that we will one day soon be able to share it with all of you who loved him, and hopefully a few more besides.

—Dan Wells

 

To honour Richard, we thought we’d share one of our favourite poems from his forthcoming collection, about the joy of movement and embellishment and friendship:

November Run

for Harold Hoefle

I read your letter, Harold,
as one nurse describes her new dessert
—rice krispie squares, peanut butter, chocolate—
to another who hooks me up to my IV drip
and I want nothing more than to go
for a run with you as wild
and muddy and unpredictable
as your letter, a long November run
to commemorate the races we never ran
against each other, the OFSAAs we never placed;
I want to head off hanging on your shoulder
—light-footed, loose-limbed, easy-breathing—
as you lead the way along the gravel shoulder
of the highway out of town, past the 7-Eleven,
the gas station, the monster homes,
then cut off down a path into the woods
and up whatever kind of hills you have
in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, or pastures
overgrown with sumac, I suppose,
or maybe we’d go for a run in the Gatineau,
why not, hell, up and down those ski trails,
over branches and rocks and puddles and streams
when there are still a few leaves
left on the hardwoods and also perhaps
a few precocious snowflakes in the air
appearing like over-keen students
to try their luck and melt on contact
as our cheeks and thighs redden,
and now you hang on my shoulder
as I lead the way, taking you on, pressing the pace
until we fall into a rhythm, brisk, mechanical,
each of our bodies telling the other’s
I can do this all I want, I can cream you,
our bones and sinews making themselves known
shedding all superfluous weight and thought,
as we run those Gatineau trails and this steep slope
and I attack, putting my forehead into it,
pumping my arms, thinking now I can do it,
administer the coup de grâce,
and leave you in the dust . . . No such luck.
At the crest, you’re still with me, surprise,
and so we head back, lungs panting, thighs aching,
letting our legs freewheel as fast as they can,
you ahead of me, or me ahead of you
breathing down my neck, laughing,
ready to pick me off and whoosh past
to the chalet where there’ll be showers and beer,
some women who’ll understand our jokes,
who’ll ooh and ahh over our mud-spattered calves,
and tell us we’re full of shit, if necessary,
and a roaring fire to get roaring drunk beside
as we proceed to purify the dialect of the tribe
and forge in the exuberance of our talk
the only lightly embellished story of our race.

ROMANTIC shortlisted for the DEREK WALCOTT POETRY PRIZE

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We’re pleased to share that Romantic by Mark Callanan (October 12, 2021) has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry!

The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry is presented by Arrowsmith Press, in partnership with The Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and is awarded to a full-length book of poems by a non-US citizen published in the previous calendar year. This year’s judge is Carolyn Forché.

The prize includes a $1,000 cash award, along with a reading at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in Boston. Winners will be announced on October 13, 2022.

Get your copy of Romantic here!

ABOUT ROMANTIC

A CBC Best Canadian Poetry Book of 2021

Drawing on Arthurian myth, the Romantic poets, the ill-fated “Great War” efforts of the Newfoundland Regiment, modern parenthood, 16-bit video games, and Major League Baseball, these poems examine the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both as individuals and as communities, in order to explain how and why we are the way we are. At its heart, Romantic interrogates our western society’s idealized, self-deluding personal and cultural perspectives.

ABOUT MARK CALLANAN

Mark Callanan is the author of two previous poetry collections, Gift Horse (Véhicule Press, 2011) and Scarecrow (Killick Press, 2003), as well as two poetry chapbooks, Skylarking (Anstruther Press, 2020) and Sea Legend (Frog Hollow Press, 2010). He was a founding editor of the St. John’s-based literary journal Riddle Fence, and co-edited The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry (Breakwater Books, 2013). He lives in St. John’s with his wife, poet and critic Andreae Callanan, and their four children.

Celebrate Mother’s Day with Biblioasis!

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Mother’s Day is fast approaching! We have some great gift ideas for your mom or any mother figures in your life.

For the mom who keeps up with the bestsellers: A Ghost in the Throat

“A powerful, bewitching blend of memoir and literary investigation … Ní Ghríofa is deeply attuned to the gaps, silences and mysteries in women’s lives, and the book reveals, perhaps above all else, how we absorb what we love—a child, a lover, a poem—and how it changes us from the inside out.”—Nina Maclaughlin, New York Times

For the mom who wants a challenge: Ducks, Newburyport

“Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmann’s daring is exhilarating—as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.”—2019 Booker Prize Jury Citation

For the mom who attends open mic night: Hail, the Invisible Watchman

“Alexandra Oliver, Canada’s sublime formal poet, grabs centuries-old traditions by the throat and gives them a huge contemporary shaking in Hail, the Invisible Watchman. Terrifyingly clever, dazzlingly skilled, and chillingly accurate in her social observations, she plunges from lyric to narrative and back again in this, her third volume, where a housewife has ‘a waist like a keyhole’ and a ‘good mood’ has a ‘scent’ … With Hail, the Invisible Watchman Oliver again alters the landscape of Canadian poetry.” —Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst

For the mom who loves historical fiction: The Barrøy Chronicles

“A profound interrogation of freedom and fate, as well as a fascinating portrait of a vanished time, written in prose as clear and washed clean as the world after a storm.”—The Guardian

For the mom who is everyone’s best friend: The Last Goldfish

“Lahey is a writer of extraordinary gifts, evoking the world of two raucous schoolgirls growing up in the 1980s in astonishing, at times laugh-out-loud funny, detail … Lou couldn’t have asked for a more stalwart, loyal friend than Anita Lahey; we couldn’t ask for a more acutely observant and empathetic writer.”—Moira Farr, author of After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor’s Tale

For the mom who wants to be surprised: Biblioasis Mystery Box

Each box is unique and carefully curated. Tell us some of your favourite books or genres in the notes box, so we can pick books specially for you, or leave it blank for a complete surprise!

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us at Biblioasis!

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