National Poetry Month (April 2026) - Canadian PoetsUnpublished

Share

Print

A compassionate meditation on the transformative power of relationships, Soft Shelters examines what it is to become home for another person, how to shelter those we love without losing ourselves in the process. These poems ask us to consider the gifts left by dear ones who drop into--and...

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2024 WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose...

Key Selling Points The author is well known for his anti-bullying poem "To This Day" which has over 24 million views on YouTube. Inconvenient Skin has been nominated for the CODE Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Young Adult Literature.

The mythopoetic seasonal life of islanders and their love of being islanded, are captured with luminous clarity in Fertig's exceptional new book; her first in 14 years. "I have always been struck by three qualities in Mona Fertig's poetry: a sensuousness, an honouring of the...

Canadian poet David Zieroth's creative journey, still unfolding after more than fifty years, comes into brilliant focus in this revelatory retrospective. Gathered with meticulous care and arranged chronologically, this vital collection reflects the unique voice and ever-evolving style of...

From Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Susan Musgrave, author of more than thirty-five books, comes Hunger, works selected from Musgrave's last four books with an introduction by Micheline Maylor (The Bad Wife, Little Wildheart) and a humorous and thoughtful after-essay by Musgrave herself about the...

Kim Fahner's The Pollination Field is a poetic foray into the literal and metaphorical world of bees, but it also includes an exploration of other pollinators--bats, beetles, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and even humans. In these poems, Fahner continues with her poetic observation and...

What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care. In seven sections, Daniel braids the...

Written across the span of four Novembers, this collection delivers a send-off to "loved poets" who are no longer with us. Dedicated as letters and long epistolary lyrics to those who are missing a loved one, November, November acknowledges poetry's "palpitating vulnerable form," and how...

Selected by editor Aislinn Hunter, the 2025 edition of Best Canadian Poetry showcases the best Canadian poetry writing published in 2023. Featuring: Hollie Adams * George Amabile * Erin Bedford * Billy-Ray Belcourt * Bertrand Bickersteth * Elisabeth Blair * Ronna...

Six years ago, Joanna' s Streetly' s two stepsons and their boat disappeared into the ocean on an eerily calm night, barely 200 feet from Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, BC. All of Us Hidden begins with poems that inhabit Tla-o-qui-aht traditional territory, the remote summer whaling...

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...

allostatic load navigates the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuous years marked by global racial tensions, the commodification of care, and the burden of systemic injustice. Moving between diaristic intimacy and the remove of news reportage, Junie Désil's second poetry...

FEATURED ON CBC NEWFOUNDLAND MORNING WITH LEIGH ANNE POWER Poems that repurpose the language of beer cans and fast-food wrappers to explore everything from chronic illness to climate crisis to the joy of wild swimming. Created entirely out of words found on trash...

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 A.M. KLEIN POETRY PRIZE A rolling call and response between antebellum Black history and the present that mediates it. Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and...

Based on Tea Gerbeza's experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that ...

Chambersonic imagines the book as an acoustic chamber. This collection of poems, essays, performance scores, and audio recordings comes alive with documents, rehearsals, and reverberations, all populated by an ensemble of players, instruments, and materials that make sound together. A conductor...

Shortlisted, 2025 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry Longlisted, 2025 Toronto Book Awards A CBC Best Book of 2025 Borrowing its title from a finance term--"the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists"--Shadow Price is a stunning debut...

Myth, the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds ('real' and 'imaginary') unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in...

A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling - and remaking - the self from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Tolu Oloruntoba. Moving and inventive, Unravel deals with the multiple ways in which a person and world can be deconstructed, and what could happen in the aftermath.

Country Music is a book about the stories the author listened to late at night around kitchen tables or campfires growing up in rural British Columbia. Mining these materials for a rural poetics - a country music - Koss begins to understand his working-class upbringing and academic...

From wherever I am, I will send word like a golden thread, roll an unravelling ball through time toward myself. In this stunning debut collection, Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two distinct and moving portraits of early womanhood. The...

WINNER OF T.S. ELIOT PRIZE WINNER OF GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR POETRY WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE AGuardian, Financial Times, CBC, and Observer Best Book of 2025 The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie's sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural,...

Lotus flowers, youthful hunger, and other temporary beauties intertwine to tell this coming-of-age story, a set of pulsating poems that move toward a distant memory or a flaming future. Kyo Lee's intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro...

Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson's attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with...

Revolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum's artwork + and -, Revolutions asks how young Arab women - who live in homes and communities where actions are...

The driving impulse of Amy LeBlanc's new collection of poetry, I used to live here, is an examination of chronic illness, disability, and autoimmunity. The collection also aims to find moments of magic and ritual within the experience of illness and to find new metaphors for illness and...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD FOR POETRY A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin's Gay Girl Prayers does...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD 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...

Winner of the Claire Harris Poetry Prize Raw, reverent, and bursting with searing vulnerability, Non-Prophetcanvases the electric tension between devotion and doubt to gods both personal and ubiquitous, and reflects on the natural and built worlds in their claims to the...

A wandering meditation on motherhood, language, and art and a parallactic and slow amble through private rooms and interiors. The result is a woman ricocheting off the bounds of a marriage, memory, and herself. The latest book by Gillian Sze, author of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award-winning book...

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Awards (Poetry) Shortlisted, Nelson Ball Prize Escaping from the evils of the modern world into the vivid colours of a bird's plumage, Michael Trussler's 10:10plunges into the mystery and horror of living at the beginning of the...

Winner, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award Finalist, Governor General's Literary Awards (Poetry) Shortlisted, E.J. Pratt Family Poetry Prize Longlisted, First Nation Communities READ "Canada rejected our applications for enrolment in the Qalipu First Nation....

Hauntings form the canopy of The Seventh Town of Ghosts. These titular towns, centred in yesterdays, tomorrows, and the ongoing, lead to a special kind of singing: songs to the reader who wrestles with existence, the unsure peace within family, and the often-tense interdependence of life. Here,...

Fifty poems to dance (awkwardly) between queer and anxious spaces. Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a current. Recorded on deliberately shaky media, this collection offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From Scruff dates to mix tapes, Jes Battis...

I knew it was time to build what could carry, what could find the high point to name what I knew to be the world and carry it with me. At the heart of The Knot of My Tongue is a speaker trying to find language and selfhood following devastating personal rupture. She excavates and redefines voices...

WINNER OF THE 2025 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD 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...

In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather. Never having thought of herself as an environmental poet, the author found that under the strictures of the pandemic the recent effects of climate change became more and more intrusive...