Gordon Hill Press

Notes from the Ward is Steffi Tad-y's new collection of poetry exploring bipolar disorder and psychotic break through lived experience and a poet's eye. It is breathtakingly truthful and disarmingly direct, a powerful intervention into a diagnosis that remains more medicalized and sensationalized than understood.

the problem with having a body unites Jessica Popeski's preoccupations with intersectional ecofeminism, epigenetics, and the inheritance of fractured, grandmaternal generational lines. It reconciles private and public conflicts, examining how political and geographical rupture and war zones generate traumatic, ancestral memory by chronicling experiences of moving through the world with dis/ability and anorexia. Accompanied by the insistence of matrilineal song, these poems ask loud questions about cyclical bouts of anxiety and depression, madness, illness, voicelessness, and disordered eating. By granting these recurring intergenerational cadences value in the present, this collection seeks to transform stress, and the legacy of its gifts, into a greater consciousness.

Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concetta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be place of sanctuary but can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Principe's characteristic subtlety, intelligence - a nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home.

Blasphemy and Other Ancestors is comprised of four novellas, in which authors Padgett Powell, Darius James, Lee Henderson, and Jean Marc Ah-Sen explore the tag end of existence and the abasements that memory holds in store for characters living "outside of their time."In Blasphemy and Other Ancestors, a Southern man of letters tries to instruct his assistant on the matters of the heart, a self-centered telephile recounts how his aunt taught him about the world beyond his T.V. set, an avant-garde filmmaker is haunted by a Nazi persecutor at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and a sundowner discovers that a writer recording the events of his life holds the secret to his ability to remember his past lives.

Crazy/Mad is the latest modern poetry of resistance, against the norms and standards of a moment and against the idea of the confessional poem as a tool only for the poet themselves. Written around the poet's lifelong fears of how their mental health, gender and orientation could be perceived and potentially punished, the poems whimper, rail and spin against continued psychological, personal and political oppressions at the human and institutional levels, including heteronormativity, monosexism and ableism; and rally for embracing all our forms of diversity, within and without.

Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concetta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be place of sanctuary but can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Principe's characteristic subtlety, intelligence - a nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home.

A brief relief from hunger by Sabrina Spenser Smith is a poetry collection about the yearnings of a young man-cocaine, human connection, fast food-and the ravenous world in which he lives. In Vancouver, the speaker binges Big Macs post-rehab while others consume fentanyl-tainted drugs. Growling bodies are everywhere, including on Facebook where people post cruel comments about drug users in the face of British Columbia's toxic drug supply crisis. At the heart of the collection are poems that respond to these comments from the perspective of the speaker, now sober but still hungry, whose friends are dying from the contaminated drug supply. The speaker knows at least one reliable source of contentment: Grandma's kitchen, where, at his lowest points, he finds cabbage rolls, acceptance, and a tenderness he wishes to absorb into his masculinity.

Winner of The City of Edmonton Robert Kroetsch Book PrizeWinner of The Writers Guild of Alberta Memoir AwardAs Jennifer Bowering Delisle was on her path through infertility towards motherhood, she was simultaneously losing her own mother to a rare degenerative neurological disease and an approaching medically-assisted death. The lyric essays in Micrographia explore how losses can collide and reverberate both within our own lives and in our relationships with the rest of the world. How much do we share of our stories, and how much do we understand of what others are experiencing? Ultimately, this is a book about connection; "micrographia" is both the term for the diminished handwriting caused by neurological disease, and the narrative fragments offered here.

In Uncomfortability, Roxanna Bennett's third book with Gordon Hill Press, pandemic conditions are explored in their individuated awfulness but also their paradoxical solidarity, the unifying collective status of being somehow constrained, life radically changing due to social proscription. Continuing her development and renovation of the sonnet form established in her previous books, but building on the form by arranging the text into seasonal divisions like a Book of Hours, Uncomfortability is devoted to this question from "Life Without Weather", "Could we begin to love each other's pain?" The book answers, "No one needs to fight. We are all the same."

Why do we stand in front of art and look at it? Why do we go to galleries and museums? What does it feel like? What do you expect to have happen there? How do you feel before you enter, after you leave? What do you do with all your moods, your attentions, your restlessness, your curiosity, your sense of time? How does a visit come to be in the way that a painting comes to be? Does it matter how you begin? Does it matter if you're ready? Jeffery Donaldson's Momento answers these questions and more by offering a poetic daydream about the curious, otherworldly, but urgent and existential experience of art, artifacts, and the buildings that house them. This little book itself is like a visit to a museum. Enter and wander as you please.

Safety Razor combines personal lyrics with translations from Old Norse, its taut poems running like high-wires between the poles of terror and joy, danger and safety, erudition and naivety. Mingling subjects as diverse as dinosaur bones and diacritical markers, Vikings and mothering, Safety Razor pits cultural and historical flotsam against the intimate and the academic. Be prepared for a voice that is both vulnerable and scientific as it explores the exploitation of Jumbo the Elephant, how a baby experiences a tornado, or a Viking demonstration of poetic prowess through vomit and blood. Every line in Osborne's sharp verse is like a "pin dipped in tobacco spit," something inked with precision and grit.

A whorling pseudotranslation of French Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux's La Repoetique, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is a herniating long-poem, a w(h)orld built by and for the word. Unconventional and otherwise inconceivable relationships thrive in this unreal space, where hot tub (s)cum, The Tinder-Poem, comes to life to date a mercurial living-meme, the Chose-Coke Poser: sometimes Goblin, sometimes aristocratic variant of the Femboy Hooters meme. The whorld at once a food-tray fastness, a clotted pocket mirror propping open a mouth, and a bloody buffet for twenty befanged criminals seeking refuge from the law. Whorld as ever-unrolling unraveling rug; as yawnsense; as slimey timey oneness; as aerated English, Nu-Cue-Ler Alberta English, used-to-be-the-bottom-of-an-Ocean English, as the trembling timbre of the Tinder-Poem's voice asking "does your English always fight like this, or just at the holidays?" The Repoetic is the realm of the loser, the cruiser, and the havering grief that an immortal Mother asks of us. Sieve for the unreal, forgotten, and trampled, for Lady Di and Dido and Bart Simpson's unending boyhood. The cerebral, no-chill, scab-picking, contours flush to contours queertopia, the nemesis to cartopia, straight-time and straight-rhyme alike. The Res Poetica a long-overdue middle-finger to Plato's no-poet Res Publica. And though no panacea nor samizdat, The Repoetic's an annihilating solvent; the joke-rupt-by-hiccup haghounding its way into existence twixt split sycamore Pocky sticks; the stretched elastic embouchure of the things we wish we could say yet can't couch-twirl thru the threshold. The Repoetic a singu(hi)larity, the Poem a noise the Poem annoys.

brat is an anthology of forest creatures, lost girls, and tiny precious moments. In this collection of poetry, smallness begets uprising, rats signify life rather than death, and bunnies are slutty woodland sprites. brat makes smallness into power, resilience, and survival. In these poems, to be a brat is to be a scamp, an upstart, an agent of mischief: to cause trouble; to riot; to right wrongs; to enact change because it is right, regardless of a corrupt legal system. If brathood is the irreverent claiming of ownership over all good things, then this collection is the quintessential brat.

Vulnerable and hallucinatory, Rhonda Waterfall writes an alarming and vivid West Coast novel. Set in the rain forest on the outer coast of Vancouver Island, Sombrio takes us into the dark heart of lost childhoods. Three men, an artist, his apprentice, and an ex-bank robber turned poet seek refuge in an abandoned squatters shack. As windstorm descends upon the men, their thin hold on reality begins to unravel and fray. Each man must grapple with his past and with his desire for fame or infamy along with what their disastrous choices have wrought for their children. This is a tale of madness, art, love, addiction, and paternal responsibility. And how men lauded as geniuses crush their daughters.

WJD is an irreverent phenomenology of West-Asia, where Islamicate consciousness is driven in and out of a plethora of conflicting ideologies and has left an impression deep enough to be read across the centuries. It also includes The OceanDweller, a translation of Saeed Tavanaee Marvi's experimental tale of the power of poetry dipped in marine biology and shades of astronomy. The two volumes are printed together, one beginning from each side, with its own cover, making a unique and beautiful book.

Steffi Tad-y's debut collection brings forward diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness. Family history and work lyrics occur against a tonal backdrop of the carceral. Yet Tad-y brings a tenderness to these fraught circumstances, finding beauty in detail and repetitive acts of love, in part due to the use of a multiplicity of forms that render a surplus of affect into beautiful images. Though danger properly exists in Tad-y's world, her poetry takes its own advice in "Writer's Archive": "Look. Enough. Each full stop unspooling / the cardinal & bluebird privacy of things."

In How Beautiful People Are, his third collection, Ayaz Pirani continues to write his people's pothi: a trans-national, inter-generational poetry of post-colonial love and loss animated by the syncretizing figure of Kabir and drawn from the extraordinary diwan of ginan and granth literature. Walking alongside the tiger of Ali and an assortment of beloved infidels, Ayaz uncovers just How Beautiful People Are. After all, what will darkness do, his poems ask, when a true guru makes light?

I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago are the words nobody wants to hear from a fledgling poet behind a microphone. The warning works hand-in-hand with another poetry-world mantra that's emblazoned on the submissions page of countless litmag websites: "Before submitting, read one of our issues to get an idea of what kind of poems we publish." Implying as they do a lack of effort, expertise, or knowledge, these statements keep normies away from the proudly embattled form that is poetry.But Carl Watts' first book of poetry criticism makes the counterintuitive argument that it is the nebulous lack of professionalism and prestige that makes poetry vital. Working his argument through a series of interlocking paradoxes, Watts shows how contemporary poetry creates meaning and value - an especially pertinent finding at a time when we're expected to always be competing in the neoliberal race for self-improvement. Watts suggests that, at last, poetry might get real work out of us, in the process locating and grounding us among real people and a real practice.

In [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], MLA Chernoff contemplates the ways that trauma, poverty, and strict gender norms rupture the concept of childhood. The tension of multiple meanings in the word "squelch" acts as a guide to Chernoff's unique voice, which uses language to swaddle intrusive thoughts and mimic defense mechanisms such as avoidance, depersonalization, and derealization. [SQUELCH PROCEDURES] is an ambitious attempt to show how healing and regression are often indistinguishable, while the past is always predisposed to happen more than once: first as tragedy, then as farce.

Poet-critic Jim Johnstone has described Kevin Heslop's the correct fury of your why is a mountain as among "the most promising poetic projects to come out of Canada in recent years." This debut collection communicates Heslop's sense of balance as a visual artist, curator, and poet who weights the page with visual harmony. By turns experiment, lyric, and incantation, the book nods to its author's training as an actor, combining a command of language, form, character, and polyphony to make something performatively unique.

Aaron Schneider's What We Think We Know is a debut collection of short fiction that tests, expands, and sometimes explodes the limits of the short story, setting conventional forms alongside fragmented narratives, playing with perspective, and incorporating the instruments of data analysis (figures, tables and charts) into literary fiction. Here you'll find a satirical take on a scientific poster, a triptych of linked pieces that use footnotes, figures, and financial data to unfold the loves, dreams and disappointments of their shared protagonist, an autofiction novella that digs into the author's fraught relationship with his father, and a lyrical novelette that explores the life of a family through an extended description of their home. At once experimental and deeply human, What We Think We Know is an accomplished exploration of the possibilities of fiction.

Longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Me, You, Then Snow by Khashayar Mohammadi is a collection of poetry woven from dreams, memories and deep-seeded longing, a collection of poetry that ranges from ambiguously addressed love-letters, to ekphrastic poems for arthouse cinema, to pieces written near midnight when the day's experiences rush back into view. Though working in diverse forms and styles, the poetry manifests as a profoundly unified desire to experience and communicate the world.

Stars Need Counting meditates on questions of suicide in the mode of A. Alvarez, when he says, in A Savage God, that there are no answers to these questions, because suicide is a "closed world" - so closed that it's not our place to judge or cast shame. These essays explore the quality of what is closed about this world, bring it close enough to scrape the shame off the act, and for both those who have passed and those who survive, offer peace.

The Garden by A. F. Moritz is a passionate denunciation of injustice, especially as seen in the violent injustice directed to the African diaspora in North America. Comprised of a long poem, "The Garden in the Midst", and an in-depth essay, "The Poet's Garden," the book centers on the South Central Los Angeles "riot" of 1992 in response to the acquittal of police officers caught badly beating Rodney King in 1991. From this central point, the poem and essay reach out to encompass the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd, the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, and the long history of legalized criminal repression these two deaths belong to. Largely completed in 1992, Moritz returned to his manuscript in 2020 following the death of Mr. Floyd out of self-interrogation and grief. The Garden suggests that only the essence of poetry can prove antithetical antidote-if there can even be one-to this human crime and tragedy.

Shortlisted for Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award for Poetry, and winner of the Raymond Souster Award, try Award winning book with Gordon Hill Press, Roxanna Bennett's The Untranslatable I builds on Roxanna's acute sense of form and cripping of myth by establishing a more reflective, heartbreaking voice that asks, "Was I chosen? Is this a gift or a curse?" and provides answers not as prescribed path or cure, but as beautiful song.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize, M. Travis Lane's Keeping Count begins in the poet's favourite terrain: short, condensed lyric that focuses on the natural world. But pull a thread: music turns Lane writes, and the book progressively defamiliarizes the reader, moving from ecopoetry to a longer poetry of interiority in the second section, concluding with a final section that focuses on issues of mortality. As George Elliott Clarke has written so aptly, If you have not read Lane before, prepare to travel: Like T.S. Eliot, she wants you to have a transporting experience in your imagination. If you have read Lane before, prepare for fresh astonishment. She is Homeric breadth and Sapphic brevity."

In Saturn Peach, Lily Wang establishes a distinctive voice that is part heartbreak and part wise witness chronicling the strangeness of a technologized world. When asked to describe her book, Wang answered in her quintessential way, "There are things I never want to know but always know. Every day I live with them. Every day I live. I am like a young fruit. Like a peach, common, not the popular kind but oblate, saturn. I live and inside me this pale fruit, yellow and white. I take bites out of myself and share them with you. Maybe you taste like me. Maybe you hold this fruit and become a tree." If ever there were a book that disarmingly - and seemingly effortlessly - encouraged its reader to become a metaphor, then Saturn Peach is it.

Archaic Torso of Gumby is a series of interlinked stories and essays by Geoffrey Morrison and Matthew Tomkinson that explore the gooey, prickly, sticky materials of late-capitalist pop culture, from video games to claymation to children's picture-books commissioned by oil and gas companies. Here lyric essay, personal memoir, fable, pseudohistory, and science fiction all coexist alongside more conventional short story forms. Each part reveals unlikely connections between subjects as different as a sentient wallet, a gathering of headless saints, abject descriptions of 3D-printed food, a sixteenth-century courtier who thinks he's a horse, a virtual reality religious experience, and a couple with a fetish involving crustaceans. By turns cerebral, goofy, and heartfelt, Archaic Torso of Gumby is a delirious rabbit hole for the adventurous reader.

Winner of the 2020 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta's Emerging Artist Award, and shortlisted for the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, Amy LeBlanc's debut poetry collection, I know something you don't know, resides in the intersection of folklore and femininity. With fairy-tale lucidity and fluid voice, the poems in this collection weave through the seams between story and fact. This debut collection is alluring and noxious like hemlock, foxglove, and blooming wildflowers.

Night Lunch is a shapeshifting sonnet sequence set in the cold waters off the North Coast of Labrador. Reflecting Chaulk's own experience, the speaker-a young deckhand on a freight and passenger ferry servicing isolated communities-endures long irregular work hours, weather, icebergs, and loneliness, all the while navigating the taut intersections of race, labour, class, and masculinity. That Chaulk has Inuit family in and from Labrador makes this debut poetic journey a cultural coming-home for the young deckhand, as chronicled in supple, powerful verse.

In A Cemetery for Holes, poetic language bends and breaks, resists and reforms under the stress of family trauma. Consensual reality shifts with nonconsensual harm. It is this history of violence which is ultimately, confronted, fought against, and overcome. While engaged in this struggle, the poems also strive to rebuild, to console and to rediscover the world, its beauty, tenderness, humour, and joy.

Winner of the The Writers' Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction, Sourcebooks for Our Drawings is a book steeped in place: the rural idyll of a Southeastern New Brunswick farmhouse, the author's childhood suburbia, and the commercial sprawl of contemporary Atlantic Canada. Each piece provides a snapshot of New Brunswick in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a place at once unique and startlingly not-so in our globalized world. Part fragmentary memoir, part genre hybrid, and entirely a compilation of familial lore, Jacobs' new book-his first in prose-is a singular and idiosyncratic portrait of New Brunswick, an alternate history and an antidote to dry regionalism. A formally innovative and very personal work, Sourcebooks for Our Drawings nevertheless addresses universal concerns about our fraught relationships with nostalgia and memory.