The Muses´ Company

Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems, Melanie Dennis Unrau's debut collection, is an elegantly spare, thoughtful, and fiercely tenacious meditation on the trials and tribulations of modern motherhood. Written in response to the platitude "Your children are your poetry now," Happiness Threads explores the struggle of a young mother to balance the demands of raising young children with her desire to make art. Unrau wastes neither words nor sentiment; often brief and wonderfully compact, these poems shy away from nothing--delving into every challenge from the onslaught of dirty diapers and spit-up to the despair in the aftermath of a stillbirth.

Finalist for the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First BookEvolving from a routine of long walks he began to help him quit smoking, Winnipeg singer, songwriter and musician Scott Nolan's debut poetry collection Moon Was a Feather reflects on a life well-considered. Poems that chronicle a difficult youth, experience with drugs, friendships, and music are interwoven with insights gleaned from the eclectic jumble of neighbourhoods and people he encounters on his long walks. Spare-eloquent with a healthy dose of grit-the poems of Moon Was a Feather are infused with the poet's deep appreciation for the eccentricities of fate that life throws at him, and the love for music that helps him make sense of them.

Winner of the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for PoetryFor Katherena Vermette, Winnipeg's North End is a neighbourhood of colourful birds, stately elms, and always wily rivers. It is where a brother's disappearance is trivialized by local media and police because he is young and aboriginal. It is also where young girls share secrets, movies, cigarettes, Big Gulps and stories of love-where a young mother full of both maternal trepidation and joy watches her small daughters as they play in the park.

Winner of the 2009 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for PoetryThis is a small northern town is the long awaited, first full-length collection of poems by Rosanna Deerchild. These are poems about what it means to be from the north; a town divided along colour lines; and a family dealing with its history of secrets. At its core, this collection is about the life of a Cree girl and the places she finds comfort and escape.

Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), has been heralded as a complicated and passion fuelled artist who dared to live in disregard of the burdensome expectations for women in the first half of the last century. 97 Positions of the Heart is a lyrical travelogue through the courageous life of this Canadian writer. Poet Jaik Josephson mines both her biography and literary catalogue to escort the reader into her remarkable world. Each poem charts Smart's persistent quest to resist the forces that sought to claim and silence her. Text is paired with illustrations by Erin Josephson-Laidlaw to reveal a vast emotional range that meditates upon Elizabeth's bewildering childhood, a tumultuous romantic pairing with English writer, George Barker, the experience of motherhood and her pursuit of a prosaic language that speaks a truth about life in the social margins.I am ready for a teetering walk in the darkon those highest of heels.I am ready for that merciful car.Ready to ride to where suckling jazz wails feral,to where my people smoke and laugh absurd in their feathers and uncaring.

Intermission is an uncommon and refreshing excavation of popular culture, memory, and relationship. It offers startling interpretations of the fashionable sitcoms and young-adult novels which were prevalent during the late 1970s while exploring the nuances of belonging, faith, and loss. With a tensile gesture we are moved from the icons of the 1960s Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the playful insertion of Jim Morrison's documented acronym of his own name, Mr. Mojo Risin' to the cityscapes inherited by Generation X:& they became icons worn to waste behind our mothers& our fathers like a cityscape, like a black & white photograph,like a muted reflection, like a background of a lost era,like a misplaced decade, like a shaky foundation which has shaped the minds of my own generation.Intermission is peopled with a richness of character and stories that move from one piece to the next. It is a still and revealing inquiry into the elastic sense of memory. Striking and astounding, this collection of work is a luminous reflection on loss--the loss of childhood, adolescence, relationship, and life.