Citizens of Ordinary Time

Benjamin Goluboff & Mark Luebbers

June 2023/132 pp/978-1988214504

In this collaborative poetic endeavour, Benjamin Goluboff (Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse) and Mark Luebbers (Flat Light) project the lives of eclectic and memorable people through speculative biography. Renowned in their use of this poetic style, here we see the likes Robert Frank, Bill Evans, Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, and others in imagined glimmers from their lives. In unique work that follows in the line of Spoon River Anthology, we are invited along for poetic experience that couples historical fact with deep-dive lyric experience. These are poems of experience, ones that let readers feel and hear and witness history in a way that makes it very real, almost personal, and leaves a lasting memory and lingering feelings.

Meeting Thoreau at the Gas Station Diner

Marty Gervais

April 2022/104 pp/978-1988214481

Windsor, ON’s renowned poet and storyteller returns with a profoundly personal poetic memoir of a foundational time in North America. Gervais returns us to an era defined hitchhiking, psychedelic music, and the politics of Vietnam. The era of the unbridled open road, the freedom of movement across a land and place we had yet to come to terms with. An ecological text of people and lives and uniquely Canadian places this is exploration of self personified. Saturated with the vibrancy of life and detail, Gervais bring us along with him, viewing the world though roll-up car windows, finding its mood in late night AM radio, and finds its community in the superstitions, loves, and longings of people Gervais discovers along the way.

Flat Light

Marks Luebbers

Dec 2020/92 pp/‎ 978-1988214443

In Mark Luebbers debut poetry collection, he frames his discussion with the condition of “flat light.” A condition that makes it more difficult to see surfaces and details in contrast, distorts distances, and reduces color values. In order to see well in flat light, one must learn to see “without eyes.” And in these poems Luebbers uses this more encompassing poetic vision to reconsider boundaries between wildlife and humanity, the depth of artists and their lives, and the manner that all of it touches the familiarity of our lives.

The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island

Craig Finley

feb 2021/126 pp/978-1988214375

Finlay’s poems are the works of a person who has traveled the world in search of himself and his place in it. He is a Midwestern poet in the sense that his poems hide narratives that seek honesty above all else, and he is not a Midwestern poet in the sense that he doesn’t apologize for the truth when it is found. Mammoths draws from his experiences and from a wide survey of human history to make us look at someone who isn’t quite at home yet, exploring themes of place, memory and history. His collection often rejects the division between personal history and objective world history, instead opting for a hyper-local reinterpretation of the stories we tell about the world.

Our Mother of Sorrows

Nina Clements

Aug 2020/96 pp/978-1988214405

In this stunning debut poetry collection, Clements utilizes heartfelt lyricism to explore the hard turns that familial bonds, motherhood, and faith play in the world. These are poems that sing out in a broken bottle chorus of the ways that people share the common, the uncommon, and the unexpectant in light of the world that we are told must be. In Our Mother of Sorrows, we see the ways that familial love and expectations meet the hard edge of tragedy and darkness. These are poems that sing of the sparkling glimmers in the midst of everyday life. Glimmers that reveal the simple wonder, both enlightening and enraging, that comprise a life lived and the quiet, most personal struggles, that people and families endure.

Counterglow

Patricia Killelea

feb 2019/ 70 pp/ 978-1988214245

Borrowing its title from astronomy, the counterglow is a faint light in the night sky that appears directly opposite the sun. Made up of interplanetary dust, this glow is difficult to detect unless one observes from a place without light. These lyric poems of Patricia Killelea speak from this darkness as she seeks a language of redemption– some kind of brightness to cling to, however faint. Spanning terrains of spiritual and literal hunger, where ecological and personal crisis intertwine, this collection is an unwavering affirmation of the power of words in the face of wordlessness.

Civilian

Deonte Osayande

Feb 2019/ 192 pp/ 978-1988214269

In a look at what makes a black man in today’s society, Osayande brings us through central questions of belonging, love, and happiness in his native home of Detroit. In his largest collection of poetic pieces yet, the renowned Detroit performance poet, writer, and educator answers how one responds to a world seemingly stacked against. Whether with love, with the law, finances and even with ones own mental health, these are poems that illustrate the battles against the cold-heartedness of contemporary American and that ever looming demon in the back of his own mind.

Goodwill Galaxy Hunting

LeRoy Gorman

Jan 2019/ 78 pp/978-1988214252

In Gormans collection of haiku, tanka, and visual poems we recognize the new, the familiar, the unsaid. His work delivers an engaging visual and lyric pathway across our shared universe. Each turn, each line, each image a homage to the places we’ve been and the places we shall go. Here is our universe in clear images, lines, and voice. One that we recall playfully and in reverent awe. Hunting the universe through poetics we are brought through a voyage of self that leaves us meditating over lyric turns and images, and left with a reverence for the wonders of the universe and our place in it.

Said the Cannibal

Laurie Smith

Oct 2017 / 102 pp/ 978-1988214184

In a collection that is part dark humour, part history, part meditation on the darker portions of simple existence, Smith dazzles and entertains with her newest collection of poems. Here we play witness to starving settlers, unsettling mass murders, and television visions. Questions about what makes a meal and what makes murder illustrate the fine line that even the basic tenents of Christianity and the very basic aspects of civilized societies are approached in a fashion that are uniquely Smith’s style, leaving the reader with both laughter, occasional shutters, and lasting questions that come when a sharp poetic voice enlightens us to the nuances of our shared everyday lives.

Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems

Benjamin Goluboff

Oct 2017/ 98 pp/ ‎ 978-1988214177

Almost fifty years after his death, Ho Chi Minh remains a deeply divisive figure — heroic revolutionary, or brutal dictator, depending on your perspective on the Vietnam wars. Not overtly political, the poems in this collection interrogate Ho’s life and wars with a lyricism that is both dark and inventive. Many versions of the man inhabit these poems: Ho as trickster and tyrant, lover and ghost. Goluboff’s imagination travels from fact to fancy with disarming grace. This debut collection also includes a suite of poems about photographs of and by Allen Ginsberg, and another group whose subjects range from classic photographs to Chicago graffiti and the battle of Fredericksburg. Entertaining and deftly voiced, these are poems that will stay with you

Class

Deonte Osayande

Fev 2017/ 104 pp/‎ 978-1988214115

One of the Midwest’s finest slam poets, Osayande brings his work to the written page and delivers a lyric exploration of everyday life in Detroit in his debut full-length collection Class. In his voice you can hear and feel the lineage of some of Detroit’s finest poetic voices, stretching back to David Blair, Murray Jackson, and Naomi Long Madgett. He captures the rhythms, images, and deepest meditations of life both hardscrabble and painfully beautiful in a fashion that calls us to know that survival is much more about living than cowering in fear. As a teacher Osayande brings us before his classrooms, let’s us linger on the experiences and moments of growing up in a city that feels lost amidst the promises of America, and takes us through the high cost of being black in a place where the colour of one’s skin can deliver a trauma that only the strongest can survive. His poems show us the Detroit that has always been here. Both heartbreaking and empowering the poems in this collection ask the reader to consider the America that is kept hidden from Prime Time television, that carries on because it must, and understands that the act of speaking is the best therapy and resistance that one can offer to a world given at best to indifference and at worst insidious violence.