The third instalment of Read Local BC’s nine-part gift guide series
Part 1: Books to Relax With
Part 2: Reading for Pleasure
Opportunities to be creative can be hard to come by, even though we’ve all felt the satisfaction and enrichment that being creative brings. It’s impossible to buy and wrap a box of creativity, but the gift of a book of poetry is pretty close.
No other form has the creative force of poetry, or does to language what poetry can do: stretching, shrinking, and transforming words before your eyes into feelings, images, ideas. There’s nothing like poetry to capture your imagination, challenge what you know, and send your thoughts spinning off in non-linear directions.
Get Creative
Books of poetry to illuminate, challenge, and stoke your creative fire.
Bounce House by Jennica Harper (Anvil Press).
Bounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper’s fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing. Measured and meticulously weighted, these poems are playful and poignant as they navigate the strange terrain around losing a loved one: how the past and present blur together, the dead simultaneously here and missing, and how joy moves inevitably forward, as if on wheels.
Inconvenient Skin / nayêhtâwan wasakay by Shane L. Koyczan (Theytus Books).
Inconvenient Skin challenges how reconciliation has become a contested buzzword filled with promises and good intentions but rarely any meaningful follow-through. While Canada’s history is filled with darkness, these poems aim to unpack that history to clean the wounds so the nation can finally heal. Powerful and thought-provoking, this collection will draw you in and make you reconsider Canada’s colonial legacy. The cover features the art of Kent Monkman, and the interior features work by Joseph Sanchez, a member of the Indian Group of Seven. Written in English and Cree.
Kiskajeyi – I AM READY by Michelle Sylliboy (Rebel Mountain Press).
This hieroglyphic poetry book is the first of its kind. Mi’kmaq artist and writer, Michelle Sylliboy blends her poetry, photography, and Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) hieroglyphic poetry in this unprecedented book.
Quarrels by Eve Joseph (Anvil Press).
The poems in this 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor’s hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists.
Winter’s Cold Girls by Lisa Baird (Caitlin Press).
In her debut collection of poetry, Lisa Baird explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political scope. These poems bear witness to the resilience of bodies and sexualities and are grounded in an earthy humour. Baird’s poetic style shifts from lyric to deeply personal to fantastical: an old woman plants broken light bulbs and harvests dark flowers; two sisters grow feathers in a nest in the backyard maple; a mother turns into a deer and escapes the unspeakable through a kitchen window. These are poems of disruption, discovery, and witness—they balance brutal honesty with a welcoming intensity. They want you to come close.