Product Description: Governor General’s Literary award finalist Sharon Thesen’s latest poetry collection, Oyama Pink Shale, is a sly, self-directed, discrete yet joyously emancipatory work. By animating and voicing various moments and selves — childhood masques, indebted adult friend to artists, cold documentarian of a haunted sanitarium, among others — Thesen’s poems show the transience of the earthly moment while convincing us of the thread of spirit that links all our lost bits and makes them possible...read more

Product Description: Musical, personable, equally alive to joy and despair, Thesen's poetry evokes the spirituality that lies at the periphery of things. Whether a glimpse of neighbor’s yellow dress, a tube of polysporin, or a tin awning that is momentarily mistaken for a lake, Thesen knows that the spiritual can disguise itself in a number of forms...read more

Product Description: The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology: A Selection of the 2003 Shortlist includes poems from the seven exceptional books shortlisted for the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize. This annual anthology gathers together extraordinary poets and introduces us to some of the finest poems within their collections, work that is at the heart of language and that reminds us what it means to be human...read more

Product Description: The long poem, nowadays, is the talk of various discourses with each other: “A poem is a small painting, a long poem is a mural.”The second edition of The New Long Poem Anthology is an irreplaceable roadmap of a vital and powerful poetic form, a record of the most seductive and sustained “singing talk” in postmodern Canadian writing...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Whether riffing on rush-hour traffic, on walking the dog, or on watching TV, Sharon Thesen's incantatory poems capture elusive, overlooked moments, and together form an incisive and witty portrait collage of our daily lives.In spinning acts of violence into fairytales, mundane anxieties into catchy advertising jingles, and pedestrian scenes into surrealistic filmscapes, these poems reveal to us a pair of scissors—a double-edged sword where workaday events hold transcendent magic, and artful fantasies are born of inescapable banality...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: News & Smoke includes selections from all six of Thesen’s previous books (of which only Aurora remains in print); unpublished poems from the fifteen year period of the late 70s to the mid 90s; as well as some work previously published only in magazines...read more

The highly influential yet undisclosed relationship between modern American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) and Frances Boldereff comes to light in this first collection of their extensive, often impassioned, correspondence. What starts with a fan letter from the idiosyncratic intellectual Boldereff soon surges to an exchange numbering hundreds of pages. In these letters, one views the early stages of the “Maximus” poems and the developing poetics embodied in Olson’s 1950 essay on “Projective Verse.” While this correspondence reveals much about the work and life of a man who became the dominant figure among the Black Mountain poets, Boldereff herself stands out as an extraordinary collaborator, occasional lover, and intellectual rival to Olson. Here are two great minds and creative spirits caught up in an exchange every bit as riveting as the letters of de Beauvoir and Sartre.