In this new collection of poetry, Sidney Wade includes poems written in many forms that touch on a variety of subjects, all informed by a singular voice and an intensely vibrant language. The volume is set primarily in Istanbul and illuminates physical and metaphysical borders-the edges, everywhere, of water and land; of vanished empires left standing, in architectural form, in the present; of two continents, Europe and Asia; of the broader Western and Eastern cultures and the civilizations that inhabit them. The compelling intricacy of the tangled borders of history and myth, culture and...

This collection of poems by Robin Magowan represent moments such as a child mat-riding on Red Flag day, and drug overdoses during an affair with a terrorist dragon lady. It aims to take the reader inside, using an instinctive notation to register his fascination with sensation, movement and colour.

"My lover tells me I am like this place./I tell him what I miss: the slap of leaves/on skin and air that's like a damp embrace". The poems of this debut have a Cinderella-like innocence, transforming ugliness into beauty and waving the wand of well-crafted metaphor over all they encounter. The horrific suicide of a grandfather, a mother's cancer, the mourning for a stillborn child, the potential foreclosure of a neighbor's farm are all recounted with a refined clarity. Yet through it all, de los Santos manages to frame life's traumas with a voice that can seem borrowed from the Stage Manager...

Stella Johnston's poems in Without a Witness invite the reader into widely different places, from the nightmarish landscape of a morphine hallucination, to the last few moments of a Gary Cooper western, to the bedside of a dying Roman emperor in a field tent in Persia. The acute perception-whether one of pain, joy, grief, remorse, or relief-figures in every poem's attempt to hold onto something essential. At times, moments of loss become almost indistinguishable from moments of enlightenment; even terrible cruelty turns into the ironic counterpart to knowledge by which something, after all,...