UAlberta Press is celebrating Poetry Month with four new collections of poetry, representing Canada from British Columbia to Nova Scotia.
Spoken-word poet Valerie Mason-John unsettles readers with potent images of ongoing trauma from slavery and colonization in I Am Still Your Negro. Her narratives range from the beginnings of the African Diaspora to the story of a stowaway on the Windrush, from racism and sexism in Trump’s America to the wide impact of the Me Too movement. Stories of entrapment, sexual assault, addictive behaviours, and rave culture are told and contrasted to the strengthening and forthright voice of Yaata, Supreme Being.
Kat Cameron’s poetry in Ghosts Still Linger illuminates the unsung perspectives of the women of the West, creating a compelling narrative that reflects the poet’s own struggles with sorrow. She conjures ghosts and weaves together insights on loss, memory, and the impacts of boom and bust.
Following the deaths of her Mennonite grandparents, Angeline Schellenberg began exploring their influence on her life. Her elegiac love letter to them, Fields of Light and Stone, articulates her grief against the backdrop of their involuntary emigration. She artfully captures the immigrant identity, vital to Canadian culture, in poems that draw on events both personal and global: war and famine, dementia and cancer, hidden sacrifice and secrets.
In To float, to drown, to close up, to open, E. Alex Pierce enters the territory of memory embedded in landscape where “language tied to the land” evokes the cadence of tidal rivers and creates a fluid world. She traces the fragmented childhood beginnings that lead to the formation of a young artist who moves from music, through theatre, to poetry.
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Our books are available in e-versions and found in libraries across Canada. There are many independent bookstores that are open for curbside pickup and delivery.