On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fifth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Hard Light features a new Introduction by Lisa Moore, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. First published in 1998, Hard Light retells and reimagines his father's and others' stories of outport Newfoundland and the...

Both chronicle and confrontation, the poems of Jacob Scheier's debut work out and through notions of loss. As the death of a young man's mother instigates and informs these investigations, the realities of romantic failures become inextricably connected, and in the process More to Keep Us Warm maps the limitations, and breaking points, of the human heart. Questioning how and why we fall in and out of love becomes the collection's haunting refrain. At...

This debut poetry collection from Lisa Bird-Wilson reflects on the legacy of the residential school system: the fragmentation of families and histories, with blows that resonate through the generations. Inspired by family and archival sources, Bird-Wilson assembles scraps of a history torn apart by colonial violence. The collection takes its name from the federal government's complex organizational structure of residential schools archives, which...

Having lived part time in Brooklyn for the past several years, Jacob Scheier's new poems are solidly rooted in Jewish New York life and examine love, loss, history, identity, protest, and popular culture. At the heart of Letter from Brooklyn is the notion that people understand who they are by where they have been. Everything is at once political and poetic, inseparable from intimate experience and personal heartbreak. Scheier moves from the inner...

A long poem dramatizing the clash in visions of the land, which occurs when a white settler builds on a sacred Iroquois site.

On the day that David Waltner-Toews' young daughter Rebecca gave "Mr. Fluff, that venerable stuffed dog" to her older brother, the poet learned a lesson in community building -- to get what you really want you must give it away and then share it back. There is nothing didactic about The Fat Lady Struck Dumb, though the book is packed with wisdom compacted of love for the planet and detailed knowledge of its ecosystems, including the stress they currently...

Reading John Reibetanz, one is struck with the way language, closely attended to, kept oiled and sharp, can give experience back its bite. And conversely, how experience can be the whetstone for language, chastening its presumptions and requiring from it fresh exactitudes of music and insight. Whether the subject is a cord of wood, a painting, or the New York Times (deeply and dancingly read) John Reibetanz brings a nearly invisible craft into close...

The Fleece Era is Yukon-based, UK-born Joanna Lilley's first book of poems: a wry and eloquent testament to the intricacies of our various relationships. From the shattered pieces of our environmental puzzles to the labyrinth of family dynamics, Lilley makes these dilemmas come alive. Chillingly sparse, attractively odd and refreshingly frank, The Fleece Era embraces the complexities of human life with an unsettling mix of the sardonic and the compassionate....

"In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans woman in expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans...