In Songs for the Dancing Chicken, Emily Schultz’s debut collection of poetry, the films and life of acclaimed director Werner Herzog become linguistic launch pads, jumping off points for subtle investigations into everyday life. Like her subject, Schultz uses hypnotic images to imbue that everyday life with profound insight.

Seven Into Even reworks Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in counterpoint to the seven deadly sins, and brings these vast references through a mesh of contemporary settings and issues in a series of poetic installations. The number seven works as an organizing principle: the book struggles with narrative and its constraints, questioning the development of characters as a poetic device, and reflecting on itself as it builds.

Rooted in the Modernist tradition of writers like William Carlos Williams and indebted to Canadians like bpNichol, The Invisible World Is In Decline is a philosophical, erotic, and highly personal prose poem. At the same time, it takes on the Postmodern challenges of engaging concerns that extend beyond the autobiographical. Whiteman investigates spiritual crisis, love, and the struggle through language to make sense of what it is to be human in a world where the human seems to be all that is available.

The Semiconducting Dictionary: Our Strindberg is a playful original re-visioning of the life of notorious misogynist and modern drama master August Strindberg, mixing prose and poetry of various forms from different historical periods including straightforward lyric, found poetry, haibun, list poems, magic spells, and alchemical recipes to construct a portrait and to tell a story.

?

The two sections that comprise matt robinson’s fourth full-length volume of poetry, Against the Hard Angle, though disparate in terms of form – the first consisting primarily of a long poem; the other a collection of shorter lyrical pieces – nonetheless share a common concern with ideas of relationship and its examination. At their core, these are poems about where we stand in relation to the rest of our various worlds.