Under the stewardship of esteemed series editor, Molly Peacock, The Best Canadian Poetry in English takes the pulse of Canada’s poetry on an annual basis.

Is the ekphrastic poem in some way an art heist? Is it a reproduction or a conversation with the work of art? What gap lies between the poem and the art?

Canadian poet Myna Wallin’s collection, A Thousand Profane Pieces, is full of eroticism and free expressions of sexuality. But do there seem to be fewer poets interested in writing about sex these days? Is it considered passé? Declassé? Why are more poets writing about loons than sexual politics?

Five established Canadian poets take to the stage to read their work. Though they come from different
perspectives and poetic stances, each performer delivers a high standard of poetic achievement,
and together, these voices represent a cross-section of current Canadian artistic concerns.

How does place compel our creativity and shape our poetic imagination? Whether at home or abroad, whether on a pastoral retreat or in an off-hour at a busy city job, how does the writer’s location seep into the written work? Why does travel, a new environment, stimulate and inspire new work for some writers?

Presenting a mode of literature more in dialogue with the visual arts than with conventional poetry or fiction, and arguing for a new kind of ‘thinker-ship’ to replace the conventional idea of a ‘readership’, the lively, incisive and accessible conversations in Simon Morris’ film Sucking on Words are an ideal introduction to Goldsmith’s witty and provocative [...]

Just as realist painting lost its appeal for many artists after the invention of photography, so many writers abandoned naturalistic storytelling after the development of cinema. These Silences turns the spotlight on novelists who have overhauled and reinvented modernist developments in fiction, to bring up to the minute literary experimentation kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

Anthony Joseph has been described as both “blending the diasporic with the avant garde” and “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry meets Sun Ra”, Joseph’s novel, The African Origin Of UFOs, is accessible but mind expanding. His Afro-futurism encompasses science fiction and folk tales, surreal imagery and neologisms, sudden historical shifts and dexterous verbal riffs on a wide range [...]

Iain Sinclair has been called East London’s recording angel. Hackney’s Pepys. A literary mud-larker and tip-picker. A Travelodge tramp. A toxicologist of the 21st-century landscape. A historian of countercultures and occulted pasts. A psychogeographer.

Edward S. Robinson riffs on his book Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives From William S. Burroughs to the Present. In this book Robinson offers a biography of Burroughs cut-up method. He locates its prehistory in modernist and avant-garde practices.

Tom McCarthy was short listed for last year’s Booker Prize. His books are crammed with coincidence, with doubles and fakes, moments of deja vu, repetitions of repetitions. McCarthy draws on the history of the avant-garde and modernist experimentation to produce left-field literary fiction that is both acclaimed and contemporary.

Writers from the Book Works Seminar series whose work demonstrates a total disregard for the conventions that structure received ideas about fiction.