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6 Alberta Books For the Poetry Reader

Looking for a book for the poetry lover on your holiday shopping list? Here are 6 of our favourite Alberta-published poetry collections. Check out our poetry book list for more of our recommendations!

THERE’S MORE
By Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

In there’s more, Umezurike navigates immigrant life with a multifaceted awareness of joy, melancholia, loss, and hope. He takes on the rich concepts of home and belonging: home lost and regained, home created with others and with the land, home as “anywhere we find something to love. 

there's more

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

Published: Mar 06, 2023 by University of Alberta Press
ISBN: 9781772126808

Accessible icon: a stick person inside a circle. Available as an accessible eBook

KINK BANDS
By David Martin

In his second book of poems, David Martin digs deep into an examination of the world using the lens of geology. The collection veers from the Rocky Mountains and explorations of “fossilized” towns to family histories and myth-soaked theories, all while seeking a balance between disruptive poetic techniques and the centred lyrical voice.

Kink Bands

David Martin (CA)

Published: Sep 01, 2023 by NeWest Press
ISBN: 9781774390771

YOU STILL LOOK THE SAME
By Farzana Doctor

This debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor is both an intimate deep dive and a humorous glance at the tumultuous decade of her forties. Through crisp and vivid language, Doctor explores mid-life breakups and dating, female genital cutting, imprints of racism and misogyny, and the oddness of sex and love, and urges us to take a second look at the ways in which human relationships are never what we expect them to be.

You Still Look the Same

Farzana Doctor (CA)

Published: May 01, 2022 by Freehand Books
ISBN: 9781990601057

Accessible icon: a stick person inside a circle. Available as an accessible eBook

MUSTER POINTS
By Lucas Crawford

In March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, ending a relationship, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got there. What does a writer do, stranded in a dorm room, unsure of the future? Write poems.

Muster Points

Lucas Crawford (CA)

Published: Jun 15, 2023 by University of Calgary Press
ISBN: 9781773854533

Accessible icon: a stick person inside a circle. Available as an accessible eBook

SPIRIT OF PLACE
By Michael J. Leeb

An injured dragonfly is picked from a car grill and placed on a rock to recuperate, only to materialize at a distant trailhead to usher the hiker toward a set of ancient pictographs he might have otherwise missed. This is the spiritual world of Michael Leeb, who captures his outdoor experiences in this collection of poetry. He contemplates the magpie’s song as winter approaches, and reveals how the private courtship of two crows makes him avert his eyes.

Spirit of Place: Earth, Wind, Sky and Water

Michael Leeb (CA)

Published: Jul 15, 2016 by Eschia Books
ISBN: 9781926696317

Accessible icon: a stick person inside a circle. Available as an accessible eBook

TRANSCRIBING MOONLIGHT
By Skylar Kay

Transcribing Moonlight is a collection of autobiographical haibun which outlines the life of a trans woman from December 2018 to December 2019. The form of the journal itself is traditional for haibun; while experimental at times, the haibun pay attention to the physical world and are therefore able to capture the changing seasons, moons, and phases of the narrator’s life. 

Transcribing Moonlight

Skylar Kay (CA)

Published: by Frontenac House Ltd.
ISBN: 9781989466346