Brick Books’ Top 15 List of Course Adoptions
Our poetry titles have developed a real audience at colleges and universities across Canada and in the United States as course adoption texts. This Top 15 list represents the most popular titles of the previous nine school years, although a perusal of our entire list will alert you to some real gems not mentioned here. Please contact us to request examination copies.
A Really Good Brown Girl – Marilyn Dumont – Dumont turns the challenges of her Metis heritage into opportunities: in a voice that is fierce, direct, and true, she explores and transcends the multiple boundaries imposed by society on the self.
Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson - Joan Crate – In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor — the part white, part Mohawk princess Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake.
Hard Light – Michael Crummey – Crummey retells and reinvents his father’s stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half century ago in writing that is supple and charged with intensity, language that vivifies — electrifies — whoever and whatever it describes.
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth – Jan Zwicky – This Governor General’s Award winning collection contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperilled earth drawing frequently on Zwicky’s experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario.
Short Haul Engine – Karen Solie – “a fierce writing of quickness and edge that can take on just about anything: the highway, Freud, farm suicides, sturgeon, all manner of flawed and far-off romance — with candour and a trenchant humour that’s the cutting edge of intelligence.” Don McKay introduces Karen Solie in Introductions … Poets Present Poets.
Hologram: A Book of Glosas – P.K. Page – The glosa is an early Renaissance form, first developed by the poets of the Spanish court. In Hologram, celebrated poet P.K. Page offers us fourteen of these elegant, intricate poems, each a homage to another poet.
New Life in Dark Seas – Stan Dragland (Ed.) – A quarter of a century old and youthful still, Brick Books offers this selection, as inclusive as we could make it, of the writers we have published during our first quarter century.
Modern and Normal - Karen Solie – Modern and Normal grapples with philosophy and physics, with ecology and the shocked ramblings of desire and its chorus of broken hearts. A startling oneness arises from the chaos, sheer moments of intimacy between a fractal and a Cooper’s hawk, between a “slipknot below her navel” and a whiskey bottle.
The Grey Islands – John Steffler – “This is a book of such excellence that someone in future is liable to say about the author: “Steffler — Steffler? — oh yes, he wrote The Grey Islands, didn’t he?” – Al Purdy, October 1985, Books in Canada
Not Yet but Still – Margaret Avison – These poems are about city stresses and weather, natural creatures, seasons of day and year, with a few glimpses from train windows. A few are vignettes and portraits–comic or sombre or fantastic–in our spoken language. There are meditations. There is one poem in the guise of a book review which wrestles with questions we all ask and none of us can answer.”
The Ledger – Robert Kroetsch – This foundational book-length poem in the Field Notes series is about pioneering in Bruce County, Ontario. It makes the debit-credit form of accounting into a force-field that holds the pros and cons of settling a new country.
The True Names of Birds – Sue Goyette – “This is a fresh new voice with a tense lyrical intelligence. This is a collection to begin everything with, a cure for silence, secrets that arrive with a steady eloquence.” -Patrick Lane
Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems – Randall Maggs – A master raconteur, Randall Maggs wraps the story of the game of hockey in the “intense, moody, contradictory” character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.
Robinson’s Crossing – Jan Zwicky – Poems about history and histories, Robinson’s Crossing enacts the pause at the frontier, creating space for reflection on how Europeans came to the prairies.
Short Talks – Anne Carson – Anne Carson’s very first published poetry collection. Cover painting, photograph and line drawing inside are by the author.
