Details of the Current Subscription (2023)
Baby Book
by Amy Ching-Yan Lam
Funny as hell and full of unease, Baby Book stacks story upon story: from a discount bus tour family vacation to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems disrupt stuck narratives of property and inheritance, and respond to the overwhelming phenomena of life and history with tenderness and resistance.
Optic Nerve
by Matthew Hollett
Poet Mary Germaine describes this book beautifully: “Who knew having your brain poked through your eye holes would be such a good time? … Optic Nerve teaches us that anything can be a light show if you know how to look.”
A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen
by Erin Noteboom
This book marries science and poetry in a way that seems impossible, but stands. Erin Noteboom is the poet’s pen-name of acclaimed YA novelist and science writer Erin Bow, and these poems offer up exquisite intersections: sadness is knowledge and science “is only half a turn from love.”
House Within a House
by Nicholas Dawson (translated by David Bradford)
Our first translation of a poetic work from Quebec! We are very proud to be publishing Nicholas Dawson’s virtuosic meditation on the wiles of depression, illuminated by queer and diasporic experience.
Peony Vertigo
by Jan Conn
Jan Conn’s latest collection is vulnerable and ecstatic, always re-emerging out of traumatic personal memory to joyously engage in being close to equally vulnerable species, in being touched by endangered climates.
Sonnets from a Cell
by Bradley Peters
This is quite literally a book of sonnets about the experience of incarceration, and about the violence of the carceral state, from the inside. Based on personal experience and deep research, this book is full of craft and grit and urgent insight.
Elementary Particles
by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
With disarming, unhurried grace, Elementary Particles examines the building blocks of a life—the personal history, ancenstral languages, transformations, and losses that we all experience.
Bottom Rail on Top
by David Bradford
In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, Griffin and GG–nominated poet David Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of his own life. Like an earworm, it’s a story that can’t help itself—a study that doesn’t end.
2 Staff Favourites
2 additional selections from staff favourites that change every year.
Special Subscriber Perk
The 2023 gift is a hand-sewn softcover journal crafted by local Kingston artisans, Free/Form Archive.
