New Books in Poetry

Lauren k. Watel's Book of Potions (Sarabande Books, 2025) is the winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, c...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Michael Blouin about his poetry collection, Hard Electric (Anvil Press, 2024). Hard Electric is Michael Blouin’s third book of poetry, a road-tripping, bridge-burning collection of the author’s hard-won and soft-edged reflections that seem to stutter-step towards resolution while tumbling down a decided slant towards disaster. “Where Does My Hea...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with PEI poet and commercial fisherman, Chris Bailey, about his collection, Forecast: Pretty Bleak (McClelland & Stewart, 2025).  Confessional, candid, and insightful, Forecast: Pretty Bleak looks at life in rural PEI. These poems explore climate change, work, family, love, and the idea that sometimes all you’ve got is hope for better weather and fav...

We need Emily Dickinson’s startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on Dickinson’s poetry, to explore some of Dickinson’s poems in an extra-long podcast. “It’s astonishing that after forty years of reading Dickinson, I am still ‘awed beyond my errand’ by how Dickinson’s poems let us experience something viscerally, at t...

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with cultural icons, Anne Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment) and Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene) who have collaborated to create Your Devotee in Rags—a metamorphic sonic poetry LP released by Siren Recordings in 2025 and is available from Spotify. The conversation starts with a discussion of Anne’s epic, The Iovis Trilogy (Coffe...

Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) is an intersectional exploration of the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential to mother. As Mother Body unfolds, it tasks its reader to understand the expected and unexpected manifestations of motherhood, through menstruation and womb work, but also generational, societal, and literary mothering. With a variety of forms and modes, these...

NBN host Hollay Ghadery is delighted to speak with Toronto area poet Stedmond Pardy about his newest book, Beached Whales (Mosaic Press, 2024). Stedmond Pardy’s first book of poems The Pleasures of this Planet Aren't Enough was published by Mosaic Press in 2020 and launched his career as a boundary-pushing literary and poetic voice. His devoted readers can’t get enough of his compelling YouTube an...

On this episode of NBN, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Griffin and Governor General Award winning poet, Tolu Oloruntoba, whose highly-anticipated poetry collection, Unravel, was released by McClelland & Stewart in spring 2025. A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath...

Poems by and biographies of inmates of the Dachau Concentration Camp, testimonies to the persistence of the humanity and creativity of the individual in the face of extreme suffering. The concentration camp at Dachau was the first established by the Nazis, opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. It first held political prisoners, but later also forced laborers, Soviet POWs, Jews, and ot...

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discus...

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) about their phenomenal debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books, 2021), which won the 2022 ReLit Award for Poetry. With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places More about Charlie Petch: Charlie Petch (they/them...

In this episode, we sit down with Director and Producer Diana Nicolae and Editor and Camera Matt Jozwiakowski to discuss their documentary film, "Between Silence and Sin." The film explores the life and work of dissident Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, an artist whose voice was threatened, censored, and banned under the Communist dictatorship. In our conversation, we uncover the roots that inspired D...

Today I spoke with Ronald Okuaki Lieber about his new book, The Long Journey Out (Resource Publications, 2023) These poems are arranged in four sections: Setting, The Way Across, Bridge, And Back. Lieber, a practicing psychoanalyst, says that this follows the structure from "psychedelic journey work.” Throughout the collection, Lieber (who lived in fourteen localities the first fourteen years of h...

In this episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery chops it up with poet Rob Winger about his collection, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant by Rob Winger (McClelland & Stewart, 2021). This is an astonishing collection of poems that question perception, meaning, and context. How does private thinking align with public action? And what might it mean to intend something anyhow? To name our particulars? To transl...

The final volume in Dr. Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians (LSU Press, 2025) examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dr. Dubrow’s husband came to the end of his tenure as an officer. Civilians addresses what...

In this episode of NBN host, Hollay Ghadery speaks with the incomparable Toronto poet Kirby in an exclusive sampler of spectacular Kirby poetry. Kirby and Hollay talk about community and about Kirby’s work including their most recent poetry collection, She (Knife|Fork|Book, 2024) as well as Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021). Kirby also read from some of their new work. "She is a capacious c...

From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman’s journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home. NBN host Hollay Ghadery and Catherine enjoy a lively conversation about poetry, community, and this new collection of poems. In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with one of her “favourite poets in the galaxy”, Canada’s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Elliot Clarke about his Canticles series of books—focusing on Canticles II (MMXX). Canticles is a lyric-styled epic. Clarke's visions of canonical and apocryphal scriptures are black in ink, but lightning in illumination. Testament II issues re-readings,...

Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing. Gray also discusses how they started writing poetry, how they approach drafting and revision, and how their work in public health fits with an...

In this episode of High Theory, Ryan Ruby talks to us about Poetry. Our standard definition of poetry today is an institutional one, much like contemporary art: if art is what artists and museums and collectors call art, poetry is what poets and professors and publishers say is poetry. Ruby argues that this indefinable thing humans have been doing well nigh forever is better understood as a medium...

Ethereal, soul-stirring, and playful, Baby Cerberus (Buckrider Books, 2024) by Natasha Ramoutar traces joy and kinship across a multitude of lives. Flitting from myths and folklore to video games to imagined futures, each piece asks us to consider how we care for one another. As we move through sentient galleries, swashbuckling adventures, and the doors of Atlantis, the collection reorients us in...

In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn't the same thing as staying gone... Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen's isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the so...

With timeless poetry and stunning imagery, the prophet Amos of Tekoa, a simple herdsman from the Judean mountains, stands in front of a stubborn, antagonistic audience of Israelite royalty and aristocracy and he rebukes them for their many abuses of power. But he offers them a better vision of themselves by lifting them to the heavens on wings of lyrical brilliance. Join us as we speak with Rabbi...

This week on Madison’s Notes, we sit down with philosopher and author Charles Taylor to discuss his latest work, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Belknap Press, 2024) . Taylor dives into the profound role of poetry in reconnecting us to a sense of wonder and meaning in a world often characterized by disillusionment. Drawing on his vast expertise in philosophy, Taylor explo...

Ellen Chang-Richardson’s breathtaking poetry collection, Blood/Belies, was released in spring 2024 by Wolsak & Wynn and was a third bestseller in nonfiction in Calgary, Alberta. Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as they bring their father’s, and their own, stori...