Winnipeg Free Press

Ontario writer Jeramy Dodds is one of those poets who suddenly emerges on the national scene, apparently out of nowhere.

Actually, he won the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award in poetry, and his debut, Crabwise to the Hounds, was just shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Award.

Toronto writer Margaret Christakos’ seventh collection is What Stirs (Coach House, 120 pages, $17), and it is stirring both emotionally and in a bold experimentalism.

The ambitious title poem and several others use phrasal sequencing, a technique older than written poetry that brings a musical dimension to the material.

Christakos’ work is often very funny in using the language of the lyric against itself: 'The way to San Jose is aquiver/ with few and fewer friends', or 'Mauve hydrangea heads nodded off in front of my laptop/ with the pallor of popped vivacity.'

Toronto writer RM Vaughan's fourth book of poetry, Troubled (Coach House, 80 pages, $17), is subtitled A Memoir in Poems and Fragments, and it's a successful and jarring genre collage.

Troubled is based on the painful story of Vaughan's own unhappy relationship with a psychiatrist, one that began in therapy and turned into a whirlwind sexual affair.

A lot of Canadian poets are rediscovering traditional forms these days, but few of them are having as much fun as Montreal writer David McGimpsey.

His fourth book, Sitcom (Coach House, 112 pages, $17), reveals a rabid obsession with TV shows like Hawaii Five-O and The Golden Girls.

Toronto writer Rachel Zolf's third book, Human Resources (Coach House, 96 pages, $17), is an avant-garde satire on the way she makes a living.

Structure moves in, out of lucidity

By Alison Calder

Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Coach House, 109 pages, $17), Toronto writer Angela Rawlings' first book, is a gorgeously produced little thing.

The poetry, structured through the dual trajectories of a moth's life cycle and the stages of sleep, moves in and out of lucidity.