The poems in Lorna Crozier's nineteenth collection, After That, present raw, intensely moving snapshots of life after a staggering loss. As ever, Crozier has an acute attentiveness to the everyday, which lifts the poems and offers readers a glimpse at sustaining, life-affirming, tender moments of acceptance and deep appreciation.

"Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger. Sometimes a distance from the world's tumult opens our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars. The village becomes a microcosm of the age-old conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the...

What happens when someone you love suddenly cliff-dives into mental illness? And then you discover that there may be no return? This experimental memoir reflects on the author's intimate and complicated relationship with a woman diagnosed with suicidal depression, and the startling and chaotic new world of locked wards, heavy medications, and electroconvulsive therapy that follows. Interweaving personal essays, fragmented prose, poetry, stream-of-consciousness,...

Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years. Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named...

"Using the Jackpine Sonnet form, consisting mostly of 13-line and sometimes 17-line poems that have ten syllables per line, James Deahl presents reflections on various places where he has lived and their history; a series of monologues in the voices of ancestors in his family tree going back to the 17th century; portraits of people he admires, particularly 'strong women,' 'love poems' and a series of political poems focused on 'Dystopian America'...