what if the rain referred to something else? and bowling and shoes were done with the mouth? Sometimes language, thoughts, and emotions are a fixed structure like a warehouse. Sometimes they are fog, waves, light, or music. This is LSE: Language as a second English. English as a grammar of ghosts. Words as the snowfall of ideas. The Obvious Flap is a musical, poetic flux of recurring and recursive images exploring language's luminous fringes of language. The text weaves a variety of thematic threads of humour, literary allusions, and narrative into a fabric that spreads into an open, proprioceptive linguistic environment. Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts have concocted a collaborative jam session for multiple larynxes and have made an obvious flap as they have fallen through the mirror into Plunderland. not everyone is a poet my dog for instance.

The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs take multiple positions. The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs don't trust your grandmother's cooking. They have visited Pangea, they have visited Toronto and Montreal, the B.C. Gulf Islands, Tiberias, the tailing ponds near Sudbury, and they are still not satisfied, are still unconvinced, still need more proof. They are suckers for dovetailed boxes, winter fire pits, houses that sit not quite true, a rent garbage bag spilling its guts on Queen Street. The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs have some choice words for Orpheus, for Eurydice, for Beowulf, fro Dumbledore and Hermione. The poems in Arguments for Lawn Chairs are devoid of hope, but are joyful nonetheless.

Karen Shenfeld's careful, concentrated language draws the reader in. Hers is a charged, physical world where figure skates are ?a shock of alpine white, ? and the Torah's ?crowned letters dance.? It is also a world marked by profound metaphysical connections where fireflies flash ?coded signals of their secret selves.? There is an irresistible brilliance and humour to several of the poems and Shenfeld's tributes to her redhot Jewish mamas - Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, and Sophie Tucker - will leave the lover of poetry wishing she?d offered more. - Kenneth Sherma

As a poet, critic, anthologist and teacher, Saskatchewan native Eli Mandel was a major figure in Canadian literature, particularly prairie literature. Mandel fashioned his identity as a post-Holocaust Jewish writer positioned dramatically between extremes of tradition and innovation, nation and region, East and West, producing work which can be read in a variety of contexts and which reflects patterns and changes within Canadian writing from the 1950s to the 1980s. This two-volume edition of Mandel's collected poetry includes the complete texts of ten previously published volumes of poetry, as well as 82 "new" poems never before presented in a collection.

How is one to speak with the dead? Why should you turn? Is this an apple? Anyone for tea before night falls? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?With these questions, plucked from the poems of writers whom she admires, Alison Pick fashions "answers:" extraordinary meditations on life and death, love and work, happiness and sorrow. The book includes a remarkable sequence about the poet's discovery as a teenager of her father's Jewish ancestry. Alison Pick is the winner of the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for the best unpublished writer under 35. The jury wrote: "The poems prove once again that poetry generates poetry ... that literary excellence fuels excellence in the generations that follow." By turns spiritual and earthy, accessible and complex, thoughtful and wrenching, Question & Answer announces the arrival a brilliant new poetic voice.

The poet explores the meaning of family, memory, and return. She draws her inspiration from Jewish mystical tradition and personal travels in Africa and Asia. An underlying voice elegant, cosmopolitan, and intense.

In this sensuously defiant collection of new poems, the winner of the 2004 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal expands and deepens a poetic ruse. In his critically acclaimed collections Saracen Island and Companion, David Solway took on the voice of a fictitious Greek poet named Andreas Karavis. The poems of these earlier two books were so artful and refreshingly immediate that many readers were convinced that they were authentic translations from the Greek. For The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat, a new book of ostensible translations, Solway adopts the persona of Karavis's spurned lover, Turkish Cypriot poet Nesmine Rifat and explores the aftermath of one of Karavis's love affairs. Lushly sexual and sparkling with wit and intelligence, these passionate lyrics take the form of undelivered letters, written by Rifat in the wake of Karavis's desertion and his eventual marriage to her rival Anna Zoumi. Solway portrays, with subtlety and sensitivity, a powerful woman and gifted poet undergoing a turbulent emotional journey. Moving from wrath and arrogant disdain, through bitterness and grief, to an acceptance of the love she cannot subdue, his female poet grows in both strength and art. As an intimate record of one woman's anguish, The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat is a remarkable achievement — even more so when one recalls that the author is actually a man.

Karen Shenfeld is a well-established poet, freelance writer and film researcher, living in Toronto. Her first collection of poetry. The law of Return (Guernica Editions, 1999), explores her familial roots, and won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry in 2001. In The Fertile Crescent, Shenfeld gives poetic life to ancient and medieval Jewish travelers. She also draws upon her own powerful experiences of traversing the globe, including crossing the Sahara Desert and voyaging down the Congo River. Book jacket.