The trouble with honesty, it has no / final answers, leaves you in the cranny / where nothing left unknown meets finding out.
The puzzles of poetry and marriage are these: How to hold on to what you also release? How to protect love when other loves are put between? In this collection of sixty-nine “fifteeners” – sonnet-like constellations of five tercets – Jeffery Donaldson explores the outcomes of both questions over the course of a life in verse and a loving thirty-one-year open marriage.

The poems orbit around two readings that Donaldson and his wife chose for their wedding: a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke about two people protecting one another’s solitude; and a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the prince is told, “You are responsible for your rose.”

As openbound turns toward open marriage itself – its risks, its revelations, its misunderstandings, its wounds under cultural scrutiny – the work reveals itself foremost as a book of love poems, continuing Donaldson’s long devotion to a metaphoric both/and poetics capacious enough to hold loving and freedom in the same breath.

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Here is where our ruins / are falling in on themselves. Here / is where we ride out our grievance-parade/ and endless he-said she-said teetering / arguments in this world of dizzying / bumper car days

These are poems of Dorothy and the Witch in Oz, of cinematic mythologies and fractured fairy tales, inviting us to witness acts of grim revenge and reconsider the folkloric forests lodged in our collective minds.

With unsparing insight and rueful humour, Batten Down presents verse that rages across landscapes, in an era of increasingly thuggish leadership, where women press forward through persistent danger. Su Croll probes the cultural and historical forces that shape our present moment, indicting and questioning the twisted brutality Alfred Hitchcock visited upon his iconic blondes and the constricting circumstances endured by two wily Tudor queens. Throughout the collection, characters and situations function as a barbarous skeleton key to the confusions of our disordered, bouleversé culture.

Batten Down exposes our bruised, chaotic world, believing poetry can both bear witness to its chaos and offer the language and form necessary to better understand it.

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The Goat’s Tongue is a ceremony of silence, soil, and becoming—an interdisciplinary poetry collection that traces the story of a girl, a goat, and an owl as they traverse landscapes of vulnerability, belonging, and memory through symbolic dialogue. The book asks enduring questions: What does it mean to be truly human? What does it mean to forgive those who reject you?

Written in English and a symbolic language developed during Peace Akintade-Oluwagbeye’s 138-hour performance ritual Ori. Ara. Emi. (Ori. Ori. My Head), the books expands the possibilities of what a poetry book can hold: an archive of an ephemeral exchange, a material trace of a live ritual, and a living bridge between Yoruba oral tradition and contemporary performance-based poetics. The symbolic system—eighteen symbols derived from thirty-six—carries its own meanings and theology, inviting readers into layered forms of translation, interpretation, and intimacy.

Rooted in Yoruba folklore and shaped by postcolonial themes of silence, isolation, and communication, The Goat’s Tongue moves through pica, ancestral memory, grief, care, and forgiveness with visionary force. This is a book that refuses confinement—poetry as movement, poetry as secret, poetry as witness—insisting that language can be feral, tender, and communal all at once.

Winner of the 7th International Metatron Poetry Prize, selected by guest judge Precious Okoyomon.

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Feelings of emptiness, acts of emptying, and physical empties coalesce in these vivid and timely poems. Through a queer lens, Surkan’s speaker scrutinizes masculinity and fatherhood as he confronts the necessary emptiness that comes with becoming someone’s ancestor. Arrays of drained and discarded entities – empty bottles, broken pots and cups – summon a world, husked and untenably extracted, that teeters toward collapse, but even those empty spaces are receptacles for fleeting moments of vulnerability and tenderness. At its core, Empties explores the conditions of life on the verge of hopelessness. It finds, among shadows of doom and despair, unlikely but nonetheless inevitable reasons to hope.

These are poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while still finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.” In direness, there is also awe: one mustn’t forget, Surkan reminds us, that only empty bottles can sing.

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Blending poetic fragment, philosophical inquiry, and spatial rupture, all the time traces queer longing as it moves across language, breath, and time.

all the time is a meditative, genre-blurring work that explores the edges of queer longing, memory, and language. Composed as a durational long poem, Xiaoxuan Huang’s debut moves through fragments, love letters, and lyric essays, where silence is not absence but active presence. Here, language stutters, hesitates, repeats—capturing the rhythm of desire, the dissonance of intimacy, and the complexity of speaking what resists articulation.

Spanning the thresholds of poetics and theory, the text uses spatial interruption and elliptical syntax to mirror the body’s halting attempts at connection. It is a work shaped by breath and time, where punctuation dissolves into pauses, and pages open like quiet rooms.

At once rigorous and tender, all the time invites the reader into a porous, recursive experience of reading—one that unfolds slowly, insistently, and with profound care. A love poem to time, to listening, and to everything language cannot hold.

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Those who speak about the carnage are punished by censure, sanction, smearing and worse. Across Canada—and internationally—journalists are muzzled, academics are stifled, doctors are fired, activists are arrested, and artists are banned. Words such as genocide and ceasefire have been excised from the vocabulary, and criticism of the conflict invites accusations of antisemitism.

Razing Palestine brings together the testimonies and stories of a wide range of individuals across a variety of domains who have suffered the cost and consequences of speaking up for Palestine. As Palestine was razed, the courage and the voices of those who raised the issue must be heard.

With a Foreword by Gabor Maté. Contributors include: Sheima Benembarek, Amy Blanding, Safa Chebbi, Libby Davis, Yves Engler, Yipeng Ge, Fred Hahn, Yara Jamal, Thoby King, Nora Loreto, Ehab Lotayef, Samira Mohyeddine, Kagiso Lesego Molope, Arfa Rana, Sean Tucker, and more.

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