The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2015

In its eighth year of publication, this collection features 50 poems by established poets including George Elliott Clarke, Barry Dempster, A.F. Moritz, Hoa Nguyen, Adam Sol, and Priscila Uppal, but also many emerging poets. In his introductory essay, guest editor McArthur Mooney blames efforts to make poetry accessible for some terrible poetry with "flattened vocabulary and dumbed-down ideas," but as a poet and curator of a reading series, he admits that he and his peers are still concerned with what welcomes readers into poetry. The editors scoured more than 50 Canadian literary sources for poems that he calls "difficult" in the sense that "an accessible poem is just an advertisement for a poem, while a good difficult one is a proof, a demonstration of the wildness available within the domesticated urges of our language." The social-activist voice is amplified in poems dealing with carbon dioxide emissions, the prime minister, escaping slaves burnt alive, seal hunting and sexual politics, which Lahey writes reflects an age when humans face "an impressive range of apocalyptic fates." The anthology includes contributors' commentaries on their poems. Readers will find this edition replete with new and memorable verses that will welcome them into the wilds of poetry. (Oct.)