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116 Third Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario
613-233-2589
octopus@octopusbooks.ca
251 Bank Street, Ottawa, Ontario 613-688-0752
251 Bank Street, Ottawa, Ontario 613-688-0752
Category: Poetry
$18.00
The Stag Head Spoke
Wolsak & Wynn Pub Limited |
April 21, 2014 |
120 pages
Having taken over a decade to write, Erina Harris' first full-length work comprises two serial poems or "Books" within which individual poems stand on their own, and also refract amongst themselves, building, within each Book, its own careful language. Harris engages historic modes such as the... More Info
$16.95
Dog Ear
Signal Editions |
May 1, 2014 |
78 pages
Like the “page turned down to make another / page,” Dog Ear explores the marks we leave on a world whose social, political and personal markers are constantly shifting. In his fourth book of poems—and most focused work to date—Jim Johnstone establishes himself as an exquisite observer of... More Info
$19.95
Sun Bear
March 28, 2014 |
112 pages
The fourth collection from the celebrated American poet and editor, Matthew Zapruder. Matthew Zapruder’s poems begin in the faint inkling, in the bloom of thought, and then unfold into wide-reaching meditations on what it means to live in the contemporary moment, among plastic, statistics, and... More Info
$19.95
Directing Herbert White
March 28, 2014 |
88 pages
The debut poetry collection by the actor, director, and writer James Franco I’m a nocturnal creature, And I’m here to cheat time. You can see time and exhaustion Taking pay from my face— In fifty years My sleep will be death, I’ll go like the rest, But I’ll have played All the games and... More Info
$19.95
The Quiet
March 28, 2014 |
104 pages
Anne-Marie Turza’s poignant debut collection is a vibrant, imaginative meditation on quiet — in unseen cities, in secret spaces, in forgotten rooms, in our everyday life. In these delicately vibrant poems, The Quiet illuminates the private, hushed, underlying moments that discreetly pervade the... More Info
$19.00
The Digamma
January 1, 2014 |
64 pages
The Digamma is the latest book of poetry in prose by celebrated author Yves Bonnefoy, who is also the leading translator of Shakespeare in France. In this new collection, his fascination with the defining author of our language is amply reflected in ?God in Hamlet' and ?For a Staging of Othello',... More Info
$19.95
Abecedarium
February 1, 2014 |
124 pages
would you believe me when i make consorts of alphabet runaways & stayathomes i have rounded up where they wandered all over the page Dennis Cooley masterfully extends the genre of the abecedary to explore his curiosity of the limitlessness of human communication. With linguistic wit and... More Info
$27.95
And Short the Season
W W Norton & Company Incorporated |
April 21, 2014 |
112 pages
From the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, a stunning collection of poems that course with the rhythms of nature."
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$23.00
Secession/Insecession
Bookthug |
April 15, 2014 |
200 pages
Secession / Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, Secession - translated by Erín Moure - joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics, Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against... More Info
$16.00
Satisfying Clicking Sound
Signal Editions |
May 1, 2014 |
64 pages
Satisfying Clicking Sound is a book that’s never afraid to make a show of itself. Jason Guriel gives us a quick-thinking colloquial style able to segue deftly from deadpan wit to deep emotion. Like the hard-to-master knuckleball he celebrates as being “less spun / than blown / out onto the air,... More Info
$19.95
Polari
April 8, 2014 |
88 pages
"Polari," from the Italian "polare" ("to talk") is a coded language, originating in the U.K. and dating as far back as the 16th century. Overheard in outdoor markets, the theatre, fairgrounds, and circuses, it was appropriated by gay men to provide them with cover as well as with a way to assert... More Info
$18.95
Complicity
McClelland & Stewart Limited |
March 1, 2014 |
112 pages
Award-winning poet Adam Sol's fourth collection is a meditation on complicity. By turns intimate and lyrical, experimental and outlandish, the collection focuses on how we cannot escape the troubling structures that determine our lives. Sol addresses gender politics, the value of art, capitalism... More Info
$18.95
Old Hat
March 1, 2014 |
96 pages
Old Hat is the third book of poetry and first collection of occasional poems by the author of the 2007 Globe 100 book, Muybridge's Horse: Governor General and Trillium Awards nominee, Rob Winger. Driven by an attempt to understand how to reorder common experience, the book's transitional sections -... More Info
$15.95
She Draws the Rain
Thistledown PressLtd |
March 15, 2013 |
76 pages
As an environmental activist and avid gardener Chambers has finely tuned her sensitivities to the magic and drama of nature. Her poetry uses this energy to describe the relationships that people have to the environment, to themselves and to each other. She Draws the Rain contains poems of both... More Info
$12.95
SubUrban Legends
Freehand Books |
April 1, 2009 |
88 pages
Joan Crate’s much-anticipated third book of poetry is equal parts revision and reverie, offering a mid-life view of childhood influences and expectations that is stirring, startling, and wise. Deliciously invoking the iconic figure of Snow White, subUrban Legends considers what lies beyond youth... More Info
$19.95
Last Temptation of Bond (The)
University of Alberta |
August 15, 2013 |
120 pages
Poet Kimmy Beach has succeeded where every Bond villain has failed: to kill 007.
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The Tree of Meaning
Counterpoint |
July 1, 2009 |
329 pages
“Poems, where I come from,” writes Robert Bringhurst, “are spoken to be written and written to be spoken.The Tree of Meaningis a book of critical prose composed in the same way.” Together, these thirteen lectures present a superbly grounded approach to the study of language, focusing on... More Info
$29.95
Baghdad
Harvard University Press |
November 18, 2013 |
377 pages
Baghdad: The City in Verse captures the essence of life lived in one of the world's enduring metropolises. This unusual anthology offers original translations of 170 Arabic poems from Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Jewish poets--most for the first time in English--from Baghdad's founding... More Info
$18.95
I Write These Words / J'cris Ces Mots
Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series |
April 15, 2013 |
90 pages
I write these words / Jcris ces mots is a fascinating volume of poetry that examines the world of a woman born in Tunisia but living in Toronto, and womens universal struggle to find their place in the world. Poems explore the roles woman play in diverse societies and cultures and draw the reader... More Info
$18.95
Global Poetry Anthology 2013
Signal Editions |
November 15, 2013 |
88 pages
The Global Poetry Anthology is a one-of-a-kind collection of contemporary previously-unpublished poems gathered from all corners of the English speaking world. An international editorial board ensures the present volume's cosmopolitan palette, and the "blind" selection process guarantees that... More Info
$15.95
Wild Rice Dreams
September 15, 2013 |
80 pages
“Wild Rice Dreams” is a collection of Aboriginal poetry that delves into the human experience from an Anishinaabe perspective. The book captures sensible cultural and emotional challenges, and ultimately shares subtle insight and compassion. The poems explore how intricate relationships between... More Info
$18.00
Again for the First Time
Wordspace Press |
April 21, 2014 |
88 pages
Originally published in 1984 to great acclaim, including being awarded the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Prize, this stirring collection of poems pairs and often plays against the mythologies of the author’s mixed Greek and Mexican heritage. A strong work of feminism, the pieces blend... More Info
$14.99
The Same As Yes
November 4, 2011 |
79 pages
The startling poems in this debut collection are both pretty and strange, clear and mysterious. All of the poems are conversations, of sorts: a dancer talks to the floorboards; a dressing gown talks to itself; an old man talks to the radio in his sleep; men and women talk, and talk without talking.... More Info
Err
Blewointment Press |
March 1, 2011 |
95 pages
X, passing the Ancient Mariner on his new SeaDoo, like pirate flix with cheap FX, no kraken exploded from no Styx. Extras wandered the ship, eyes X-ed out like the dead in comix. All in all, our luck was mixed.
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$20.00
Post-Apothecary
September 15, 2011 |
81 pages
In this collection of poems, the author explores the themes of sickness, healing, isolation, and regeneration. The work was inspired, in part, by a visit to an abandoned TB sanitarium in Saskatchewan, the author's home province. "'Place'sets tone and atmosphere, generates image, and carries its own... More Info
$17.95
Fallout
Hagios Pr |
April 30, 2010 |
86 pages
Fallout embraces the darkness of the 20th century in poems that inhabit both the fear and wonder of that time. On the surface Fallout appears to be about the legacy of the nuclear age yet Ridley writes with a subversive humour that counters the fierceness of her subject.
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$28.95
The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
Waverley Books Limited |
September 1, 2012 |
480 pages
Collects the poems and songs of the famed Scottish author.
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Dante's House
Signal Editions |
October 1, 2013 |
68 pages
Richard Greene’s first collection since winning the 2010 Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, take as their subject the rumors, misunderstandings and half-truths that often comprise our knowledge of others. With an astonishing gift for capturing states of feeling, Greene’s new poems movingly... More Info
$17.95
A Pretty Sight
Coach House |
October 15, 2013 |
96 pages
David O'Meara finds defiance amid decay and oblivion, with guest appearances from Sid Vicious, Socrates and Sophie Scholl.
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$17.00
Enjoy It While It Hurts
Wolsak & Wynn Pub Limited |
September 8, 2013 |
Enjoy It While It Hurts's an edifying miscellany of quarrelsome quips, holiday oddities, benevolent advice, curious thoughts and comically apocalyptic melancholia. This'elightful collection of light verse and nonsense poetry written and illustrated by the award-winning, multitalented JonArno Lawson... More Info
$16.95
Slack Action
Porcupine's Quill |
September 15, 2013 |
96 pages
?Slack action? describes the movement of boxcars in the midst of a train that brakes and then accelerates, where ?reciprocal momentums ... meet and intermingle, the forward push / backing into slows, and the slows pulling off / pulling forward ahead of their kickbacks and jostles ...? – where... More Info
$17.95
Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway
Biblioasis |
September 10, 2013 |
64 pages
If Robert Browning had boobs, the result might be these ticklishly rhythmic and roundly recitable poems.
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$20.00
The the Counting House
Bookthug |
October 1, 2013 |
96 pages
Akin to a bookkeeper’s accounting of what’s given and taken in a fraught, uncertain exchange, The Counting House goes on to record the pageantry and pedantry of courtly affection gone awry. Symbols and origins of traditional rhymes involving kings and queens serve as inventory, alongside... More Info
The Place of Scraps
Talonbooks Limited |
September 10, 2013 |
288 pages
A conceptual poetry book that plays with the idea of historical First Nations' representation through visual and erasure poems.
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$17.95
Multitudes
Coach House Books |
November 12, 2013 |
120 pages
"Alphabetic dismantling, syntactic play, essaying words backwards and 4words (as she might say), Christakos manifests forensic clarity and telegraphic fortitude in this unsettling work."?Rachel Blau DuPlessis Margaret Christakos's eighth collection, Multitudes, is a moving, witty foray into a... More Info
$21.00
Holy Heathen Rhapsody
Penguin Paperbacks |
September 24, 2013 |
112 pages
New work from an award-winning poet who ?writes transporting poems of discovery, contemplation, and gratitude” (Booklist) Pattiann Rogers has won acclaim as one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry. The poems in her new collection, Holy Heathen Rhapsody, embrace and embody... More Info
Needs Improvement
Coach House |
October 15, 2013 |
84 pages
The irreverent poetry of report cards, lesson plans, city mottos, invigilation guides, and, of course, Michel Foucault ?
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$24.95
New Collected Poems
Counterpoint |
April 9, 2013 |
352 pages
This collection of two hundred poems from the T.S. Eliot Award-winning poet features an overview of his career, including works from Collected Poems as well as Entries, Given and Leavings.
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$17.95
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
September 10, 2013 |
184 pages
Alice Walker sums up the premise and purpose for this year of poems in her Preface: “I was born into a family of eight siblings. I am the youngest. Five of us have died. I share losses, health concerns, and other challenges common to the human condition, especially in these times of war, poverty,... More Info
$19.95
Jailbreaks
Biblioasis |
April 11, 2008 |
158 pages
A collection of 99 Canadian sonnets from the 19th Century to the present.
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$16.95
In the Dog House
Talonbooks Limited |
June 4, 2013 |
80 pages
Emotive, yet wryly unsentimental poems give voice to the many forms of suffering Aboriginal people have endured.
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$16.95
To the Barricades
Talonbooks Limited |
April 16, 2013 |
160 pages
A poetic record of revolution that traces the lines from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches.
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$18.95
X
Blewointmentpress |
June 7, 2013 |
126 pages
Heed this warning. In X, Rhodes takes poetry from the comfortable land of the expected to places it has seldom been. Often using
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Love, and All That Jazz
The Porcupine's Quill |
June 1, 2013 |
240 pages
At the end of Lewis' previous memoir, the bitterly and beautifully honest Little Comrades, she left her young self newly married in New York City in the year 1952. But at that point, everything is about to change. Downstairs from Laurie and Sol lives Gary, and it soon becomes clear that she and her... More Info
Alden Nowlan Selected Poems
House of Anansi Press |
August 3, 2013 |
174 pages
The best of beloved poet Alden Nowlan's explicitly honest, direct, and insightful poetry. Now featuring an introduction by Susan Musgrave Alden Nowlan, one of Canada's finest and most influential poets, died in 1983. He leaves a rich legacy of poetry that is accessible yet profound, and that speaks... More Info
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Octopus Books
116 Third AvenueOttawa, Ontario, Canada
K1S 2K1
613-233-2589
Under One Roof
251 Bank Street
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
K2P 1X3
613-688-0752