Signal Editions imprint: 28 books

Satisfying Clicking Sound is a book that’s never afraid to make a show of itself. In his third collection, Jason Guriel gives us a quick-thinking colloquial style that segues deftly from deadpan wit to deep emotion. Like the hard-to-master knuckleball he celebrates as “less spun / than blown /...

A legend of 19th century French Canadian poetry, Émile Nelligan was only 16 when he fell under the influence of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and began writing taut, confidently surrealistic poems, shot through self-lacerating melancholy. Three years later, when a mental collapse led to his life-long institutionalization...

Like the “page turned down to make another / page,” Dog Ear explores the marks we leave on a world whose social and political markers are constantly shifting. In his fourth book of poems—and most powerful work to date—Jim Johnstone establishes himself as an exquisite observer of decay, both...

The Scarborourgh takes place over three days in 1992: Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday—the weekend 15-year-old Kristin French was abducted and murdered by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. In poems both opulent and stricken, ravishing and unflinching, Michael Lista—nine, at the time—revisits...

In poetry that strikes a delicate balance between candour and lament., Mockingbird tracks the aftershocks of a failed marriage through a variety of self-portraits. Derek Webster’s speakers itemize their regrets and fears while keeping sentimentality in check and the result is a first book of exceptional...

A mesmerizing and moving first collection, Model Disciple gives us a poetry of two minds. Confounded by Japanese-Canadian legacies too painful to fully embrace, Michael Prior’s split speakers struggle to understand themselves as they submit to their reinvention: “I am all that is wrong with the...

Praised for his darkly psychological accounts of extreme experiences, Jim Johnstone’s fifth book of poems explores his most difficult terrain to date: mental illness and addiction. Like Coleridge's opium dreams, Johnstone's narratives in The Chemical Life are hallucinatory, coloured by his use of...

Penny Dreadfuls were popular, cheaply produced 19th century magazines filled with brutal and sensationalist tales. In her uncompromising second collection of poetry, Vancouver poet Shannon Stewart revisits their grisly spirit through a series of meditations that examine the medias obsession for luridness,...

Installations, David Solway’s 14th book of poetry, is haunted with transformation, Few poets possess as commanding a gift for metaphor or can use it to masterfully conjure the ever-changing landscape of the natural world. Like the jerry-rigged farmer’s contraption that stands in for “eclectic...

Carnal, flamboyant, visceral and bold, Table Manners is a rich meal. Catriona Wright’s debut introduces us to the image of the poet as “gastronaut,” a figure who seems to live entirely between table and a stove and who steeps her surroundings and relationships in complex emotional flavours....

Beginning with the arrival of the Campbell clan in Canada in 1827— “pale Scot farmers fording the river, / seated backwards in refusal”—Laws & Locks tracks the history of one family’s struggle with depression, madness and mental illness. Chad Campbell’s first book of poetry is a brilliant...

“I believe in the power of original sin,” writes James Arthur, “in the wound/ that keeps on wounding.” Set against a backdrop of political turmoil in the United States, The Suicide’s Son is about the complicated personal histories that parents inherit, add to, and pass on to their children....

Radio Weather confronts the changeableness of life—how existence can switch gears with the speed of announced-for snow that turns abruptly to rain. Shoshanna Wingate’s first book runs the gauntlet of her various roles—mother, wife, daughter—in taut, unsentimental, immaculately constructed...

What We Carry is a profound exploration of the weight of human history at three levels: the individual, the cultural, and environmental. From her brilliant “Extinction Sonnets”—odes to various disappearing species—to a spirited examination of everyday salutations, Susan Glickman’s range...