Walking on The Beaches of Temporal Candy is a collection of poetry split into two sections: the first being “Poems Written Travelling Around the Sun” and “Poems Written On The Walk To Work.” Both sections make use of fantastical imagery and gritty language to examine the notion of time, particularly when it passes slowly at jobs for which the employee lacks passion or during moments of anxiety over quotidian life when the strain and anger builds to a crescendo.

TreeTalk creates a second canopy for the boulevard elm, re-foliated with poetic paper leaves and tied with string instead of caterpillar silk.

Emotionally charged, witty, and surprising- Catherine Greenwood’s second published collection of poetry, The Lost Letters, allows the reader to appreciate the long-ago love story of Heloise and Abelard with a modern twist. Greenwood explores forbidden, separated love. Heloise and Abelard were driven apart after they were discovered having an uncsanctioned relationship in the 12th century.

An apple tree grown from seed can take up to 10 years to bear fruit and Marlene Cookshaw’s fifth book of poetry, Mowing, has likewise germinated for over a decade. Now she is harvesting the fruits of her literary labour and it is sweet.

Mark Laba’s Inflatable Life is a collection of 35 poems pondering everything from Edgar Allan Poe to skeet shooting to TV variety shows he watched as a child, most now forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. Consequently, The Inflatable Life, features singing, dancing, drama, comedy, and commentary on gritty pulp fiction, “Borscht Belt” humour, ventriloquism, and comic books, so that the poems collectively present a kind of Jewish vaudeville both surreal and lyrical.

Almost daily, we experience strange juxtapositions of the traditional and the modern, the old and the new. After a yoga class, students flock to their cellphones in order to catch up to the rest of us. Ceremonial tea and aspartame-filled energy potions are served side-by-side in bustling franchised coffeehouses. And yet we usually tread these strange pairings absent-mindedly. In John Reibetanz’s eighth book of poetry, Afloat, one witnesses these types of unexpected collisions manifold, and comes away with a multi-faceted understanding of the book’s main muse: water.