Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Marjorie Maddox, Seeing Things, Wildhouse Publishing, February 2025, poetry
With its focus on memory, illness, and their ramifications, Seeing Things explores overlapping roles of a daughter whose mother is entering the beginning stages of dementia and of a mother whose daughter is struggling with depression. These poems also witness a woman juggling her own memories of abuse and survival who lives in a world unsettled by shifting boundaries of truth and fabrication. Ultimately, Seeing Things explores the ways that we distort or preserve memory, define or alter reality, see or disregard those around us. This is a brave collection that gives voice to lament while at the same time welcoming “the hidden angels and saints” ever present along the way. Amid the anguish of loss and despair, it includes odes that dare to praise “each breaking day, dangerous / yet divine in all / its gorgeous glory.”
Andrea Potos, The Presence of One Word, Fernwood Press, September 2025, poetry
The Presence of One Word explores ancestral memory and the bonds of love between generations and with those who have passed on. Andrea Potos’s poems capture with graceful insight her wide breadth of belonging, her treasured ties to family and loved friends, to great masters of various arts, to landscapes that shimmer and invite, to small and large details of the everyday as well as the momentous. She belongs because she beholds. To her, these people, places, and observations are vastly more than their literal dimensions-they are genuinely luminous. “It seems I am forever / looking for the thin / place, wishing to glimpse / inside a moment, close enough / to stand sentry to the invisible.”
Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli, Product of Italy, Made in Canada: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to Food, Family, and Resilience, Latitude 46 Publishing, October 2025, creative nonfiction (essays)
In this creative nonfiction collection, award-winning teacher and author Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli depicts roles she has assumed over the decades: daughter, sister, mother, teacher. Rebelling at some of the handmade clothes she had to wear in her youth, spending time in hospital as her dad’s health fails, learning some life lessons from her students, and reflecting on the influences of her first language and culture, Battigelli shares these and other stories vividly. Whether navigating the choppy waters of family challenges & loss or recounting lighter moments, Battigelli writes with unflinching honesty, measured doses of humour, and with heart and spirit. The stories encapsulate the moments and incidents that have impacted her in various ways throughout her life, ways that ultimately helped shape her character and sensibilities as a daughter, mother, teacher, and writer.
Product of Italy, Made in Canada: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to Food, Family, and Resilience
Cecily Parks, The Seeds, Alice James Books, October 2025, poetry
The Seeds confronts the ecological paradox of homemaking in an environment that domesticity rejects—one of mess, disease, and everyday violence—in poems that explore the equal distress and delight entangled in the act of caring for a family, a new home, and the earth that sustains them. Cecily Parks draws on literary sources ranging from nursery rhymes to The Odyssey to examine how we form relationships with the natural world. These poems find lessons implicit in the ecological trajectories that underscore humanity’s power to alter natural processes and powerlessness to control them. The Seeds deconstructs what it means to love nature, especially when the natural world challenges our desires for beauty, abundance, and safety. Looking to more-than-human guides with an open mind and heart, Parks’ third book offers a collection of unconventional contemporary environmental histories, in which places become biological and emotional primers for those who will inherit them.
Sadiqa de Meijer, In the Field, Palimpsest Press, October 2025, creative nonfiction (essays)
In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer’s follow up to the Governor General’s Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.
Carla Panciera, One Trail of Longing, Another of String, Bordighera Press, November 2025, poetry
One Trail of Longing, Another of String is a collection of poetry divided into four thematic sections. The work reflects on the author’s childhood on a Rhode Island dairy farm and contrasts these memories with her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Through a series of vignettes and lyrical verses, Panciera explores the delicate and often complex threads of family, memory, and the passage of time. Birds, in particular, become recurring symbols of love, loss, and the will to survive. The poems also consider the impermanence of things—from the shifting sand on a barrier island to the sources of memory—and the enduring connections that tether the past to the present. Ultimately, this collection is a reflection on the human experience, capturing the universal struggle to hold on to what has been and to navigate the ever-changing landscape of life.