The first time I heard Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's poetry was in a song on Lal's 2008 album Deportation. The track, "Your Body Could Start a War," is about airport security post 9/11. It starts with an eerie warped bass which crashes into a loud and steady beat, followed by an urgent piano to the climax of Piepzna-Samarasinha's vocals: "my lover's tits are explosive -- hips are illegal -- my lip gloss it a bomb and so is my hijab -- we are terrorists for crossing these lines on a map no one but them can see."

Science and poetry dovetail in Anne Simpson's latest collection, Is, in which she meditates on what it means to be human. She starts with the cell and examines what happens as it divides and multiplies. As she moves from the "world not yet world" through the flood and war, intimate scenes of love, parenthood, illness and death emerge.

Simpson explores the synthesis of form and content while retaining the lyricism that distinguished earlier works like the award-winning Light Falls Through You. In "Book of Beginnings," the words hum with the energy of creation and the lack of punctuation enhance the melodic fluidity of the lines:

Sandy Pool compares her first poetry book Exploding into Night to a "choose your own adventure": this fictionalized account of a murder in one of Toronto's neighbourhoods can be read in fragments or from beginning to end to produce different narratives.

Despite the current unsustainability of our individual carbon footprints, the standard method of personal renewal in affluent postmodern society continues to be tourism. Eyes glazed over by routine and sameness are opened to the pseudo-newness of "elsewhere." It's a strategy often used in the creative writing game. From that temporary, distant perspective, one can cast a long look back at one's homeland, and gain fresh insights.

"These days serious poets aim for the bone" writes Anna Marie Sewell. They do, and so does she. Writing surface poetry is not Sewell's style. In Fifth World Drum she goes deep and takes her reader with her. Recounting her experiences with identity, her search for culture and spirituality, and work on her craft -- poetry -- Sewell is not afraid to write about reality.

It's refreshing to see a new poet on the scene who brings a different perspective to the privileged life we live as Canadians. Salimah Valiani, a queer activist of colour, brings readers to different places with very different views on what it is to educate and challenge through poetry, letters and memoir.

Packed in the 150 pages that is Valiani's second, and newest, collection, Letter Out: Letter In, are memories, meditations and calls to action through radical thought and crisp sentences. The collection is split in four parts: Letter to South Africa; Letter to Canada; Letter to All; Letter Out: Letter In.

Overlapping interests -- young writers, the urban landscape and subversive art -- guided the Toronto's Steel Bananas art collective in producing GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose. The book's form, content and process were also inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's rhizome theory, where people and ideas are encouraged to be non-hierarchical and non-linear. Botanically, rhizomes grow horizontally, and their offshoots can begin and end anywhere.

Unisex Love Poems

Deanna Fong's first collection of poetry reads like a delicately prepared menu. Fong offers three courses -- From Skins to Bones, Exploration and Hearts -- each of which makes use of common linguistic, emotive and narrative ingredients.

From Skins to Bones opens with a poem called "Five Foods for Sexual Deviants." Here, Fong channels Lorna Crozier's The Garden Going On Without Us in an exploration of the sensual in food. She writes of Parmesan, that stone-faced cheese: "Pungent and potent, / this grainy unpasteurized patriarch / only yearns to be shaved." The poems in From Skins to Bones are thick with rhythm and description.

In honour of community, collaboration and spirit, six Vancouver writers took on traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku, hokku and renga, and created their own modern hybrids. The final product for the 2008 Powell Street Festival was a limited run of 120 slender, hand-stitched, illustrated chapbooks with ribbon bookmarks attached, complete with a dedication to the late Roy Kiyooka.

The "pH6" in the title implies a sense of balance to the book's unpredictable poetic pairings - inspiration and creativity, ritual and invention, life and death. The voices within make up an echo chamber across time and experience, the shadow of tradition always traceable.