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Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing program.

Recent Poetry



Available in the US

Obon: The Festival Of the Dead, Terry Watada

ISBN 1-897235-14-3; 978-1-897235-14-0; paper;
$15.95 CAD/$14.95 USD; 96 pages, trade; October 2006

Terry Watada crafts an artful mix of Buddhist tradition, Japanese-infused language and rich cultural history, where death is but one stop in the cyclical, timeless nature of a life. His is a warm tribute to the thin veil between worlds where sorrow is as transient as happiness. Obon: The Festival of the Dead is a celebration of people who endure through poverty and prejudice while they deftly and memorably evoke the traditions that redeem and define them. Deploying a remarkable balance between line and space, Watada’s span of syntax and diction are striking. Whether writing about drug addiction, forced labour, jazz, or the reveries of Japanese values, Watada measures the impact of each poem as carefully as a well-placed stone in the Ryoan-ji, or an arranged paper lantern in the Urabon. Obon: The Festival of the Dead is honest communion that bids ancestral voices to speak from every page, spreading their illumination long after the poetic moment, long after the season of Obon has ended.


Available in the US

Phosphorus, Heidi Garnett
ISBN 1-897235-13-5; 978-1-897235-13-3; paper;
$15.95 CAD/$14.95 USD; 96 pages, trade; October 2006

Heidi Garnett’s Phosphorous is a poignant assertion of the ubiquitous nature of personal history.
Summoning the spirits and voices of those who suffered and endured the torments of Nazi Germany in World War II, Garnett relocates their moments of despair and suffering into poems of lament and reprieve. While family history simmers in the fragments of what is known and what isn’t, the unshakable knowledge of “skulls knitted together at the margins” informs the present. In all the rituals of immigration to Canada, and the journey west, and in the celebrations of acceptance, hard work and safety, the memories of the past are never far away. Through these biographical poems Garnett reminds us that though we “try to keep our distance” from the loss, pain and suffering of our histories, we cannot escape “the hooked branch that grafts the past/to now”.



Available in the US

Saltations, Jennifer Still
ISBN 1-894345-96-7; $15.95 CDN $13.95 US; 96 pages, trade paper; September 2005

Jennifer Still’s lyric poetry investigates the ancestral forces and early family memories needed to form the speciation of self. Saltations suggests how we evolve into the complex spirits and personalities of our adulthood, and “where am I now” becomes a reflective mantra in living. With textual dexterity and verbal intelligence, Still moves through prairie landscapes, flora and fauna, in intricate metaphors shrewdly worked for their resonance and harmony, and balances their weight with earthy, familiar universals of the human condition. These are poems of unmistakable quality and consistency, poems that herald a significant new poet.

“Based on the inheritance of a salt doll figurine from the poet's late great-great grandmother, these poems are leaps of the heart, palpitations of memory that attempt to reconcile the inheritances and the losses that flow through a bloodline of generations of women . . . ”
— Steven Ross Smith



Available in the US

Blood & Bone, Ice & Stone, Glen Sorestad
ISBN 1-894345-97-5; $15.95 CDN $13.95 US; 80 pages, trade paper; September 2005

Glen Sorestad has been publishing poetry for thirty years and throughout his distinguished career he has relied upon the central themes of family, history, nature and friendship to guide his readers through his ever-expanding desire to name, and remember. Blood & Bone, Ice & Stone continues Sorestad’s poetic journey. Whether seeking his family roots in Norway, capturing the small epiphanies in nature as he travels, or shaping the memories of those whom he has met and befriended, his poems deliver a supple wisdom and unfettered honesty.

“Sorestad honours the ordinary in his poetry . . . helps us see meaning in everyday rituals.”
— JM.Bridgman, Prairie Fire



Available in the US

Poems From a Broken Body, John Livingstone Clark
ISBN 1-894345-83-5; $15.95 CDN $13.95 US; 80 pages, trade paper; April 2005

Poems From A Broken Body leads the reader through poems engraved with heightened intellect and characterized by perceptions of pain. At times underscoring the sensitivity of genius and in counterpoint, the ignorance of the insensitive world, Clark’s work attempts to bring closure to an understanding of the “burden of self”. His poems are epitomized by spiritual energy and surreal imagery and are always carefully measured for line, breath and impact. This, his eighth book of poetry, is his most experimental.



Available in the US


More Than Three Feet of Ice, Brenda Schmidt
ISBN 1-894345-89-4; $15.95 CDN $13.95 US; 96 pages, trade paper; April 2005

Schmidt’s poetry is the Canadian wilderness. From the tundra to the prairies, it reads like a naturalist’s tour of the Canadian north. In language both deft and pure, Schmidt creates the relationships between external and internal landscapes, examining the impacts left by the travellers who seek the wealth of the north’s resources. More Than Three Feet Of Ice measures the non-renewable against the renewable, and the past against the present, in one of the last frontiers on earth. Praised by such contemporaries as Lorna Crozier, Brenda Schmidt has emerged as a distinctive voice, necessary and appropriate for the conscience of our time.

“Every once in a while a poet comes along whom you suddenly know you’ve been waiting for. Clear-eyed, original, imaginative. Brenda Schmidt is such a poet. She makes a familiar landscape unfamiliar in a most disarming way.”
— Lorna Crozier