Is addiction a disease, a sin, a sign of hypersensitivity, a personal failing, or a unique resource for the creative mind? However it is defined, addiction can have devastating consequences, often shattering lives, sundering families, causing impoverishment, and even triggering suicide. Yet it can also be a source of inspiration. In these frank essays, leading American and Canadian writers explore their surprisingly diverse personal experiences with this complex phenomenon, candidly recounting what happened when alcohol, heroin, smoking, food, gambling, or sex -- sometimes in combination -- took over their lives.

Small Beneath the Sky is a tender, unsparing portrait of a family. It is also a book about place. Growing up in a small prairie city, where the local heroes were hockey players and curlers, Lorna Crozier never once dreamed of becoming a writer. Nonetheless, the grace, wisdom, and wit of her poetry have won her international acclaim. In this marvellous volume of recollections, she charts the geography that has shaped her character and her sense of home.
Crozier vividly depicts her hometown of Swift Current, with its one main street, its two high schools-the one on top of the hill was for the wealthy kids - and its three beer parlours, where her father spent most of his evenings. She captures crystal moments from her childhood - delivering newspapers with her brother in the blue-snow light of a winter morning, planting potatoes under a pale full moon, enjoying an illicit night swim in the town's public pool. She writes unflinchingly, too, about the grief and shame caused by poverty and alcoholism. At the heart of the book is Crozier's fierce love for her mother, Peggy, her no-nonsense champion and moral guide.
The people in these pages are drawn simply, without adornment, as befits the landscape in which they live. Interspersed with the narratives of daily life - sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking - are prose poems evoking the elements. These first causes - dust, light, rain, wind, snow-take on mythical qualities in Crozier's sure hands, imparting ancient knowledge about the prairie grasslands and their effect on those who have put down stakes there.
Rich in detail, generous in spirit, this unconventional memoir pays tribute to life's mysteries, secrets, and surprises. Lorna Crozier approaches the past with a tactile, arms-wide-open sense of discovery. Calling on the ghosts of ancestors and the power of memory, she has traced her beginnings with a poet's precision and an open heart.

Canada's best new poets, as selected by Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier. Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's new selection of Canada's finest young poets. Nine years ago the first volume of Breathing Fire was published to rave reviews, introducing 31 of Canada's finest new poets to a wide and appreciative audience of readers. The anthology has since gone into several printings and become a basic text in schools and universities across the country. And the poets within, including Michael Redhill, Karen Solie, Tim Bowling, Stephanie Bolster, Michael Crummey, Evelyn Lau, Sue Goyette and Carmine Starnino, have gone on to develop and captivate wide readerships of their own. Today a new and exciting generation of poets has come of age. Some, including Tammy Armstrong, Adam Dickinson, George Murray, Alison Pick, Shane Rhodes, Matt Robinson, Laisha Rosnau and Nathalie Stephens, have already put out books, and have even won or been short-listed for major awards. Others with work just as compelling will be introduced for the first time. Breathing Fire II collects the best from all 33 of these writers, proudly presenting the next generation of Canada's poets to the world.