Guest editor Rob Taylor, author of the widely acclaimed collection The News, brings a passionate ear for rhythm, an eye for narrative compression, an appetite for vital subject matter, and an affinity for warmth and wit to his selections for Best Canadian Poetry 2019. The fifty ruggedly independent poems gathered here tackle themes of emergence, defiance, ferocious anger, gratitude, and survival. They are alive with acoustic energy, precise in their language, and moving in their use of the personal to explore fraught political realities. They emit a cloud of invisible energy, a charge. Featuring work by: Colleen Baran * Gary Barwin * Billy-Ray Belcourt * Ali Blythe * Marilyn Bowering * Julie Bruck * Sara Cassidy * Sue Chenette * Chelsea Coupal * Kayla Czaga * Sadiqa de Meijer * Adebe DeRango-Adem * Chris Evans * Beth Follett * Stevie Howell * Danielle Hubbard * Dallas Hunt * Catherine Hunter * Sonnet L'Abbe * Ben Ladouceur * Tess Liem * D.A. Lockhart * Jessie Loyer * Annick MacAskill * Domenica Martinello * Laura Matwichuk * Katie McGarry * Jimmy McInnes * A.F. Moritz * Alexandra Oliver * Alycia Pirmohamed * Marion Quednau * Claudia Coutu Radmore * Shazia Hafiz Ramji * Shaun Robinson * Yusuf Saadi * Rebecca Salazar * Ellie Sawatzky * David Seymour * Kevin Spenst * Mallory Tater * Souvankham Thammavongsa * Russell Thornton * Daniel Scott Tysdal * William Vallieres * Katherena Vermette * Douglas Walbourne-Gough * Cara Waterfall * Gillian Wigmore * Ian Williams

"It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this." In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, "a revelation in words by means of the words." The epiphany here is not only the poet's. It's ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together-to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an "unspoken / Stranger no longer."