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 shortlisted for major awards. Others with work just as compelling will be introduced for the first time. Breathing Fire 2 collects the best from all 33 of these writers, proudly presenting the next generation of Canada's poets to the world.

Lorna Crozier and her partner Patrick Lane are among Canada's leading poets. Crozier is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Garden Going on Without Us (1983), the Governor General's Award-winning Inventing the Hawk (1992), Everything Arrives at the Light (1995), A Saving Grace (1996) and What the Living Won't Let Go (2000). In 1995 she co-edited Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets with Patrick Lane. Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-four books of poetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2014, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honour that recognizes a lifetime of achievement and merit of a high degree. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. Lane now makes his home in Victoria, BC, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.

"QUIDI VIDI" Alison Pick

Walk as far as you can,
then farther, past
the chain-link barring the road,
tire tracks deep as the rut of your mind,
the place you always get stuck.
Wanting more, or wanting
less, to be rid of the word
called wanting. Boulders,
tall grass, shrubs you can't name,
birds you can't name,
the ocean. Being a stranger sneaks you through
the latch of language - briefly. Bottles, you know.
Condoms, you know. And the weight
of being human where other humans have been.
Back of the sea like one line of thought,
slight variation of foam at the shore
where artifice gives itself up. Farther out,
a ledge in the rock
as though attention might help. Turning
for home, hands in your pockets, night mists in
like animal breath, the black-brown shapes
of gathering mammals
bending to drink at the silent pool
of mind submerged in the mind.
If a gap in awareness exists, it's there
you might have slipped through.

"FALLING" Matt Rader

Clipped my skull on the lip of the bridge
as I plunged feet-first into the anxious river.
My teeth jawed together, all castanet
or clam-shell, crunched my tongue to pulp.
I couldn't talk, or scream, or lift a finger.
Couldn't remember why I was there or where
amongst all the falling my body had gone.
Rivulets of red ribboned my head like an insect-
painter's quick study of the wingless human--
The Faller--a gesture-drawing in blood and air.
Here's how I picture it: limbs all stutter and wheel
in the rioting wind, all seizure of sign-language
and panic-dance, eyes scrolled back, calculating
velocity by distance, the time left to swallow
or spit before impact. Never mind the fear
or embarrassment, I pissed my pants just for
the warmth in my crotch, that one last sloppy kiss.
Falling and falling is lonely business.

"PLATE NO. 9" Nathalie Stephens

Together perhaps they are together in and out of the image one stopping at a distance from the other which would account for the absence of one the one woman who appeared later in the image before the artist who might not have noticed her presence but they both the women the two women both women are present from the beginning inside and outside of the frame the one that marks lines around the image the one this image in which two women standing and leaning one woman present the other not until later until the artist shuddered and the shudder marked by the fissured city imprinted on the image indicates the presence of two women together one woman and then another she the woman they the two women leaning and standing within reach of the artist and the need to readjust the line of vision the one that draws one woman to the other she both they the two women perhaps drawn one to the other and maybe outside of the frame they are lovers,


from "HAYNES TOWN STORE" Shane Rhodes

my grandmother said

--he comes from the south east coast of china as a boy
(or a man or as far as I can figure out
wing wong was a hundred all his life)
and after two months on ship or so it is said
in vancouver he buys a pound of chocolate
and after two months of rice and salt water
it tasted of tears wing speaks no english yet
he has selling in his blood like the last dime in his pocket
he buys more chocolate and breaks it to ten pieces
and sells each piece to the immigrants off the boats
for 5¢ each to people like wing or you or me hungry for land
or anything that looked like dirt and tasted like the dust storm
wing bought his store with
and a bag full of nickels--

---

Excerpted from Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets
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