THE COUNTERcanon

Imaginary Vessels
Paisley Rekdal

This is one of the books that completely changed how I think about poetry. Rekdal moves effortlessly between myth, history, research and lyric reflection, using the extended conceit of imaginary vessels. The poems feel curious and intellectually alive, and gave me permission to let research, gloss and storytelling live within the same poem.

West: A Translation
Paisley Rekdal

This book is part poetry, part investigation. Rekdal revisits the history of Chinese railroad workers erased from the mythology of the American West, weaving archival research with lyric reflection. Reading it reminded me that poetry can interrogate history, quietly exposing the stories nations leave out. What I particularly admire is Rekdal’s proactiveness in putting the position from which she sees history, front and center.

Olio
Tyehimba Jess

This book blew open my sense of what form can do. Jess reconstructs the lives of Black performers and musicians through persona poems, contrapuntals and remarkable typographic invention. Olio showed me how form itself can become a way of restoring history, and presenting two versions of a story.

Seam
Tarfia Faizullah

Built from interviews with survivors of wartime sexual violence during the Bangladesh Liberation War, Seam is a book that holds space for testimony without trying to claim it. Reading this collection taught me a lot about the ethics of writing in the presence of other people’s stories.

Fire Is Not a Country
Cynthia Dewi Oka

This collection moves between personal memory and political history with striking lyric intensity. Oka writes about the Indonesian massacres of 1965–66, diaspora, and inherited trauma in ways that feel both intimate and expansive. It’s a reminder that poetry can hold history without flattening it. And her syntax and otherworldly images really inspired me to push the boundaries with my own poems.

Postcolonial Love Poem
Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz writes with a kind of muscular tenderness that I find astonishing. These poems braid Mojave cosmology, desire, land and colonial history into something both intimate and political. This book reminds me that love poems can also be acts of resistance. And her voice is so unmistakably hers and so original that it helped me reflect on my own voice and refine it.

Hybrida
Tina Chang

This book sits right in the space between languages and identities. Chang reflects on diaspora, motherhood, and the experience of raising a mixed-race child while moving between English and Chinese. The poems ask how identity travels across family lines and across languages. Reading Hybrida made me think more deeply about hybridity — not just as a linguistic condition, but as something lived inside families and passed from parent to child.

Ordinary Beast
Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey writes with such clarity and control. Her poems explore race, mythology and the body in ways that feel both grounded and expansive. This book reminds me that restraint can carry enormous power.

Bluff
Danez Smith

Bluff is sharp, funny, unsettling, and fearless, like the great Danez Smith himself, who I had the great fortune to have as a Banff Winter Writers’ Residency mentor. Danez writes through the voices of scammers and hustlers navigating a brutal economy. The poems are theatrical and biting at the same time. The way Danez plays with and invents new forms inspires awe, and encouraged me to think about what new forms I might create to reflect my own histories.

National Animal
Derek Webster

This collection looks closely at the stories nations tell about themselves—and the fractures beneath those stories. Reading it made me think differently about borders, belonging and national myth. As a Canadian who has lived overseas for almost two decades, it was fascinating to read about Canada through such an unflinching and poetic lens.

Ce n’est pas le tonnerre mais nos estomacs qui grondent
Kapegik

The title alone is unforgettable: the rumbling we hear is not thunder, but hunger. Written in Nouchi and Ivoirian French, these poems speak from the body and from lived reality. They remind me that poetry isn’t only metaphor or music — it can also be a direct expression of collective survival.

This CounterCanon is always evolving.
The books that shape us rarely arrive all at once—they accumulate slowly,
changing how we read, and eventually how we write.