April invites a more reflective kind of reading. A few lines at a time. A pause between pages. An image that lingers.
National Poetry Month is a chance to explore language in its most playful, powerful, and surprising forms. Whether you’re returning to poetry or discovering it for the first time, the ORL’s Digital Collection and shelves offer space to wander through voices, styles, and perspectives from across British Columbia and beyond.
Poetry has a way of meeting readers exactly where they are. It can be emotive, curious, bold, or quietly observant. A single poem might hold a memory, capture a place, or shift how something familiar is seen. There’s no right way to read it. Start anywhere. Read one poem or ten. Revisit a favourite line and let it unfold a little differently each time.
Across the country, National Poetry Month celebrates the role poets play in shaping culture, language, and shared experience. This year’s programming through the League of Canadian Poets highlights readings, workshops, and community-driven events that bring poetry into everyday life.
At the ORL, poetry lives in many forms. Discover contemporary collections, classic works, spoken word audiobooks, and digital titles you can enjoy from home. If you’re looking for a place to begin, we’ve gathered a selection of poets with ties to British Columbia, offering a local lens into the broader landscape of Canadian poetry.
Blue Thinks Itself Within Me follows poet Kim Trainor’s experiences at the Fairy Creek blockade while exploring how poetry can respond to environmental crisis. Blending activism and lyric form, it considers what it means to write with and for a more-than-human world.
Being in Being presents the collected works of renowned Haida mythteller Skaay, preserving powerful stories, histories, and songs from the Northwest Coast. Through vivid translation, it offers a rare and expansive look at Haida oral tradition, including one of the most significant narrative poems in North American literature.
Ordinary Light reflects on living with intention in a complex and urgent time, inviting readers to consider simplicity, responsibility, and hope. Cynthia Sharp’s poems offer a thoughtful meditation on how individual choices can shape a more sustainable and humane future.
A Is for Acholi reimagines history, language, and identity through inventive and layered poetry that spans diaspora and place. Otoniya J. Okot Bitek blends lyric form with playful structure to explore colonization, cultural memory, and the search for belonging.
Pivot Point traces a nine-day canoe journey through British Columbia’s Bowron Lakes, where friendship, nature, and personal change unfold side by side. Bren Simmers blends poetry and journal reflections to explore resilience, uncertainty, and the shifting currents of life.
Witness, I Am brings together three powerful sections of poetry that explore identity, memory, and lived experience. Gregory Scofield weaves personal and cultural narratives into vivid, resonant work, including an epic retelling that honours and confronts the realities faced by Indigenous women.
How Poetry Saved My Life is a candid and powerful memoir by Amber Dawn, blending prose and poetry to reflect on queer identity and survival. At its core, it reveals how writing became a vital lifeline in the face of hardship.
Poetry doesn’t ask for much time, but often stays with you long after the page is turned. This April, consider making space for a few lines. For more information, please visit the League of Canadian Poets website.
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