Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets

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.
 
In Breathing Fire 2 the latest collection of young Canadian poets from Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, we are given a glimpse of the literary world to come ... There is urgency in their words, a cry to be heard ... If poetry allows us to distill our experiences of the world into small snapshots of meaning and truth, then we will have to turn to these new writers -- inhabitants of this new world -- to translate it for us. We will be in good hands.
--Byrna Hallam, The Martlet
–

Readers of the first edition of Breathing Fire, published nine years ago, will remember a formidable collection of young voices largely unknown to Canada's poetry scene. In Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's second introduction to "Canada's New Poets," the results are even more impressive.
--Shannon Cowan, Globe and Mail
–

This writing is driven by an underlying, ineffable vitality, a legitimacy -- a sense that the words are locked inexorably in place and the poet knows it ... There's much to like in Breathing Fire.
--Jon Mooallem, Books in Canada
–

Crozier and Lane write their intro in celebration, excitement, and gratitude for the good poems they found. For that, and for all their time and attention, they deserve praise ... [T]he book can give you hours of intense reading engagement and coax you to search for books you might have taken much longer to discover, or never discovered. A decade or two from now ... Breathing Fire 2 is likely to be ... a historical time-capsule.
--Brian Bartlett, The Malahat Review
–

Nightwood Editions
ISBN: 9780889711952
Paperback / softback
6.0 in x 9.0 in - 200 pp
Publication Date: 12/10/2004
BISAC Subject(s): POE001000-POETRY / Anthologies (multiple authors), POE011000-POETRY / Canadian 
Thema Subject(s): DCQ-Poetry anthologies (various poets)